[sarthak-ag]

I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions since a couple of years. A few anecdotes -- I am not a native English speaker and english lang stackexchange was a godsend for me because sometimes the kind of questions I had, my teacher could not satisfy me and I don't even know how I could ever explain the problem to a machine (LLMs). I am not a biology student, but at time I was just curious about the functioning of human eye, so I tried my shot at biology SE and had a wonderful discussion. I have asked a few philosophical questions on Physics SE as well with similar experience.

In my programming job I consult SO multiple times, and I have never once felt the kind of hostile discussion environment that people try to potray. SO is very valuable to me especially for questions that have less to do with documentation but more about the essence of programming itself. It disgusts me that in future I will have to communicate with a brainless LLM instead where I have no recourse if its answer doesn't satisfy me, nor I have the confidence in the correctness of its word vomit.

[bhandziuk]

It's a hard balance. New users are probably already at the end of their rope when they decide they need to actually ask a question. They often aren't aware that their question was already asked because they don't have the words or experience to sufficiently describe their problem. Then someone points that out which they need to do if there's going to be any order or cleanliness on SO. I think the original askers don't receive that very well because it's often pointed out by some automated looking message like "your question is a duplicate and is closed".

Everybody is trying to do their best but the new askers don't have the experience to not ask their question and the experienced SO users have seen that question asked a dozen times already.

[rich_sasha]

I mostly agree, but also, the moderation has gone from great to pedantic, and further to poor enforcement of nonsensical rules.

I have had questions closed as duplicate, where the "original" asked something else. Questions about choice of framework apparently are off topic on SE stack exchange -> closed. Weirdo moderators / keen users butting in on active, sane questions with "I'm voting to close because [random nonsensical rule]".

I feel bad writing it as I suspect most moderators on SO are great, but this is nonetheless my overwhelming experience of past 12 months.

EDIT I forget about the patronizing users who didn't read the question, but don't let that stop them from lecturing you. On SO rules, life mistakes...

[gymbeaux]

I had a guy vote to close one of my 5-year-old questions that had an answer and plenty of upvotes at that point. It’s clearly helping people out but yeah let’s delete it because you want a badge (I’m not sure if you get a badge for that)

[karaterobot]

Who shows contempt for SO? I don't see much of that, personally. Whenever it goes down, I see a lot of jokes about how nobody can do their job. The linked article agrees with you that it's "one of the greatest compendia of human knowledge ever produced".

[photochemsyn]

Almost every time I had a coding-type question for SO, I would diligently search through previous SO answers and 98% of the time I could find the answer to my question by doing so - but it would always take a long time. LLMs are just a lot faster, and while double-checking their output is necessary, that's a much quicker process than trying to hunt down answers starting from little knowledge.

There's also the issue of people trying to improve their SO score because that can impact things like job interviews, at least on the programming side, and as with any such system gaming it for high reputation (points for questions, answers, upvotes) has some side effects on people's behavior that aren't always pleasant. There's also a saturation effect, e.g. many common questions have already been asked, and the 'archive of truth' mentality means that you're supposed to search past answers before asking anything, which again tends to take a lot longer than ChatGPT does.

[rtkwe]

I've used SO to look up problems a lot but I've never gotten a good answer out of it myself. Either it's marked as a duplicate of a similar but different question or I don't get any replies and a few downvotes. To me it's an entirely read only site partially because of it's relatively high barrier to commenting on solutions.

[scarface_74]

That’s the beauty of using ChatGPT for programming questions. You don’t have to have confidence in the answer. You can easily verify correctness by running the code it outputs and testing it.

That being said, I realize you do have to be careful about subtle bugs.

My canonical example is “write a Python script that returns all of the AWS IAM roles that contain a given list of policies”.

The code it usually generates works correctly as long as you don’t have more than 50 roles in your account. It won’t add pagination support unless you spot the bug and tell it.

The second question I have is what type of questions do you find are better suited for Stack Overflow than ChatGPT? Are they questions based on post 2021 knowledge?

[sarthak-ag]

> You can easily verify correctness by running the code it outputs and testing it.

This is not always as easy for all types of questions. It's hard to come up with an example on the spot, but I tried a few queries I searched on SO in the last week, and found one to demonstrate. I was searching for "Where to store JWT in browser?". This is the SO answer [1] for reference. Now to prove my point, I ask the question to ChatGPT (3.5). Here's the chat [2].

On a first glance it looks like ChatGPT may have nailed it, though the information dump is HUGE. Among the 6 options it suggests, the last option "secure cookies" looks "correct". Indeed it is correct in what it says that this can prevent XSS attack. But it is not complete. Because it still does not prevent XSRF attack entirely. So I had to explicitly prompt it to think about XSRF and its response is weird. At first it incorrectly claims that XSRF attack is mitigated, but then in the response body it elaborates that we also need anti-XSRF tokens for complete protection. So I don't know what to make of it. Contrast this with the SO answer which is way more direct.

Honestly, ChatGPT's answer looks like that of a student who is trying to impress some examiner with their knowledge dump by beating around the bush rather than trying to precisely answer the actual question.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27067251/where-to-store-... [2]: https://chat.openai.com/share/c26fee93-5d3d-48e2-a820-297974...

[polynomial]

In general, when ppl say ChatGPT on hn, do they mean 3.5 (free version) or 4.0 (paid version)?

Which is it you are referring to here?

[birdstheword5]

You're right. But I think it can really vary based on which community you ask in.

I think most people dislike how hostile the main stack overflow site is to beginners, who despite being the ones who need the most help, are the most likely to get their question closed/ downvoted. It's unfortunately necessary to maintain the high quality of the site.

[tivert]

> I think most people dislike how hostile the main stack overflow site is to beginners, who despite being the ones who need the most help, are the most likely to get their question closed/ downvoted. It's unfortunately necessary to maintain the high quality of the site.

It's not just hostile to beginners. It's also quite hostile to experienced programmers (at least those subject to less than ideal design constraints), who are incorrectly treated like newbies and force-fed cookbook answers that fail to answer the actual question asked.

For example. Here's a paraphrase of some experiences I've had on Stack Overflow (obfuscated to preserve my anonymity):

> Me: I need to know about the implementation of this weird function in this weird proprietary language. I need to re-implement its output, which was (unwisely) directly exposed in our system's output and is depended on by our integrations. I know this sucks, but it's the problem I have to solve.

> StackOverflow: That's a bad design. You should use the XYZ function in Python instead.

> Me: You're not answering my question. I know it's a bad design, but I can't change it. The output is fixed, and I have no authority to force a change. If I can't re-implement the function, I'm suck using the weird language forever.

> StackOverflow: You should use XYZ function in Python. If you can't, talk to your architect and get budget allocated to rewrite all the downstream systems.

> Me: You're no help at all. Why did you even bother answering?

> Me (thinking to myself): Wait, I know: chasing after internet points and trying to feel high and mighty.

> StockOverflow: What if a newbie found this question? If I don't tell you to use XYZ function in Python, they might do something else instead! Like design and implement and entire less-than-ideal system!

> Me (thinking to myself): Good grief.