What comes after Stack Overflow?(infoworld.com) |
What comes after Stack Overflow?(infoworld.com) |
The decline began before ChatGPT's November 2022 launch. So it would still decline even without the availability of LLMs. For me personally SO has mostly lost it's value because of the bueraucratic and arrogant ivory-tower mentality of the admins.
> "cannibal's dilemma"
Looking at services like Perplexity, I don't think it is/was essential to use SO data for training, since the main point of Perplexity is to use sufficiently intelligent agents (based on LLMs) to search and infer from many sources. The specific knowledge the agent received from the training data is not only static (i.e. not current), but neither essential, as long as the agent has sufficient general knowledge to solve the research request. It's like real experts; the knowlege we were trained on at university is only a small subset of the world and usually not very current; but we have learned how to do research and to solve problems. I'm much more efficient with Perplexity than I ever was with SO, and no longer silly discussions.
SO was always explicitly intended to be an "ivory tower", or at least to produce one as a permanent, useful artifact. The people you call "admins" are not anything of the sort; we have a few dozen actual moderators, and then a hundred thousand or so people entitled to cast close votes, and many more entitled to edit posts unilaterally. The role "administrator" does not exist at Stack Exchange. There are staff who actually work for Stack Exchange, Inc., but in large part they are enemies of the community on meta who discuss policy and try to organize curation.
> I'm much more efficient with Perplexity than I ever was with SO, and no longer silly discussions.
SO is explicitly not for discussion of any kind. That's why there's a meta site, so that even questions about SO itself don't have to distract from the main Q&A flow.
If you wanted to talk to some"one" (whether human or AI) back and forth to solve a personal problem, then SO was never intended to fill that purpose, and in fact explicitly designed to avoid that mode of discourse (even though the original design created some perverse incentives that were never addressed). The whole point of it is to not be a discussion forum - so that when you find a Q&A later, you don't have to read through a "thread" to find the question, filter out the arguing, make sure you found something relevant, and get an answer. So that when you want to be "helpful", you can explain a basic topic once and refer people back to it later; and so that you can directly answer questions instead of trying to figure out what people even want to know in the first place.
If you were on SO because you wanted to describe your current situation and have someone help you fix the code, you were always in the wrong place, and it was your responsibility to understand that.
If the site "lost value" for you in that regard, it's only because people were trying to provide value that was never in the site's mandate - in a way that directly harms the site's actual goals.
Codidact (https://software.codidact.com), for those who actually care about the Q&A site model (although we're designed explicitly to allow for opening separate "sections" for things that don't work like Q&A). That is, if you're posting a question in order to frame useful, searchable information, and not simply to get help with a project.
Disclosure: I am a moderator there (actual moderator, not just someone entitled to edit posts - which we still do as a community, with the same kind of Creative Commons licensing arrangement).
I bet Google are kicking themselves for killing Google Code.
https://code.google.com/archive/about
> But alas, in 2015 Google bid farewell to the service
Oh, you mean the comment section, which is explicitly by policy not for extended discussion (and in fact, actual moderators have a template message that they can use when moving those comments to a chat room in bulk, which says so in about as many words).
The purpose of this section under a question is to determine and address issues with the question - by telling you what to fix if you need to fix it, by making sure you're understood so that someone else can fix it, etc.
> and usually there was no answer
It is explicitly against policy to attempt to answer a question in the comments. That's why there are actual answers labelled as such; it's why comments are limited in length and formatting capability; and it's why, when you open the comment submission form, the placeholder text in the text field reads
> Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid answering questions in comments.
Moving on:
> or just one which recommended to not ask the question
Yes, because questions that aren't fixable shouldn't be asked, and questions that can be fixed should be.
> I neither care much whether the people who blocked my questions are called admins or moderators or whatever, the outcome is the same.
Your questions were not "blocked"; other people were simply prevented from answering them until you fix the question. You are given a minimum of 9 days to do this before automatic deletion, and you can still petition for undeletion.
If you don't care about a site enough even to use or understand its basic terminology, why should that site try to accommodate you?
> I used the site as intented.
No, you clearly did not, based on your demonstrated lack of understanding of basic principles of how the site works.
I didn't say anything else.
> other people were simply prevented from answering them until you fix the question
Oh, thanks, I feel much better now.
> No, you clearly did not, based on your demonstrated lack of understanding of basic principles of how the site works.
Which is what common people call "bad marketing" ;-) In Switzerland, we have a popular expression for the attitude we can observe on SO: “schön sterben” (to die beautifully). As I said, I left SO behind and am much better off with what I have now, and I'm definitely not the only one.
You claimed to gain value from discussion that was explicitly against policy, while also claiming to use the site as intended.
> Oh, thanks, I feel much better now.
You were not using the site as intended if you believed that you should be able to get a personalized answer to your question without having to fix it to meet standards first.
> As I said, I left SO behind and am much better off with what I have now
I'm glad you found something that allowed you to have the experience you wanted. This does not in any way change the fact that, based on the available evidence, you did not use Stack Overflow the way it was designed and intended to be used, but rather - like most people - in the way that you supposed it ought to be used.
> Which is what common people call "bad marketing" ;-)
I agree. The company keeps trying to mislead people about how the site is intended to be used, in pursuit of profit.
But Atwood and Spolsky were overall pretty clear about this. They were much more clear about describing the kinds of things they wanted to not be.
And the company staff are, quite simply, not the people who get to decide what that purpose is.
Not now that there are 29M users, with 100k of them eligible for basic curation actions, and a separate meta discussion site with 50k Q&A entries (just for Stack Overflow specifically, and another 100k for the network generally, which includes a ton of old Stack Overflow-specific stuff for historical reasons), and a 16-year-long history of a community figuring these things out among themselves.
> “schön sterben” (to die beautifully)
Oh, the site absolutely will die.
Because because the curators are also leaving, because the company continues to be hostile to them - trying to make the site work like another Quora, repeatedly trying to sneak in random uses for AI; repeatedly claiming to have listened to the community in discussion and then doing yet another thing that demonstrates complete ignorance of the community's most basic positions; repeatedly introducing new channels for user-generated content without even thinking about how spammers will use them; seemingly having no awareness of the work the volunteer community does to fight spam (including large-scale third-party automation) despite being repeatedly told about it; hobbling the mods (the two dozen actual mods) from enforcing the rules....
... And it won't be beautiful.
But maybe some of those curators will come to https://software.codidact.com instead.
I'm sure you can recognize that this does not apply if you read more carefully.
> But maybe some of those curators will come to https://software.codidact.com instead.
You will likely attract original SO "curators" with your statements, but hardly any of the very many customers who fled SO for the same reasons I did.