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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by ad_on_is@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev

It just occured to me, that I haven't asked anything on SO for a while now. It might even be years, the last I asked for help.

Most of the problems I come across were already faced by someone else.

Do you guys feel the same?

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[-] unmagical@lemmy.ml 57 points 2 months ago

When the number one result in Google is a site answering my exact question with "did you try googling it first?" I have no incentive to interact with that site.

[-] Buckshot@programming.dev 28 points 2 months ago

i got that once, except it was my exact question with no response at all, then i noticed it was me that posted the question 4 years earlier.

i used to use stack overflow a lot back in 2007/08 but i cant remember the last time i actually got an answer.

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I've stopped using most corporate message boards and forums since AI hysteria highlighted their greed and self-aggrandizement.

All of them act like they are indispensable and provide value, when their only value is the network effect, and their "products" are entirely user generated and moderated. It's only a matter of time until they enshittify and rug pull.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

"Have you tried formatting your PC and completely reinstalling Windows? That often fixes icon misalignment on the desktop. Please upvote if this helps you!" - every "volunteer Microsoft Support Forum" representative ever.

They all have that same irritatingly obsequious and simultaneously infantile dunning-Kruger customer support agent vibe when responding. Never posted there myself, but all the responses feel like they’re written in that tone.

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 8 points 2 months ago

Ha I once googled some question, found a great answer in some random forum and was like about to write a reply saying what a great answer it was when I realised it was me, like 10 years ago.

[-] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 29 points 2 months ago

Never. IIRC, I also couldn't upvote good solutions because I had never posted or something, though I may be mis-remembering.

[-] kennebel@lemmy.world 22 points 2 months ago

This was my experience as well. They seemed to angle the system away from the casual user, which I didn’t have time to sit around and answer questions to get enough fake internet points to interact more.

[-] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 9 points 2 months ago

Yeah, it sucks. In the cases where it was really helpful, I couldn't upvote the answer that helped me solve my issue (usually with some more poorly-documented library or something).

[-] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

You can however always accept the answer, which is similar and pretty helpful

[-] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 4 points 2 months ago

I'm not the one asking anything in this case, just findingnothers' questions and answers

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

fake internet points

Your take is a valid one, but not very fair.

Points are a reputation system. People who are contribute and provide quality get increased trust and power.

It's not "fake". It's a designed system of points with meaning.

A casual surfer not being able to vote is by design. Which has a cost of missing out on valid votes, but the benefit of evading trolls and misuse.

[-] kennebel@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

Some of my saltiness comes from the fact that I tried to answer questions a few times, but told I wasn't worthy enough to participate in the conversation, and so I was confused by the system. Also, I saw people answering with lots of points, but their answers were trash and I couldn't impact that response/point gathering, and just made me think it was just another gamified system, and engineers love to game a system. :)

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

If that were really true then they would give users with 100k rep some benefit of the doubt when it comes to questions... but nope. Still get closed as "too vague" by people who haven't even heard of the thing you're asking about.

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

At least that's a testament to neutrality - in a shitty way.

[-] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 28 points 2 months ago

I've never asked a question there. Typically if there's no quick answer to my question already available, I'll just dig through documentation.

[-] fubarx@lemmy.ml 26 points 2 months ago

Funny story: when SO first started, started answering questions in domains I had experience in. The gamification was fun. After a year, questions got repetitive, so stopped.

A few years later. Googling a tech question. Top answer. Checked. Looks good.

Scroll down. It's my own answer from way back when.

First time I felt old.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Never. Don't have the patience to gather enough points to ask a question.

Oh, and, how to boil an egg

[-] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Asking, answering, and editing require no reputation.

[-] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Most of the responses on that site are toxic, so I tend to avoid it.

[-] madeindjs@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

So which one are you using ?

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

By responses you mean to include comments and moderation, not just answers?

It's sometimes there, but - from the [limited] use I have - I would certainly not qualify them as "most".

Never. For the most part i haven't had a question that hasn't already asked or that couldn't be answered from reading the docs or some other source. For the cases i get stuck i ask the question to a more focused group

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 13 points 2 months ago

I find SO too pissy to interact with. If I find something useful there, I'll copy it, but otherwise I ignore it.

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

What do you mean by pissy? What do you find so pissy?

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

I would answer your question, but it's too much like a previous question, that someone else hasn't answered yet.

[-] catalyst@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

I asked and answered a small handful of questions in the mid 20-teens but not really much since. I still wind up finding good answers there on a semi regular basis, though.

I just looked in my profile and my last question was in 2017. I received a holier than thou “what you’re trying to do is wrong” type of response and finally solved it with the help of a coworker who actually cared.

