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> With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards When you operate a community that's hostile to questions that have

> With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards When you operate a community that's hostile to questions that have already been answered, are poorly researched, or are homework, don't be surprised when people start taking those questions elsewhere, and don't be surprised when they start asking their good questions elsewhere, too.

insane_dreamer 1y ago
Elsewhere where? SO is still the best place for obscure coding questions.
BrenBarn 1y ago
But if you operate a community that isn't hostile to those things, don't be surprised if it gets flooded with the same few questions 10 million times.
kmfrk 1y ago
Yeah, asking a programming question without some bitter old coder tut-tutting you is very much a selling point with AI chatbots, regardless of my reservations with the overall trend.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  The sarcastic enthusiasm and fake humanity from the LLMs is wearing thin as well if you ask me.
  - theshackleford 1y ago
    The difference is I can instruct an LLM (and have) to knock that shit off.
    - bilbo0s 1y ago
      True. Humans don’t take direction very well.
      - Gigachad 1y ago
        Which is good to some extent. We have people off the deep end sharing “unlock/jailbreak prompts” which turn LLMs in to schizophrenia machines affirming any psychosis. While a real person would push back and try to get you help. ChatGPT can’t tell the difference between being given a harmless instruction / role play prompt, vs someone who is going insane. Probably explains why many of the most vocal AI users seem detached from reality, it’s the first time they have someone who blindly affirms everything they think while telling them they are so smart and completely correct all the time.
        jay_kyburz 1y ago
        Those stack overflow dudes would be savage if you started posting crazy manifestos looking for feedback.
        morgoths_bane 1y ago
        [dead]
        jay_kyburz 1y ago
        When I look at how far tech has come in my own life, I'm mid 50's, I don't think the singularity is out of the question in my kids life, or even my own if I'm lucky. When I born there was no such thing as a PC or the internet. As far as I'm aware, the only missing step is for the llms to be able to roll the results of a test back into its training set. It can then start proposing hypotheses and testing them. Then it can do logic. I don't understand the skepticism. LLMs are already a lot smarter than me, all they need is the ability to learn. ** Wikipedia definition of singularity. "an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing all human intelligence.[4]"
  - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    You’re absolutely right! (tm)
  - ChrisRR 1y ago
    See any brit trying to deal with american coworkers
  - greenavocado 1y ago
    Just add "Respond in an insolent caustic acerbic style" to the end of each prompt
  - kamaal 1y ago
    >>fake humanity I'd rather be treated nice by a bot, than be abused by a human. Make whatever of this you will. Though I know the bot is not sentient. I'd rather chat with it, than some human who doesn't talk well. Im guessing the future of relationships works the same way. All the best competing with a bot that makes you feel nice, than a spouse/partner who doesn't. It will be a hard era to come for people who misbehave. The tolerance for that sort of stuff is going to go away entirely.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > It will be a hard era to come for people who misbehave. The tolerance for that sort of stuff is going to go away entirely This is perhaps one of the most fascist sentences I've ever read No more "misbehaving" only perfect conformity
      - kamaal 1y ago
        I dont know what this means. Are you saying people who don't willingly offer to become punching bags for abusive people are fascists?
      - Timwi 1y ago
        Yeah sorry, but I think you massively misread that take. It's not about conformity. It's about keeping yourself liked so that people will voluntarily interact with you. You can no longer get away with being a narcissistic arsehole. I'm not sure I agree that's gonna happen, I'm just trying to paraphrase what I think the GP meant.
    - jlaternman 1y ago
      I see what you mean as in no tolerance for abusive people that can currently get away with overtly treating people like shit, but I do immediately think “that generally captures the more trivial abusers.” The most destructive ones tend to be covert, and more often will appear as friendly and polite as LLMs when setting up their targets. That makes me wonder if it will create a harder or easier era for them. Not something I’ve thought on before to have formed an opinion, but it makes me wonder.
- bazoom42 1y ago
  Sure, but this is only possible because the LLM is trained on those answers.
  - karaterobot 1y ago
    Proving that AI is not just parroting back what it reads on the web, ChatGPT manages to correct my programming mistakes without making me feel bad. If it learned from Substack, I'm glad it learned selectively!
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Sure, but the technology peels off the aggravation and delivers the content without the asshats. If someone stuck an LLM between me and facebook, so I got all my facebook content without the flat earthers, moon landing deniers and tartarians, meta would never see me again.
    - didgetmaster 1y ago
      That's not good enough. The AI has to give me updates on important events of my friends and family without showing me everything they ate at restaurants, funny cat videos they liked, or what movies they planned to watch.
      - rusk 1y ago
