Some of the alternatives that the author suggests (Slack, Discord, Matrix rooms) are so much worse to search for answers in. Stack overflow has many disadvantages, but it is extremely good at being a publicly searchable repository of answers to common questions
I believe pretty strongly that almost every company should have some kind of internal SE
The problem that comes to mind is that every question and answer that’s posted is something you have to maintain as part of your docs as they rot over time.<p>I’d be curious to hear what the common solutions to that are.<p>Maybe it can be used as a limbo to gather FAQs that get crystallized into the real docs and then deleted.
Good documentation, communication channels and a healthy work environment where colleagues can communicate and help each other are much beneficial than an internal SE.
Documentation doesn’t solve the problem of Q/A situations.<p>Internal Stack Exchanfes are (were? I’m not sure whether they discontinued it…my old company had one but new one doesn’t) is really good at converting chat style communication into a permanent easily searchable record that can also be easily updated.<p>You can also avoid many of the pitfalls with stack overflow around over aggressive moderation (not really needed since the volume of questions won’t be as high), or inappropriate commenting of any sort (reach out to the individual directly or even to their manager), etc.
The only suitable bit of tech that comes to my mind is Lemmy (the reddit-style activitypub thing).
And we wouldn’t have a use case for Ai without StackOverflow & Google’s broken search.
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Can someone parse what this blog is trying to say with the whole Joe story at the top? I’m too deep in post-Thanksgiving travel acquired illness to understand what this story is trying to tell me. The StackOverflow links are 404s because they were deleted, which the article oddly acknowledges after the links but without removing the deleted links.<p>As far as I can tell, the author of this blog post had their StackOverflow question deleted for some reason, it made them angry, and now they want us all to delete our StackOverflow accounts and moved to Discord, Slack, Matrix, a forum they acknowledge is actually pretty mean to new users, and a lot of other alternatives?
This seems like a totally incoherent complaint. The alleged SO bad-actor is upset that they can't police a community, but the author has the same complaint, just directed at SO.<p>All platforms with any moderation system can be subverted by bad actors - IDK that much about SO's mechanisms but it strikes me as leaving the "community" far more leverage for getting around entrenched bad actors than discord, reddit, etc.<p>And what's more... it's software purpose-built for technical Q&A. Some of my SO answers have been updated by others as they became outdated. Not that I have some particular fondness for SO, but what a cool collective intelligence feature.<p>I have a feeling this was written for an in-group and broke containment, but the straight forward answer here seems to me to be "SO should have a report system for dealing with bad actors," not "boycott the forum I don't like so people use the one I do"
Absolutely not.<p>1) This is a people problem, not a site problem. Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted, and for every singular tech professional who is, there are a dozen horrid maladjusted ones who are unfortunately successful and find themselves with power they aren't mature enough to have.<p>2) StackOverflow is still a treasure trove of information and a place anyone can go and ask questions about even niche and deprecated technology. Just recently asked a question about InnoSetup on StackOverflow and got a great response from possibly <i>the</i> expert fellow on InnoSetup.<p>Having an "invested community" requires an inordinate amount of effort from a tiny handful of founders for uncertain reward.
So interesting that this post is about putting incentives in the right place.<p>I distinctly remember the number one fantastic thing about StackOverflow in the beginning was that their incentives were so much better than all the alternatives.<p>The way SO gave you points for answering questions and gave you more for being the best answer etc etc meant the answers you got there were so much better than anywhere else. This is why the site grew so rapidly and so quickly became the best place to get a great answer.
I just had that kind of experience, but with Stack Exchange.<p>The Ubuntu people seem to have recently pushed to users a new version of the CUPS printer scheduler that doesn't like the syntax of some old cupsd.conf files. This breaks all printing on affected machines.<p>So where are the bug reports? Stack Exchange. Nobody over there is going to fix it. This needs to be discussed on Ubuntu Forums, where the maintainers might read it.
For now, I posted similar discussions on the CUPS forum and Ubuntu's own forum, and linked them to each other. There's a finger-pointing problem coming up - is this a CUPS bug or a Ubuntu bug? (What writes the cupsd.conf file anyway? Ubuntu Settings?) I don't want to file a bug report until the finger-pointing phase has commentary from people who actually know the innards of Linux printing, or I'll get shot down by one side blaming the other. Let those guys fight it out.
