90% of the time if I ask for help on forums the answer will be one of three things:
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Completely absent
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Just google it scrub lmao (nevermind the fact that search has gone to shit)
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Doesn't actually answer the question
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Programming
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In the early days it seems pike Stack Overflow tried to regulate engagement from trolls. They encouraged support for dumb/newbie questions and discouraged obnoxious behaviors.
I’m guessing that’s just a losing battle. I don’t think there’s much hope of keeping a good moderator for free. It’s a tough, thankless job. Troll/poor moderators are free.
Don’t forget these responses
why do you want to do X?? Why don’t you do it Y way (that doesn’t actually solve the problem)
Sometimes this is useful, though. Other times it's infuriating 😅
The more time passes, the more information can already be found on the web (including forum threads) and the less need there is to post new threads to these kinds of forums.
generative AI "helps" with this too
why deal with stackoverflow when you can brainstorm with a chatbot that replies instantly
And doesn't insult you, and gives you an answer far more tailored to your issue.
And to the end user who doesn't know what they're doing, the end result is the same or the AI one will get them "further".
I say this because if you're following forums, chances are you're following guides, which means you don't understand what it is you're doing. Which is fine, I typically don't either, which is why I have a harder time with Linux.
But realistically, following the guide of Stackoverflow will hit a hiccup and you will be stuck. Following AI, things might not work and need to be troubleshooted, but it will continue answering questions until the two of you put together something that sort of works.
Not because of AI, but because the person kept trying. AI only made it so they didn't need to understand.
I find working with AI to help me understand way better.
Using Linux as an example. If I search for "give me the size of each subdirectory in the current directory" the stack overflow answer will be "just type du -h --max-depth=1" so you copy and paste it and, voila!, it's exactly what you want. Except I have no idea what any of it means.
However, I ask chatgpt, and it will explain that du means disk usage, -h gives a human readable form, and --max-depth=1 will only go down 1 level, without showing all of the subdirectories.
So now I've learned something.
Additionally, with coding, it's a lot like rubber duck debugging for me. Just formulating my question will often lead to an answer, or trying to explain what went wrong with the AI solution helps me get to the proper answer.
AI does give more reasoning than a forum might, that's true.
Duplicated question, I'm closing the topic.
I feel that /r/programming lost a lot of volume and intensity following the API protest drama. This community seemed like a beneficiary. Even anecdotally though, I sit in a couple of language discord servers and engagement seems lower than it was a couple of years ago.
It's no reddit in terms of quantity but honesty I've had higher quality topics and discussions here than there. Lemmy/kbin might not have taken off in the mainstream to offer a variety of subjects but when it comes to tech and software I think it's covered well enough and people are generally nicer about it. The main problem is lack of (remotely) good seach function, I dont think the threads are getting indexed by google and the on-site search is atrocious.
I don't know of any discord programming communities, I wish forums were still a thing but the only live one I know of is the jellyfin one after they moved from reddit. Other than that it's here or the various subreddits
does anyone have programming forums to recommend? besides reddit
The Cavern Of Cobol is an active place at the Something Awful forums, I've found it a great resource.
I thought the point of this instance was to try and start a decent one here.
I feel like a lot of open source projects redirect to a discord or private discussion system like slack (even worse).
And it doesn’t help at all because it can’t be indexed and can quickly disappear on a while on the admin side. You can also be banned for no reason. Searching those platforms is horrendous, I don’t want to search a badly indexed system and then ask a question because I can’t find the answer to a problem, and be told it has been discussed 30 times.
Give me a bloody wiki or old fashioned phpbb forum.
it can’t be indexed and can quickly disappear on a while on the admin side.
On a whim? Also, Google will be disabling it's caching feature soon.
Lucky google isn’t the only search engine then
There are several projects on GitHub I use that are sometimes hard to find answers for questions. They have closed the Discussions on their GitHub page, and if you ask a question by opening an issue they close it and say “go join our discord server”.
It’s frustrating. You can’t search online for any issues. When you join the discord server, you can search and find lots of questions, but there are very few answers.
Have you considered creating a ticket called "Can't ask questions without joining discord"?
Do you think it would have more answers if it were on GitHub discussions?
It would just get closed. They are strict about GitHub issues ONLY being for actual issues/bugs you find with that project. Anything else is either closed as not being an issue
Your account info says you joined Lemmy a couple of years ago. Could that have something to do with it? Could be that there are simply fewer of us here than wherever you were before.
Also, if Reddit is one of your haunts, keep in mind that a lot of communities there partially dispersed a little over a year ago, and not everyone has reappeared in the same place (or at all).
As the kind of noob type to ask dumb questions, I talk out a lot of issues with larger LLM's now. What I can not, I ask here.
I feel like the forums logins thing is too antiquated. I wish they would all be on the fediverse and compatible with Lemmy. I would love the depth and scope of many forums as niche communities with their own trees of subjects and discussions.
Even this is forum-like though. It's a forum of people talking about a topic that interests them. It just happens to be distributed.
Yeah, but it lacks the tree that tends to support more specialization. I still get on the EEVBlog forum from time to time but that kind of concentration of specialization is just not the default.
To replicate that kind of ecosystem I think the platform would need a similar complex branching hierarchy and far more effective utility for searching. The element of time is too prioritized on a link aggregator like Lemmy. Community depth of specialization remains shallow because more intellectual engagement is slower and the mechanics of most recent comment engagement are not effective/implemented. Places like the EEVBlog often have the most engagement on very old threads that also concentrate a ton of history and useful information within the single thread. These threads are the primary anchor for the whole community. I think it would take some novel innovation to bridge a link aggregator's ADHD with a forum's depth and utility.
Can't bump an old question
Tangentially, there's a whole bunch of issues going on with the programming.dev server for one. See at [email protected]. Lemmy's upcoming upgrade to 0.19.6 should help - see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623 and https://feddit.org/post/3524876 discussing it.
Sorry for the confusion. I wasn't talking about programming.dev. i thought that's obvious because p.dev isn't that old
I did mention that it was only tangentially related. I did not realize though that programming.dev was not all that old. TIL.
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