
The Decline of Stack Overflow - dvt
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d
======
rossdavidh
So, years ago I "used" Stack Overflow a lot. Now, rarely, if by "use" you mean
"ask and answer questions". But, I find answers to my questions on it every
day, and it is still far superior to other sources.

I've noticed a pattern in my attitude towards SO: when I ready an article
about it on Hacker News, I get mad. When I'm actually on it, I get detailed,
multiple answers to my question, written before I ever got there.

My suspicion is that many people noticed that a high rank on Stack Overflow
was one way to generate a reputation that might get you freelance work, and
then discovered that too many other people were trying to do the same thing,
so it became competitive and trollish...for them. But all I want to do is find
an answer to my question, that is more clear (and with better examples) than
the one in the software's actual documentation (which reads like it was
written for a textbook or maybe an AI, rather than the kind of answer you
actually get from asking somebody for help).

SO still works, better than ever, for finding out the answer to your question.
It just doesn't work as a social network or an interview/job board/advertising
site. But, you know, I don't think that's a problem for me, and really, there
are other websites out there for that.

Just look for the answer to your question, it's probably there, and if it
isn't then it likely is not available anywhere else on the internet either,
including the software documentation. Used this way, the SO internal politics
is a non-issue.

~~~
sarah180
Do you have any evidence (anecdotal or empirical) that people actually hire
based on StackOverflow rankings? I'm sure it's happened in a few cases, but it
seems backwards to me. If somebody came into an interview talking about their
high SO rank or Reddit karma, I'd wonder if they would actually be focused on
their work.

To me, hobbies and online activity aren't really credentials unless you've
really built a strong personal brand that directly relates to your job.

~~~
dvt
Employers that don't look at GitHub and Stack Overflow activity when hiring
are being silly. Unfortunately, it's the status quo. I mean, I actually wrote
a _book_ published by _Apress_ that rarely gets brought up in interviews.

~~~
jonathankoren
As a hiring manager, I rarely look at GitHub and never look at Stack Overflow
or Kaggle, or whatever. All these tell me is that you don’t have any hobbies
outside of coding.

As for GitHub in particular, it let’s me know if your project was something
substantial, or merely an exercise for a class.

GitHub, your book, all that stuff takes time and effort to read, and quite
frankly it isn’t worth it. You’re still going to need to go through the
interview process so I can figure out if you’re competent. Reading some 1000
line random GitHub repo is hard, and it’s just not worth it.

------
bandushrew
Stack Overflow is declining, except it's still so well populated with
moderators that the author of the article struggled to be able to answer a
question quickly enough for it to matter, and he can find no alternatives to
it that work as well.

I dont know anything about the internal politics of SO, and I dont think Ive
ever asked (or answered) a question, but I use it every day.

It is absolutely the single best resource for developers on the internet, and
thats amazing.

~~~
asdfadfadsf
Yeah the guy has the mental consistency of pudding:

"The consequence thereof is that a lot of good questions not only get closed
before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into
oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days."

This, merely a few paragraphs after claiming all questions are answered so
quickly he has no opportunity to participate.

~~~
DuskStar
There's a dichotomy between "questions difficult enough that I need to ask
them" and "questions simple enough I can answer them myself", though.

------
dvt
I wanted to share this article because, even as a user in the top 0.99%[1], I
constantly get railroaded by "power trolls" \-- I was _extremely_ active on
the site 6 years ago, but I barely answer/ask any questions anymore (maybe
once or twice a year).

I have countless examples of some of my old questions or answers (with 100+
upvotes) being closed almost a decade later just so some new moderator can
earn a few brownie points. After a while, it just gets old.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-
titarenco](https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco)

------
alttag
My biggest complain about SO is that with the expansion into other fields that
questions that used to be welcome on SO (or get more visibility because of
being on SO) are being shunted to SuperUser or ServerFault or other sites
under the StackExchange umbrella. [1] I think the drive to keep SO purely
about "programming" runs into issues similar to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy
[2]. As a developer, sometimes I need answers about Amazon Web Services,
Azure, Docker, or the Linux command line, as a consequence of programming, but
those sorts of questions are, more modernly, marked off-topic for SO.

1: [https://stackexchange.com/sites](https://stackexchange.com/sites) 2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman)

~~~
dessant
This is definitely something that could be solved with Stack Exchange
moderation tools. Questions could be moved to the appropiate site, the same
way you'd move issues between GitHub repositories.

~~~
Arnavion
>Questions could be moved to the appropiate site, the same way you'd move
issues between GitHub repositories.

That is already a thing the sites do.

