Stack Overflow is declining, except it's still so well populated with moderators that the author of the article struggled to be able to answer a question quickly enough for it to matter, and he can find no alternatives to it that work as well.
I dont know anything about the internal politics of SO, and I dont think Ive ever asked (or answered) a question, but I use it every day.
It is absolutely the single best resource for developers on the internet, and thats amazing.
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of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date information.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....
I'm not surprised that this is true among the population of stackoverflow users. There are many thousands of devs that have no use for, no time for, and don't care about sites like stack overflow, though. (like me...)
I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.
Stack Overflow is still far and away the best site of its kind, but it has stagnated significantly over the last several years. The site runners aren't tackling the big meta problems any longer, and they aren't pursuing innovative solutions either, they're just continuing the status quo into the future.
StackOverflow is a community driven website for a society that is used to follow rules and be disciplined.
Nowadays, the popularity of the website put it in a bad position. Handling millions of impolite, pseudo-developers, who've heard that it can help them with their problem.
In other words the community and popularity changed, not StackOverflow. And no it's not dying, it's just working! Sorry for some of us that remember the times where questions were mostly high-quality, but I don't think there is a way to prevent collateral damage in this case.
I prefer to read "opinionated question", instead of 10 paragraphs about a problem that in the end is unsolvable by logical decision.
The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically:
- google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago
- moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever.
- because of the previous bullet, oftentimes the best answer is buried in comments and has very negative feedback despite answering the exact question
Due to a combination of these things, filtering against the noise for what I wanted became increasingly more difficult and often the solution to my problem was easier found searching github comments or random blogs.
> Stack Overflow remain the site that, when you are looking for an actual answer to a technical question, is worth clicking on at least.
These days I'm skipping Stack Overflow entirely and jumping straight to the docs, unless it's a common question that I can never remember properly (like some esoteric git-fu command).
The answers on SO are outdated or crappy. When you can't ask questions about an evolving framework without it getting marked as duplicate, then the answers quickly lose all value. And the people that were answering because they wanted to give back (not because they want to farm karma) are leaving.
I wouldn't say StackOverflow is especially beloved by developers. Coders on X/Twitter used to complain about how much they dislike SO all the time; I see less of those now, probably because they've switched to using ChatGPT. When I've seen blog posts or headlines about them in the past 1-2 years, they're usually about how "StackOverflow is dying."
Stack overflow was hugely popular before their draconian moderation. And I use it less because of it. The most valuable questions I have as a developer are things like "what are they trade offs between using system.js or webpack". "How should I use flux Or redux to get the most benefit?" Or "how does the js build ecosystem work". These are much more valuable in my opinion then "I got error 4602 how do I solve it?".
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.
So, years ago I "used" Stack Overflow a lot. Now, rarely, if by "use" you mean "ask and answer questions". But, I find answers to my questions on it every day, and it is still far superior to other sources.
I've noticed a pattern in my attitude towards SO: when I ready an article about it on Hacker News, I get mad. When I'm actually on it, I get detailed, multiple answers to my question, written before I ever got there.
My suspicion is that many people noticed that a high rank on Stack Overflow was one way to generate a reputation that might get you freelance work, and then discovered that too many other people were trying to do the same thing, so it became competitive and trollish...for them. But all I want to do is find an answer to my question, that is more clear (and with better examples) than the one in the software's actual documentation (which reads like it was written for a textbook or maybe an AI, rather than the kind of answer you actually get from asking somebody for help).
SO still works, better than ever, for finding out the answer to your question. It just doesn't work as a social network or an interview/job board/advertising site. But, you know, I don't think that's a problem for me, and really, there are other websites out there for that.
Just look for the answer to your question, it's probably there, and if it isn't then it likely is not available anywhere else on the internet either, including the software documentation. Used this way, the SO internal politics is a non-issue.
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.
Definitely. The content on Stack Overflow is heavily weighted towards languages and specialties less likely to be of interest to older programmers. We (I'm 51) are far more likely to be working on infrastructure and devops than on front-end. To do it, we're using C, maybe C++, maybe Python or even perl and bash, not Java, definitely not JavaScript or any of its variants, or Erlang, or Clojure, or whatever. Not always, but much of the time. The things we need to know are scantly represented on SO.
The atmosphere on SO is probably also more of a turn-off for older programmers. Those who are established don't need to bulk up their karma on some website, and the one-upmanship from the resident karma whores gets tiresome really fast. So does the rules lawyering that leads to answers being hidden, questions being closed, and so on. The few times I've found myself there, it has seemed like a game and a distraction that I just don't have the time or inclination to keep playing, so I get out and don't come back for months. For those with broad work responsibilities plus homes and families and other outside connections, life's too short to spend much of it in a virtual mosh pit. HN is enough for that. ;)
Has anyone found any other Q/A sites similar to Stack overflow or what it used to be?
My experience with Stack overflow from early 2010s to now, is that it used to be an amazing, "must-have" site. Always the #1 result on Google. I used it for basic web and iOS dev (remember Objective-C) and it had better documentation than most of the official docs.
But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse, official docs are usually much better (at least in my experience), and there are a lot more random sites, so you can Google most programming issues without checking SO. SO is still a great resource for its archived content, but not for anything new, and it's no longer a "must-have".
But even with better documentation and more sites, old SO hasn't been completely replaced.
I haven’t (intentionally) use Stack Overflow in at least a decade. It was good in the early 2000s, but rapidly became overrun with obvious “give me theee codez” questions, while anything interesting got locked by mods for whom Wikipedia deletionism isn’t enough of an outlet for their inner Karen.
For finding answers, Stack Overflow may be useful, but for posting questions, it is not. I ceased posting questions a while ago due to the aggressive moderation, which often labeled my questions as duplicates or too common. I was very upset with the direction Stack Overflow had taken, as it seemed to embody the very criticisms it had once had about forums. The Stack Overflow community has lost its vibrancy and has become stagnant. I am pleased that platforms like ChatGPT are emerging as real competitors.
I dont know anything about the internal politics of SO, and I dont think Ive ever asked (or answered) a question, but I use it every day.
It is absolutely the single best resource for developers on the internet, and thats amazing.
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