Comment by legitster
13 days ago
Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming.
But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time:
If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer).
At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems.
(Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).
Early years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.
a.k.a enshitification
That's not what we mean when we say that phrase.
They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming.
From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.
11 replies →
enshitification is not a synonym of "went bad"
StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.
Ime, math.SE had a much friendlier vibe than most other SE sites. Primarily because you could ask about a problem you were struggling with and get help. No moderator would instantly show up and close the question as a dupe of a ten-year-old question about double integration techniques or some such.
People asking questions mostly wanted help, but most moderators thought they were curating some kind of question-answer form encyclopaedia. Very different perspectives.
I think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.
Agreed for the math one. I went there when I was dealing with game engines and needed something geometry related or the like rather than to stackoverflow and they were far nicer.
Even inside SO each language and topic would have different standards. A C question would not be answered in the same way one about a JS framework would.
I'm curious about the other Stack Exchange sites. Have they seen the same decline as Stack Overflow?
Stack Overflow was the "flagship" product of the Stack Exchange company, and if the company pivots to AI, I wonder what the future holds for the other Q&A sites on the SE network.
All the sites are seeing huge drops in activity. Today only five or six sites get 10 questions per day or more, which was SO Inc's minimum activity level for a beta site before they would "graduate" it. Now most of the network fails that test. (You can see stats for all SE sites at https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday.)
Most are reasonable and not so heavy handed.
There are a few outliers
Fair point! I suspect the toxicity/usefulness has a linear relationship with how well trod the particular community is.
Like the Internet, it got less friendly the more popular it got. And there were no measures in place to retain and reward the friendliness.
Jeff Atwood thought a lot about this when he subsequently created Discourse. Nudge people to treat their community members nice.