Anecdotally, I find that web search has been doing a much worse job of recognizing my query and presenting an SO result - which is why I personally use it less. Blogspam created from scraping SO has been completely pwning top results in Google and DDG(bing) and it’s really disheartening.

See for example “geeksforgeeks” and similar sites, which I find to be a poor and overly verbose resource, which now dominates the top position

> See for example “geeksforgeeks” and similar sites, which I find to be a poor and overly verbose resource, which now dominates the top position

Google Search's and Facebook Messenger's spam filters started letting tons of garbage through at roughly the same time. I wonder if the advances in generative deep learning helped with that.

DDG usually shows a SO preview in the right hand gutter for code related searches. I guess that must be a bing feature.

It does when it works, but I’ve found it to work less often these days.

This is so depressingly true. It's why most of my Google queries are affixed with `site:stackoverflow.com` or `site:reddit.com`. I lean on this so heavily that I've setup a couple Firefox keyword bookmarks so I can type `so <query>` or `r <query>` respectively into my address bar as a shortcut.

Doing this has vastly improved troubleshooting, finding recipes or product recommendations, etc. It slices through SEO blogspam. I get genuine results, fast.

I was asking myself similar questions after finding that the survey results bore little resemblance to what I've encountered in the US software industry in the last few years (I've been at it for decades). My first hunch is that the results say more about SO survey takers than about the actual software industry - similar to how various political polls (e.g. FoxNews, Politico) seem skewed towards the bias of the polling organization. My second hunch is that it's a big world, and I and my colleagues may just inhabit a bubble far from the center of the bell curve.

These days, the only time I drop into SO is when a "how do you do that again?" search yields a relevant-looking question asked within the last year or so. As often as not, the search leads me to a blog post or primary source (e.g. mozilla javascript documentation). But when I do make it to SO, I find that it's still a bustling community full of legitimate expert guidance.

Yes. Several parts to it.

1) My experience is greater. Many of the problems that I encountered before, I know how to solve.

2) I know what knowledge I'm looking for if I don't know the answer. Instead of searching for the problem I am having (and ending up on SO), I am searching for the specific part of the documentation that I need for solving the problem that I have.

3) I tend to bias to project specific knowledge now. The general pollution of search on Stack Overflow means that it is more productive to search Spring documentation or the project specific forums ( https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-kafka/discussions ) rather than Stack Overflow itself.

4) Stack Overflow content is having difficulty with the lack of curation of old answers and the deceased quality of people answering now. Finding an answer written in recent times with a few variations on "have you tried {x}?" without the material leading to how that suggestion was derived means that trying to apply the answer is shotgun "maybe this works" without an understanding for how it works or if that is the right solution.

4b) I try to avoid the "have you tried {x}" answers as that impacts the rate I grow my experience (and thus part 1) at. Likewise, in general, people who try the shotgun solutions (and I can see that in code reviews if they're not good about cleaning up (and they aren't) tend to continue to make the same type of errors again as they are following cookbook / paint by numbers approaches rather than understanding some basic food science or aesthetic theory.

I probably take more guidance from blog articles and GitHub issue comments than I do from StackOverflow. I think this started to happen for me around 2015/2016. I'm not sure though if that's a function of me requiring more niche/targeted guidance, or StackOverflow no longer capturing as much knowledge as it once did.

I can only talk about my personal experience:

- Documentation seems to have gotten way better overall.

- Github issues are often a good place to search for open/resolved problems.

- I've simply gotten better at reading and debugging code over time.

- There are often chat rooms for larger communities on Slack/Discord nowadays. You get a more fluent and direct form of communication there.

- I still sometimes reach for Stack Overflow. But it tends to be for things where I'm a total newbie.

I find that in recent years my best resources are official docs because that's where I find the "obvious" answers to the issue I'm having by not having previously read the docs. I also find lots of answers in gh issues (often unresolved) where I gain insight into what might be happening so I can come up with a solution. SO answers that I find useful are usually ones which link to related docs.

Why is that in recent years. The best resources have always been thofficial docs and that has not changed since before SO. The issue is that official docs are often not good and you need pointers too them. In fact I would say that official docs are getting worse and you need more help from SO now.

Agreed that github issues are very useful for understanding. But even there for popular reps there are too many stupid questions to wade through.

StackOverflow has become nearly useless because they don't mandate version numbers on questions and answers. I never start searches on SO and walk away empty handed probably 95% of the time I find my way there.

I was actually part of a study on improving that. They selected for some criteria that I'm not privy to, but part of it was being active on the site. Iirc only a few hundred meeting invites went out in total. Some of the questions I was asked were also geared towards validating the problem so they could present it to management and get more manpower on solving it.

Since then I've seen sorting by 'recently most voted' being used by default sometimes, but I still have to read up on the actual results. They're somewhere on meta SO or meta SE.

Part of the problem is the attitude that questions are duplicates of questions posted 10 years ago, so they get closed without answers. I am not sure recently most voted is enough. I think the culture needs to change substantially, maybe figure out some way to discourage closing as duplicate (cost N*5 points where N is the age of the supposed duplicate in months or years). Make it really expensive.

Maybe my attitude is wrong, but I've always felt the onus is on the Question asker to dictate that they've found the old answers and provide explanation to why they're no longer relevant to the problem. "I've already tried solutions from <x>,<y>, and <z> but they use functions depreciated in 2.1 and I'm using 3.0."

