I encounter situations where I used to rely on Stack Overflow, which carries a similar (if not higher) likelihood of being incorrect, often due to outdated information.
For instance, I was recently inquiring about a specific task with CMake and consulted ChatGPT. Initially, the response was inaccurate, but it was obviously so when it didn’t compile. Upon reprompting, I received the correct answer.
My experiences with Stack Overflow until recently:
- Using it as a useful resource for small issues
- Seeing memes about how programmers essentially just copy/paste code from Stack Overflow all day long
- Reading comments about how Stack Overflow is severely outdated and any question will be shut down immediately
And then I had an issue with library A which was using library B but had a small inconsistency in how it used it that made my use case very difficult. So I posted a question. The developer of library B appeared, agreeing that it's a problem. Followed by the developer of library A, who agreed as well and said the fix would be in the next release. 2-3 days later, my bug was fixed by updating library A.
With a sample of one, that doesn't really say anything, my view of that website is a bit biased now.
No, StackOverflow is quite a reliable source of correct and relevant answers to programming questions, with effective mechanisms for the community to identify and fix wrong or unhelpful answers.
It won't remain that way if those mechanisms are DoSed with a firehose of free plausible garbage. The flippant attitude that what we currently have is no better than that firehose, and the implication that it isn't worth worrying about or attempting to protect, is starting to grate.
> 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The answers on SO are outdated or crappy.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 use stack overflow every other day and it's fine? It's imperfect advice but there are some gems on there and it's pretty easy for me anyways to spot when something is dated, not right, or whatever. Maybe it's less useful to me now because I understand the domains I'm in better?
So true. I feel like I used StackOverflow so much when I started programming, and now it’s rarely even the most useful result on Google for the question I’m trying to answer. I struggle to imagine a scenario now where I’d want to rely on fossilized SO instead of GPT cross-referenced with official documentation.
Several times I've been searching for something that led me to a stackoverflow question or github issue in which I had apparently written the accepted answer years before.
I prefer going straight to Github issues if documentation fails me. But yes, the more familiar I get with the stack, the lesser I have come to rely on Stackoverflow.
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.
to be honest, I use my search engine of choice, yes stack overflow often comes up in the results, but also GitHub issues of people having a similar issue, often for other projects that use the same tools/libraries I do.
so I go to my search engine for answers, not stack overflow directly.
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.
I had a nightmare once about something like this. In the dream, I woke up, went to work, wanted to check something online, found out stackoverflow no longer existed.
Is it possible we might put too much trust into this one source? I know it is amazing. I know we love it. But something like this could help.
The most frequent reason I turn to stack overflow, is for solutions to things I just don’t care about right now. Like, for example, how do I get bootstrap to work in webpacker for rail, etc. I don’t really care about this, I’d rather just be writing ruby code. And even in these cases, SO isn’t that helpful half the time because either the answer is 3 years old and outdated or there used to be a relevant answer but it has been deleted for some violation.
The answers on Stack Overflow are frequently dated, and the most interesting questions and content gets locked.
I go to stack overflow if I want to read the workarounds and fixes that worked for the problems of 2014, and similar questions from today that get locked for being duplicates.
I practically don't use StackOverflow. It can be useful sometimes to find references to bugs, or something, but many of the solutions I've seen are sub-par, or the problems I have are mostly some issue in GitHub/GitLab that I'll comment in or open myself.
On the rare occasions I find a useful question, some asshole closes it because it was asked before. What makes them an asshole is that it's not the same question at all, or the question was not answered.
Using StackOverflow is often the fastest way to find results. Your implication that it means we don't know how to debug issues ourselves or use pre-existing docs is insulting and farcical. I'm perfectly capable of using other resources—that doesn't change the fact that a quick Google is often the fastest way to reference something I forgot.
I'd never hire someone who saw using Stack Overflow (when it made sense) as a flaw.
I appreciate the author's opinions overall, so this is a nitpick of just one of his core arguments. I think he is inverting the value of certain kinds of questions. To me, Stack Overflow is valuable primarily for the simple answers to simple questions, and secondarily for the complex answers to hard questions.
As a software developer well into my second decade of professional experience, I maintain a small number of technologies at what you might call an expert level. These technologies shift in and out of focus depending on what my current projects are.
When I complete a project and don't use the technology for more than a year or so, I've found that I forget all of the nitty gritty stuff and remember all the big conceptual stuff.
For example, I recently returned to Java after several years of disuse. All the bit conceptual stuff that was really hard for me to pick up initially, like polymorphic behavior, multithreading, etc., was still there. The easy but nit-picky stuff was all gone. I'd forgotten when boxing happens and doesn't happen, the behavior of equals in reference vs value types, even where I'm supposed to put certain syntactic elements. Simple questions on StackOverflow to the rescue!
As another example, I did a large project involving SVG in the early 2000's and got to the point where I knew as much as there was to know about it. I recently did a quick one-off project that utilized SVG, and I found that I'd retained the big conceptual ideas, such as the behavior of the coordinate system, the hierarchy of shapes, viewports, groups, etc., but I'd totally forgotten a huge laundry list of practical nitty-gritty things about actually making an SVG experience work.
In the Java example I was embarking on a large project, so I hit the books and re-taught myself to fish again, because it was quite worth my time investment to start from the fundamentals and work my way back up. In the SVG example, I literally just wanted to do something in an afternoon, and I knew SVG could do it, and I wasn't going to do any SVG work after that. Hitting the books and teaching myself to fish in that scenario would have been a waste of time. So I plowed through and was helped immensely by the simple-question simple-answer Stack Overflow scenario.
Then there's a whole list of technologies that I really don't have the brain-space to keep abreast of, but I still need to use. For example I am not an expert at shell scripting, but on occasion I need to write one. Back to Stack Overflow and the simple answers to simple questions.
Before Stack Overflow I wouldn't have been in the dark--as a long-time Internet community member, I would have gone through the usual: find the right community with the most helpful people, hope the community has a search engine or is well indexed by Google, read through long lists of replies without a voting system or assessment of quality, rinse-repeat. Stack Overflow speeds that process up immensely.
Personally I haven't found Stack Overflow useful for anything in a looong time. At work, usually my problems are specific to whatever proejct I'm working on and my peers are the only real source of answers regarding that. At home, if I want to work on some cool new thing then a Wikipedia page or good write-up on someone's blog is the goto source for useful, structured information.
The few times I have seen SO recently have been from friends trying to do Linux things, looking for answers on SO, and finding some ludicrous answer that is either just wrong or an extremely roundabout (and overcomplicated) approach to solving it.
For instance, I was recently inquiring about a specific task with CMake and consulted ChatGPT. Initially, the response was inaccurate, but it was obviously so when it didn’t compile. Upon reprompting, I received the correct answer.
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