- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
One aspect that I’ve always been unsure about, with Stack Overflow, and even more with sibling sites like Physics Stack Exchange or Cross Validated (stats and probability), is the voting system. In the physics and stats sites, for example, not rarely I saw answers that were accepted and upvoted but actually wrong. The point is that users can end up voting for something that looks right or useful, even if it isn’t (probably less the case when it comes to programming?).
Now an obvious reply to this comment is “And how do you know they were wrong, and non-accepted ones right?”. That’s an excellent question – and that’s exactly the point.
In the end the judge about what’s correct is only you and your own logical reasoning. In my opinion this kind of sites should get rid of the voting or acceptance system, and simply list the answers, with useful comments and counter-comments under each. When it comes to questions about science and maths, truth is not determined by majority votes or by authorities, but by sound logic and experiment. That’s the very basis from which science started. As Galileo put it:
For example, at some point in history there was probably only one human being on earth who thought “the notion of simultaneity is circular”. And at that time point that human being was right, while the majority who thought otherwise were wrong. Our current education system and sites like those reinforce the anti-scientific view that students should study and memorize what “experts” says, and that majorities dictate what’s logically correct or not. As Gibson said (1964): “Do we, in our schools and colleges, foster the spirit of inquiry, of skepticism, of adventurous thinking, of acquiring experience and reflecting on it? Or do we place a premium on docility, giving major recognition to the ability of the student to return verbatim in examinations that which he has been fed?”
Alright sorry for the rant and tangent! I feel strongly about this situation.
But it’s not truth that is implied by voting.
Voting determines the sorting precedence. It’s a way of handling the fact that the site contains more content than a person can read. It’s a way of guiding what they should read first given limited time.
That’s how I interpret it. My question is if it’s generally interpreted that way, or misinterpreted.
Gibson was correct about much of our education system and Galileo was certainly right about the consequences of overvaluing mediocre wit that merely happened to well-timed. what neither of them had to content with, however, was the internet and how social media can combine the inability to reason critically and mediocre wit with crippling insecurities and anti-social personalities to what should be predictable results.
a least Gibson understood that a technocratic future didn’t imply that people’s lives would necessarily improve.
I have to agree with this cause I have run into not a couple but many in recent years where when a proper answer is given, the accepted one despite being flawed or not recommended(Python 2->3 changes for example) anymore, it’s still the highest voted one. And proper answer is in 3rd or 4th place. And it’s where the old r/science shine cause you can properly ask some really specific domain question there and a qualified scientist might just pop up and answer you in detail. ( not that they can’t be wrong, just highly unlikely in current understanding of those topics. )