Comment by justauserid
4 hours ago
I had stopped going to it quite some time ago.
1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.
3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
This was before LLMs or COVID.
> 1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
> ...
> 3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there. And whenever I did I had to be super-defensive from the get go. It was either people trying their hardest to close it, or "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question).
I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions, but in retrospect they took the wrong approach. They should have let people ask and answer questions freely, even dups. Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
Yip, LLMs were the executioners but SO had already long since put itself on death row for exactly what you're mentioning. I think sites like FlipCode were in many ways the spiritual predecessor of SO, and the questions were more of a part of the community rather than the definition of it. People need to feel free to communicate for something like SO to be successful, and they'd turned themselves into an absurdly user-hostile site where it seemed like people were competing against each other to see who could find a reason to close questions, rather than looking for a reason to answer them.
The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.
It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.
As someone who spent a lot of time answering and moderating (not full-on moderating, but editing, voting, reviewing first questions, etc) in the WordPress SE, it was jarring sometimes to see the attitudes that the real mods brought in.
However, when you spend an hour looking at low-quality answers, questions that have he's been asked like ten times already, etc, I get the sense that the people doing the moderating were trying their best - some of them, at least. No doubt there are mods there who just enjoy the miniature lower trip a la overzealous reddit mods, and I can't imagine the stress of trying to handle the amount of traffic some of the exchanges got.
Almost feels like training an llm on that caused it to ignore certain constraints that make a problem hard and solve an easier version of you problem instead.
Also a lot of communities do their own QA on discord where they can modererate themselves.
>>Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there.
Have seen this every where, even in case of people. If people are dreading to even approach you for something, its over for you. You can't get just the good things to pass through a filter. No such thing exists.
In many ways you need to be open for everything(apart from outright wrong things, like abuse) including stupid things, to get the good things.
> 1. It was hard to ask any question.
Totally. There were so many safeguards in place, for a newcomer it is quite hard to contribute.
They also never understood a core principle of such platforms. The noise is not noise but what carries such platforms. They even had it quantified, some of their most upvoted questions are off topic because they are opinion based. Bad and good questions (and answers) come hand in hand.
Well, they were the backbone of professional IT/SWE, so of course they did a lot of things right obviously.
I hated asking Qs in SO, it felt terribly snobby. However, I used it a lot to search for answers. The alternatives were crap.
First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.
The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.
Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].
> The alternatives were crap. … Asking was still pretty terrible.
The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about. Asking was terrible because otherwise you get the other forms of crap. That's what everyone knew going in and it was a common observation that specifically motivated creating the site in the first place.
+1 to the outright hostility.
Good riddance.
Well, 2) is often a honey pot trap since some projects have no documentation, or only so little documentation that spending time trying to figure out a project is a waste of time. There is a reason why SO got important in the first place. Horrible documentation was one reason.
> I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.
For the Javascript ecosystem in particular... it also massively helped that projects finally started to work on their documentation. The churn rate was insane and documentation or working examples took an afterthought for far too long, that is what drove so many people to SO in the first place.
> It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe.
I feel this is the critical bit. People are quick to dismiss this problem as a moderation problem, but I don't agree. I believe it was a query problem, and the absolute lack of support for tying both questions and answers to specific software versions, or range of software versions. So you'd see answers from ages ago marked as the right answer to a question, even though it was using some deprecated version.
Questions on how to address the same issue when new versions were out where closed as duplicates because literally the question was asked before and answered as well. But the answer nowadays would not be applicable.
Then to sidestep this problem you see the phenomenon where ancient questions end up having multiple answers, with newer answers even out voting the accepted answer. And even those would be deprecated as well.
So SO was designed as a system where a single question can only possibly have a single accepted answer. Ever. And anyone asking similar questions would by design be routed to he question that was asked and answered. But the system was designed over the concept of static information and static notion of truth. Which the world definitely doesn't follow.