Anyone feel Stack Overflow is becoming less helpful and more snarky?

Stackoverflow is stuck in time.

They wanted to create an "encyclopedia" using a Q&A site. To do that they banned duplicate questions (and therefore answers). That means that if you search for a topic you're going to time-travel back to the oldest point when that was first asked, get ten year old answers, and that's it.

But technology changes, so an answer from ten years ago might be very different from an answer today. But SO is a really bad version of Wikipedia, so once something is "the solution" it is now that forever. Sure, you can tack on a comment or additional non-solution answers, but the site actively penalises you for doing so.

So, yeah, in answer to your question. Between SO's wildly out-of-date content, toxic community, and Google search results also becoming worse year upon year, it is a difficult site to use, or even want to use.

Definitely. The old feel was more like a wiki, where everyone contributed both questions and answers together. It was like a giant crowdsourced documentation.

But I feel like there's a lot of 'bullying' now. Bullying as in people who try to make themselves feel in control by downvoting things. There was one case where someone decided to downvote one of my questions, then ran around my profile downvoting every question that wasn't upvoted.

HN also feels a lot like this. People who sort of try to prop themselves up by pushing others down. They seem to target the ones that have the least retribution - the protection of anonymity and not losing points off their downvote.

It's different to the old days, where if someone posted a bad question or answer, we would give them advice, or edit their post to be clearer and more polite. The goal was to help people up, not push them down.

The other Stack Exchanges are nice, though. So it has little to do with the model itself.

I asked about it on their meta site (https://meta.stackexchange.com/) but was immediately attacked by the snark brigade... Parts of the site is still good, but some tags (c++ in particular) is overtaken by snark people and RTFM:ers. The smaller stack exchange sites are much more worthwhile.

Fwiw, hn has become very snarky too. So maybe it's a sign of the times.

IMO, Stack Overflow has already achieved its initial mission, but not the mission they set out for.

Stack Overflow wanted to create a wiki of questions and answers, when in reality all initial users wanted was a dedicated programming Q&A site that would answer their questions. The wiki aspect was a side goal of this.

Today, Stack Overflow has the answers to many questions, and due to the similarity in many questions already out there it is incredibly difficult to get an answer without some level of gatekeeping - whether it's from the users/moderators, or from the system itself trying to stop duplication.

IMO, Stack Overflow has failed at being a wiki, because they refuse to allow duplicates. If I were in charge of Stack Overflow, I would actively encourage duplicates, and build the Q&A system around merging duplicates over having one definitive answer. Sure, maybe the world doesn't need 50 different perspectives on how to get a Mongo collection out of Meteor, but a smart system would turn those individual contributions into one master question, asked by 50 people, with numerous answers that work in certain situations, or specific versions. Until SO consider this approach, I can only see the distrust towards them growing.

I've rarely had any issues with user posts/comments. Often the question will start out vague or lacking necessary details, but gets refined after comments.

The closed as duplicate or off-topic is very annoying. I do put in some time into moderating the moderation with reopen votes or edit suggestions.

I especially love discussions in less popular topics where they can run more deep and insightful at times.

Not really? I've always found what I needed.

The worst kind of answers are those who just post a code snippet without any context.

They've appeared to have put a lot of effort into being more polite and respectful recently, which I feel is admirable. However, that sometimes results in a "Please" prefix to the snark. As one commenter alluded to, comments in meta that go against what the majority or agree with an act of kindness get piled on and downvoted. It sometimes feels like there's a built-in culture that is likely to persist. I think that times are changing and there might be an opening for new ways to think about Q&A communities.

Stack Overflow was and is still useful. I will say that it's becoming less relevant over time for me. When I used Google to find answers to questions, other sources of answers are popping up now.

I tried contributing but it seems like everything is answered now except for the most corner-case things. I feel bad for people asking questions because they almost all get downvoted.

There was a time when it was useful but I agree with what another poster said: it's stuck in time and it shows.

Yes, I feel the same. It's a large part of why I've given up on SO.

I think everything will be better if they implement their guidelines in actual input forms to force users to provide more information and more context - not only in questions but also in answers. It's so easy right now to comment and pollute the thread and that's what they have to tackle as well. Besides that, more moderators and people reviewing what is posted can also help. Comments like "thanks" or "can you provide more context" should be on 1 to 1 basis, more like a messages.

SO is a very helpful website and companies are not even aware enough how much it helps them and how much money it saves globally.

Yes, for years now. Coupled with the almost automatic “this has been asked before” duping to different questions that have some of the same words.

I loved SO when it first started - now it’s mostly just annoying whenever SO answers show up in search results.

SO has had a very similar trajectory to Google search - getting worse over time because of some fundamental product decisions, no real hope for improvement in sight and somehow still the best product in their category.

I for one am glad other smaller, more focused StackOverflows exist, like they do for Unity3d and Unreal.

Anecdotally, I've lost count the number of Closed or Duplicate answers were better and more helpful than the canonical one.

I see a lot of questions down-voted due to insecure code: PHP & MySQL injections for example. It's a site for asking a question and learning, a down-vote is so discouraging to a new programmer.