Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes.
The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions.
Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.
Eventually SO becomes a site exclusively for lurkers instead of a platform for active participation
This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.
> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.
This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.
The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.
I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.
I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.
My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as time went on, and they became unanswered, almost always (I often ended up answering my own question, after I figured it out on my own).
I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I encountered, were the types of things that people who ship, encounter; not academic exercises.
Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on there, don't ship.
LLMs may sometimes give pretty sloppy answers, but they are almost always ship-relevant.
I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.
Which is kinda cool, but also very biased for older contributors. I could drop thousands of points bounty without thinking about it, but new users couldn't afford the attention they needed.
This is killer feature of LLMs - you will not became more experienced.
>zombie community
Like Reddit post 2015.
For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not quite comparable because the more subjective questions are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the direction of adding many more libraries than most people should).
Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008)
Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)
Google answers
And the horrific Quora
Random example:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/762357.html
It's remarkable how similar in style the answers are to what we all know from e.g. chatgpt.
No way.
Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...
I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting.
I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP.
I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes.
