That's the disappointing thing. They seemed more interested in implementing cute little badges and stuff than working on features that benefit the core function of the site.
If you're doing web development, IMO SO is doing a disservice to people at this point. It's either totally useless if you're a seasoned dev or very misleading and harmful to beginners.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure they have the incentive to really fix things because all the obsolete answers probably still bring in a ton of traffic. The only way to fix it might be to tell people to stop using it.
> People are just too lazy, SO became a replacement for many references, docs and trivial things.
That was its original purpose. It wasn't meant to be a place for answers to detailed questions. It was designed with the aim of being the first Google result for things like "How do I collapse border tables?". Trivial questions where the answer is buried deep inside technical documentation.
Their business model conflicts with what would serve users best. It once was a place where I would trust answers, now I have to search multiple times, scroll through many results to find relevant answers.
Having massive amounts of questions gets more surface area for ads but a lot of programming Q&A that is a few years out of date is mostly useless. API's change, things become deprecated or better solutions emerge.
They need to cull massive amounts of content for it to be more helpful but that would likely drop revenue.
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.
I usually like to answer questions, but for me it feels like the quality of the questions and the community has gone down overall. Most of the questions asked are from new users and are low effort, duplicated, one google search away from hundreds of answers, all of them at once. I feel like it turned into a social network, where 90% of the content generated is garbage or just duplicated content. Why I don't like this is that it encourages bad habbits for new programmers, where instead of trying to figure out how to solve a basic issue, they just ask on SO and expect a complete answer that includes valid code, so they don't actually learn anything from asking that question, they just want someone else to do their "homework".
The problem with the new site is that it boasts a tiny fraction of the SO user count. It's just harder to get good answers on a site with so few active users. The same is true for programmers.stackexchange, where code review type questions end up.
I stopped using SO at my first 2-3 years of coding anyway, that's when i started actually improving. SO has so many low quality answers and the cargo cult is doing more damage that helping young devs.
"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)
Their original objective was to be the place to ask/answer programming to related questions, but I do agree - the sheer scale has devolved them into simply optimizing search for said questions instead of focusing on maintaining quality.
I agree with all of that, but the worst part to me(which I guess relates to your point about the accepted answers) is that there's no path to deprecating old answer and old questions.
I've been lambasted here in the past for saying this, but I'll say it again now and see if I get a different response; it's no longer helpful to search for "javascript" related questions and get mostly answers for jQuery. These days I'm able to solve a lot of problems just reading MDN, but sometimes I click on a Stack Overflow article and it turns out to be 12 answers that are all jQuery-specific even when the question itself doesn't call for it. jQuery isn't bad, but the world has changed around it and we can't keep pretending like everyone is using it for the same reasons we did back in 2011.
This not only does new developers a general disservice, but it can do a disservice to projects that have less-than-average momentum. For instance, I use Ember JS every day, and it's a framework that has really changed a lot since its inception, but you'd never know it if you looked up questions for it on Stack Overflow. The Ember questions on there are so woefully outdated that I believe it gives potential new users the complete wrong impression of it. There are outdated React questions on there as well, but at least there's enough inertia behind React that new activity helps overcome this to a degree. On the other hand, people almost certainly have given up on Ember because none of the Stack Overflow answers work at all. Sure, we could all submit updated answers, but they'll be below the fold and they will never be reselected as the accepted answer. There are other reasons why Ember has been in decline, but I do blame the mechanics of SO as a big detractor.
Preventing duplicate questions is fine, the overzealousness not withstanding, but if there's no mechanism to correct existing information as time goes on in a meaningful way, the only result can be rot.
I'm tired with their fragmenting their site into airtight topic specific QA sites, now with many questions one isn't sure where to post it to get max eyeballs. I feel that is something that could have avoided by design. Topics could have been managed through tags, instead of walling them off into separate sites.
And the obsolescence, things are moving so fast in JavaScript, Android, even in QT, Clojure etc, many answers including accepted ones are obsolete, and misleading.
I feel the same about SO. I have only contributed a tiny bit, and usually avoid it when I’m trying to debug something. Like 10 years ago the answers were pretty good, but now it seems like the accepted answer is often outdated, and below the fold there will be another answer with comments saying “this ought to be the accepted answer.” It also has a lot of low effort crap that I think must be motivated by a desire to gain clout. Specific question about functional programming method in Python: here’s how you can do that with a for loop.
