I know it's the tacky thing to say, but: I feel like StackOverflow has gotten worse over the past couple years. The questions and answers are both lower quality.
It's possible that Google is leading me astray since that's typically how I'll find Q&As on there, but I don't see the same issue on the other sites in the Stack network.
I feel like Stack Overflow has gotten less useful to me as a programmer over the years, and these days I more often find the answers I need on a forum geared toward whatever technology I have a question about.
I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years, or a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as I have become a more experienced programmer.
Disagree, stack overflow is still the best place to get answers to common programming questions. If you need to sort a list in Python it’s much better to find the answer on a short stackoverflow post than to sift through dozens of blogs, each with their own style, or to try to parse pages of documentation that goes into way more detail than you need. No other site has as much content as easy to find as stackoverflow, even if it’s not perfect.
Anyone else think Stackoverflow has been in a decline the past decade?
Stackoverflow hardly surfaces when I am searching for help and when I find answers it's usually a blog or a hosted blog somewhere. Most Stackoverflow answers are usually 4-5 years old and outdated.
Perhaps it's simply my engineering has improved in the last decade and I no longer search for help very often and when I do it's outside the scope of Stackoverflow..
Anecdotal: Searching github issues has long since surpassed the usefulness of stackoverflow for me.
Possibly the types of questions I need answered has changed, but I think it's more that everything on stackoverflow is out of date or off topic. Or the people who could answer are also the people who are too busy and/or don't care enough to play the karma game.
I find Stackoverflow has gotten much worse, you don't get any answers either (i.e. I guess the good people have moved on?), but also Google has gotten worse, and documentation sites aren't helping either. Coding has just gotten harder when you rely on some complicated technology. The internet simply doesn't work as well as it did 5-10 years ago...
Stack Overflow was and is still useful. I will say that it's becoming less relevant over time for me. When I used Google to find answers to questions, other sources of answers are popping up now.
I tried contributing but it seems like everything is answered now except for the most corner-case things. I feel bad for people asking questions because they almost all get downvoted.
There was a time when it was useful but I agree with what another poster said: it's stuck in time and it shows.
Interesting that this seems to have started around Spring 2021 when posts + votes started tailing off, followed by traffic starting to decline around spring of 2022.
I can think of a few theories that I don't think hold water:
1. The rise of ChatGPT to answer many questions that StackOverflow would previously have been used for. This seems unlikely, since the timing doesn't really work out.
2. The perennial complaints about StackOverflow's culture of closing everything as duplicates or offtopic. This seems unlikely as well, since those complaints have been common for a decade or more.
3. The prevalence of SEO-optimized scrape sites - the ones that pop up with a "blog post" merely reposting a stack overflow question + answer in a different font. I've seen these for a while, and anecdotally they feel more common that they used to, but I couldn't give any real timeline for that vague feeling.
4. StackOverflow internal politics? I've seen the occasional stack-overflow meta thread pop up periodically on HN or social media, but I don't recall anything earth-shattering recently.
5. Most questions have good answers now and there's less need for new ones. I'd have bought that answer 10 or so years ago when StackOverflow's pile of questions + answers reached maturity. I don't think it suddenly hit some sort of answer saturation point in 2021.
My guess is that it's a slow shift in the culture of the StackOverflow userbase:
- Being a top answerer confers some cachet and makes you more employable in some places
- People notice this and start looking for the most effective ways to become a top answerer
- The most effective way is fast, low-effort answers
- There's been a rise in such low-effort answers over the last 5 years or so
- As a result, the cachet of being an StackOverflow top answerer is a lot lower
- The really good, deep, technical answerers (as well as the mods) are leaving as that cachet goes away
- Post quality starts dropping around 2021 and views start declining as people react to that in 2022.
When StackOverflow was new, it was an incredible resource. Unfortunately, so much cruft has accumulated that it is now nearly useless. Even if an answer was once correct (and many are not), it is likely years out of date and no longer applicable.
Yep. I stopped going there (except for incidental visits when it shows up in google searches) a long time ago because of that. The kinds of questions that most interest me -- for example, design questions -- don't have cut and dried answers. Most of what StackOverflow excels at I can find in the documentation anyway.
I think stack overflow peaked a few years ago - its grown more and more useless over the last few years - the last questions I wrote 10 or so years ago have long been modded off topic and locked, despite being within the rules at the time - the culture of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date information.
I find the most useful information in github issues nowadays....
For me Stackoverflow long time ago has stopped being a place to get answers. I'd rather explore problem on my own using books, documentations rather than search on Stackoverflow or ask there. Low content quality and hostility of the users is what drowned this what used to be useful site.
Yeah. It’s among the worst in getting correct, canonical answers on the myriad of topics I’ve asked about. People shit on Stackoverflow here, but it’s a billion times better generally.
That's a great point. I haven't really noticed it but over the last few years, the first place is rarely Stack Overflow unless it's basic things (like how to use a git or tar feature). Checking Github issues or even just reading the code. Maybe the Google algorithm or Github SEO was improved to bring it up in the results but it has helped so I'm not complaining.
Now, Google is heavily polluted with SEO garbage, junior-level blog posts churned out by what must be student assignments to "write a blog post about this week's programming assignment", and the truly horrible data scraping sites like xspdf or whatever. General web search is increasingly poor.
And Stackoverflow was great for a long time. Now it is mostly outdated (which usually means incorrect) Q/A data. Worse, the old information that should be retired actually blocks new questions with current answers because of the aggressive system of trying to prevent "duplicate" questions. It's not a duplicate question if there's an 8+ year (or even 3+ year!) gap between the date of the original and the date of the new one. Quite often, even if the original question is close enough to current needs, the answers are very unlikely to be correct now.
After ~12 years of development, StackOverflow has gone from invaluable to irrelevant.
These days my questions are either so niche nobody answers them, or like you, I get a tonne of abuse for asking in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, or not including the right info, or whatever it may be.
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