        > has to give me updates on important events of my friends and family without showing me everything That’s a RAG query
      - AznHisoka 1y ago
        If you didnt hear about it directly from them, its not important
  - andy99 1y ago
    It was bootstrapped from SO. Now there are third party data companies like Scale AI that pay gig workers to write code examples for LLM training. It's died down but I saw lots of spam for this (ie hiring) earlier in the year. Sota LLMs didn't get that way by scraping the internet, it's all custom labeled datasets.
- stephenmac98 1y ago
  Is the conclusion here not that you are asking questions when you should instead have been looking for an existing resource? The ability to search across the massive accumulation of knowledge we have already built up is a primary skill for software development, and the tut-tut'ing is a way of letting you know that you failed in that endeavor, which should be valuable feedback in itself.
- empath75 1y ago
  I sometimes think that the killer app for LLMs isn't that they are especially smart, but that they are infinitely patient.
iknowstuff 1y ago
It's an easy critique of stack overflow, sure, but the same applies to reddit tbh. It's quickly becoming far more worthwhile to chat with AI than get angry at stupid, predictably reactionary reddit comments - and you’re not reaching many people, you’re just used for training a model, or for advertising opportunities for sleazy subreddit owners
- mittensc 1y ago
  Try and follow /new on raspberry_pi or similar... You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting. And it is getting worse, new people asking help: 'but chatgpt told me X', 'I followed chatgpt and it doesnt work, please help fix bug', or some idiots that might burn the house down and deserve yelling (li-ion batteries aren't a joke, ac current likewise) Or... LLM generated stuff... which is equal to spam... If some people like doing unappreciated tech support all power to them, others might fight through spam to find nice items, I mostly stopped bothering and looking for something else. (also yelling at idiots that might kill themselves)
  - pluto_modadic 1y ago
    > "not bothering to spend any time searching" because searching has become MUCH worse, and because even when it used to be good, searching is a SKILL.
  - eddythompson80 1y ago
    If you block beginners questions and posts then the entire community becomes pretty hostile and annoying to be in. If you don't block beginners then the entire community will leave and you end up with the /r/suggestALaptop type subreddit. A woodworking subreddit will have 3 daily "What's the best table saw for a beginner" and "Dewalt vs Milwakee?" threads and anyone who cares will leave and you're left with all the bots and people trying to sell you stuff. The funny thing is that didn't use to be a problem in online communities back in the day. Every forum has a "New Users" section, a beginner section, maybe an intermediate section and an advanced section. There were forums I would hang out on in the beginners and common areas and only readonly the advanced area until I felt confident enough to participate in the conversation there intelligently or to even have a smart enough question to ask. This doesn't work in a place like reddit or stackoverflow. Those places are simply too big to have a cohesive consistent "culture" (for lack of a better word). You can't turn newbies away from /r/3dprinting because no body is on /r/4dprinting_for_beginniers. And people on the former don't care about the latter because it's not part of "the community".
LtWorf 1y ago
But without stackoverflow how do you think the AI will be able to reply about next year's new programming language?
- riku_iki 1y ago
  LLM can give many answers using absorbed docs and codebase. Rest still could be asked/answered on SO or github.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    What codebase? It wouldn't exist for a new technology. And documentation doesn't have the volume LLMs need
    - riku_iki 1y ago
      language codebase, they have some tests there for example, using which model can see what are the correct typical implementation details. > And documentation doesn't have the volume LLMs need why do you think so? It looks like LLM has some level of few shots generalization.
- unlikelytomato 1y ago
  adding the documentation to the training material and drawing on the vast amount of coding context training it already relies on.
  - Incipient 1y ago
    And it's still just going to give me crappy syntax. The number of times I need to tell copilot to PLESE not use Optional[] typing syntax in Python is mind boggling.
- omneity 1y ago
  Eventually through experience and self-play with the technologies in question.
muppetman 1y ago
Amen. I will have a small party the day that SO goes away. What a bunch of aholes.
bubblethink 1y ago
I still use SO out of habit, but they make it really difficult to use it. Everything on the web is gated behind ridiculous captchas now. More than the AI, the legacy websites will die because they are too busy trying to prevent AI companies from scraping the content and have ruined the product in the process.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Seems pretty crappy to blame the websites for this instead of the AI companies, who are the really bad actors here
  - Mars008 1y ago
    > Seems pretty crappy to blame the websites for this instead of the AI companies, who are the really bad actors here Not sure who is bad. AI companies trying to make public knowledge easily available or web sites trying to lock and monetize users' content. It's now capchas, JS, and tracking everywhere. I'm supposed to go through all of this to contribute to website so that others go through all of it to read. Add to that flashing and jumping adds which make even more unpleasant. And yes, my contribution will be locked instead of made public.
