Stack Overflow is doomed
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Stack Overflow does have an super naive reputation and moderation system and overly restrictive subject matter, which Ciro Santilli wants to improve upon with OurBigBook.com.
However, it is the best that we have now, and if you use it like Ciro, you won't get tired:What else would you expect from a naive algorithm system that has 10 million newbies asking stuff?
- monitor only rare tags that you know a lot about, let others answer duplicates on big tags for you
- only answer on bigger tags when you find a better answer than can be found on the page
- accept that sometimes things are bound to go wrong, that reputation is meaningless, and move on
The key problem of Stack Overflow is closurism. The answer close feature is just not made for purpose. The sole purpose of "closing" should be to prevent easy reputation farming. What it should do instead, is remove points gained from duplicates and off topic questions. But it should not prevent new answers. The disk space costs nothing, and Google doesn't care about the closed status of a question.
Question activity on Stack Overflow has been decreasing since 2020:
- meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26655/total-reputation-in-stack-overflow-over-time/401496#401496
- www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1592s82/the_fall_of_stack_overflow/. www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1592s82/comment/jte8aju/ is amazing:
www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1592s82/comment/jteipud/ well known user mipadi comments:You've fallen for the common misconception that the goal of stackoverflow is helping users solve problems.When the reality is that it's actually a video game. The only players are the admins/mods, and their goal is to use their "hammers" and attempts at pedantry/nitpicking (correctness not important) to compete with each other to get the highest "close" point scores. Pew pew pew!!! Bang bang bang!!! How many points can you score today?!?!Us users are just the NPCs, there as fodder for the real players.Ciro Santilli concurs, for professional niche sites. Non-professional ones are fine.
And the niche Stack Exchange sites tend to be even worse, although I can still get a question answered after much teeth gnashing, usually.
- www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/195ygru/stackoverflow_questions_down_66_in_2023_compared/
- observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
As of 2024, the only competitor of Stack Overflow is Reddit (besides LLMs, which do nothing but extract data from those two and other sites). Reddit removed the mandatory thread locking after 6 months, but still lacks the Q&A focus required for greatness. Its community however is much more chill and doesn't close and downvote the fuck out of everything.
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