"The Ubuntu people seem to have recently pushed to users a new version of the CUPS printer scheduler"<p>If you don't like breaking changes then you might consider using an Ubuntu LTS and then adding your own changes as required.<p>I've been using CUPS for roughly 20 years and since I ditched HPLIP and the like some years ago and went all in on IPP Anywhere, its been rock solid for me at home and at work and for quite a few customers.<p>So, which version of Ubuntu do you rock and can we have some links to discussions please? Or some idea of the issues involved.
What? Why'd a software maintainer read Ubuntu Forums but not Ask Ubuntu?<p>If you want it to be read by a maintainer, submit it to their bug tracker?!
Stackoverflow started failing when Jeff left. While he had a big hand in the whole mantra of being more of a Wiki than just Q&A, I feel his sense of community wouldn’t have let it get so bad.<p>Then all of the OG engineers left (I hope Nick Craver is doing well, his blog posts were incredible), an investment company took over, and whatever good will and vibe that was left melted away.<p>I’ll still occasionally find a good answer there. But it has zero future of making answers available for future good questions.<p>They took the fun away.
Love the idea but getting people to move to another platform requires both<p>- "nothing about the new thing is worse"<p>and<p>- "some things are better".<p>Any migration must also defeat social network effects ("I'll wait for everyone else before I migrate")<p>Still it is exciting to see energy for this.<p>Would be great to know what (if any) alternatives exist with a similar UI to Stack Overflow - open source or other.
> nothing about the new thing is worse<p>That is <i>definitely</i> not true. There is some complex set of coefficients that play into when people are willing to mass migrate, but needless to say the road to where we are today with platforms <i>was not</i> a linear slope upward. In many cases, like the move from forums to social media platforms, there were obvious problems basically the entire time, but one of those things is surgically good at consuming your attention and one is not.
> Choose ownership by invested communities instead of faceless gamified interlopers.<p>This is a fair take, I will say as someone who benefited greatly from SO and contributed to it way more than I should have (on paid time) the problem <i>was</i> that people asking question were always new to the site and rules, and so their questions would be shot down in service to high quality content.<p>Whats happening now is anyone who is asking questions there is even less in tune with the practices of the site and likely with tech in general. It has been consumed by every coding llm, (i don't condone it but it's a fact). So it begs the question, if you have a truly new and novel problem that hasn't yet been solved by Jon Skeet, where do you ask ?<p>As an ex hardcore user, I don't know the answer anymore but bikeshedding things with an LLM is ironically sometimes more insightful for me personally.
Even if my question has been asked <i>and</i> answered before, what would it take for the site to realize that the answer that references, say, React 15 from 2016 is not useful in 2025?
Unfortunately the sheer scale of updating that is not possible by just the mods etc, it usually comes down to someone who has searched the problem, come across the question, realized it's too old to apply, figured out a fix themselves, and <i>THEN</i> had the decency to update the question with an updated answer.<p>It's just unsustainable depending on the goodwill of users, especially when SO score means very little these days.<p>Edit : It might be very doable by AI.. But they would have to sacrifice their "no ai answer" policy. (maybe they have already)
Since I (and likely everyone else) uses AI to answer technical questions, and AI is taught by stackoverflow, and stackoverflow shuts down because it generates no income, what will the next AI be trained on?
Try as I might, I could not actually understand what the author’s point was.<p>What is so bad about SO?
The other day I saw an answer on StackOverflow which was very detailed, well researched, and grounded in decades of experience.<p>It was also heavily downvoted, because it did not directly answer the user's question. (The user had already selected a winning answer, so this was in some sense unnecessary.)<p>It struck me that a single scalar for quality was inappropriate here. It was the best post I'd read in a long time, but by the site's rules indeed "deserved" the downvotes.<p>I had to wonder if a multidimensional system (tags like "answers question" and "general context" etc.) would work better. You know... the stuff every social media site figured out twenty years ago? ;)<p>---<p>Tangential but the more I think about it, the more I think we had the web basically right twenty years ago...<p>You subscribed to what you wanted to see.. and then sometimes you'd find really cool new things through mentions or the comments section.<p>I was thinking about signal to noise ratio and taste recently and realized I'd reinvented RSS from first principles...
