yes its from reddit, but its fairly interesting.
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1hwj0sq/fired_from_meta_after_1_week_prolog_engineer/
They can go fuck themselves. I don’t even post and it’s aggravating how many questions I see go unanswered because they declare it a duplicate or something else to make it invalid. I see it more commonly now when I have more complex issues. Thanks but that post you linked to being the “original” is not the solution. They don’t even gain anything from doing this. Don’t you WANT more traffic by having more questions posted and answered?!
I assume this is a mix of AI stuff being a more common Oracle for this stuff and StackOverflow clinging to old answers and questions as being forever relevant.
Every single time I open the perfect question the only answer is “we already covered this, use the search”
I stopped asking questions there because I usually spend about twenty to thirty minutes writing them to make sure they’re clear and not duplicates. I take time to explain why they aren’t duplicates of similar questions. The I get downvoted and I get my question closed. Then the site tells me to do things and I do them but no one else knows what I’m talking about and I get mocked for not knowing how the site works. That community is toxic as fuck. Genuinely, users spend more effort and energy looking for reasons to not answer something than they do trying to make questions answerable. Heaven forbid anyone give a reason for any of this. Just gotta get their daily stats to rank up.
Seriously, the one thing SO could’ve had going for it in the wake of AI is the human aspect, but they haven’t fixed their community problems in years.
I take time to explain why they aren’t duplicates of similar questions.
Ha yes I’ve found that if you explain why your question isn’t a duplicate of another question and link to it, people are more likely to report it as a duplicate of that question. So stupid.
“An answer to the linked question answers your question, so we’ve marked your question as a duplicate. Even though your question is different.💜 Also, a bunch of people downvoted your question too did not spotting that an answer on an unrelated question answers your question. And we give you notifications of it. And they’re big, scary red numbers! But don’t worry, this helps the site!”
And then none of the answers there answer what you’re asking. 🙄 Which like, if they did, the whole process might have been worth it.
It’s such a good idea at the base level. Reputation allows additional privilege so that the people who know the most on a topic can contribute more than screaming idiots. But the lust for a higher rep score drives toxic behavior. Thus you get people in control that know how to game the system not the actual experts. I’ve had great experiences in that site, and I’ve had terrible ones. Most the great ones are because I joined in the very early days and we were really all trying to help each other. As the rep addicts took over, I bailed. By that point there were you tube tutorials to fill the gap. I’m nostalgic for what that site was. It’s very sad to see what it became.
So many things about the site sound great on paper. Like Meta? Amazing! But they never listen. I remember when they took Interpersonal.SE off of the Hot Network Questions list over a damn tweet somebody made. Apparently random tweets get more attention than posts in their dedicated community discussion location.
And I still am angry about them dragging Monica through the mud.
A few years ago I had a software problem, and in the course of trying to solve it I found someone with almost the identical problem on SO, although no-one had posted a solution. Later on, I managed to piece some facts together and come up with a solution that worked for me. Trying to make life easier for others having the same problem, I posted my solution to that SO question, along with a brief explanation of what I thought the underlying problem was, and how my solution addressed it.
I got several upvotes, and one or two comments from people saying it worked for them too, which was nice. There was also a post from someone it didn’t work for, and they outlined why they thought that might be, which was constructive.
Unfortunately there was also some salty grump who weighed in just to tell me that my solution wasn’t “correct”. Not that it didn’t work mind you, just that it wasn’t good enough for them. As far as I bothered to look into their vague comments, my solution may have fixed the issue more as a side-effect than directly, but it did fix the issue. Meanwhile this person offered no alternative instructions of their own.
As time goes on, I seem to run across this sort of – not just unhelpful but “anti-helpful” – attitude more and more often on SO.
This is how the Internet has always been imo. You’re running into the same trolls we’ve been dealing with since we first got on the fucking Internet. Some people just cannot interact with others without being rude as fuck because they’re jaded assholes. So what if you’ve seen the same thing 80 times? Move along if you don’t care.
I feel for you. Being a computer nerd in general, I’ve had to deal with this antisocial behavior forever. You really wonder why they even bother to go to places like this if they hate other people so much. I think it’s just because they want to lord over others because that’s all they have.
Well they (probably) don’t go to places like this because they have any indication it’s other people. They’re (likely) incredibly anti-social in “real” life and online is hear a video game to them with no “real” people on the other side.
I’ve blocked SO from my search results. Either the answers or useless and wrong, or they point to another thread, where the answer has also been useless and wrong. Not to mention how passive aggressive the people there are, all because they want to farm imaginary points
I’ve given up asking. I’ve been on the site since 2008, the last time i asked something and actually got an answer was 2017.
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.
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.
I’m new to programming and still in training. Is there a replacement competitor site for stack overflow that people use?
ChatGPT or Claude. Just be aware that sometimes they’ll get things convincingly wrong. If you’re new to programming and asking simple questions then it should be relatively uncommon though.
I usually just look into the docs, for most of the more basic things, search engine will find you the related function, and the docs usually have usage examples.
Also, learning to work with and read a documentation will be one of the best skills you can acquire as a programmer. I was so glad I was used to docs, because when I started to work with libraries that are under NDA (porting games on consoles, most prominently PS5), where the only resource you have are docs and internal forums without any kind of tutorials, being able to figure out what you need from docs is really nice skill to have.
I have tried using AI for non NDA programming questions, and usually I’ve ran into an issue that it simply just halucinates even on basic questions. For example, I was trying to figure out how to prevent Quest from sleeping, so we can run long-running automated tests, and all of the solutions were adb parameters that do not exist. Unless it’s something super basic, AI will probably just send to you the wrong direction.
Manually using a site like that to ask others for information will be irrelevant very shortly. I give it another year or two.
