23 ms·

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannic

• timcobb 10mo ago
  > I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? I've wondered this too and I wonder if the existing corpus plus new GitHub/doc site scrapes will be enough to keep things current.
  • parpfish 10mo ago
    Widespread internet adoption created “eternal September”, widespread LLM deployment will create “eternal 2018”
  • pigpop 10mo ago
    [dead]
• andirk 10mo ago
  That "Dead Internet" phrase keeps becoming more likely, and this graph shows that. Human-to-human interactions, LLMs using those interactions, less human-to-human interactions because of that, LLMs using... ?
• omneity 10mo ago
  Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow for. It does remove the human touch so it's quite a different dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system.
  • llbeansandrice 10mo ago
    Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape? No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
    • stackghost 10mo ago
      The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow.
      • llbeansandrice 10mo ago
        One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other services and spaces before the widespread use of AI doesn’t sound very compelling to me. Be more creative than AI.
      • ambicapter 10mo ago
        The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.
• nikhizzle 10mo ago
  I think the interesting thing here for those of us who use open source frameworks is that we can ask the LLM to look at the source to find the answer (eg. Pytorch or Phoenix in my case). For closed source libraries I do not know.
• kurtis_reed 10mo ago
  Moderation got worse over time
• brunoborges 10mo ago
  As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario. Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product. The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a product" where the first step is to search, the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the third step is to delete. The LLM is capable of answering the question "how to delete the product 'product name'". To some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic, but still possible for a human to answer if only they read documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an answer A LOT faster.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • mlinhares 10mo ago
    "In this imaginary world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs, LLMs are the best tool for the job".
    • JohnBooty 10mo ago
      world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs I believe the parent poster was clearly and specifically talking about software documentation that was strong and LLM consumption-friendly, not "everything"
    • HaZeust 9mo ago
      Yeah, old news? It's how it is today with humans. You SHOULD be making things in a human/LLM-readable format nowadays anyway if you're in tech, it'll do you well with AIs resorting to citing what you write, and content aggregators - like search engines - giving it more preferential scores.
  • al_borland 10mo ago
    If the LLM is also writing the documentation, because the developers surely don’t want to, I’m not sure how well this will work out. I have some co-workers who have tried to use Copilot for their documentation (because they never write any and I’m constantly asking them questions as a result), and the results were so bad they actually spent the time to write proper documentation. It failed successfully, I suppose.
• rapidfl 10mo ago
  > SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions We will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some details/quirks/gotchas. Example of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more effective than LLMs.
• m463 10mo ago
  Too bad stack overflow didn't high-quality-LLM itself early. I assume it had the computer-related brainpower. with respect to the "moderation is the cause" thing... Although I also don't buy moderation as the cause, I wonder if any sort of friction from the "primary source of data" can cause acceleration. for example, when I'm doing an interenet search for the definition of a word like buggywhip, some search results from the "primary source" show: > buggy whip, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary > Factsheet What does the noun buggy whip mean? There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun buggy whip. See 'Meaning & use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence. which are non-answer to keep their traffic. but the AI answer is... the answer. If SO early on had had some clear AI answer + references, I think that would have kept people on their site.
  • zahlman 10mo ago
    The meta post describing the policy of banning AI-generated answers from the site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831) is the most popular of all time. Company interference with moderator attempts to enforce that policy lead to a moderator strike. The community is vehemently against the company's current repeated attempts to sneak AI into the system, which have repeatedly produced embarrassing results (see for example https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427807 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427807 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 etc.). What you propose is a complete non-starter.
    • qcnguy 10mo ago
      Your first example is a public announcement of an llm assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback on an experiment isn't "sneaking" and the replies are a tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of questions so AI review seems like it should be useful. The top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this, the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just don't do it. The second top voted answer says "I was able to do a prompt injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug". So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol. It seems clear these people started from a belief that ai is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why this specific feature is bad. It's crazy that you are defending this group all over this HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem. I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in years. Those replies are embarrassing for the SO community, not AI.
• joe_the_user 10mo ago
  I don't think "good moderation or not" really touches what was happening with SO. I joined SO early and it had a "gamified" interface that I actually found fun. Putting in effort and such I able to slowly gain karma. The problem was as the site scaled, the competition to answer a given question became more and more intense and that made it miserable. I left at that point but I think a lot people stayed with dynamic that was extremely unhealthy. (and the quality of accepted questions declined also). With all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening.
  • zahlman 10mo ago
    Agreed. The reputation system was extremely ill considered and never revisited. You may be interested in https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 .
• sgc 10mo ago
  The newer questions that LLMs can't answer will be answered in forums - either SO, reddit, or elsewhere. There will be a much higher percentage of relevant content with far fewer new pages regurgitating questions about solved problems. So the LLMs will be able to keep up.
• josephg 10mo ago
  > The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer. Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie.