  - anigbrowl 1y ago
    Agreed, but SO was bad before LLMs showed up. Almost all expert communities seem to develop problems with gatekeepers and ego trippers past a certain size.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Ego trippers are bad, I agree But gatekeeping is actually good if you care about quality, and I think we're going to discover that more with LLMs They might democratize code but the code produced will be very low quality. Once coding communities start getting overrun with "Please help me fix my LLM generated code" we'll wish we did a bit more gatekeeping
      - 1y ago
burnte 1y ago
I never ask questions on any SO site, and I'm a 30 year professional. It really feels like the only people that post are people who wish no one else would ever post.
stevage 1y ago
What is the "elsewhere" you have in mind? I think it really is as simple as the AIs give better answers faster in most cases.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  The problem I have is that is not really true If the AI is capable of solving the problem quickly then it is usually the case that the question and answer are almost verbatim the first google search result from SO anyways That's not really any faster It might be faster for things that don't have a good SO answer, but tbh then it's usually much lower quality
  - morgoths_bane 1y ago
    [dead]
6Az4Mj4D 1y ago
I prefer Reddit communities over SO any day. SO, folks are so high headed, they will bash you with anything that doesn't suit their framework. I am sure with GPTs slowly they will lose traffic.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  Reddit has been 1000x worse than S.O. for me. (and S.O. sucks) Reddit = Question asked 6 months to 5 years ago. Auto-closed because age. Answer is out of date. Ask again, get's closed as already asked. Reddit has all the same mod problems as S.O. but it's worse because it's goal isn't to provide info, it's to be social media.
  - DharmaPolice 1y ago
    Threads don't get closed due to age on Reddit (they used to be archived but this stopped a while back). Mods can lock threads but this is used to moderate content. And which subreddit locked your thread because a similar question was asked six months ago? I find that difficult to believe.
PenguinCoder 1y ago
Before I can even see a question or answer on this Q&A site, I get three overlays entirely covering anything useful. Log into Google. Join stack overflow! Cookie consent banner. Asinine. No thank you and get the hell out of my face.
atleastoptimal 1y ago
Stack Overflow existed because it had a moat on specific bug-fix related coding information that wasn't available elsewhere, or the mechanisms/community to solicit that information wasn't available elsewhere. Its moat naturally dissolves when a chatbot can offer all that plus more. So we have to think, what other moats will dissolve as AI gets better, cheaper, more effectively and widely deployed? Will law firms be a thing, or basically just a formality because laws still require humans to submit cases? Will therapists still exist when AI therapy could be scientifically and anecdotally shown to be 10x as effective and much less expensive? A lot of inertia will exist because of trust, people's bias towards "the way things have always been", but as the difference in utility between traditional services and AI-powered services grow, that inertia will not be able to resist the force of change.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  Expertsexchange was around at the time. SO's moat was they gave away access for free instead of pretending that paying got you better answers.
- Applejinx 1y ago
  Law is founded on the idea that reality matters and just making stuff up won't work there. If you could just hallucinate things and run with that there would be no reason for law because it wouldn't matter whether anything was true.
  - atleastoptimal 1y ago
    The whole point of the legal profession is stretching the truth to the furthest extent towards your aims while remaining nominally within a given framework. LLM's are very good at that and are becoming increasingly good at that, and will be better at humans than that in the near future (if they aren't already)
arwhatever 1y ago
Stack Overflow is a programming Q&A website where people get mad at you for asking programming questions the overwhelming majority of the time.
bapak 1y ago
My most souring experience on SO was posting a comment below an answer pointing out that it did not answer the question and merely repeated it. The comment was deleted, and deleted again when I posted it again. Then the author of the answer went on meta and complained about my behavior, from which came a barrage of downvotes on my answer. Now think which answer has 4 times as many votes as his answer, years later? Mine. But why delete the comment? Why not just reply? I don't get it. It wasn't even a mod, it was just someone with 3k points, much less than I have.
amelius 1y ago
It was a very useful website, though. If AI didn't kill it, we would still be using it.
- blindstitch 1y ago
  I think something else would come in its place, like an automated way of trying out the options for solutions that you get when using it. Which AI incidentally is pretty good at.
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
right Stack Overflow over the years has gone from a site where it was useful to ask questions about stuff you knew nothing about in order to learn to becoming a site where you ask things you already almost have the answer to, get 90% of the way done in answering the question and stop because you realized what the answer must be OR get 100% done and then answer your question a few minutes/hours later.
- blindstitch 1y ago
