Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Am I alone in pretty much having completely stopped using stackoverflow in the past year?

Even before AI came out I was having problems with using it due to their community having turned into an insular group that was against the Outsider (e.x. having my questions closed as a duplicate of another question despite my question have quoted the original and pointing out the difference in my situation, not being able to get perms to do anything useful without having earned karma you cant get because the established players keep everyone else out, etc)

Now though I just end up reading docs on the tool in question or asking ChatGPT. In the times where ChatGPT was wrong or hallucinating, I never found the right answer on stackoverflow after.

Oh and thats beyond the seemingly endless amount of copycats who look like they are just scraping stackoverflow and then reposting with better SEO? Not entirely sure what it is but for a while I kept finding websites with duplicate down to the typo answers, as stackoverflow

I found it increasingly annoying that almost every time I searched for some variation of "what is a good tool/library/device for X" there was a SO thread high in the search results, but of course the question was closed (often with some great, but old, answers) because they do not accept questions like that. They could have had a lot of more happy users if they figured out a way to support that kind of questions somehow.

Someone actually took the time to close my 16 years old question of that type. There wasn't any activity on it, and it had good answers. Some people are just bored.

I can't quite remember, but don't you get mod points for actions like that. Someone looking to increase their mod level, or boost their points (is it useful on a CV [Resumé]?), might go chasing older questions.

Also, they have a really annoying "community bot" that revives v.old questions into the new question queue... it tricked me a few times, then I started to check it wasn't a community bot question before looking further (pretty moronic and anti-answerer behaviour imo).

You don't. Assuming that by "mod points" you mean badges, no badge listed on https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges can be earned by closing questions.

I've just had the same experience: last month someone decided it was a good idea to close a question of mine from 2010 because it was "opinion-based", asking me to "Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. This will help others answer the question". The question, other than being 15 years old, had more than one thousand votes, 15 answers with positive score and a bunch of low quality answers. The question is still up on the site, just nobody can answer on it, but it feels hostile to me (and to the people who took the time to contribute answers) and made to accommodate the wishes of someone who cares about tidying up the place more than anything else.

I purposely deleted all of my Stack Overflow accounts for this reason. Tired of that site.

> figured out a way to support that

Seriously, sites need to stop fighting their users. If people are constantly asking for that content, there is a need for it.

The data shows that you are not alone. AI is decimating StackOverflow.

The draconian approach to keeping the site clean made some sense before AI, because they used to have tons of really, really, really low-effort questions. ("do my homework", basically.) But now those go to AI....

My usage is more in line with how it was originally conceived, I search engines as an interface to Stack Overflow. If I have a problem, I do a search, if it lands me on Stack Overflow, then that's where I get my information.

The really good answers are getting harder to find, so I see Stack Overflow less and less, but I disagree with those who comments that LLMs have taken the role of primary source of information. I don't use ChatGPT, CoPilot, or any other LLM and I also seen a sharp reduction in the amount of times I find myself on Stack Overflow. Depending on what I do, my go to is either the official documentation or source code. Only exception is probably C, where I will frequently go to the OpenBSD man pages first, as they are really well written, and then adapt if something doesn't line up with glibc.

I have a Kiwix archive of all of StackOverflow from shortly before ChatGPT launched. I suspect that's all I'll ever need, and even that will become less useful as time passes.

Insular communities seem to be the fate of sites that put a strong emphasis on voting as a way of moderating content. SO gets scraped quite a bit. It's easy to do and even if the knockoff site only gets 0.1% of SO's traffic, it's worthwhile. Being text heavy means it's easy to host and gets good SEO.

I still use stackoverflow through searching for very obscure things that got answered a while ago and a question kept alive and relevant through people doing good Samaritan work and updating answers to the current year.

Each time I tried to get an answer from any LLM, the thing was always deeply wrong or obviously flawed. Mind you I am always searching for specific, niche, really crappy things that are often an overlap of SW and HW...

But again this is very cherry picked opinion from my personal use.

Agreed from a software engineering perspective. I can't imagine who still uses stack overflow.

However I'm still in the phase where I think of opening a browser before realising my IDE with it's LLM is a better first choice.

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