  • nine_k 10mo ago
    LLMs also search Google for answers. Hence the knowledge may be not lost even for those who only supervises machines that write code.
  • CamperBob2 10mo ago
    Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then). Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time. The question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
    • hombre_fatal 10mo ago
      What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute. > People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's. Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack. We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot"). As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt.
• Aurornis 10mo ago
  > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor that the moderation started taking on a life of its own. Stack Overflow moderator drama felt constant in the later 2010s with endless weird drama spilling across Twitter, Reddit, and the moderator’s personal blogs. That’s about the same time period where it felt like the moderation team was more interested in finding reasons to exercise their moderation power than in maintaining an interesting website. Since about 2020 every time I click a Stack Overflow link I estimate there’s a 50/50 chance that the question I clicked on would be marked as off topic or closed or something before anyone could answer it. Between the moderator drama and the constant bait-and-switch feeling of clicking on SO links that didn’t go anywhere the site just felt more exhausting than helpful.
  • franze 10mo ago
    I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the question)
  • Shog9 10mo ago
    There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't. At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore. ...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call. I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits. [0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
• shevy-java 10mo ago
  > The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers. I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.
  • cubefox 10mo ago
    There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Reddit and HN, which are poorly optimized for answering questions.
    • gbear605 10mo ago
      Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors.
      • cubefox 10mo ago
        The decline was much slower, not the following exponential decline that can only have been caused by LLMs.
    • hju22_-3 10mo ago
      You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other questions first, ensure that your account has enough "clout" to overturn stupid closures of questions, and when you have wasted enough time doing that, then you can finally ask your own question. Or you can just go somewhere else that isn't an intellectual charade and circle jerking and figure it out without wasting tons of time chasing clout and hoping a moderator won't just close the question as duplicate. SO was never the best platform, exactly because of its horrendous moderation. It was good, yes. It had the quality assurance, to a degree, yes. But when just asking a question becomes such a monumental task, people will go elsewhere, to better platforms. Which includes other forums, and, LLMs. So no, what you're attributing to LLMs is merely a symptom of the deeper issue.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• emodendroket 10mo ago
  If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones: 1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions. 2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.
  • al_borland 10mo ago
    > Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology. This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times than I can count.
    • speedgoose 10mo ago
      Have you tried using context7 or a similar MCP to have the agent automatically fetch up to date documentation?
    • mlrtime 10mo ago
      Then you're doing it wrong? I'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git clone the repo and tell it to reference the source. Apologies for using you as an example, but this is a common theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a specific/complex question with little context and then complain when the answer is wrong.
      • pigpop 10mo ago
        This is exactly the issue that most people run into and it's literally the GIGO principle that we should all be familiar with by now. If your design spec amounts to "fix it" then don't be surprised at the results. One of the major improvements I've noticed in Claude Code using Opus 4.5 is that it will often read the source of the library we're using so that it fully understands the API as well as the implementation. You have to treat LLMs like any other developer that you'd delegate work to and provide them with a well thought out specification of the feature they're building or enough details about how to reproduce a bug for them to diagnose and fix it. If you want their code to conform to the style you prefer then you have to give them a style guide and examples or provide a linter and code formatter and let them know how to run it. They're getting better at making up for these human deficits as more and more of these common failure cases are recorded but you can get much better output now by simply putting some thought into how you use them.
• dleeftink 10mo ago
  Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means. Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• brudgers 10mo ago
  The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question For me, the value was writing answers on topics I was interested in…and internet points as feedback on their quality. When SE abandoned their app, it broke my habit.
• camhart 10mo ago
  I stopped because of moderators. They literally killed the site for me.
• m-schuetz 10mo ago
  > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems The moderation was precisely the reason I stopped using stackoverflow and started looking for answers and asking questions elsewhere. It was nearly impossible to ask anything without someone replying "Why would you even want to do that, do <something completely different that does not solve my problem> instead!". Or someone claiming it's a duplicate and you should use that ancient answer from another question that 1) barely fits and doesnt solve my problem and 2) is so outdated, it's no longer useful. Whenever I had to ask something, I had to add a justification as to why I have to do it that way and why previous posts do not solve the issue, and that took more space than the question itself. I certainly won't miss SO.
  • raxxorraxor 9mo ago
    I will miss it but you are right about moderation. I don't know what the issue is on some platforms, reddit and SO come to mind. Moderators on many other platforms or forums seem to be alright and keep a clear head, even when they have to deal with a lot of vitriol and they get little thanks for their work. There are probably negative examples as well but some platforms seem to be especially vulnerable. If I had to run reddit or SO, I would limit moderation to one subreddit/subdomain. No idea if that would help, but the problem isn't exactly invisible.