  This is scarily accurate about how I use stack overflow. And then I never make the post, and the information never ends up out there!
yorwba 1y ago
I would definitely be surprised if people who've been asking good questions on StackOverflow so far would suddenly ask them elsewhere, since part of what makes a question good for StackOverflow is that it cannot be easily answered elsewhere. E.g. MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk about their research, they're unlikely to use LLMs for that anytime soon. So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying, it might very well be a sign that they finally succeeded in their war to keep everyone else out. Probably bad for the company milking the community for profit, though.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying, If you're not growing, you're dying. Businesses completely perverted that saying, but the basis for it is still true. People move on, change inerests, or simply die. You can't have a healthy long term community without new members coming in.
- 0xEF 1y ago
  I don't even think it's been about asking good questions, at least not for many years. I used SO regularly and even when I wasn't asking a question at all, it was an incredible slog to just find a concise and correct answer instead of sniping comments from people who wanted to flex knowledge, or others answering from some oblique perspective that had nothing to do with the original problem. Asking good questions is always important, yes, but if the community does not know how to provide good answers, seekers seek elsewhere. Side note, great html book here on asking good questions, since we still absolutely have that problem to deal with even when using Gen AI as a starting point; http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
- Buttons840 1y ago
  > MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk... When StackOverflow was new I visited frequently to enjoy the community talking about programming. For others, the goal was always to build the ultimate wiki. The people who wanted the ultimate wiki won, and the community left, and that's where we see SO today. No community, but it is the ultimate wiki filled with programming wisdom from 2014.
assimpleaspossi 1y ago
I went to SO for the first time in a long time to ask a question. It wouldn't let me do so until I edited three previous questions to better meet their standards. Those three questions were from 12 years ago.
nudgeOrnurture 1y ago
yeah, it's always fun when toddlers are told to read the docs, first, and then a few blog posts that clarify things in varying ways, then another article on how to ask (the right) questions and finally, give a summary of what one already tried and documented carefully because one already took a course on journaling one's path through the maze that is deprecation, version requirements, and basic libraries neither included in the most used distros, nor included in the setup of the package one is trying to install. don't matter, money is the motive and good ol' Ponzi made sure the gut biome of his obedient little army sticks to his divine ways of doin' things: job security, 'just doin' one's job' and that pat on the head TED talk, of course
scotty79 1y ago
SO is trying to pivot to education and gamification.
ChrisRR 1y ago
Stack Overflow is blaming AI for its failing when it's been a steaming pile for a decade. It's basically always been unusable for anything embedded related, because every question gets closed and marked as a duplicate of some desktop/web/mobile question with 100,000x the RAM
hopelite 1y ago
I think you may be overlooking that those are different and largely unrelated issues even if they are correlated. It is a shift of the whole modality, not just the service or location in which the modality is being conducted. Stack Overflow was a modality of humans asking and answering questions of each other, AI is totally replacing the humans in the answering step (for the time being), and doing so far more efficiently. Ai does not care how many times someone asks the same question, let alone how unimportant it is to a human ego. Let’s also not act as if it was just SO that is hostile to answering questions of humans. Remember seeing that letter from the aughts that went around the internet, where Linus Torvalds berated people? Ai does not do that, Ai is patient and supportive, not humanly limited in its patience and support. It is a far superior experience from that perspective. Ai may be limited still at this point and will not have a certain amount of experience based on second and third order effects and interactions between systems and methods that a human will have experience with from a life of experiences, but I frankly do not have any reason to believe that level of fine grained synthesized expertise will be gained soon enough; it is a mere feedback and learning loop away. The infant that Ai is right now is really not all that far off from becoming a toddler smarter than any genius human coder has ever been in all of human history. I’m thinking it is no more than another year to year and a half, and Ai will be the undisputed expert at every single repeatable programming question there is.
isk517 1y ago
I'm diving back into Linux server setup and management after being away for about 2 decades. The number of times the the top 3-5 search results are Stack Overflow questions with someone who is having the exact same issue I'm having and the top answer is 'this has been answered elseware, try searching' was almost enough to make me say, screw this I'm going back to Windows.
j45 1y ago
Early Stack Overflow was definitely better where questions were encouraged and maybe guided eventually towards where they need to be instead of hard rules that didn't encourage better questions and continuing your journey of questions.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

