I must agree, their reach must be insane! Although my last question was like 3 years ago, I do visit it at least twice a week for quick answers.
I feel like most “often asked” questions has been answered. I very seldomly find that creating a new question is necessary as most things is covered in past awnsers. However for package related problems, GitHub issues has become the go to.
I've got over 15k rep on SO and I've found more and more difficult to make an impact on there. Questions have either been asked or are answered instantly. All the time I'm getting answers and questions closed down and deleted as mods are gardening. I don't know what the answer is but its grown to the point where I find it too much effort too much.
Having said all that I'm just glad that its there. I remember coding without the internet (and I don't just mean a router failure) and that had its own challenges but SO has got me answers typically with in minutes and now instantly as the Q. base has grown. It's an amazing resource. If they can work out how people can contribute easily again it will be here for years to come.
It may be getting worse. Not sure. There are definitely a lot of questions that have been marked "closed" or "off topic" that I would genuinely like to have seen more answers to.
The bottom line is that it's still a really important archive of software coding. I'd say 80+ percent of the issues I face in coding, someone has seen before - and therefore, a place like SO could have solved my issue with almost zero time wasted.
Yeah, the moderation became insane. Every question is a duplicate, every answer is moderated out.
The answers on github and across the web are always much much better and more up to date. I can't remember the last time SO had the answer I wanted or needed.
I think it's a virtuous cycle of modern development that popular SO questions make their into the official documents. And things people find super annoying just get fixed and disappear. I had some issues with a popular framework a few years back and got answered by the creator directly.
I agree. Anecdotal but I used to visit SO all the time during my first years as a programmer compared to now where I only need it occasionally. It was also a long time ago I posted an actual question.
I wonder if this is a combination of JavaScript frameworks becoming more sophisticated and offloading concerns from developers and the sheer exhaustion of trying to get a question answered from SO without the host of problems involved in simply asking the question.
It's often easier to ask and answer your own question on the corresponding Github issue tracker and let Google index it, then to run the SO moderation gauntlet.
I agree SO has a problem with treatment of well-meaning new users. Could be improved. However, I will say that in spite of that, I have had some excellent experiences there. Sometimes I encounter a difficult issue that I simply cannot resolve on my own, and I want to ask people more expert than I how to resolve it. If I'm careful in how I write up the question then I find that over time I generally get useful answers. It's a great way of reaching others working in the same teeny-tiny niche that I am.
So there are problems, but still many good things happening there.
I found it incredibly useful as a beginner. As long as you could put together a decent question and were a little patient you would usually get your answer.
The more experienced I got, the less useful I found it. These days, if I’m stuck, most of the time so is everybody else reading my question.
Quite often it’s actually because I’ve encountered a bug with whatever framework I’m using, or a mistake in the documentation.
I find raising an GitHub issue more useful than asking on SO.
It’s still great as a knowledge bank thought, as others have pointed out most of the time when you Google an issue the answer will be on SO. The only issue there is when the top rated/accepted question is actually no longer correct, or best practice, as the language/framework has changed or evolved.
I thought the exact same thing, since it never occurred to me that anyone would actually ask a question on SO and wait for an answer from it.
When doing niche development, small mailing lists provide an invaluable asset for these sorts of questions. Oddly, seems strange to ask on such a generalist site as SO.
"They're absolutely essential to the software dev community"
Posting a question there has been pointless for years.
I also dont think I've seen any answers there via duckduckgo useful to me in a long time. I dont think I'd even notice if it disappeared tomorrow. (I am not a web dev btw)
In the past, it was the first place I'd go. The last few questions I asked were downvoted and closed or told to reference answers from another question that didn't have anything to do with what I was asking for. I just gave up on it being a useful resource when I got stumped as a developer based on the last few questions I asked.
The last few years I've gotten better answers from Reddit, Discord and various forums I visit from time to time. I've even started using ChatGPT to get answers which has worked surprisingly well.
I don't want to say its outlived its usefulness, but even the small dev circles I run in, none of those people have used it in a while either.
Currently struggling with searching for the usual developer queries, but not getting the answers I need :(
“Something something random package name is suddenly broken Reddit”
The backup is using the same query with “stack overflow”, but that knowledge has become dated.
Around the rise of Slack, and then Discord and Teams, knowledge started becoming transferred between open source devs within their corresponding chat. People would get their answer on a VueJs issue and move on… The end result was that Google never picked that up, and the next dev popped in the chat the next day with the exact same question.
In the last couple years, Reddit has become the place for devs to do q&a as well.
It’s also making it difficult for me to communicate with prospective users online for simple market research and feedback.
Unfortunately, the moderators and I had a disagreement about the importance of asking questions without attempting to first solve the problem.
Well written (and well-defined) questions are the key StackOverflow. From the questions, you could extract a Rosetta Stone of programming. An experienced programmer could learn most languages on the job.
Worse than that, I used to be very knowledgeable about a topic and having not played the game and not scored any points, it was too frustrating to answer questions there.
The unfortunate thing is that people often see it as the github of project support, and choose to go there to ask questions rather than a project's mailing list.
I don't want to throw dirt at the project in question, but I signed up specifically to ask a question regarding a configuration problem, and the reply was "search for <specific term> in the channel." like they apparently already had enough people ask the question that they immediately knew how to find the relevant discussion containing a solution. Versus in the old days, asking on irc and getting a link to a forum thread, or even better, finding the thread on Google.
I don't know how much of an outlier this is, as said, I didn't ever use it again and that was at least two years ago. But at least here on hn I've read similar stories.
Proactively asking on SO is a no go to solve any problem. Just digging for anyone who already answer your question, or open a issue on the github repo which host the library you use. SO used to be a place where people could ask anything they want, but now only difficult questions could be answered, or else it will be downvoted, marked as duplicated or answered by some toxic people, definitely not a good beginner experience.
It sounds like what you're mainly describing is that it's hard to ask a question that isn't already answered on the site. (You can't close as a dupe unless the duplicate has answers.) From a "helping the most people learn" perspective, this sounds like a champagne problem: There's so many answers that it's hard to find something to ask that's not already covered.
From a community perspective, we do want all devs to be able to get involved in the site, so it's not ideal if the solution set is actually so comprehensive that it raises the bar for getting involved.
But I'm not too worried. SO still gets over ten thousand questions per day, which gives devs who want to contribute to the programming community a ton of opportunities to share answers and help. Plus, and new languages like swift leave a lot of blue ocean for asking new questions.
Don't get me wrong, our two biggest product priorities are focused on how we can make it easier for new users to get involved, and how we can ensure that more active users continue to feel appreciated and find it rewarding to share their knowledge on SO, where so many others can benefit from it. There's plenty more we can do on both fronts, but I'm not too worried that we're running out of ways for devs to contribute if they want to.
Disclosure: I work at Stack Exchange. I love Stack Exchange. I am not an unbiased observer of Stack Exchange. My mom says I and my company are special, and I believe her.
I feel like most “often asked” questions has been answered. I very seldomly find that creating a new question is necessary as most things is covered in past awnsers. However for package related problems, GitHub issues has become the go to.
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