• Derpenheim@lemmy.zip
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    22 hours ago

    AI didn’t stackoverflow. Its own toxic environment did.

    Learning to code, and run into an issue that is extremely common but you dont know that because again, youre learning to code? Answered before, removed

    Have an issue that you dont know exactly how it came about, and others have been talking about it elsewhere because its a relatively new issue but is pervasive? Duplicate, removed

    Have an issue because you aren’t God’s gift to coding? Verbally assaulted in the responses, removed.

    It was a shit website dominated by the worst of computer science.

    • asret@lemmy.zip
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      7 hours ago

      The strict moderation is the main strength of it. Makes it so much easier to find useful answers and for those answers to be refined.

      Most of the toxicity I’ve seen surrounding the site has been from people upset that they were asked to improve their search skills, asked to improve their question to be more useful for those answering them, or simply demanding that people answer to their deadlines.

      It’s hard to take complaints about the site seriously when so many of them seen to come from entitled arseholes being offended at being asked to not be arseholes.

      • smeg@feddit.uk
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        15 minutes ago

        Yeah, I’m not denying the numbers in the graph, but I’ve seen people saying Stack Overflow is dead for years, but it’s been consistently useful for me, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of the hostility either.

      • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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        7 hours ago

        Couldn’t they just merge posts if they were duplicates and avoid the whole toxic environment?

        I’m sure they could have coded it like that.

    • Kacarott@aussie.zone
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      18 hours ago

      It’s a mixture of so many common questions already having existing answers, the toxic community, and AI. There was already a decline happening before AI appeared, but it got much quicker after chatgpt released.

    • blarghly@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      tbf, you have to compare it to what came before - old style forums dedicated to any given language, framework, or technology. Not only was stack better at consolidating questions and answers, it significantly cut down on the verbal abuse levelled at new coders. [Closed as Duplicate] might be offputting - but it is still better than 3 pages of insults and squabbling because you asked how to close vim.