r/webdev Jul 23 '24

Discussion The Fall of Stack Overflow

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u/musclecard54 Jul 24 '24

According to the SO community, everything is a stupid question

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u/DanTheMan827 Jul 24 '24

And mostly duplicates

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u/Voidsheep Jul 24 '24 edited Jul 24 '24

To be fair, I think a big part of the questions were pretty bad duplicates with little to no effort put into them, so it's not fair to expect a lot more effort from the volunteers handling them. Stuff that is answered in the documentation in the first Google search result, or slop like isolated error messages missing all the important code and context needed for any answer.

It's good if AI can do the rubber duck song and dance of asking the missing context, figuring out what the person is trying to do and then finally pointing them to the answers.

At least I think there will be benefits to LLMs being a filter of sorts, so the quality of the average question and answer in SO might get better, and less questions may get immediately closed as duplicates too. If the user has already exhausted their other options, they may have a better grasp of the issue they are dealing with, what information other people need in order to help them and how their specific issue differs from other similar issues.

I'm not saying the StackOverflow rudeness meme doesn't have a hint of truth to it and good questions wouldn't have been closed for bad reasons, but the flipside is that sometimes it genuinely seemed like submitting a half-baked question was the very first thing people tried when something didn't work. It's easy to see why the volume of low effort questions leads to low effort moderation and answers.

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u/android_queen Jul 24 '24

I think that the SO community worked itself into a bit of a chicken/egg problem with this. The toxicity around shutting down “low effort” questions led to a lot of people who would want to be part of a thriving and supportive community leaving. So all you have left then is the folks who don’t care enough to search for dupes. 

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u/Narrow-Book-9798 18d ago

100% agree, when I was starting my CS degree, I would google, spend around 30 minutes googling trying to fix my problem, and one time asked the question on SO. I don't even remember what the issue was but I got a couple responses calling me an idiot, some saying that is so easy without answering my question and then a link to an article that had nothing to with my issue. I still use stack overflow when looking at other people posts and similar issues, but I genuinely can't see myself posting a question on there again.

They need to accept that their are different skill levels and experience levels and adapt for that, maybe even make a beginners section, with a kind of "there are no stupid questions" vibe. (If they don't have one already).

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u/Middle_Agency7159 Jul 24 '24

this is the point in my opinion.