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Comment on Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions

BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Even before AI I stopped asking any questions or even answering for that matter on that website within like the first few months of using it. Just not worth the hassle of dealing with the mods and I didn’t want my account to get suspended in case I really needed to ask an actual question in the future, now I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to any stack website and it does not show up in the Google search results anymore, they dug their own grave

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JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The humans of StackOverflow have been pricks for so long. If they fixed that problem years ago they would have been in a great position with the advent of AI. They could’ve marketed themselves as a site for humans. But no, fuckfacepoweruser found an answer to a different question he believes answers your question so marked your question as a duplicate and fuckfacerubberstamper voted to close it in the queue without critically thinking about it.

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- theolodis@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I used to moderate and answer questions on SO, but stopped because at some point you see the 500th question about how to use some javascript function.
  
  Of course I flagged them all as duplicate and linked them to an extensive answer about the specific function, explaining all aspects and edge cases, because I don’t think there need to be 500 similatlr answers (who’s going to maintain them?)
  
  But yeah, sorry that I didn’t fix YOUR code sample, and you had to actually do your homework by yourself.
  
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  - JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    My questions weren’t homework problems with 500 duplicates. Maybe that type of shit being the most common in the vote to close queue is why fuckfacerubberstamper can’t be bothered to actually think about what they’re closing as dupes.
    
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- ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  If the alternative is the cesspit that is Yahoo Answers and Quora, I’ll take the heavy-handed moderation of StackOverflow.
  
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  - JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    You don’t think there’s any middle ground between the two? None whatsoever?
    
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    elephantium@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Well, no. If there were a middle ground, we’d all be using it.
    
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    ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Of course there’s a middle ground, that’s much closer in my ideal world to StackOverflow than it is to Yahoo Answers or Quora.
    
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    ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    If Stack Overflow is a 3/10 then Quora is a 1/10 and Yahoo Answers is -5/10.
    
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Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn’t copy/pasting code.

And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.

But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don’t have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren’t really upset at “having” to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.

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- SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I call it “comic book guy” syndrome. The desperate need to feel superior.
  
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- BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  That last part is so true, some people are just miserable and want to spread that misery to others to make themselves feel better
  
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kazerniel@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Hear hear, it was the hostile atmosphere that pushed me away from Stack Exchange years before LLMs were a thing. That very clear impression that the site does not exist to help specific people, but a vague audience, and the treatment of every question and answer is subjugated to that. Since then I just ask/answer questions on platforms like Lemmy, Reddit, Discord, or the Discourse forums ran by various organisations, it’s a much more pleasant experience.

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dgmib@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The stupidest part is that their aggressive hostility against new questions means that the content is becoming dated. The answers to many, many questions will change as the tech evolves.

And since AI’s ability to answer tech questions depends heavily on a similar question being in the training dataset, all the AIs are going to increasingly give outdated answers.

They really have shot themselves in the foot for at best some short term gain.

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THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
This was my issue. The two times I posted real, actual questions that I needed help with, and tried to provide as much detail as possible while saying I didn’t understand the subject,

I got clowned on, immediately downvoted negative, and got no actual help whatsoever. Now I just hope someone else had a similar issue.

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