Elsewhere where? SO is still the best place for obscure coding questions.

BrenBarn 1y ago

But if you operate a community that isn't hostile to those things, don't be surprised if it gets flooded with the same few questions 10 million times.

kmfrk 1y ago

Yeah, asking a programming question without some bitter old coder tut-tutting you is very much a selling point with AI chatbots, regardless of my reservations with the overall trend.

jay_kyburz 1y ago
The sarcastic enthusiasm and fake humanity from the LLMs is wearing thin as well if you ask me.
- theshackleford 1y ago
  The difference is I can instruct an LLM (and have) to knock that shit off.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    True. Humans don’t take direction very well.
    - Gigachad 1y ago
      Which is good to some extent. We have people off the deep end sharing “unlock/jailbreak prompts” which turn LLMs in to schizophrenia machines affirming any psychosis. While a real person would push back and try to get you help. ChatGPT can’t tell the difference between being given a harmless instruction / role play prompt, vs someone who is going insane. Probably explains why many of the most vocal AI users seem detached from reality, it’s the first time they have someone who blindly affirms everything they think while telling them they are so smart and completely correct all the time.
      - jay_kyburz 1y ago
        Those stack overflow dudes would be savage if you started posting crazy manifestos looking for feedback.
      - morgoths_bane 1y ago
        [dead]
        jay_kyburz 1y ago
        When I look at how far tech has come in my own life, I'm mid 50's, I don't think the singularity is out of the question in my kids life, or even my own if I'm lucky. When I born there was no such thing as a PC or the internet. As far as I'm aware, the only missing step is for the llms to be able to roll the results of a test back into its training set. It can then start proposing hypotheses and testing them. Then it can do logic. I don't understand the skepticism. LLMs are already a lot smarter than me, all they need is the ability to learn. ** Wikipedia definition of singularity. "an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing all human intelligence.[4]"
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  You’re absolutely right! (tm)
- ChrisRR 1y ago
  See any brit trying to deal with american coworkers
- greenavocado 1y ago
  Just add "Respond in an insolent caustic acerbic style" to the end of each prompt
- kamaal 1y ago
  >>fake humanity I'd rather be treated nice by a bot, than be abused by a human. Make whatever of this you will. Though I know the bot is not sentient. I'd rather chat with it, than some human who doesn't talk well. Im guessing the future of relationships works the same way. All the best competing with a bot that makes you feel nice, than a spouse/partner who doesn't. It will be a hard era to come for people who misbehave. The tolerance for that sort of stuff is going to go away entirely.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > It will be a hard era to come for people who misbehave. The tolerance for that sort of stuff is going to go away entirely This is perhaps one of the most fascist sentences I've ever read No more "misbehaving" only perfect conformity
    - kamaal 1y ago
      I dont know what this means. Are you saying people who don't willingly offer to become punching bags for abusive people are fascists?
    - Timwi 1y ago
      Yeah sorry, but I think you massively misread that take. It's not about conformity. It's about keeping yourself liked so that people will voluntarily interact with you. You can no longer get away with being a narcissistic arsehole. I'm not sure I agree that's gonna happen, I'm just trying to paraphrase what I think the GP meant.
  - jlaternman 1y ago
    I see what you mean as in no tolerance for abusive people that can currently get away with overtly treating people like shit, but I do immediately think “that generally captures the more trivial abusers.” The most destructive ones tend to be covert, and more often will appear as friendly and polite as LLMs when setting up their targets. That makes me wonder if it will create a harder or easier era for them. Not something I’ve thought on before to have formed an opinion, but it makes me wonder.
bazoom42 1y ago
Sure, but this is only possible because the LLM is trained on those answers.
- karaterobot 1y ago
  Proving that AI is not just parroting back what it reads on the web, ChatGPT manages to correct my programming mistakes without making me feel bad. If it learned from Substack, I'm glad it learned selectively!
- protocolture 1y ago
  Sure, but the technology peels off the aggravation and delivers the content without the asshats. If someone stuck an LLM between me and facebook, so I got all my facebook content without the flat earthers, moon landing deniers and tartarians, meta would never see me again.
  - didgetmaster 1y ago
    That's not good enough. The AI has to give me updates on important events of my friends and family without showing me everything they ate at restaurants, funny cat videos they liked, or what movies they planned to watch.
    - rusk 1y ago
      > has to give me updates on important events of my friends and family without showing me everything That’s a RAG query
    - AznHisoka 1y ago
      If you didnt hear about it directly from them, its not important
- andy99 1y ago
  It was bootstrapped from SO. Now there are third party data companies like Scale AI that pay gig workers to write code examples for LLM training. It's died down but I saw lots of spam for this (ie hiring) earlier in the year. Sota LLMs didn't get that way by scraping the internet, it's all custom labeled datasets.
stephenmac98 1y ago
Is the conclusion here not that you are asking questions when you should instead have been looking for an existing resource? The ability to search across the massive accumulation of knowledge we have already built up is a primary skill for software development, and the tut-tut'ing is a way of letting you know that you failed in that endeavor, which should be valuable feedback in itself.
empath75 1y ago
I sometimes think that the killer app for LLMs isn't that they are especially smart, but that they are infinitely patient.

