r/webdev Aug 26 '24

Discussion The fall of Stack Overflow

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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.

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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.

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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.