I’ve wondered for years why everyone raves about this website like it’s a cultural institution to us programmers. I thought it was just me that’s underwhelmed.
They wanted no duplicates, and only a single unique question/answer thread. But technology moves forward and there was never only one way to solve most issues anyway.
What we have today is e.g. JavaScript question/answers that pre-date ES6, are high in google search rankings, and also largely bad. People can reply with ES6 solutions to 6+ year old problems, but there's little rep' benefit so few do.
Ultimately SO is a "question/answer" site that's super hostile to new questions and most "answers" will just be a mod close/re-point to the "dupe." Plus they want questions so generic that they are rarely helpful to the question asker themselves.
That makes sense as the site is almost useless now. It's been entirely taken over by people who do nothing but farm karma.
The current situation...
If you're a noob who's learning, then your question will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked as question is deemed low quality..
If you're a pro, then your question will be about something obscure which the mods don't understand, and also will require a more nuanced answer, so it will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked.
So it's aimed at mid-level devs to ask things with certain answers, the kind of answer which would most likely be found in documentation. So the people who require help/answers the most are kicked off, whereas people who need answers/help the least are encouraged.
> The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language."
The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".
The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah those are high quality answers, if we were all still using Jquery.
S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of answers" in a different way that would have preserved the quality but not dejected all of it's users.
There should be a real difference between good questions and questions which could be solved by having a look at the docs.
People are just too lazy, SO became a replacement for many references, docs and trivial things.
At the current state, it's not possible to judge a developer by the SO points, we have to check the profile, browse through a few given answers and eventually create an opinion based on the quality of the answers.
It's simply because they might have answered a question called "How do I fill an array with 4 elements".
Thousand of people are lazy and voted that question up and also the answer.
What we have now, is a guy who got a ton of points by asking a stupid question and a guy who answered a trivial stupid question and got 120 up votes on that.
Why should we change that?
SO is a great huge site, developers can show what they have to offer, you can set up resume and you can search for jobs over SO.
SO just establish itself as an important tool for recruiter and companies looking for top notch developers but the points are misleading, someone who has answered lots of trivial questions isn't necessarily a good developer because of those trivial answers to trivial questions.
On the other hand, we got many people with below the 3k mark, who just answered really hard questions with 3-4 up votes.
What I'm afraid of is that someone with more points gets preferred in a decision between two developers from SO for a job position.
I think the person is simply frustrated because he realizes that StackExchange could be so much better. I quit a few years ago when they changed all question upvotes to be only worth 5 points, but rejoined about a year and a half ago because it's still the best existing option.
When asking questions, I try to make them good enough so that other people will find them useful in the future, and it's great when I get a like-minded answer. Some examples:
Still, I think StackOverflow could be taken up a notch to allow more collaboration and organization. Also, wouldn't it be great to be able to provide runnable source code in some sort of git archive? For some languages like Javascript the code in the questions/answers could be in something like http://jsfiddle.net
Ideally, a group of people could pick any topic and essentially write several books (beginner and advanced) by asking lots of questions. At least that was my initial belief. Say, for example, you wanted to learn elisp, and you typed: "Hello world in emacs", well I've got that answered:
> I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve.
I can think of a few (not that this hasn't been discussed to death already):
How to properly moderate a site like that.
How to keep answers updated.
How to keep answers updated without mods shutting things down due to duplication. A lot of html and JS questions are garbage in 2021 but there's no way to improve the situation without mods screaming "duplication".
How to allow for answers that are more than just what you'd find in the documentation. A lot of the value of the site came in the first few years, when you were allowed to expand on your answers and provide useful information. The amount of new value created by SO is decreasing rapidly.
One final one is that they need to stop worrying about low-quality questions. That's the only problem they've tried to solve in the last decade, and it's already solved by upvoting and search.
Stackoverflow did that. No discussion on the questions as well as only questions with objective answers make it a useless website for a lot of developers, aside from using it as a documentation or examples website (which is what they want and achieved)
If you're doing web development, IMO SO is doing a disservice to people at this point. It's either totally useless if you're a seasoned dev or very misleading and harmful to beginners.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure they have the incentive to really fix things because all the obsolete answers probably still bring in a ton of traffic. The only way to fix it might be to tell people to stop using it.
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