iknowstuff 1y ago

It's an easy critique of stack overflow, sure, but the same applies to reddit tbh. It's quickly becoming far more worthwhile to chat with AI than get angry at stupid, predictably reactionary reddit comments - and you’re not reaching many people, you’re just used for training a model, or for advertising opportunities for sleazy subreddit owners

mittensc 1y ago
Try and follow /new on raspberry_pi or similar... You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting. And it is getting worse, new people asking help: 'but chatgpt told me X', 'I followed chatgpt and it doesnt work, please help fix bug', or some idiots that might burn the house down and deserve yelling (li-ion batteries aren't a joke, ac current likewise) Or... LLM generated stuff... which is equal to spam... If some people like doing unappreciated tech support all power to them, others might fight through spam to find nice items, I mostly stopped bothering and looking for something else. (also yelling at idiots that might kill themselves)
- pluto_modadic 1y ago
  > "not bothering to spend any time searching" because searching has become MUCH worse, and because even when it used to be good, searching is a SKILL.
- eddythompson80 1y ago
  If you block beginners questions and posts then the entire community becomes pretty hostile and annoying to be in. If you don't block beginners then the entire community will leave and you end up with the /r/suggestALaptop type subreddit. A woodworking subreddit will have 3 daily "What's the best table saw for a beginner" and "Dewalt vs Milwakee?" threads and anyone who cares will leave and you're left with all the bots and people trying to sell you stuff. The funny thing is that didn't use to be a problem in online communities back in the day. Every forum has a "New Users" section, a beginner section, maybe an intermediate section and an advanced section. There were forums I would hang out on in the beginners and common areas and only readonly the advanced area until I felt confident enough to participate in the conversation there intelligently or to even have a smart enough question to ask. This doesn't work in a place like reddit or stackoverflow. Those places are simply too big to have a cohesive consistent "culture" (for lack of a better word). You can't turn newbies away from /r/3dprinting because no body is on /r/4dprinting_for_beginniers. And people on the former don't care about the latter because it's not part of "the community".

LtWorf 1y ago

But without stackoverflow how do you think the AI will be able to reply about next year's new programming language?

riku_iki 1y ago
LLM can give many answers using absorbed docs and codebase. Rest still could be asked/answered on SO or github.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  What codebase? It wouldn't exist for a new technology. And documentation doesn't have the volume LLMs need
  - riku_iki 1y ago
    language codebase, they have some tests there for example, using which model can see what are the correct typical implementation details. > And documentation doesn't have the volume LLMs need why do you think so? It looks like LLM has some level of few shots generalization.
unlikelytomato 1y ago
adding the documentation to the training material and drawing on the vast amount of coding context training it already relies on.
- Incipient 1y ago
  And it's still just going to give me crappy syntax. The number of times I need to tell copilot to PLESE not use Optional[] typing syntax in Python is mind boggling.
omneity 1y ago
Eventually through experience and self-play with the technologies in question.

muppetman 1y ago

Amen. I will have a small party the day that SO goes away. What a bunch of aholes.