I think the only place I'd seen voting that wasn't just up or down was Slashdot, and all that did was let the user adjust weights for the dimensions. I do miss their voting though.
> I had to wonder if a multidimensional system (tags like "answers question" and "general context" etc.) would work better.<p>Same for HN. You're supposed to vote based on "contributes to the discussion" but if someone posts something that's false, that can be a common misconception that others will have as well and is explained in replies. Does it need to be downvoted for a honest mistake? You know people will.<p>There's a bunch of dimensions you could vote for but something close to "I disagree with this" is what people mostly use. If that were a separate metric from "contributes to the conversation", they could each affect ranking/grayness appropriately<p>Another forum I'm on lets you classify posts from "troll" (-1) through "irrelevant" to "fine", "good", and "exceptional" (+3). It then takes the median value of all votes, biasing/tie-breaking towards "fine". There is no limit on how many posts you're allowed to mark as exceptionally good, but if you abuse it, your voting rights are taken away. It's far from perfect (if you have behind-the-scenes knowledge of something, you can see where the hive mind goes wrong) but I like it better than what HN does, also because it's public and you can filter for the exceptionally good replies. They're most often by people who post additional sources and information that the article could/should have had. On HN, the only time we get to see vote count is when something gets grayed out for being super bad...
Do you have a link?
I don't know what TLA+ is, but thanks for an entertaining rant, and the excerpt from Heller's timeless book.
This comes some years too late. Who is really using StackOverflow to ask questions?
I know that ChatGPT can answer all questions that StackOverflow can answer in a fast, friendly and nearby as correct way. It has limitations, but the most people on StackOverflow are jsut doing the same than ChatGPT, just repeat after other people. All this things will be gone soon.
I don't remember where I read this, but will tell this story every time ChatGPT is mentioned as a replacement of StackOverflow.<p>> I asked chatgpt how do I do X. Chatgpt replied with the accepted answer from stack overflow, thus saving me 1 second. In theory. In practice, what Chatgpt did NOT tell me was that the top voted comment on that accepted answer said "Do not do this, doing X in this way creates a security vulnerability of type Y because of Z"
Honestly, in this scenario I’d lean toward the LLM providing the better answer. Whoever shared this parable didn’t understand that ChatGPT isn’t just a search engine that regurgitates the top voted accepted comment from Stack Overflow. An LLM is probably more likely to parse the entire page <i>and</i> all of the comments if it pulls an URL. It would also be more likely to pull multiple URLs. It would also be more likely to pull from accumulated embedded knowledge. Unfortunately for this fabricated example, the casual visitor to Stack Overflow is most likely to be duped by an incorrect accepted answer if they don’t scroll down and read the fine print (which isn’t that common, a fact that surprises people who always read the comments and all answers).
As a ConTeXt user I use to ask questions on SO from time to time because (1) the wiki can be outdated or incoherent; and (2) I get lost on the mailing list, which is the other way you can ask stuff or get help about ConTeXt. I don't see ChatGPT or something like that catching up about something so niche fairly soon, though
ChatGPT can provide the same answers SO can because it mined SO as part of its training data.
From my experience, the majority of answers (accepted or highest voted) are wrong/outdated, with the second or third being the correct answer.
Yes. Giant disorganized piles of atomized information are less useful than optimized integrated data representations queryable by LLMs.
I still use SO to ask questions. In fact, just asked a question couple days ago which ChatGPT couldn't answer, nor has anyone on SO been able to:<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79831192/multi-line-title-in-uibutton-in-a-uitableviewheaderfooterview-causes-uiviewalert" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79831192/multi-line-titl...</a>
Well, SO is only read by scrapers these days so no answers doesn't mean much. Could be the question is unsolvable, could be lots of people know the answer and won't see it because you've written it in a graveyard.<p>edit: thought I'd try to check that belief but the process for getting SO to show me any information involves enough layers of question boxes and captions that I've kind of got the confirmation by giving up in annoyance.
I pay $10 a month to a small forum I frequent. If you're not willing to support the websites you use, it all leads to the same end.