  • dharman246 9mo ago
    That's not moderation. That's a lack of moderation. Comments like this weren't posted by mods but by people looking for stuff to answer. A mod would definitely delete such a comment if they were notified about it. But not enough users flagged stuff and preferred to complain about being hurt instead. There's also a problem that not enough mods were present at all times to handle the volume of comments posted.
• cletus 10mo ago
  As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state. But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute poison. I'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from Civ4: "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That sums it up exactly. There is a certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up as Reddit mods, for example. Rules and standards are good up to a point but some people forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselves and having debates about what's a repeated question, how questions and answers should be structured, etc. This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. And this goes back to the rules and standards being a tool not a goal. My stance was (and is) that shouldn't we solve flame wars when they happen rather than going around and "solving" imaginary problems? I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider. Even something that does have a definite answer like "how do I efficiently code a factorial function?" has multiple but different defensible answers. Even in one language you can have multiple implementations that might, say, be compile-time or runtime. Another commenter here talked about finding the nearest point on an ellipse and came up with a method they're proud of where there are other methods that would also do the job. Anyway, I'd occasionally login and see a constant churn on my answers from moderators doing pointless busywork as this month they'd decided something needed to be capitalized or not capitalized. A perfect example of this kind of thing is Bryan Henderson's war on "comprised of" on Wikipedia [2]. Anyway, I think the core issue of SO was that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit and I got a lot of accepted answers on questions that could never be asked today. You'll also read many anecdotes about people having a negative experience asking questions on SO in later years where their question was immediately closed as, say, a duplicate when the question wasn't a duplicate. The moderator just didn't understand the difference. That sort of thing. But any mature site ultimately ends with an impossible barrier to entry as newcomers don't know all the cultural rules that have been put in place and they tend to have a negative experience as they get yelled at for not knowing that Rule 11.6.2.7 forbids the kind of question they asked. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus [2]: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-comprised-of-on-wikipedia-one-editor-will-take-it-out https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-c...
• znpy 10mo ago
  > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems Just to add another personal data point: i started posting in on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting. Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. Moderation was an incredible problem for stack overflow.
  • zahlman 10mo ago
    > Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. 99.9% probability the people who made those edits a) were not moderators; b) were acting completely in accordance with established policy (please read: "Why do clear, accurate, appropriately detailed posts still get edited?" https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176) Why do you think you should be the one who gets to decide whether that's "acceptable"? The site existed before you came to it, and it has goals, purposes and cultural norms established beforehand. It's your responsibility, before using any site on the Internet that accepts user-generated content, to try to understand the site's and community's expectations for that content. On Stack Overflow, the expectations are: 1. You license the content to the site and to the community, and everyone is allowed to edit it. (This is also explicitly laid out in the TOS.) 2. You are contributing to a collaborative effort to build a useful resource for the programming community: a catalog of questions whose answers can be useful to many people, not just to yourself. 3. Content is intended to be matter-of-fact and right to the point, and explicitly not conversational. You are emphatically not participating in a discussion forum.
    • QuesnayJr 10mo ago
      The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could.
      • zahlman 10mo ago
        What "tone"? Why is it unreasonable to say these sorts of things about Stack Overflow, or about any community? How is "your questions and answers need to meet our standards to be accepted" any different from "your pull requests need to meet our standards to be accepted"?
• zahlman 10mo ago
  > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have historically done hardly any of it; the site simply didn't scale like that. There have been tens of millions of questions, versus a couple dozen moderators.) The kinds of questions that people are getting quick, accurate answers for from an LLM are, overwhelmingly, the sort of thing that SO never wanted. Generally because they are specific to the person asking: either that person's issue won't be relevant to other people, or the work hasn't been done to make it recognizable by others. And then of course you have the duplicates. You would not believe the logic some people put forward to insist that their questions are not duplicate; that they wouldn't be able, in other words, to get a suitable answer (note: the purpose is to answer a question, not solve a problem) from the existing Q&A. It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers. I agree that Reddit played a big role in this. But not just by answering questions; by forming a place where people who objected to the SO content model could congregate. Insulting other users is and always has been against Stack Overflow Code of Conduct. The large majority of insults, in my experience, come from new users who are upset at being politely asked to follow procedures or told that they aren't actually allowed to use the site the way they're trying to. There have been many duplicate threads on the meta site about why community members (with enough reputation) are permitted to cast close votes on questions without commenting on what is wrong. The consensus: close reasons are usually fairly obvious; there is an established process for people to come to the meta site to ask for more detailed reasoning; and comments aren't anonymous, so it makes oneself a target.
  • eastbound 10mo ago
    It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality. > It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers. This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new (for example after a library change) and marking it as duplicate of an unanswered answer if a guarantee that the next SEO user won’t see it.
• lofaszvanitt 10mo ago
  Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me. When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim. And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it. It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved.