[-] tyler@programming.dev 8 points 2 months ago

Last time I asked was in 2019. I've asked 30+ questions total, only about half of those are ever answered. I've found that, the more experienced I get, the less my questions get answered on SO. Usually because my questions are well thought out, explained incredibly well, and the problem isn't that I don't understand something. It's that my problem is one of a kind. E.g. no one else on the planet is having it. So of course I'm not going to get help for it.

[-] ad_on_is@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago

yeah... that's what I realized too.

If you ask basic questions - "google it yourself" ... closed!

If you ask anything specific (like in your case) - it's just crickets

[-] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 7 points 2 months ago

I haven’t asked that much on SO. Often I can find the answer myself. In other cases my question is so niche I don’t know how to formulate it into a good SO question.

One of my questions got closed for being duplicate because it was tangentially related to a different question. I got the answer, but it left me a sour taste.

[-] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

Did you get the answer from the duplicate? If so I don't see what the problem is, they're building a knowledge repository so all dupes must be closed

[-] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Only from the comment saying it was a duplicate. The question wasn’t even the same and the answer was barely touching my question.

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 7 points 2 months ago

I forgot that last time was in 2023, although the previous one was in 2016. SO had a lot of moderation drama and point-grinders that (imo) led to community becoming more toxic, to the point where it's not too pleasant for me to participate in.

To be fair, they still have some good answers, and sometimes they can provide a useful answer, but edge-case rare obscure problems that seemed to be the very reason for SO are rarely answered now, as I see it

[-] Tovervlag@feddit.nl 6 points 2 months ago

Never, end up there a lot when googling though.

[-] key@lemmy.keychat.org 6 points 2 months ago

Never asked one. Answered my first one recently.

[-] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

You should already know that. It’s such a simple thing. — first answer on StackOverflow

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Usually iterations of:

"Closed and locked due to duplicate of: (question asked 9 years ago about Visual Studio 2011 and Visual Basic, when you're using VS code '22 and C#)"

"This seems like an XY problem, what are you really trying to accomplish?", after a one thousand word post describing in detail exactly what you are trying to accomplish and the many different reasons why you can't just use #GENERIC_EVERYDAY_METHOD.

Either that or the quick and dirty method that I want for a one off data conversion that uses standard libraries is heavily down voted and lost while the elaborate, all-cases-considered, 7-third-party-library-using answer becomes the top result.

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

This is not my experience at all.

It seems we search for and look at different kinds of questions.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The problem with stack overflow is that you need to know enough about the domain you're working in to describe it accurately enough to search and find that previous great answer.

If you have no clue, and then naively ask the no-clue kinds of questions, because you have no clue, then you get beaten over the head about not searching for the existing answer that you don't know how to search for.

[-] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 5 points 2 months ago

Was somewhat active in the travel section, but left since 90% are now visa questions on how to get into the schengen area.

[-] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 months ago

I think I've asked only two or three questions there, ever, and those were on topics obscure enough that the answers ended up coming from me.

There was a time when I answered other people pretty regularly, but that was more than a few years ago. I stopped mainly because I'm not very comfortable giving them free labour so they can be the gatekeepers of community knowledge.

I wonder if anyone is working on a fediverse Q&A platform.

[-] MagicShel@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago

Sometime between 2013 and 2018. Had to answer it myself. It got at least a couple dozen upvotes and a lot of people finding it useful and asking follow up questions.

It's deleted now. To be fair it was probably really outdated. But my account seems to be completely gone now. Maybe it got hacked. I haven't been there in a long time.

[-] Eiri@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

It must have been over 5 years ago. It turned me off. The culture there was so painful. People would refuse to answer a question just because they deemed the premise of your question unacceptable. Or even recommend you change your whole project's language.

It was like that both in questions and in chat. I never tried again.

[-] tirohia@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago

Last time I wrote a question - probably a couple of months ago. Last time I posted a question .... aaaaages ago.

By the time I get sufficiently frustrated to contemplate asking a question, I find the clarity that comes from stopping and trying to clearly lay out a question usually results in my figuring it out just before I hit post.

[-] voklen@programming.dev 3 points 2 months ago

Very rarely, but if it's a specific enough question that I've actually researched before I usually get a good response.

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I asked 6 questions on StackOverflow. 3 in 2010 and 3 in 2011.

For context; I gave 183 answers.

I can agree with most questions having already been asked.

Moreso, most questions on StackOverflow can be answered with some context knowledge or some reading of official docs or references, or trying out. I've not felt the need to ask anything.

[-] Scoopta@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

I find I ask less questions now because I'm a better programmer and just visit the site less in general. I used to ask a lot. I actually don't find that many duplicates though, usually when I have a question there isn't already an answer... usually because when I have a question I'm doing something insane, I find I do that a lot lol.

[-] Templa@beehaw.org 1 points 2 months ago

It has been one or two years. I deleted my accounts since then and don't look anything there anymore (if I can) considering things are quite outdated now.

[-] PoY@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 months ago

everyone at my company uses chatgpt first

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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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