Let go of StackOverflow; communities must take ownership

Some of the alternatives that the author suggests (Slack, Discord, Matrix rooms) are so much worse to search for answers in. Stack overflow has many disadvantages, but it is extremely good at being a publicly searchable repository of answers to common questions

Can someone parse what this blog is trying to say with the whole Joe story at the top? I’m too deep in post-Thanksgiving travel acquired illness to understand what this story is trying to tell me. The StackOverflow links are 404s because they were deleted, which the article oddly acknowledges after the links but without removing the deleted links.

As far as I can tell, the author of this blog post had their StackOverflow question deleted for some reason, it made them angry, and now they want us all to delete our StackOverflow accounts and moved to Discord, Slack, Matrix, a forum they acknowledge is actually pretty mean to new users, and a lot of other alternatives?

This seems like a totally incoherent complaint. The alleged SO bad-actor is upset that they can't police a community, but the author has the same complaint, just directed at SO.

All platforms with any moderation system can be subverted by bad actors - IDK that much about SO's mechanisms but it strikes me as leaving the "community" far more leverage for getting around entrenched bad actors than discord, reddit, etc.

And what's more... it's software purpose-built for technical Q&A. Some of my SO answers have been updated by others as they became outdated. Not that I have some particular fondness for SO, but what a cool collective intelligence feature.

I have a feeling this was written for an in-group and broke containment, but the straight forward answer here seems to me to be "SO should have a report system for dealing with bad actors," not "boycott the forum I don't like so people use the one I do"

Absolutely not.

1) This is a people problem, not a site problem. Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted, and for every singular tech professional who is, there are a dozen horrid maladjusted ones who are unfortunately successful and find themselves with power they aren't mature enough to have.

2) StackOverflow is still a treasure trove of information and a place anyone can go and ask questions about even niche and deprecated technology. Just recently asked a question about InnoSetup on StackOverflow and got a great response from possibly the expert fellow on InnoSetup.

Having an "invested community" requires an inordinate amount of effort from a tiny handful of founders for uncertain reward.

I just had that kind of experience, but with Stack Exchange.

The Ubuntu people seem to have recently pushed to users a new version of the CUPS printer scheduler that doesn't like the syntax of some old cupsd.conf files. This breaks all printing on affected machines.

So where are the bug reports? Stack Exchange. Nobody over there is going to fix it. This needs to be discussed on Ubuntu Forums, where the maintainers might read it. For now, I posted similar discussions on the CUPS forum and Ubuntu's own forum, and linked them to each other. There's a finger-pointing problem coming up - is this a CUPS bug or a Ubuntu bug? (What writes the cupsd.conf file anyway? Ubuntu Settings?) I don't want to file a bug report until the finger-pointing phase has commentary from people who actually know the innards of Linux printing, or I'll get shot down by one side blaming the other. Let those guys fight it out.

Stackoverflow started failing when Jeff left. While he had a big hand in the whole mantra of being more of a Wiki than just Q&A, I feel his sense of community wouldn’t have let it get so bad.

Then all of the OG engineers left (I hope Nick Craver is doing well, his blog posts were incredible), an investment company took over, and whatever good will and vibe that was left melted away.

I’ll still occasionally find a good answer there. But it has zero future of making answers available for future good questions.

They took the fun away.

A huge benefit of stackoverflow, perhaps the biggest benefit, is that it is a single place you can go to ask about a wide variety of languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. and interactions between them.

Having to join a separate mailing list, forum, or chat server for every "community" you might have technical questions about, then keeping track of those is incredibly inconvenient. And in some cases it may not be clear which one to ask a question on.

That's not to say that such places for community discussion isn't valuable, but stackoverflow serves a different purpose.

So interesting that this post is about putting incentives in the right place.

I distinctly remember the number one fantastic thing about StackOverflow in the beginning was that their incentives were so much better than all the alternatives.

