Timeline for Stack Overflow is no longer useful
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
37 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 6 at 22:15 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | @ChristophRackwitz This is a network-wide issue. See: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 | |
| Oct 6 at 21:21 | comment | added | Christoph Rackwitz | perhaps the game mechanics need tweaking so that rep isn't such an "artifact of time and opportunity" but actually something approaching "reputation" | |
| Oct 6 at 19:54 | comment | added | Ian Kemp - SO dead by AI greed | "the effort to reach 67k rep should be treated with a bit of respect due to the dedication this person had to the site" what is this nonsense about "dedication"? The majority of that user's reputation comes from a single question they asked in 2016, just like mine comes from a single answer from 2009. That's not dedication, that's a simple artifact of time and opportunity. If there's any true metric of dedication on SO, it's how much time someone's spent on Meta and that user hasn't. "No one feels welcomed" - guess I'm no one. | |
| Oct 3 at 13:11 | comment | added | Nelson Teixeira | Worst than that: The fact that it was so upvoted shows the problem is systemic. The least would be: "Thanks for your dedication, we appreciated it". But treating a dedicated user like this it's just terrible. Terminally terrible. At this point I see no future for SO. | |
| Oct 3 at 13:02 | comment | added | Nelson Teixeira | See? this is the perfect example of why people changed to LLMs in a heartbeat. If the effort to reach 67k rep shouldn't be treated with a bit of respect due to the dedication this person had to the site and it doesn't "entitle you to any special treatment" (it should) how would people treat the average user ? This is the attitude that is bringing SO down. No one feels welcomed. Not event it's best supporters. This just drives people away. I don't know if it's cultural, but to me this response was as rude as hell. I'm not used to receive this kind responses. Nor I will get used. I'll just walk. | |
| Sep 4 at 12:39 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | "This answer seems to be literally "not an answer to the question". The question was "Stack Overflow is no longer useful (please do something)". This answer basically says, "these are the standards, they are good"" — I answered the only things that could actually be "answered" here (and do keep in mind that the meta site doesn't work exactly like the main site). These are the standards; they are good; and saying so is the appropriate response. If this isn't accepted as an "answer" then the "question does not appear to seek input and discussion" and should have been closed instead. | |
| Jun 22 at 2:00 | comment | added | Christoph Rackwitz | the argument falls flat: fire fighters (SO) do not become "less useful" just because smoke alarms alert of a fire at a time when a resident can still handle it themselves (LLM use). the machine just catches the trivial work and reduces former catastrophes to something manageable. | |
| Jun 22 at 1:54 | comment | added | Christoph Rackwitz | there is no "new" SO. SO's traffic has dwindled since the advent of usable useful LLMs that answer technical questions. -- the standards don't induce any claim to SO's usefulness. the prospective relaxation of standards, which is being proposed, would make the site worse. -- if you think there's a "niche" for a different site to be created, that would be a fine proposal. don't try to change what you can't change. do something new. create competition. let the market (of brains, or users at least) sort it out. | |
| Jun 21 at 23:19 | comment | added | yeerk | This answer seems to be literally "not an answer to the question". The question was "Stack Overflow is no longer useful (please do something)". This answer basically says, "these are the standards, they are good". Why would the existence of standards prove the site is useful? Why would they help it become useful again? It is known as a fact that new Stack Overflow's new questions have significantly decreased (down to almost a quarter of the questions per month). It is being used by less people, and therefore helping less people, and possibly, not useful. | |
| Jun 6 at 23:44 | comment | added | Philip Couling | Just to follow up and add to that. Googles ranking algorithms peanalise for age. So SO answers gradually slip down the rankings with little-no maintainance on the majority. Interestingly Wikipedia doesn't seem to suffer from this so much, but scratch beneith the surface and you find even obscure wikipedia pages have a constant drip feed of updates. example. Discoverability is becoming a problem for SO already. | |
| Jun 6 at 21:09 | comment | added | Christoph Rackwitz | I think the "museum" aspect needs to be addressed more structurally. I continue to see Q&As that are a decade old and help nobody (mislead newbies) with today's versions of libraries, yet they continue to receive traffic. that should be most obvious with fast-paced webdev but even glacially moving libraries serve to show this. I am unaware of any mechanisms or policies on SO that specifically address or even just implicitly allow dealing with outdated content in any effective manner. | |
