[discors]

From my experience, interacting with stack overflow and other software related sister communities has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ignoring the elephant in the room that I do use SO everyday with some success, but it’s mostly replaced by ChatGPT.

The ridiculous (IMHO) moderation under the guise of “we have only one purpose” often didn’t even align with that goal.

The writing was on the wall.

So many questions that could have served answers are locked, deleted, and unfortunately, never asked due to the unpleasantness of dealing with the moderation.

I speak for myself.

[D13Fd]

Yeah their moderation is awful. So many times, I've found my exact question with a "closed, duplicate of x" note, where "x" is not my question at all and is entirely unhelpful to me.

[cptnapalm]

This is exactly why I never click on it when I'm looking for something. It's never a solution that a search finds; it's always an question answered that it's a duplicate of something completely unrelated.

[duxup]

ChatGPT at least seems like it is trying to help me.

The meta games going on in SO are a whole lot more of a mess and ChatGPT is more than happy to hear my question a 3rd time and spit out the same answer as before but change a few things. SO, not so much.

[coffeebeqn]

I use chatgpt as a rubber duck who I’m suspicious of. Way too often it just comes up with fictional features

[s_dev]

I really don't get this dependence problem. People want information to be 100% accurate?

This is the internet -- lies and false claims are the standard. It's up to individuals to corroborate that the info they're looking at is reliable. Google provides a list of relevant results to a keyword search -- every one of those results can be bogus and no one bats an eye. ChatGPT provides text output based on a text input and the text can be bogus. Why should ChatGPT be held to a higher standard than Google?

[SV_BubbleTime]

Is entirely possible to hit some search result for a real human had a code hallucination. And to the topic, on stackoverflow that would have been deleted, downvoted or corrected.

GPT will tell you it’s right… well, it’ll apologize, offer another solution that could also be wrong and now you are in a loop.

[s_dev]

Only a computer can get stuck in a loop or a person who is insane. It's not like if you ask a person to divide by zero they will fall in to a coma or sit there computing.

I 100% believe that ChatGPT can output absolute garbage but for the same reason you don't cite Wikipedia/Google you won't be citing ChatGPT. Just like Wikipedia or Google It's just an excellent starting point to rapidly get a working draft going.

[duxup]

I get wrong answers too, but they're pretty easy to figure out fast and if I rephrase I get what I need.

It's not like I'm not validating SO answers, there's not any extra steps from my SO experience. Also SO likes to give oddly, technically correct, but also hard to work with code sometimes to the point of being unusable and I take someone else's example anyway. ChatGPT is really good at making super generic answers and quick iterations / alterations.

ChatGPT's power is often in the "conversation" where I add or take things away or change things "I need to break out X,Y,Z before I render it because..." and blamo I get new code. SO has none of that.

[SV_BubbleTime]

I’m going to steal that.

I’ve been trying to explain to people that GPT is good for subjective things, not object of things. But that didn’t really jive with the programming part that works OK for certain tasks.

Then I realized it does and programming is just subjective a lot of the time. You need a right answer but how you get there is open.

Using it as a spring board is good advice.

[tomrod]

Aye. It's a scaffold or first draft at best.

[nirvdrum]

I've found it refreshing to be able to ask a performance-related question and not get a trite reply about premature optimization. It's frustrating reading a well-researched, obviously informed question about a specific thing and the top reply is "Why do you need this? Did you profile it?". Nothing new is learned and the cynical part of me thinks it's just a race to get free Stack Overflow points.

[dotnet00]

Similarly with questions about doing X with Y where the top answer just pushes some library, a different language or outright changes X to something else (without answering the original question).

I feel like the people writing those answers should also be well aware that often you can't just change the problem or just add in a library to solve one specific problem on a whim. It's kind of demeaning to push those kinds of answers anyway rather than maybe question the task but provide a solution anyway.

