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The Fall of Stack Overflow
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Amazing how much hate SO receives here. As knowledge base it's working super good. And yes, a lot of questions have been answered already. And also yes, just like any other online community there's bad apples which you have to live with unfortunately.
Idolizing ChatGPT as a viable replacementis laughable, because it has no knowledge, no understanding, of what it says. It's just repeating what it "learned" and connected. Ask about something new and it will simply lie, which is arguably worse than an unfriendly answer in my opinion.
The advice on stack overflow is trash because "that question has been answered already" yeah, it was answered 10 years ago on a completely different version. That answer is depreciated.
Not to mention the amount of convoluted answers that get voted to the top and then someone with two upvotes at the bottom meekly giving the answer that you actually needed.
It's like that librarian from the New York public library who determined whether or not children's books would even get published.
She gave "good night moon" a bad score and it fell out of popularity for 30 years after the author died.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Typically answers are getting upvoted when they work for someone. So the top answer worked for more people than the other answers. Now there can be more than one solution to a problem but neither the people who try to answer the question, nor the people who vote on the answers, can possibly know which of them works specifically for you.
ChatGPT will just as well give you a technically correct, but for you wrong, answer. And only after some refinement give the answer you need. Not that different than reading all the answers and picking the one which works for you.
Of course older answers are going to have more uovotes if they technically work. That doesn't mean it's the best answer. It's possible that someone would like to make a new, better, answer and is unable to because of SA restrictions on posting.
The kinds of people who post on SA regularly aren't going to be the people with the best answers.
On top of that SA gives badges for uovoting and it's possible other benefits I'm unaware of.
As we saw with reddit, uovotes systems can be inherently flawed, we have no way of knowing if that uovote is genuine.