| Jun 6 at 19:31 | comment | added | Philip Couling | The thought may be "sincere" but it wholly fails on the point of aging content. Even SO's creators address aging content It's beginning to seem inevitable that Stackoverflow will reach steady state due to falling engagement. But it is unlikely to continue to be useful beyond that. Technology changes. SO is a Library. It was never ment to be a museum. | |
| Jun 6 at 16:08 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | @Timmmm This, too, has been well addressed. You are taking things overly literally while also groundlessly ascribing motives to it (it's emphatically not about "driving people away"). I agree that SO "is essentially dead"; I disagree that question influx is a way to measure that. And the people you are talking about are not "mods". After 15 years on the site you really ought to understand the basics. | |
| Jun 6 at 10:58 | comment | added | Timmmm | @karlknechtel if you think about it for even a second it can't possibly be true. Does nothing ever change in programming? Of course it does! So there should always be new questions to ask. I suspect you realised this obvious fact and therefore the most likely explanation is this is denying-the-obvious so you don't have to face the unpleasant fact that SO is essentially dead, and a significant factor is the mods. | |
| May 27 at 6:14 | history | edited | Cow | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
changed qoute precent to percent
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| May 21 at 15:58 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | There is objectively nothing wrong with telling people that they should know better, in cases where they objectively should know better. Having respectful dialogue requires the starter of the conversation to rein in the frustration. OP didn't "disagree about" policy, but demonstrated a complete ignorance of what the policy even is, judged the site purely on personal usefulness without any consideration for what we're trying to accomplish, and expressed an intention to leave, without indicating any desire to reconsider. There was therefore no opportunity to "address concerns with empathy". | |
| May 21 at 14:39 | comment | added | bragboy | @KarlKnechtel - I appreciate your response, but I stand by my assessment. While I understand your points about site rules, the tone of your answer came across as dismissive and condescending. Phrases like "you ought to understand the basics" and "this sort of dramatic rhetoric accomplishes nothing positive" felt like talking down to someone expressing genuine frustration. Healthy communities thrive on respectful dialogue, even when disagreeing about policies. Addressing concerns with empathy rather than perceived superiority would better serve everyone, which is why I commented as I did. | |
| May 20 at 18:02 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | @bragboy sorry, I can't understand why you think there is anything arrogant in the answer. The OP is the one who acted like experience and reputation should allow someone to ignore the site's purpose. The OP is the one who did not try to understand why we close questions, or try to join the discussion about how the site works for an entire 14 years. The OP is the one who described people with 3000 reputation as "noobs" and wrongly assumed a better understanding of policy than the people who closed the question (two of whom almost certainly had more reputation than OP, incidentally). | |
| May 20 at 17:47 | comment | added | bragboy | This is the exact sort of arrogance many people were silently wishing they want to see the site to die. | |
| Mar 11 at 2:07 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | "Why not just delete your answer" - because the system doesn't like it when people self-delete popular answers. It triggers anti-ragequit detection, etc. But also because being able to point to it helps me explain these issues with Stack Overflow's design to a broad audience. | |
| Mar 10 at 13:33 | comment | added | TheMaster | @Gimby Even Stackoverflow volumes are dropping like crazy. I highly doubt the survival of infant sites. | |
| Mar 10 at 12:19 | comment | added | TheMaster | Why not just delete your answer to get rid of that 5%? | |
| Apr 15, 2024 at 9:04 | comment | added | jperl | @KarlKnechtel "The ultimate goal of a Q&A library is zero engagement, because everything that needs to be asked has already been asked and answered so clearly and thoroughly that nobody who finds the question needs any further explanation." Things are not set in stone, they evolve overtime. What is valid one day might not be tomorrow. Also, there will always be new problems to solve, new paradigms, new programming languages. I don't see any valid reason why we should ever reach a point of zero engagement. | |
