Why you should know: StackOverflow is facing a mod strike in a similar way as Reddit’s mod strike. They are doing this in response to StackOverflow’s failure to address it’s promises and provide moderation tools
Someone should work on a LemmyOverflow UI for Lemmy
good for them. Organizing and taking action is the only way to get capitalists to listen
Me: Good for them, that’s great hope they get want they want.
Me, to myself, in bed at night: Oh god how will I code
At least we have readily available AI tools to help
Trained on old stack overflow answers, so newer things could be a problem.
The new Copilot for Docs beta aims to solve that problem by providing the AI context about the libraries you’re using, new or old. It’ll have all the information from the documentation, so it will know all the functions, parameters, outputs, etc.
Fun fact: the stack exchange for research mathematics, MathOverflow, is a separate 501©(3) nonprofit which at any time can pack up their stuff and migrate, including their domain name and all of their data, per the agreement they made when they joined the stack exchange network in 2013, originally operating the site themselves since 2009.
https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow/970#970
While the MathOverflow site is operated by Stack Exchange, Inc., the domain and the MathOverflow name are owned by the MathOverflow corporation. The MathOverflow corporation is completely independent from Stack Exchange and its mission is to ensure the continued operation of the site in a manner that meets the needs and expectations of the community.
Subject to Section 8, should MathOverflow wish to migrate its data outside of the Stack Exchange network, Stack Exchange shall, within thirty (30) days of receipt of a written request from MathOverflow, provide MathOverflow with a complete and current database that contains all the data necessary to recreate MathOverflow on MathOverflow’s own servers and software. Following such transfer, Stack Exchange will cease all use of the MathOverflow database.
If they don’t like how the site is being run, they can leave. Food for thought. If all communities on the internet were so careful and prescient to plan an exit strategy in advance, to make clear that you just operate our site and we can leave for a competitor, we’d not be in this mess.
If only /r/AskHistorians were this prescient.
If all communities on the internet were so careful and prescient to plan an exit strategy in advance, to make clear that you just operate our site and we can leave for a competitor, we’d not be in this mess.
That’s why God invented the GPL.
Always surprised by companies outsourcing all their moderation to unpaid volunteers and then act shocked when they’re ready to pause their work.
I never got any help asking questions there anyways. Answers I got back we’re trollish. When I provide and answer it can’t be the answer as it’s based on your own reputation score which you can’t get but answering questions. It seems like a flawed system. Didn’t know they had mods either. Never really got any solutions either from stack overflow, unless you read every comment for the right answer.
Instead of hoping that the corporation will change, they should just move to the fediverse.
Entire programming industry is about to panic!
Betcha some people lose their jobs when management notices how much less productive they are without Reddit and StackOverflow.
At least school’s out for summer.
The quality of programming-related content on Reddit is absolutely terrible. The major lanuage-related subreddits are almost nothing but people self-promoting their latest Medium blogspam or thousands of people patting someone on the back for sharing their first “Hello world” program. Anyone going there for any sort of advice surely didn’t gain any sort of productivity boost.
Stack overflow has mods?
Closed: This question has already been answered 5 years ago here <link to completely unrelated question>
Better yet: “this question has been answered here <link to old question, answer does not work/doesnt apply or work anymore>”
Found that out today too
Is there a FOSS alternative to stackexchange yet?
https://www.codidact.com/ was started in response to the previous round of exactly the same shitty behaviour from the stack exchange management a few years ago.
OSQA (question & answer) used to be the one that you could host locally
Following
Seems like Lemmy has a starring functionality.
All open source forum software pretty much
Yeah, before StackOverflow took over everything my web searches for programming problems would usually lead to forum threads. The quality of information would usually be better there, too.
Unlike Reddit, Stack Overflow would probably be better without moderators.
In fact, you could easily replace Stack Overflow mods with a script that goes into every new question, comments “USE THE FUCKING SEARCH BAR” and locks the thread.
I don’t think so: Stack Overflow requires much more moderation for the comments and answers to actually stay on topic and be somewhat professional. Especially the “don’t just link somewhere, explain the thing” rule might require a lot of moderation.
Moderation will probably be done by AI in the future. It’s probably just a bit too expensive still.
Why is this being downvoted? This dystopian nightmare future is very likely going to happen.
People on stack overflow explain things?
Replace them with a script that goes into every comment and put “duplicate of existing post”.
Even if there is no existing post.
Or there is but it was ages ago, had no decent answers and all information in it has become outdated.
There is at least one existing post for each post.
So…was the strike because they put a 100-strike limit on moderators marking normal questions as Duplicate/Opinionated/Unclear? Or, because all of the normal users left and it’s just spam trolls left behind?
Ahhh, it’s because of divisions of opinion on AI. No doubt, it’d be easy to tell ChatGPT “ChatGPT, can you come up with excuses to lock all the questions on the front page so my query about Scala stays up top?”
I’m constantly baffled by my coding professor suggesting stackoverflow to students for asking questions because of the experience I am seeing others have there. The new ones are always downvoted and the only reply usually just calls the person stupid. I’d just kinda accepted that this was the culture I was going to matriculate into when I graduate.
Honestly? Your coding professor sounds kind of awesome. Because that is the most useful skill you can learn as a programmer/coder.
There are two (now three-ish) ways to solve a problem like 'I need to integrate this new library" or “I am trying to do X with Y” and the like. You can spend hours learning every nuance of every library and algorithm to figure out exactly what corner case you are in. Or you can ask for help.
And when you ask for help? You need to know how to vet those answers and figure out what is useful. This is true wither it is Jane on the Frontend team or xxx_420_JustBlazeIt on Stack Overflow. And sometimes that is going to involve dealing with an asshole and trying to key in on the useful bits.
Adding on to that is the idea of using an LLM like ChatGPT (which scrapes stackoverflow…). Which is mostly the same end user experience.
One of the hardest and most annoying things to teach people is how to ask for help. It pisses me off to no end how many “weekly standup” meetings I need to schedule just because I know that there are those people who will not ask for help unless I specifically ask them “oh, okay. What is the source of that delay and how can we help? Hey Fred, you have a lot of experience with X, right? Can you and Jim try to sum this problem up for the rest of us?”. And if we don’t have that meeting, they are going to sit by themselves silently trying to parse shitty documentation for weeks.
I once handed in a citation from an answer to my Stack Overflow question.
Something along the lines of… “After hitting a roadblock the community at Stack Overflow was consulted, as suggested in the lecture, and deemed the task not feasible [1].”
The answer I put in the reference was one of the many variants of “Who in their right mind would do this in Matlab? Use Python instead.”
I passed lol.
It was good when it was relatively new. The culture quickly turned toxic, as you’re seeing, and it’s been getting steadily worse for years now. There is a lot of useful information, and often the only thing online with code examples for a certain programming issue. but it is also increasingly outdated, in part due to the ‘no repeat questions’ thing. I have a couple popular answers about PHP and JavaScript from over 12 years ago, and they still get upvoted. Some people comment and say “this is answer is incorrect!” and… yeah, it’s from 2009.
If even the elitist programmers at stack overflow that know everything and discourage questions from users that treat it as some sort of question and answers site can be effected by companies taking from the communities, it can happen to anyone.
Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Welp. That’s it. The internet is closed for business. Thanks for stopping by
The new corporate internet is slowly dying, seems like. About time to go back the the more grassroots internet if possible. The rich won’t save us.
I hate the libertarian implications of the “join or die” snake, but I feel like this strikes my current sentiment:
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxlVDdu1Isl_H_QchRuNGe1MaX0nS_DUXk
