yes its from reddit, but its fairly interesting.
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1hwj0sq/fired_from_meta_after_1_week_prolog_engineer/
Manually using a site like that to ask others for information will be irrelevant very shortly. I give it another year or two.
I asked 1 high-quality question in 2024, and it was closed almost immediately, and I haven’t engaged with the site since.
If someone with 20,000+ karma has their nicely-formatted questions closed so quickly, what must the newbies and rank-in-file encounter? This is probably a big reason why it’s declining.
It’s a high quality question, yes.
The close as already answered elsewhere is valid though. It’s not saying that the question is wrong; at least a decade ago StackOverflow explicitly allowed and encouraged asking the same question in different ways so they and their answers can be found.
It’s about operator precedence. And the referenced question asks the same thing, about ?? and a comparison operator.
The head note says:
This question already has an answer here:
Notably, it refers to answers, not the invalidity or duplication of a question.
The header also mentions [previously] opinion based, so I looked into the question edit history. It most certainly was not a “high quality” question at the beginning - at the very least to the degree it looks like now.
Notably, it refers to answers, not the invalidity or duplication of a question.
I think it’s too much to close a question just because a different question happen to have the same answer. There might be a future answer that might apply to one, but not the other.
Do you think that applies to this question?
Null coalesce operator vs comparison operator precedence? Both questions are about that. I don’t see one having a different answer to the other. In that case, duplication would only lead to spread out partially outdated information, instead of one place being updated.
Find myself wondering if the quality of the remaining questions is higher. There definitely has airways been some of the gate keeping that people complain about, but a lot of it has also legitimately been people upset that they get redirected upon asking low quality or duplicate questions.
It doesn’t help that some of the duplicates aren’t duplicates at all but some SO admin or mod hasn’t read or understood the question properly and points the asker at something that’s actually only vaguely related or irrelevant.
I’m pretty sure I’ve also heard of askers providing links to other questions that are similar to but not quite what they’re interested in, explained why their question is different and yet it’s one of those linked questions that ends up being identified as being identical to the asker’s question.
There may also be at least one pair of questions that each point back at the other as being the original, and there’s no useful information in either. (I don’t know why this idea is in my head though, so maybe it was a joke I read somewhere.)
Either way, the admins and mods there do not like to be told they are wrong and will shut things down fast if it starts looking like they’ve made a mistake. Unfortunately for them, stories like this get out anyway.
Petty little overlords of the toxic waste dump of their own making.
See this is what I’m talking about. You’re saying you’ve heard stories. I bet some of them are legitimate criticism, but I’m also positive many of them are from people that couldn’t put on the bare minimum of effort when asking for help from strangers on the internet.
I asked a very good, thoughtful question yesterday and within 5 minutes got a downvote with no comment or explanation or feedback as to why. Ive got around 3k rep, not while im not a poweruser or whatever i aint new to it.
Glad other people engaged with it productively, but yea was a real “this is what people have been talking about”
Can this be explained by the fact that the Internet already has satisfactory answers to more and more questions, so there is less need to actively ask new ones?
I would imagine it’s more ChatGPT getting about as good as stackoverflow.
Couple that with the ability to ask a question without someone closing it as off topic, or a duplicate, or telling you you don’t actually need to do the thing you need to do, or bringing up the XY problem, or… well the list goes on.
ChatGPT might hallucinate sometimes but it’s nice about it and it fundamentally changes the barrier to entry to ask a question in the same way that stackoverflow once did.
Stackoverflow was a step change because it excelled at being a a great place to ask questions because they gamified people actually answering them.
ChatGPT is another step change because it makes it so you can get a similar quality answer instantly and without any of the social baggage. It also allows you to have follow-ups and get into a groove of question and answer. It’s not always right but I was pleasantly surprised using it to navigate unfamiliar libraries and apis and being able to drill down on something. Even when it got something wrong it got it right enough that I could course correct without having to argue back and forth with someone.
Bleh, maybe I’m an old man, but when I’m searching stackoverflow, I find the context of stack overflow answers really helpful.
I.E. the top result may include caveats itself or have comments indicating why an answer might be problematic. And sometimes the best answer isn’t even the top answer. I’ve not used AI code assistance very much, but these all seem like things that the model is likely to take for granted.
But I also never contribute to stackoverflow, and agree I’d much rather engage with with an AI than do THAT.
but these all seem like things that the model is likely to take for granted.
I see it pretty often saying “you could do it this way, or XYZ other way”
Can you please tell me why? I read about it and made a lot of noise but I forgot what it was about.
If i recall A lot of power user even threaten to delete their post as strike?
I think the big one recently is the opt in ai training. A lot of people were not happy with their data being hoovered up and making so a ton of $$. So they are replacing their answers with nonsense/deleting them. Plus there’s now ai bots that are on so…such a strange world.
SO is only useful if it’s filled with things that help out users. If it starts getting less foot traffic, an evaporation effect occurs where more and more uses leave thereby making it even less useful.