| Nov 25, 2023 at 18:50 | comment | added | rook | @Gimby thank you I have created an account on Codidact. StackOverflow no longer serves any purpose, the leadership forgot what made this site great to begin with, and has stagnated. Very sad to see :( | |
| Nov 22, 2023 at 14:30 | comment | added | Peter Mortensen | @Gimby: Stack Overflow Forums opened recently (August 2023). | |
| Nov 22, 2023 at 4:07 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | @Gimby "people who think like you, started Codidact." as a major Codidact proponent, I strongly disagree. The underlying idea about "community" does not mean losing sight of how a Q&A site works. For example, while we have minimally "threaded" comments with a higher character limit and more access to formatting, the design deliberately keeps them more out of the way. Codidact is orders of magnitude more like Stack Exchange than it is like Reddit. | |
| Nov 21, 2023 at 14:20 | comment | added | Gimby | @rook people who think like you, started Codidact. That's essentially the choice. Accept how Stack Overflow is different from sites like Reddit on purpose and thus you'll have to adapt rather than demand... or don't accept it, and thus go spend your time and energy somewhere else. The cool thing is that Codidact is still in its infancy, so it allows you to pay attention to all the changes that'll be made to it overtime which will slowly but surely turn it into a version of Stack Overflow. But that is with the big IF that it takes off and starts to see volume like Stack Overflow does. | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 21:24 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | Let us continue this discussion in chat. | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 21:23 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | I understand your position perfectly well. I just strongly disagree. (You should also consider that the community for the most part is opposed to the company's various forays into AI.) | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 21:23 | comment | added | rook | A question unanswered is unable to unlock value for anyone. Should we not care more about the value that we provide by our services? | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 21:22 | comment | added | rook | You seem to miss the point entirely. You can still be a Q&A site that allows for people to be able to communicate more freely. It is important to note, that even though my question didn't meet these strict rules - the community wanted answer but was unable. If this question was answered, we would all learn something and the AI trained on these questions would then be able to help future generations. | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 21:12 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | That said, experts are not "disallowed to communicate", and being able to ask questions that blatantly don't meet standards has absolutely nothing to do with such communication. | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 21:11 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | It is not at all inherently a bad thing that engagement has fallen off a cliff. As time passes there should naturally be fewer outstanding, unasked questions that meet standards. The ultimate goal of a Q&A library is zero engagement, because everything that needs to be asked has already been asked and answered so clearly and thoroughly that nobody who finds the question needs any further explanation. A new question is a bug report proposing that a worthwhile question is missing. | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 20:51 | comment | added | rook | I understand that you believe that you have good rational for these rules, but it is no secret that engagement has fallen off of a cliff. Disallowing exerts to communicate is likely a contributing factor. Perhaps we need to rethink the role of this platform on today's internet. | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 20:42 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | "I fear that thousands of good questions are now being closed for pedantic reasons that harm both the individual and the community." This is because you fail to understand that these questions are not good, and why we sincerely believe this to be the case. "And more over, is this platform to help people or not?" - this has been addressed countless times on Meta. Yes, we help people by existing, primarily as a searchable reference. No, we do not directly help people in the sense of providing a help desk, discussion forum, tech support center or anything else along those lines. | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 20:37 | comment | added | rook | Thank you for the thoughtful response. I fear that thousands of good questions are now being closed for pedantic reasons that harm both the individual and the community. While you are correct that I did break the rules, we must ask ourselves do these new rules help people? And more over, is this platform to help people or not? | |
| Nov 17, 2023 at 20:35 | history | answered | Karl Knechtel | CC BY-SA 4.0 |