~~~
ciupicri
Not quite. It's impossible to move a question from Stack Overflow to Server
Fault or Super User right now, you can only say that it might belong there.

~~~
Arnavion
Do you specifically mean "right now" ? As in it has been disabled at the
current moment? Because there are plenty of questions that have been moved
around from one site to another in the past.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aserverfault.com+%22migrated...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aserverfault.com+%22migrated+from+stackoverflow.com%22)

Edit: Eg here's one from June this year:
[https://serverfault.com/questions/971652/windows-how-to-
kill...](https://serverfault.com/questions/971652/windows-how-to-kill-a-
zombie-process-keeping-a-service-alive)

------
commandlinefan
[https://i.redd.it/per2eihv0jn31.png](https://i.redd.it/per2eihv0jn31.png)

------
lmm
Half of the complaints quoted are about overzealous moderation, half are about
low question quality. So it's unclear whether the article offers a coherent
critique; if you're somewhere in the middle of the complaints then maybe
you're doing it right.

I do think a coherent issue emerges here: much like wikipedia, stack overflow
rewards and privileges those who do "meta" actions over and above those who
make positive object-level contributions, when it should be the other way
around. Answering a question should be more rewarding than closing it as a
duplicate. Helping a newcomer should be more rewarding than driving them away.

~~~
Supermancho
Another problem that MANY moderated forums suffer from is too much focus on
identity. If everytime you posted to SO or HN or /. or wkipedia or whatever,
you were assigned a random id (consistent id for all responses to a specific
story) rather than linking to your acct/post history/achievements, with a
policy against posting with PII... the cliques might dissolve and the trolls
do not benefit.

~~~
xxpor
Not a judgement on the idea, but that's how 4chan works on some boards.

------
dashundchen
The publish date on this article says October 2019, but it's judging by the
tweets linking to it, it's originally from September 2016.

[https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fhackernoon.com%2F...](https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fhackernoon.com%2Fthe-
decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d)

~~~
crystalPalace
Probably has to do with Hacker Noon migrating from Medium to their own
platform. Some of the formatting and metadata may have gotten malformed in the
move.

------
graphicsRat
Some mods are ridiculous. The profile of one tag maintainer for example read
thus (paraphrased) "X is now a mature technology and all the meaningful
questions have been asked so I spend most of my time editing and deleting
questions".

ALL my questions got downvoted. So I stopped asking questions under that tag.

~~~
bigmit37
CUDA? lol. I remember reading that for someone who answers mainly CUDA-related
questions.

------
seisvelas
I occasionally ask and answer questions on StackOverflow, but I find the 'old
system' of forums, mailing lists, and chat (now it's Slack sometimes instead
of IRC) to be making a minor resurgence.

Recently when a question about Racket went unanswered I resorted to the Racket
user mailing list and received exceptional advice. The #python IRC channel is
unbeatable for help debugging small snippets (of the kind and size you'd
normally put in a StackOverflow post), and the Elixir Forums are just
fantastic - they go to great lengths as a community.

The support you'll get in those kinds of places is almost always better than
the answers you'd receive on StackOverflow, but the downside is the
inconvenience of decentralization. Take Racket for example - the user mailing
list is by far the best resource for questions, but how would you know that?
There is also an /r/racket subreddit, a [racket] StackOverflow tag, and a
(pretty dead) official #racket IRC channel on Freenode. A user is as (if not
more) likely to check those places before even thinking to hit the mailing
list.

I myself had a StackOverflow post closed recently, but I don't think it's so
dramatic. And some tags are certainly better than others. Asking a question on
[react] will lead to a flood of poorly written answers from people seeking
quick points, for example. [asm] on the other hand has Peter Cordes, who is
like a code angel and veritable blessing to all of Hacker Kind.

------
thrower123
No matter how bad Stack Overflow gets, it is wildly better than what came
before it. If you are not old enough to remember the horrors of trying to get
any useful information out of the old world of random forums, or
expertsexchange (most of these have gone the way of geocities), take a gander
through some of the older MSDN forums - posts from the mid 2000s still tend to
show up if you're searching for somewhat obscure IIS or ASP.NET related stuff.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
9 years ago I joined Superuser (it was in beta at the time IIRC) out of pure
hatred for Experts Exchange and how every time I would put in a technical
question in Google, their paywall site would come up.

I'm glad Stack Exchange beat Experts Exchange and will always contribute to it
no matter what the politics. Because that's how much Experts Exchange pissed
me off.

------
chimi
I never created an account there. I tried a couple times to add a comment or
answer a question or ask a question and everything I wanted to do required
more points than I had. I had no time or interest in building cred, just so I
could help someone out or get help.

------
hartator
The biggest pain point is all this interesting questions closed for bs
reasons.

------
musicale
Thank you for your interest in this topic. Because it has attracted aggressive
moderation, posting an answer now requires 10,000,000 _reputation_ on this
site (the _association bonus does not count_ ), a signed note from your
physician, and special dispensation from the pope.

Would you like to answer one of these other unrelated and very stupid
_unanswered questions_ instead?

------
yellowapple
I've had okay experiences on StackOverflow, but only because

1\. I tend to answer questions thoroughly, in keeping with the spirit of
StackOverflow being a common target from web searches

2\. I dare not _ask_ a question, ever

