I never understood the move to synchronous communication for asynchronous questions. The ephemeral nature of discord is really a PITA. It’s like using IRC for a FAQ.
It makes sense if the issues being discussed are time-sensitive. Sometimes people need a solution now, not to open a bug report and hope that it will get a response an unspecified amount of time later.
Pretty soon search engines won't be able to return anything anymore. At which point we might be looking for communities where live people can help with our issue. And if that happens Discord won't look that out of place anymore.
If you can go somewhere and have your problem solved do you really care that some schmuck later won't be able to find the solution written somewhere and will have to go through the same process?
Support is moving to discord which sucks massive ass.
It sucks but can you blame them? It's a natural response when people see that the old method (public posting and indexing) is being corrupted and grows increasingly irrelevant.
We're going to see more and more knowledge becoming insular and/or gated behind manual curation.
This doesn't necessarily have to mean Discord, can be private forums of any kind but private nonetheless. Discord may be the wrong tool but the problem it's being applied to is real.
Not to mention the people answering the questions are liable to just start accusing you of being an idiot if you make any less progress with their solution than "it's been fixed so hard that it gained five new functions I didn't even write into it!" I wrote a 3Js project once and ISTG the people on that discord had all the patience of a three year old who suddenly has to go to the bathroom the red second you've merged onto the highway.
I just got a ping the other day from a Discord server that said they'd finished moving their support onto a forum on their website specifically because Discord's forum feature is terrible.
The period when dejanews just started to index newsgroups was a golden age for finding answers on the internet, IMO, and there's a strong similarity to the fediverse. All we need is for it to be searchable... OK, I see your point now.
I support the take over. People thinking that they can pick and choose who makes money and how are fooling themselves. The developer who wants all his IP protected so he can make money is upset that a larger entity is also making money is honestly tough fucking shit. Either go back to the origins of the internet napster days or shut the fuck up and live with what we created. There isn't any middle ground. Its only going to get worse unless you make this place hostile to people building walls and stealing all the data for themselves.
I guess I've moved to the part of my career where Stack Overflow isn't that helpful, but I've found a lot of utility in searching issues on GitHub and Reddit posts.
But are they losing the first positions because they're losing relevance, or is it due to other sites abusing seo and search engines abusing from advertising results?
Many queries don't find relevant questions, and the relevant questions are often not answered properly. I often find the exact same problem I'm having, but the answers are just a bunch of those CV padders that post completely irrelevant answers based on a buzzword they saw while skimming the question.
Stack Overflow, technically a neutral term. Idk though whether the name in such a context would violate any trademark laws even if it's a non-profit platform.
Need to make sure the diff is small enough. A tiny change that creates a bug or makes the answer effectively useless is much worse than sweeping changes
I did on Friday and within 5 mins they suspended me and reverted them all. I knew they would so I didn't care - I just did it so they'd see as many unhappy users as possible.
I then deleted my account of over 10 years with over 50k reputation. Fuck stackoverflow.
I don't understand why you and others are so mad about this. Stackoverflow is a great resource that takes significant time and money to maintain. I don't have a problem with the maintainers making money by selling access to train AI on the data.
Having Stackoverflow as an alternative to reddit is important so that people aren't stuck using reddit.
Same reason for me. Take some of their time and say fuck you to them. But I will do crippling edits by single characters in one month time. I have time.
Because it's original work they contributed for free. Lending others that kind of expertise and time, just that it get's used by a machine learning algorithm, which aims to reproduce this, without giving it back to them or the community in a similar free manner, feels violating.
Apart from that, creators feel ownership over their content and it feels wrong not to be asked what happens to it. (Although those probably wouldn't – or shouldn't – use SO anyway, as their content gets commercialised anyway by giving it SO for free.)