• weatherlite 10mo ago
  > What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions? That's a great question. I have no idea how things will play out now - do models become generalized enough to handle "out of distrubition" problems or not ? If they don't then I suppose a few years from now we'll get an uptick in Stackoverflow questions; the website will still exist it's not going anywhere.
• chrischen 10mo ago
  This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms of not having to need to ask redundant questions).
• xz0r 10mo ago
  > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems Questions asked on SO that got downvoted by the heavy handed moderation would have been answered by LLMs without any of the flak whatsoever. Those who had downvoted other's questions on SO for not being good enough, must be asking a lot of such not good enough questions to an LLM today. Sure, the SO system worked, but it was user hostile and I'm glad we all don't have to deal with it anymore.
• jasonfarnon 10mo ago
  "I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers." I think at least one other reason is that a lot of the questions were already posted. There are only so many questions of interest, until a popular new technology comes along. And if you look at mathoverflow (which wouldnt have the constant shocks from new technologies) the trend is pretty stable...until right around 2022. And even since then, the dropoff isn't nearly so dramatic. https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/edit/1927201#graph https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/edit/19272...
• cyberrock 10mo ago
  There's another significant forum: GitHub, the rise of which coincided with the start of SO's decline. I bet most niche questions went over to GH repos' issue/discussion forums, and SO was left with more general questions that bored contributors.
• DrSiemer 10mo ago
  We'll get to the point where we can mass moderate core knowledge eventually. We may need to hand out extra weight for verified experts and some kind of most-votes-win type logic (perhaps even comments?), but live training data updates will be a massive evolution for language models.
• maplethorpe 10mo ago
  > will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions? I honestly don't think they need to. As we've seen so far, for most jobs in this world, answers that sound correct are good enough. Is chasing more accuracy a good use of resources if your audience can't tell the difference anyway?
• noduerme 10mo ago
  >>what happens now? I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the response. The overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where everything collaboratively built falls apart. The machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and self-righteous.... /okay. there was always a needy component to Stack Overflow. "I have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this algorithm?" and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be honest, it was the giving of information which forced you to think, and research, and answer correctly, which made systems like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the fucking future. Things are gonna slide / in all directions / won't be nothin you can measure anymore. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WlbQRoz3o4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WlbQRoz3o4
  • CuriouslyC 10mo ago
    Labs are spending billions on data set curation and RL from human experts to fill in the areas where they're currently weak. It's higher quality data than SO, the only issue is that it's not public.
    • noduerme 10mo ago
      Can you explain what you're saying in greater depth? Are you saying that the reason there is no human expertise on the internet anymore is that everyone with knowledge is now under contract to train AIs?
      • CuriouslyC 10mo ago
• thih9 10mo ago
  > What do LLMs train off of now? Perhaps they’ll rely on what was used by people who answered SO questions. So: official docs and maybe source code. Maybe even from experience too, i.e. from human feedback and human written code during agentic coding sessions. > The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top. Arguably it does insult even more, just by existing alone.
• sotix 10mo ago
  > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with.
• jlarocco 10mo ago
  > - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions? To me this shows just how limited LLMs are. Hopefully more people realize that LLMs aren't as useful as they seem, and in 10 years they're relegated to sending spam and generating marketting websites.
  • tgv 10mo ago
    Or we just stagnate, as tech no longer can afford to change.
• furyofantares 10mo ago
  > The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO. Plus they might find the answer on SO without asking a new question - You probably would expect the # of new questions to peak or plateau even if the site wasn't dying, due to the accumulation of already-answered questions.
• BigParm 9mo ago
  The LLMs will learn from our interactions with them. That's why they're often free
• DirkH 9mo ago
  Specialized research AI agents are coming at which point we'll have numerous LLMs running and verifying experiments and creating a higher quality text corpus than the 2014-2020 halcyon, which is then used for other LLMs to be trained on. It will be the reverse I suspect. Eventually we will see that LLM quality is lower when it is training data from 2014-2020 and will chalk it up to human limitations and the data not being written with a laser-focused goal of training better AI.
• n5NOJwkc7kRC 9mo ago
  The moderation was a lot of the problem, but not the whole problem. Honestly these days a larger part is that old, low-quality answers are usually stuck as the top answer on old questions, despite the fact that the situation has changed massively in the past decade and there are newer answers further down that give the new answer. Or better yet: when the top answer is a decade old and says "that doesn't even make sense, why would you want to do that, it's impossible, but you can look at literally the entire Handbook to see what you can do" (with a link to the frontpage of the FreeBSD Handbook) and you have to scroll down nearly to the bottom to find the one answer that actually answers the question (how to add an on-link route on FreeBSD) (and that it's not actually impossible like the arrogant jerk on top claimed)...
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago
  If my questions become more open ended and challenging as I become more senior, and I am not allowed to ask them on SO, why would I stay on the website? So you get junior questions only and no seniors to answers. The decline started in 2016, not 2026, they killed themselves