As much of an information resource I think it turned out to be for many of us, it’s one of the worst places to actually ask a question for help. Toxic programmer culture just makes it a horrible place. I’ve been writing code for 25 years and the one lesson that’s easy to learn (and early on) is that there are so many folks out there that see things differently than you and approach problems with a different mindset. Sometimes the answer is plain as day to you, and others, a slam dunk is just completely out of reach but obvious to everyone else. SO as a whole needs to learn to give everyone a bit of understanding and either help the community get better or just STFU.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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20+ year programmer and I've never made an account on SO. During the early stages of SO, the idea of making people have to earn a certain amount of SO karma just to ask a question seemed like an odd obstacle to place in front of new users. I get why they may want to do it but decisions like that are already divisive and toxic to being with.
My question would be: When should we expect the Fediverse version of Stack Overflow?
Searchability is not good within the Fediverse, and most traffic to SO is from Google Search... We might need to work on SEO first or nobody will ever see it
Have to disagree on that hard. SEO is a cancer on the Internet that has compromised usability and usefulness for a quick buck. A dedicated, ad-free search engine for the platform would be much more useful and likely to remain so.
But how do you find a website and the relevant content then?
I agree, that you should have a good search on a platform, specifically optimized on the scope of that platform, but it's just an unfortunate truth, that google is often better than these individual searches.
SEO could also just mean that all the stuff is actually server side rendered, so that google is able to find the content (which is not the case yet for lemmy-ui, but there is lemmy-ui-leptos in development, which should support that at someday)
But how do you find a website and the relevant content then?
Not sure that I have a good answer there but, with the rapid decline of major search engines because of SEO, paid result placement, and LLM-generated ad sites, I'm going to go with "probably not a major, ad-funded search engine". At the current rate, it is likely that it wouldn't even appear in the first page or three, even if clearly relevant. A non-commercial, community effort just can't compete like that.
SEO could also just mean that all the stuff is actually server side rendered, so that google is able to find the content (which is not the case yet for lemmy-ui, but there is lemmy-ui-leptos in development, which should support that at someday)
SEO, in my experience having worked in the web hosting industry, has pretty specific meaning - gaming the search engine algorithms by using keywords, networks of unique IPs pointing to it, etc, almost be always with the intent of getting ad pages higher in the search results.
Yes, not being able to be rendered outside of ActivityPub easily makes it unlikely to appear in Google. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing and can be a forcing mechanism to change how we are interacting with the Internet and reduce the amount of participation in providing profit to those selling our personal information. Plus, there are many of us that don't want to contribute to learning data used to power LLMs that being used to worsen human life for profit.
I probably wouldn't see it that negative TBH. I'm often finding interesting content for whatever problem or interest I'm currently having via google (SO and yes reddit has also quite a lot to offer from the community). I rarely click anything that looks too profit-oriented and fortunately those pages although are on the first page, often aren't the first search result.
SEO got a little bit smarter nowadays, sure it's still a game with the search, but modern SEO is more focused on information and site design (e.g. does it display on mobile correctly?) etc. AFAIK.
Yeah there really are two "branches" that I'm aware of. One is the one that has a lot of overlap with accessibility and compatibility (following standards, ensuring design suits devices, etc). This one is anywhere from neutral to positive. The other is attempting to game the search engines to promote their results higher than more relevant content, often using questionable approaches and often for ad-derived profit.
Lemmy could be that, just have programming (and other) Q&A communities here.
Lemmy is like Reddit, which is used a lot to ask questions and get help. But StackOverflow fills a different niche, it's meant to be useful to as many people as possible and stay up to date. This is why
- there's a distinction between "comments" and "answers" (comments can be used to request additional information, and for meta discussion)
- both questions and answers can be modified by other users, for example to
- add more information, or remove unnecessary details
- correct outdated information
- fix typos and formatting
- rephrase sentences that are confusing
- a question can be closed as duplicate, so people always find the oldest thread of the question with the best/most detailed answers
- before submitting a question, you get a list of related questions to avoid creating a duplicate question
- questions have tags, making them easier to search for
I haven't used Stack Overflow in a while so I forgot about most of those features, and as long as it also uses ActivityPub it doesn't really matter that much if it is a different platform. I think some of those features could even be useful on Lemmy (tagging posts would be nice and maybe community-editable posts could be a thing that communities could choose to enable).
I absolutely hate SO. It’s my last resort when looking for help, and I’ve never signed up.
Between snarky arseholes, the “already answered here” comments even when the question isn’t the same, and people saying “dw i solved it” and never stating how they solved it the whole place can just fuck of.
Bruh newpipe cant open piped links