bubblethink 1y ago

I still use SO out of habit, but they make it really difficult to use it. Everything on the web is gated behind ridiculous captchas now. More than the AI, the legacy websites will die because they are too busy trying to prevent AI companies from scraping the content and have ruined the product in the process.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Seems pretty crappy to blame the websites for this instead of the AI companies, who are the really bad actors here
- Mars008 1y ago
  > Seems pretty crappy to blame the websites for this instead of the AI companies, who are the really bad actors here Not sure who is bad. AI companies trying to make public knowledge easily available or web sites trying to lock and monetize users' content. It's now capchas, JS, and tracking everywhere. I'm supposed to go through all of this to contribute to website so that others go through all of it to read. Add to that flashing and jumping adds which make even more unpleasant. And yes, my contribution will be locked instead of made public.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  Agreed, but SO was bad before LLMs showed up. Almost all expert communities seem to develop problems with gatekeepers and ego trippers past a certain size.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Ego trippers are bad, I agree But gatekeeping is actually good if you care about quality, and I think we're going to discover that more with LLMs They might democratize code but the code produced will be very low quality. Once coding communities start getting overrun with "Please help me fix my LLM generated code" we'll wish we did a bit more gatekeeping
    - 1y ago

burnte 1y ago

I never ask questions on any SO site, and I'm a 30 year professional. It really feels like the only people that post are people who wish no one else would ever post.

stevage 1y ago

What is the "elsewhere" you have in mind? I think it really is as simple as the AIs give better answers faster in most cases.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
The problem I have is that is not really true If the AI is capable of solving the problem quickly then it is usually the case that the question and answer are almost verbatim the first google search result from SO anyways That's not really any faster It might be faster for things that don't have a good SO answer, but tbh then it's usually much lower quality
- morgoths_bane 1y ago
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6Az4Mj4D 1y ago

I prefer Reddit communities over SO any day. SO, folks are so high headed, they will bash you with anything that doesn't suit their framework. I am sure with GPTs slowly they will lose traffic.

socalgal2 1y ago
Reddit has been 1000x worse than S.O. for me. (and S.O. sucks) Reddit = Question asked 6 months to 5 years ago. Auto-closed because age. Answer is out of date. Ask again, get's closed as already asked. Reddit has all the same mod problems as S.O. but it's worse because it's goal isn't to provide info, it's to be social media.
- DharmaPolice 1y ago
  Threads don't get closed due to age on Reddit (they used to be archived but this stopped a while back). Mods can lock threads but this is used to moderate content. And which subreddit locked your thread because a similar question was asked six months ago? I find that difficult to believe.

PenguinCoder 1y ago

Before I can even see a question or answer on this Q&A site, I get three overlays entirely covering anything useful. Log into Google. Join stack overflow! Cookie consent banner. Asinine. No thank you and get the hell out of my face.

atleastoptimal 1y ago

Stack Overflow existed because it had a moat on specific bug-fix related coding information that wasn't available elsewhere, or the mechanisms/community to solicit that information wasn't available elsewhere. Its moat naturally dissolves when a chatbot can offer all that plus more. So we have to think, what other moats will dissolve as AI gets better, cheaper, more effectively and widely deployed? Will law firms be a thing, or basically just a formality because laws still require humans to submit cases? Will therapists still exist when AI therapy could be scientifically and anecdotally shown to be 10x as effective and much less expensive? A lot of inertia will exist because of trust, people's bias towards "the way things have always been", but as the difference in utility between traditional services and AI-powered services grow, that inertia will not be able to resist the force of change.

zdragnar 1y ago
Expertsexchange was around at the time. SO's moat was they gave away access for free instead of pretending that paying got you better answers.
Applejinx 1y ago
Law is founded on the idea that reality matters and just making stuff up won't work there. If you could just hallucinate things and run with that there would be no reason for law because it wouldn't matter whether anything was true.
- atleastoptimal 1y ago
  The whole point of the legal profession is stretching the truth to the furthest extent towards your aims while remaining nominally within a given framework. LLM's are very good at that and are becoming increasingly good at that, and will be better at humans than that in the near future (if they aren't already)

arwhatever 1y ago

Stack Overflow is a programming Q&A website where people get mad at you for asking programming questions the overwhelming majority of the time.

bapak 1y ago

My most souring experience on SO was posting a comment below an answer pointing out that it did not answer the question and merely repeated it. The comment was deleted, and deleted again when I posted it again. Then the author of the answer went on meta and complained about my behavior, from which came a barrage of downvotes on my answer. Now think which answer has 4 times as many votes as his answer, years later? Mine. But why delete the comment? Why not just reply? I don't get it. It wasn't even a mod, it was just someone with 3k points, much less than I have.

amelius 1y ago

It was a very useful website, though. If AI didn't kill it, we would still be using it.

blindstitch 1y ago
I think something else would come in its place, like an automated way of trying out the options for solutions that you get when using it. Which AI incidentally is pretty good at.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago

right Stack Overflow over the years has gone from a site where it was useful to ask questions about stuff you knew nothing about in order to learn to becoming a site where you ask things you already almost have the answer to, get 90% of the way done in answering the question and stop because you realized what the answer must be OR get 100% done and then answer your question a few minutes/hours later.