The way SO gave you points for answering questions and gave you more for being the best answer etc etc meant the answers you got there were so much better than anywhere else. This is why the site grew so rapidly and so quickly became the best place to get a great answer.

> Choose ownership by invested communities instead of faceless gamified interlopers.

This is a fair take, I will say as someone who benefited greatly from SO and contributed to it way more than I should have (on paid time) the problem was that people asking question were always new to the site and rules, and so their questions would be shot down in service to high quality content.

Whats happening now is anyone who is asking questions there is even less in tune with the practices of the site and likely with tech in general. It has been consumed by every coding llm, (i don't condone it but it's a fact). So it begs the question, if you have a truly new and novel problem that hasn't yet been solved by Jon Skeet, where do you ask ?

As an ex hardcore user, I don't know the answer anymore but bikeshedding things with an LLM is ironically sometimes more insightful for me personally.

Love the idea but getting people to move to another platform requires both

- "nothing about the new thing is worse"

and

- "some things are better".

Any migration must also defeat social network effects ("I'll wait for everyone else before I migrate")

Still it is exciting to see energy for this.

Would be great to know what (if any) alternatives exist with a similar UI to Stack Overflow - open source or other.

I've decided that I am done with all that social media crap. The only way to combat this digital amnesia problem is to selfhost again.

I also decided to build my website from scratch in Go, because this way I can allow people to download, share, and reuse content more easily. If my website goes down, I can offer a peer to peer client. If my wiki goes down, I can offer a prepared ZIM package.

(And yes, I'm also building my own ZIM search client/server hybrid because I don't like the way ZIM's search works)

In my case I had to do a bunch of things before, e.g. writing a Go WebASM bindings framework, fixing the webview/webview bindings, and rewriting my website so it can be hosted locally and in parts, too.

I separated the website, weblog, wiki and (markdown) editor on purpose, so that I can split up the wiki if need be.

The only thing I regret is having invested so much in social media to share knowledge. That time would've been better spent on just persisting it in a wiki.

Also I think LLMs are great tools for discovery and learning, if they would respect the given boundaries, and if the owners of said LLMs would pay for the caused traffic bandwidth. Which leads back to the point of why I'm creating a ZIM server that also has MCP support.

Since I (and likely everyone else) uses AI to answer technical questions, and AI is taught by stackoverflow, and stackoverflow shuts down because it generates no income, what will the next AI be trained on?

Try as I might, I could not actually understand what the author’s point was.

What is so bad about SO?

I don't know what TLA+ is, but thanks for an entertaining rant, and the excerpt from Heller's timeless book.

I pay $10 a month to a small forum I frequent. If you're not willing to support the websites you use, it all leads to the same end.

This comes some years too late. Who is really using StackOverflow to ask questions? I know that ChatGPT can answer all questions that StackOverflow can answer in a fast, friendly and nearby as correct way. It has limitations, but the most people on StackOverflow are jsut doing the same than ChatGPT, just repeat after other people. All this things will be gone soon.

The other day I saw an answer on StackOverflow which was very detailed, well researched, and grounded in decades of experience.

It was also heavily downvoted, because it did not directly answer the user's question. (The user had already selected a winning answer, so this was in some sense unnecessary.)

It struck me that a single scalar for quality was inappropriate here. It was the best post I'd read in a long time, but by the site's rules indeed "deserved" the downvotes.

I had to wonder if a multidimensional system (tags like "answers question" and "general context" etc.) would work better. You know... the stuff every social media site figured out twenty years ago? ;)

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Tangential but the more I think about it, the more I think we had the web basically right twenty years ago...

You subscribed to what you wanted to see.. and then sometimes you'd find really cool new things through mentions or the comments section.

I was thinking about signal to noise ratio and taste recently and realized I'd reinvented RSS from first principles...

Wholeheartedly agree that moderation on Stack Overflow is nuts but email lists, Slack channels and Discord are poor solutions.