~~~
tomashubelbauer
It is funny that for a site which spent the better part of the last two years
to be more welcoming (which they IMO approached unsuccessfully), this is still
the prevailing strategy. And it works, so I can't disagree. Now I don't think
SO is that bad, if you really try to write a good question, at least in my
experience, the reception is good. But I know I'm the odd one out among my dev
friends and colleagues about not being afraid of posting questions to SO.
Others, like you say, don't dare.

~~~
alttag
I have a question I want to ask, but haven't. This is mostly because I feel
that asking it properly, describing what I've tried, linking to (not)
duplicates and explaining why they're not relevant, and linking to the docs to
try and explain why I don't understand them, etc., etc, is a great deal of
work. In other words, explain why the top 20 Google and SO results and
workarounds aren't relevant to the answer I'm looking for. Doing it "properly"
would take about 30 minutes. ... and thus I haven't asked.

I went with a workaround that I'm unsatisfied with because it was easier than
asking a good question.

~~~
tomashubelbauer
I see what you mean, but when it comes to the rigor required to putting
together a good question, this is no different than say filling in an issue
template when reporting a bug or asking for support in a Github repository,
right? Do you avoid that for the same reason? Not that I would blame you, I
for one hate filling in overly defensive issue templates designed to
discourage drive by shitty issue posters, but inadvertently alienating
otherwise decent posters, such as (hopefully) myself.

------
balls187
Stack's problem, was and still is, it doesn't do a good job helping new users
learn how to use the site.

When it first came out, the state of programming questions on the web was
abysmal. The top answers were wrong, and required you to register to view.
There were forum posts, and half the answers were basically "RTFM". In my
early days, it was things like "How do you convert a string to an int in C++"
asked on Usenet. This was asked so many times that Marshall Cline wrote an FAQ
which became the defacto place to learn about C++.

Stack solved that problem, AND fixed the issue of low-quality questions and
answers.

These days, I find the answer to my question on Stack such that I rarely have
to ask anything. Occasionally I'll be bored and answer a question.

Stack is still an amazing resource, just that the community and platform has
matured, and there are less opportunities for new users to ask and answer
basic questions.

Perhaps head over to Meta and suggest a Minor League Stackoverflow that will
allow new users to ask the same basic questions over an over again, earn a
fraction of rep, and graduate to the real site.

------
jpalomaki
It might help if you were only allowed to downvote/edit/close on topics where
you have proved yourself.

If have gained some reputation answering Java questions, maybe that does not
make me qualified to decide if a C++ question is suitable for the site. A bit
like the fact that reputation from SO does not carry to other StackExchange
sites.

~~~
baud147258
Well, if you have high rep on a tag, you have more power for questions with
that tag.

------
conscion
Some of the author's issues seem to be a result of not scaling the voting
thresholds based on the sites size. For example, 5 votes needs to close a
question: When the site had 100 users, 5 votes is 5% of the site - a
meaningful proportion. When the site has 1,000,000 users, 5 votes is 0.0005% -
which may have no information content at all, it could just be random noise
and the votes to close wouldn't be meaningful representation of the
communities viewpoint.

------
thanatropism
Is this sudden flurry of bearishness about SO somehow (indirectly) correlated
to its recent adoption of mandatory gender pronouns as policy?

~~~
trianglem
It's an incredibly poisonous topic because most of the country does not agree
with the premise. This is probably flame bait, let me know if it is.