blindstitch 1y ago
This is scarily accurate about how I use stack overflow. And then I never make the post, and the information never ends up out there!

yorwba 1y ago

I would definitely be surprised if people who've been asking good questions on StackOverflow so far would suddenly ask them elsewhere, since part of what makes a question good for StackOverflow is that it cannot be easily answered elsewhere. E.g. MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk about their research, they're unlikely to use LLMs for that anytime soon. So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying, it might very well be a sign that they finally succeeded in their war to keep everyone else out. Probably bad for the company milking the community for profit, though.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying, If you're not growing, you're dying. Businesses completely perverted that saying, but the basis for it is still true. People move on, change inerests, or simply die. You can't have a healthy long term community without new members coming in.
0xEF 1y ago
I don't even think it's been about asking good questions, at least not for many years. I used SO regularly and even when I wasn't asking a question at all, it was an incredible slog to just find a concise and correct answer instead of sniping comments from people who wanted to flex knowledge, or others answering from some oblique perspective that had nothing to do with the original problem. Asking good questions is always important, yes, but if the community does not know how to provide good answers, seekers seek elsewhere. Side note, great html book here on asking good questions, since we still absolutely have that problem to deal with even when using Gen AI as a starting point; http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Buttons840 1y ago
> MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk... When StackOverflow was new I visited frequently to enjoy the community talking about programming. For others, the goal was always to build the ultimate wiki. The people who wanted the ultimate wiki won, and the community left, and that's where we see SO today. No community, but it is the ultimate wiki filled with programming wisdom from 2014.

assimpleaspossi 1y ago

I went to SO for the first time in a long time to ask a question. It wouldn't let me do so until I edited three previous questions to better meet their standards. Those three questions were from 12 years ago.

nudgeOrnurture 1y ago

yeah, it's always fun when toddlers are told to read the docs, first, and then a few blog posts that clarify things in varying ways, then another article on how to ask (the right) questions and finally, give a summary of what one already tried and documented carefully because one already took a course on journaling one's path through the maze that is deprecation, version requirements, and basic libraries neither included in the most used distros, nor included in the setup of the package one is trying to install. don't matter, money is the motive and good ol' Ponzi made sure the gut biome of his obedient little army sticks to his divine ways of doin' things: job security, 'just doin' one's job' and that pat on the head TED talk, of course

scotty79 1y ago

SO is trying to pivot to education and gamification.

ChrisRR 1y ago

Stack Overflow is blaming AI for its failing when it's been a steaming pile for a decade. It's basically always been unusable for anything embedded related, because every question gets closed and marked as a duplicate of some desktop/web/mobile question with 100,000x the RAM

hopelite 1y ago

I think you may be overlooking that those are different and largely unrelated issues even if they are correlated. It is a shift of the whole modality, not just the service or location in which the modality is being conducted. Stack Overflow was a modality of humans asking and answering questions of each other, AI is totally replacing the humans in the answering step (for the time being), and doing so far more efficiently. Ai does not care how many times someone asks the same question, let alone how unimportant it is to a human ego. Let’s also not act as if it was just SO that is hostile to answering questions of humans. Remember seeing that letter from the aughts that went around the internet, where Linus Torvalds berated people? Ai does not do that, Ai is patient and supportive, not humanly limited in its patience and support. It is a far superior experience from that perspective. Ai may be limited still at this point and will not have a certain amount of experience based on second and third order effects and interactions between systems and methods that a human will have experience with from a life of experiences, but I frankly do not have any reason to believe that level of fine grained synthesized expertise will be gained soon enough; it is a mere feedback and learning loop away. The infant that Ai is right now is really not all that far off from becoming a toddler smarter than any genius human coder has ever been in all of human history. I’m thinking it is no more than another year to year and a half, and Ai will be the undisputed expert at every single repeatable programming question there is.

isk517 1y ago

I'm diving back into Linux server setup and management after being away for about 2 decades. The number of times the the top 3-5 search results are Stack Overflow questions with someone who is having the exact same issue I'm having and the top answer is 'this has been answered elseware, try searching' was almost enough to make me say, screw this I'm going back to Windows.

j45 1y ago

Early Stack Overflow was definitely better where questions were encouraged and maybe guided eventually towards where they need to be instead of hard rules that didn't encourage better questions and continuing your journey of questions.