666
The Fall of Stack Overflow
(programming.dev)
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
Well, for starters, the fall started six months before ChatGPT launched. And there was a brief uptick in traffic after ChatGPT's launch.
For me the real problem with Stack Overflow, as someone who was one of the earliest users of the service, is when you ask a question now you don't actually get a good answer anymore. Often your question just gets deleted by moderators. And even when I've answered someone's perfectly good question, the question (and my answer) have been deleted by mods.
All I can say is thank god ChatGPT came when it did, because we needed something to replace Stack Overflow.
Do we have a community on lemmy to ask questions like stackoverflow?
I think for specific platforms, like rust questions in the rust community.
It wouldn't be very good.
Most people want answers, not questions, and with Stack Overflow the answers are usually already there and easy to find. Plus they are maintained and kept up to date, so if something was correct six years ago but isn't anymore, that will usually be obvious before you try the solution.
Some kind of federated stack overflow alternative could be awesome, but Lemmy is not it and never will be.
My favorite part of stackoverflow was asking a question because every result from Google at the time was either not helpful... Or lead to a SO page with the same question with no answer, but was marked as a previously answered question by a moderator... And was then told by them to use Google
Like bitch I did use Google, the first 2 pages of answers filtered only for SO results were all marked as previously answered and closed by moderators!
That was the last time I used SO. Never figured out the answer to my problem either. At least chatGPT might point me in the right direction to figuring out the problem
Ah. Feels similar to the relevance discussions on the German Wikipedia. Gatekeeping at its finest.