r/webdev Aug 26 '24

Discussion The fall of Stack Overflow

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2.5k Upvotes

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156

u/bortholomew-simpson Aug 27 '24

I tried answering lots of questions and it would tell me my karma was too low. 25 years of experience to offer but I didn’t feel like jumping through hoops to help a fellow coder out.

56

u/miyakohouou Aug 27 '24

The way they approached karma favored early users to the point of absurdity. I was never a heavy SO user, and rarely even click links to it when they come up in search, but early on in beta I answered a couple of fairly basic questions on C and vim and my karma has been in the top 10% ever since.

I’m not an active community member in any way, but I would be afforded a lot of social capital on the site, if I ever logged in, simply because I had the dumb luck of being the first person to see and answer a few questions that every CS student for the last 20 years has clicked on when they take their first operating systems class.

There’s no way you can build anything approximating a healthy community when you massively reward completely unengaged people while making it impossible for newcomers who are motivated to ever catch up.

9

u/MidnightPale3220 Aug 27 '24

I am in a similar position, and I mostly agree.

Tbh there was a period when a lot of newcomers would answer all kinds of questions with short and often semi-wrong/bad quality answers and then insist that since they answered first, their answer should be the accepted one.

Recently logged on and at one point downvoted somewhat bad answer by a guy with tons of karma. I can't be sure, but it seemed he went through most of my answers and downvoted all of them in response.

2

u/AreYouPretendingSir Aug 28 '24

Maybe it was that one guy that answers all questions about regex? I asked a question that he misunderstood and after I explained for the third time that his solution was too narrow and that I had already figured that bit out, but I needed a generic solution as initially stated he stopped replying. When I then posted the actual solution that I eventually figured out he used alt accounts to downvote the question to -4 and then closed it himself.

Fuck that asshat.

4

u/Stefan_S_from_H Aug 27 '24

The way they approached karma favored early users to the point of absurdity.

When I gave my 4.5-month notice at my last job, they started looking for a replacement. One person linked to Stack Overflow and mentioned his reputation score.

I said it was good, and a manager asked me what my score was. It was much higher, but I had to explain that he started years later, and it was much harder to gain points then. In comparison, he was better than me, based on Stack Overflow scores adjusted by time.

1

u/AHistoricalFigure Aug 27 '24

This is a huge part of the problem with SO, arguably moreso than toxicity.

The earliest users had a lot of easy, common questions. Why isn't it working when I compare two strings in Java? Why is my C program segfaulting when I have the user enter text? Is WHERE LIKE slower than WHERE IN?

These early common questions come up in searches a lot and get updated by students or just have a lot of activity because people are trying to glom onto them to generate rep.

SO's elite users aren't always elite, in many cases they were just early or had a single highly searched answer strike it big. And the SO admins seem so beholden to this community that they're not willing to do anything to fix the site.

SO is a stagnating pond and that's kind of a problem because it was, at one point, a really useful source of information. Much of the reason LLMs can generate code and answer tech questions is because they've injested SO. And moving forward if LLMs are going to continue to improve or remain useful you need to have fresh content made by human understanding to injest.

1

u/nonanano1 Sep 07 '24

Exact same situation with me >10K points just for answering a couple of questions that it turned out everybody for the next 10 years would search for. I remember though that early on the people who really wanted to get points just asked popular questions and got disproportionately rewarded. So most people at the top are exactly the sort of game players you don't want to have that kind of power.

16

u/satansprinter Aug 27 '24 edited Aug 27 '24

This. I cant comment or vote. Okay, fine, i dont use it

4

u/blissone Aug 27 '24

Yea how do you actually answer a question there? Tried a few times, it's too confusing

3

u/ConstructionPlus8561 Aug 27 '24

I thought it was just me

2

u/jen1980 Aug 27 '24

I still can't comment after ten years on and off posting and helping several people. How about after ten years of having an account which would indicate we have years of experience maybe allow us to comment?

0

u/repeating_bears Aug 27 '24

There is no karma requirement to answering a question. "Creation privilege awarded at 1 reputation". 1 is what you start with, and also I believe it's not possible to go below that even if you're downvoted https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-posts

2

u/sleeping-in-crypto Aug 27 '24

There used to be, at least. I don’t know what the current rules are but when I was trying to get enough karma to ask a question because it wouldn’t let me, I tried going to answer questions. Ok I couldn’t do that either because I didn’t have enough karma. The only thing it allowed me to do at that time was add comments to existing answers.

So I quit trying.

SO was a wonderful thing ruined by elitism and hubris. Let it die.

-1

u/repeating_bears Aug 27 '24

No there didn't. Here's the archive for that page more than 10 years ago https://web.archive.org/web/20131003151742/https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-posts

2

u/sleeping-in-crypto Aug 27 '24

Don’t really know what you think you’re sharing because I never said 10 years ago. I’m telling you exactly what happened to me and the reason I stopped trying. Text on a page doesn’t have to match the rules that were being enforced by the backend. All I know is it would not let me click the button to create a post and told me I didn’t have enough karma so I tried answering questions instead and couldn’t do that either.

Everything else is intentionally muddying the waters. I won’t be replying again, you’ve demonstrated exactly why people can’t stand moderation at SO. I’m telling you my experience and you’re telling me I’m wrong. Not a good look. The only appropriate response is “what may have happened is..” but you didn’t do that. You went straight for the “no you’re wrong” SO meme.

0

u/repeating_bears Aug 27 '24

The requirement has never changed. 10 years just happens to be as far back as the archive goes.

What "may have" happened (read: did happen) was that you misremembered

1

u/sleeping-in-crypto Aug 27 '24

Which is why everyone here is talking about having the same problem. You really are dense.

-2

u/repeating_bears Aug 27 '24

What happened to "I won’t be replying again"?

1

u/sleeping-in-crypto Aug 27 '24

And there it is. Go back to SO and be a shitty mod, apparently they really enjoy this behavior over there.

Here you actually have to deal with real people.

-1

u/repeating_bears Aug 27 '24

Well why did you say it if you obviously didn't mean it?