------
thrax
I've found the internet to be a pretty generous community.. of course with any
community, there are bad actors that will attempt to commodify that generosity
by subtly asking for more and more, all the while profiting on the generosity
of humans as a whole. Stack overflow needs to start paying it's workers.

~~~
jressey
Philosophically I am with you. Though, I do think SO rewards its users in a
tangential way. "Karma" is something you can advertise to prospective
employers. Not just the score, but you can give examples of how you answer
questions for people of different skill levels.

The work I've done on SO, which is frankly insignificant compared to many
users, has enhanced my hire-ability as a lead or manager.

------
weef
I can't stand when someone answers a question on SO by first admitting they
know nothing about the subject then take a guess with an answer. Why bother
answering if you don't know the subject?

------
Glyptodon
As someone who has asked questions there (or at least tried) a few times over
the years, and who does constantly end up there when searching for answers I
do think it's kind of heap.

The two major problems I see are a) people constantly claiming that questions
are duplicates when they aren't, possibly because of poor reading
comprehension, skimming, or some sort of Dunning-Kruger type effect, and b)
people re-asking questions because they know an existing identical or almost
identical question doesn't actually have a correct or useful answer and not
really knowing what they're supposed to do about it, particularly as
occasional or new SO users.

After those, is the inability of people to comment on answers until they're
judged worthy which makes it so people feel forced to use answers as comments.

While I think the site continues to be useful it also seems to be something of
an intractable morass.

------
Maximus9000
Joel Spolski knows about many of these problems and is actively trying to
change the culture on stack overflow... needless to say, changing a groups
culture is hard.

~~~
ncmncm
He doesn't need to change the culture. He needs to change the workings. The
culture will adjust spontaneously to the workings.

If five downvotes are all it takes to cripple a question, and tens of
thousands of people can cast them, then your site will work badly, no matter
how successful your culture advocacy.

Downvoting has to cost something. Everything except providing useful answers
should cost something.

------
babyslothzoo
Stack Overflow is the new Yahoo Answers

Lots of "can you google this for me" and copy/pasted content from other
original sources without context or attribution

------
exabrial
The problem is that it's literred with low quality questions like "How do I
add two chars?" which has been answered incessantly and could also be resolved
with a google search.

Their standard for questions should someone mandate that you include your
code, include what you've tried to do already, and include the full text of
error messages received.

~~~
Ninn
There's plenty of high quality questions that go unanswered for ever. So I
don't think you should flatter your self with this analysis. At least great
moderation can generally help with low quality questions.

------
mLuby
I've asked and answered a handful of questions ad found the experience
generally rewarding. Even if there's no answer to a question, it's comforting
to know I'm not alone in my struggle. I do wish versions were included in
certain cases, especially for services/frameworks with rapidly changing APIs.

------
h91wka
Small advice: if you are lucky enough to work with FOSS, just read the source
code. Most of SO questions can be answered either by looking at concrete
implementation details or by skimming through the code to get general concept.
It gives more accurate answers more quickly than people on SO ever could,
because

1) it doesn't require waiting for someone to read and answer your question 2)
it doesn't require lossy conversion to natural language and back 3) "live"
source code is probably more tested and more optimized than synthetic examples
that someone came up with in 5 minutes and never ran

As soon as you develop the skill of finding relevant functions in large code
bases, SO becomes mostly unnecessary. I never registered there, never asked a
question, and don't browse it that often. I clone source code of my most
commonly used tools locally just for quick grepping, and use full-text github
search for more exotic staff.

P.S. Funny how the article keeps calling SO "totalitarian", while it is, in
fact, a painfully precise model of democracy.

------
RosanaAnaDana
Some parts of SO are far worse than others and I think the 'No True Scotsman'
falacy mentioned by alttag is very apropos. The GIS stackoverflow is pretty
much dead to due to heavy handed moderation.

------
marmada
I think an actual problem with Stack Overflow is question quality. Oftentimes
askers will include massive code samples, so it is hard to determine if their
question is also your question.

------
zajd
What decline? Are you talking about your own personal perception or like
actual data about the site and the way its used?

Personal anecdote: StackOverflow continues to be one of, if not the, best
sources for solving programming problems, and I know of literally 0
alternatives that even come close. Quora? Are you kidding me?

~~~
microtherion
Yes, Quora pretty much exists to validate the strict moderation policies used
by other sites. There are occasional good answers, but they are buried under a
mountain of idiocy:

Questions that could have been answered with 5 minutes' worth of googling.

Completely opinion based questions: [https://www.quora.com/Who-sang-My-Way-
better-Elvis-or-Sinatr...](https://www.quora.com/Who-sang-My-Way-better-Elvis-
or-Sinatra)

Endless duplicates of stupid questions:
[https://www.quora.com/search?q=lyrics+prank](https://www.quora.com/search?q=lyrics+prank)

People who serially produce horrible translations of answers, probably using
software, presumably for clout chasing.

And long, detailed, stories that most likely were made up (That's the genre
that made me give up reading notalwaysright.com: Too many stories of people
who behave horribly until a 7'5" Marine shows up to save the day).