[bluetomcat]

The SO community culture rewards precise, concise and direct answers to simple and popular questions like "how do you subtract 2 dates in Python". In the first years, those were the low-hanging fruit and a source of big reputation points for some people. Unpopular questions regarding an obscure bug in the user's code or perhaps a misunderstanding of the OP aren't seen as "pretty" - they require answerers to understand the context of the particular problem and will not gain them many reputation points, even if they provide a useful answer to the OP.

[bowsamic]

I'm actually quite shocked going back and looking at old StackOverflow posts. At the time, I was supportive of such brutality, but it is clearly against modern norms regarding what is appropriate internet socialisation.

My take is that SO was born in a time where ethics among the primarily male and tech-fanatical audience of the internet was less developed. At the time, what we now would call toxicity was expected: we thought it was shameful to not ask a question properly, to waste others' time, to not have tried significantly before asking. Now, we have a different view: first, the asker may not be a technical person and may not be someone you would feel comfortable berating; second, even among hardcore tech people there is a much stronger emphasis on appropriate communication and mental health. I remembered stories of my step father giving his subordinates "bollockings" (British term for heavily and aggressively shouting at and disciplining someone who has made a mistake). Well, I work for him now, and he does not do this anymore. Everyone is quite scared of upsetting everyone else, everyone is more aware of the suffering of others, etc.

Somehow, SO has partly retained these aspects of the old internet, when almost all other spaces have shed them.

EDI: You can see the user "rejectfinite" has replied to you with a flagged comment which demonstrates how people still try to act out this kind of toxicity, but note the swiftness of his downvotes and his almost immediate flagging. We just don't tolerate that anymore. But we used to

[discors]

> You can see the user “rejectfinite” has replied to you with a flagged comment which demonstrates how people still try to act out this kind of toxicity

A point made well. I saw that post.

I myself have been generously downvoted, which is understandable given the audience here on HN.

[the_only_law]

> we have only one purpose

The problem to me always seemed like the goals of the company didn’t line up with the goals of many (most?) of its users.

[LeifCarrotson]

I agree, with the caveat that "most" must be referring to the larger number of visitors posting questions, not the larger number of answers posted by a smaller number of contributors, nor the even larger number of readers who find an existing question and answer, read the answer, and leave with minimal interaction.

Most question-askers - who actually post a question - want to have a response customized to their exact problem. ChatGPT is infinitely patient, if a million users give it the same prompt a hundred times a day it will provide each of them an answer. They want to interact with it like a Discord chatroom - post a question, get answer.

Most answer-posters want to avoid posting the same response over, and over, and over. They want other users to interact with it like an encyclopedia of FAQs - or rather, questions frequently pondered but only asked once.

I'd argue that most answer-seekers probably want a single, high-ranking canonical question and answer as well; they don't want low-quality copy-pasted single-line responses in a chatroom. Maybe they upvote the pre-existing question, maybe they're just anonymous viewers. Stack Overflow the organization, like this group, wants the best-written, researched, articulated response to any particular question to rank highly on Google.

What's for sure is that no one looking for an answer ever wants to see "Closed as duplicate". The question is how you keep that from happening, unfortunately it's probably untenable to do anything but have a small cadre of community moderators (with all the self-selection trouble that causes) closing questions subjectively marked as duplicates and intensely frustrating the people who posted those questions. Nor does anyone want to (nor are they able to) scroll up through 500GB of chat logs to find a prior Q&A by someone else.

[throwaway154]

Seconded.

[_fat_santa]

IMHO their moderation practices is precisely why they are seeing this decline, like you said SO is a great resource to read but I've never asked a question outside of a handful of times over the years and every time the question was locked, deleted, etc.

On the one hand I get their argument that they want only the highest quality answers on there but in that heavy handed moderation they now have another problem which is no one outside of a handful of individuals actually wants to post or contribute.

I think if SO didn't have such heavy handed moderation practices they would have lower quality answers on there but they would also not be experiencing such a gradual decline.