I do recognize the problem you're describing though. I think I've developed this mindset because I stopped helping out in StackOverflow a lot due to the low quality of many questions. I did a bit of time moderating with the intent to teach new users how to improve their questions, but ultimately the amount of users who want quick answers outpaces my patience so I just moved on. I follow two niche categories now that I consider myself an expert in and that's about all I help out with anymore.

Yeah, questioners should be encouraged to include version numbers. Ideally there would be a specific mandatory field for a version number. I'm honestly shocked there isn't one, it seems so obvious there's no way I'm the first to think of it.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned so far is the community/moderation. Those who do "visit" frequently are quite the clique, much like Wikipedians, with many of the same kind of outcomes. I used to spend my time helping people on there several times a week but I've been put off.

That being said, unix.stackexchange.com, is great.

Absolutely. Two of the big reasons are improved understanding and problem solving skills on my part and improvements in the tech stack I use day to day making things more clear and covering more use cases cleanly.

The third is that I’ve come to recognize that the average quality of answers on SO is quite poor — while they technically serve as solutions to posted problems, they often come with big caveats… use of private/deprecated APIs, hackiness, and feature misuse abound.

As such when I use SO these days it’s usually not for wholesale solutions to problems but rather to add to a greater body of examples of APIs in action which I can then abstract and use as needed. It’s decent for this use case.

> The third is that I’ve come to recognize that the average quality of answers on SO is quite poor — while they technically serve as solutions to posted problems, they often come with big caveats… use of private/deprecated APIs, hackiness, and feature misuse abound.

The real clean answer is usually a mildly upvoted comment that scolds the answerer for violating a standard or using a bad practice. SO is still useful when that happens.

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow Guidelines. It is currently not accepting answers.

I love that GitHub added discussions to repos directly now. You can ask a question without getting berated by some SO mod about how your question makes no sense because you didn’t use the technically correct term for something.

There always those really weird esoteric bugs that someone has already slogged through lots of trial and error to resolve. SO is great for those kinds of problems.

Yep - if you're getting a particular error code or message that makes no sense, googling as often as not finds it in a SO post, along with 20 ways to solve it, of which at least 1 usually gives you what you need to do so. It's hard to imagine how much time I'd have spent tracking it down otherwise.

I can confirm. Also the technology used really counts: with Javascript I got weird error and there are no standard in the ecosystem so I found my self looking on Google and SO all the time. With Ruby, on the other hand, there are better documentation, no weird errors and everything seems so smooth that I visit StackOverflow just once a month. I have been working with JS for 3 years and just 1 year with Rub

Broadly, yes. It's been years since I asked a question, and for searching and finding an answer, github issues has replaced it.

Every time I search on stackoverflow it thinks I am a robot and wants me to solve a capture. My workaround is to use "site:stackoverflow.com" on some search search engine. But this definitely made me use SO way less.

I find myself using it equally much, but maybe in a different way. There are always times I find my self wanting to do something weird in a framework a specific framework or a language so I go see if there are already solutions out there. There are also times where I find an existing question but I’m not happy with the answers so I write my own after some research—which I would have hoped to have been able to skip—then my answer serves as a reference for the next time I need to do something similar (which may be as long as a year or two, so I won’t remember).

24 years experience here.

12 years old account on SO.

Haven't used SO for anything for past 7 years.

I stopped answering questions after their policy changed which states that you don't own your answers, they do.

I figured, what's the point in using SO if there's code beggars plaguing it and SO staff isn't taking proper steps to prevent it from happening so I stopped using it alltogether.

It's not the place it once was after it was ran over by horde of code plumbers who can't look for similar answers.

My SO usage decreased dramatically once I switched from a simple text editor (Sublime) to an IDE that can resolve symbols and drill down into their definitions.

A lot of my SO usage used to be just looking up API documentation/syntax (and SO would rank higher than the framework's own documentation) which I no longer need to do if I can just Cmd+Click into the symbol and see its internal implementation.

I believe that Stack Overflow belongs to a time when VCS was the exception rather than the rule, codebases were scattered across many different providers, discussions took place on dedicated channels or mailing lists, documentation was scarce and of poor quality, and tooling was limited to the most essential. All this added friction to any form of shared knowledge of being built by the general public.

I didn't start using SO till I had already been a professional programmer for 20+ years, so I have no idea how I might have used it had it existed when I was starting out.

After 35 years as a professional programmer, I find SO invaluable. I might not use it with any kind of regularity, but when I need the kind of thing SO delivers, SO delivers.

I used it a lot more when I wrote more JS. When writing Elixir I just read the docs or go look at source code.

It probably depends on the technology you are using. For example, the Android conceptual guides are very good, but the javadoc / references are abysmal. You simply can't get anything done without SO because its more authoritative than the Android javadoc.

I find this as well. Earlier in my career it was useful, but in the last bunch of years I rarely if ever am on SO, and if I am, I’m trying to contribute answers. Wouldn’t be surprised if the survey data is largely skewed to more junior people.

In the beginning I used SO a ton, both asking questions and using existing answers.

But now I can't remember the last time I visited SO and I stopped asking questions many years ago.

This is true even when learning new languages and other things.

That would be great. I work in a generalist type of field where learning new tools is part of the job so I am still googling the same stupid questions almost every day

I google the same git commands three times a day and end up on stackoverflow. Everything else is answered by the github issue comment with 10 emojis under it.

Yeah, more or less, I still do come back to it when I'm picking up a new language or framework.