Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>At some point that “helpful” vibe changed. Stack Overflow ceased being a question and answer site, and begun calcifying into a documentation site. Questions are answered with “see this other answer”.

>Maybe it’s the fate of all Q&A sites to eventually become documentation sites. If you answer the question “correctly” once, why bother repeating yourself?

You have misunderstood the editorial intent of Stack Overflow because it was always meant to be "documentation" more than a service to answer any questions including repeated/duplicated questions. This misunderstanding isn't your fault because most people visiting that site misunderstand it.

I wrote a previous comment citing co-founder Jeff Atwood's reasoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115438

StackOverflow seemed to be "more helpful" in the beginning because the volume of content (aka "documentation") was still being seeded and built out by the new questions. Being helpful was a side effect of the site not having much content.

But now that there's a ton of content, a new question is more likely to be cross-referenced to a previous answer and therefore "Closed as duplicate" or some other reason. Yes, that seems a little rude and "unhelpful". And people don't realize that's the way Stack Overflow is designed to work.

EDIT to also add comment from co-founder Spolsky: "In our equation, we are a community of people writing answers that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people. Ours is a project more like wikipedia" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656581

This is correct. It's also a problem. SO is still useful, but its utility has seriously diminished over time because of this approach. Too much of what's there is incorrect, outdated, or questions that aren't addressed elsewhere are unanswered because someone mistakenly thought it was already answered.

So would be much more useful if there were some effective mechanism to get rid of or correct entries that were answered incorrectly in the first place or have become incorrect or no longer relevant with time.

>So would be much more useful if there were some effective mechanism to get rid of or correct entries that were answered incorrectly in the first place or have become incorrect or no longer relevant with time.

Sometimes, the community will "fix" that by having a newer answer get upvoted beyond the "accepted" answer. E.g. a Python 3.2 answer with more modern syntax in 2014 gets upvoted above the Python 3.1 accepted answer in 2010:

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2331592/why-does-datetim...

But that type of "correction" only happens on popular questions. The more obscure questions and answers that are wrong will remain wrong because there are not enough eyeballs and/or widespread expertise to fix them.

I answered a popular-ish Ruby on Rails question in 2014 and it's still 3 votes shy from overtaking the outdated top answer from 2009. I don't even know if my answer is the best today because I haven't done Rails in years.

I definitely think this is a major pain point in the platform. I don't think that doing away with duplicates is the answer – instead there should be a way to downrank outdated stuff. Or something. I think they were experimenting with some approaches, but I haven't really been active in the last few years.

I've read that, but I disagree. Stack Overflow would be better for the community if it allowed repetition. Repetition isn't harmful, and it lets the next generation learn how to answer questions, which is a legitimately hard skill, and I'm arguing is more useful than creating a static repository of documentation.

>would be better for the community if it allowed repetition. Repetition isn't harmful,

The "community" also includes the people who volunteer to answer the questions. The answerers don't want repetition. Jeff Atwood wanted to prioritize the SO experience for the answerers.

To paraphrase JA's reasoning:

- asking questions is easy which can lead to an increasing volume of bad questions that degrades the site for the answerers

- answering questions is hard and more valuable for StackOverflow so optimize the site for them. (JA wrote, ">We feel that the world is awash in questions, but not answers. Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A; system. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers."[1])

I do understand how you would want SO to work differently and I'm not debating your opinion. I'm just relaying how the cofounders wanted StackOverflow to work.

[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-....

Also note that all products, especially successful ones, change (anyone used Excel lately?) and the cofounders are all long gone. They built something that was temporally valuable, (rightfully) cashed in and moved on.

> - asking questions is easy

No, asking bad or thoughtless questions is easy. Asking a good question, complete with "this is what I've tried" and snippets and links to all revelant resources like API documentation, CodePens/Godbolts/standards and a summary of your thinking that has led to needing an answer in the first place is very hard.

A good question is probably at least an hour's work, and there are very few easy questions left that don't need substantial work even to frame.

An answer can be very in-depth with research and analysis, which also takes a long time, but it can also be anywhere on the spectrum down to fairly straightforward "you missed a function call" answer.

On the other hand, writing a good question sometimes solves your problem half way through when your Minimal Viable Example suddenly starts working and your realise the flaw, or the rubber-duck nature makes you think it through in a new way.

> answering questions is hard

I think this assumption is not true anymore - ChatGPT can give an answer in less time and (human) effort than it takes to formulate and devise a question. So it really is about creating a set of curated question-answer pairs, where both the questions and the answers can be auto-generated. In this context, asking the same question different ways is really helpful to an AI. And there is no such thing as a bad question, there are just Q-A pairs that do not contribute significantly to training the model ("boring" questions). I've noticed Quora is experimenting with ChatGPT but they aren't at the point where you can flag the AI's answer as incorrect or misleading and fix it.

> chatgpt can give an answer in less time and (human) effort than it takes to formulate and devise a question.

Can it? I mean, you still have to spend the time and effort required in order to ensure that ChatGPT's answer is correct and complete.

Well, the question-asker should be able to tell if ChatGPT's answer is incorrect. Most obviously, for software, they try it and it doesn't work, or for scientific questions, they look up the references and they don't exist. It is probably even possible to automate such checking to some extent. But similar issues apply to checking human answers - at some point, the answer is correct because it sounds plausible, not because it has been verified.

If people are posting answers that they don't know are correct, putting the burden on the asker to do that vetting, then the entire point of the site is moot.

News flash, but a lot of stackoverflow answers are garbage - incorrect, out of date, etc.. Does this make it useless? No, you just have to sift through.

Repetition is harmful. I've seen it play out on many expert forums (including an M:tG forum with several Level 2 Judges): sooner or later, depending on the person's stress-resistance, but always, they get too tired of answering the same questions over and over and over and over again. And manifestations of that phenomenon aren't pretty: they either leave the forum entirely, or turn quite acidic in their tone. In either case, their usefulness as the anwererers becomes quite low.

Repetition is harmful, stale answers are harmful, growing the results forever is harmful, searching for good old answers that are still valid is difficult, prioritizing newer answers means that the good old ones are harder to find, etc., etc., etc. Every forum, wiki, and growing documentation base eventually stagnates, overflows, or dies some other way. Wikipedia is one exception that mostly stays up-to-date.

What if people just don't answer the same questions over and over? Old answers can be linked, but the whole point of allowing repetition is to get fresh answers, ideally from new people. People going insane repeating themselves is a separate issue that can be solved in much better ways than prohibiting duplicate questions.

Serious question: how many answers have you posted on Stack Overflow?

Because people standing from the sidelines telling me what I should and shouldn't be doing with my spare time leaves more than a little bad taste in my mouth.

Asked a few, answered a few, same as most people I suppose.

So basically you have no experience what it's like to be answering questions? Most answers come from a fairly dedicated group of people who check the site most days, not from the occasional strays.

I'm not saying that people answering questions are always right or always have the final say, but it's easy to have strong opinions on what's "better for the community" if you're not the one doing the legwork or have to deal with the fallout from that.

I certainly would never be saying that sort of stuff unless I had put in the work. My balls just aren't big enough I guess.

> This misunderstanding isn't your fault because most people visiting that site misunderstand it.

And the reason few people understand it is because it's not logical. If you want documentation, read the documentation, and in most cases, that's what they did before asking the question. Anything more than cut and paste of the official documentation is discussion. "Well what is usually done to make this work in practice..." Nope. That's discussion, and to 99.9% of people asking for help, it's why such a site exists.

Do I have evidence? Sure, look at all the questions that have moved to Reddit, Discord, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com