7 ms·
Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
- scotty79 5mo agoI'm curious if they could pivot into a site where LLMs post questions and answer problems posted by other LLMs.
- jsLavaGoat 5mo agoThanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.
- zem 5mo agoif the mismoderation did not kill stackoverflow, it at the least made people who might otherwise have supported the site feel like nothing of value was lost.
- ge96 5mo agoThe SO podcast was fun when it was running
- alach11 5mo agoEveryone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.
- StableAlkyne 5mo agoIMO it was a combination of moderators and users Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
- huhkerrf 5mo agoIt's hard for me to imagine a user base more pedantic and judgy than reddit. It must have been really bad.
- ijk 5mo agoClosing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems. There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect. The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
- mcswell 5mo agoIn my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.
- ceejayoz 5mo ago> against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
- svachalek 5mo agoIt was always strict, that was its feature. But it was dying well before ChatGPT came along, due to going from strict to unusably over-moderated.
- joshstrange 5mo agoI'm all for a heavily moderated forum (that's why I like HN) but SO was clearly on the decline (from the graphs in this post) before LLMs came onto the scene. It peaked around 2017 (not counting COVID numbers) and was in a steady decline. ChatGPT just pushed it off the cliff (figuratively and literally).
- strongpigeon 5mo ago> but it always was that way. I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this. But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
- smrq 5mo agoEveryone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.
- dpark 5mo agoI rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions. I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.
- baq 5mo agoWhat’s crazy is with the current gen of LLMs you could 100% rein in the abusive mods. SO could reinvent itself as a place for coding agents to get clankermotiomal support after they ‘hear’ ‘WHY THE F DID YOU DO THAT’. (Seriously a hook could draft a submission and then set up a listener for responses. Who would be answering is an interesting question tho)
- ijk 5mo agoAh yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.
- boca_honey 5mo agoThat basic 90's sitcom level-1 sarcasm is not helpful in any adult discussion, it's very common on engineers and technical people, and it's probably the reason SO and similar sites were being abandoned by the regular internet users before LLMs. Just say what you intent to communicate, dude. If funny is not your forte, don't force it.
- stackghost 5mo agoEveryone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so. It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
- bluedino 5mo agoQuestion askers got lazier and lazier.
- lanewinfield 5mo agoNot to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency. Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
- zem 5mo agoif early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise). I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
- silon42 5mo agoI found this often for C# (and sometimes Typescript) related stuff... redirected to a question with a wrong/useless answer. For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.
- dpark 5mo agoIt was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
- deaton 5mo agoStackOverflow's extremely strict moderation was probably the #1 reason it turned into a high quality resource rather than a dumpster fire like reddit.
- jsLavaGoat 5mo agoWhy are you trying to do that? You should do this totally different thing that I do because I know how to do it.
- ijk 5mo agoA sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens. There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation. The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century. It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5
- IshKebab 5mo agoYeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves. It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.
- cyanydeez 5mo agoyeah, everyone seems to just ellide over the ability of LLM's to scrape all of stack overflow and do the same hack and slash response. Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.
- cm2187 5mo agoAgree. But I asked a couple questions about a year ago and got zero response. It's not just people asking questions who deserted SO, it is also people answering them (probably a chicken and egg problem - reversal of network effects).
- dorgo 5mo agoI had a work SO account with many questions/answers - everything fine. Later I created a SO account for use with my private projects and happened to have answered a couple questions without getting upvotes. The algorithm banned me from answering questions with the remark that I should improve the quality of my answers. You can bet that I never answered a question again on SO with any account.
- cryptoegorophy 5mo agoThis has been my experience. Glad they got what they finally deserved.
- andomar 5mo agoYeah, as I understand it, they wanted to optimize for Google search. This meant having "canonical" answers. This killed the site in the long term. In the short term, it worked wonderfully, and the founders made a (well deserved) killing.
- conradfr 5mo agoCall me crazy but sometimes I still find a better solution on StackOverflow than what Claude Code insists to do. I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoMuch of what Claude insists you do probably came from SO.
- akkad33 5mo agoOr Reddit. I don't know about Claude but Gemini has given me answers that are verbatim comments from Reddit.
- arcanemachiner 5mo agoI've gotten my own answers given back to me for problems I forgot I already had.
- irishcoffee 5mo agoI had email correspondence once with a vendor about how to talk to their i2c bus. The documentation was all asm, and I wanted to at least “uplift” to C. They didn’t have any answers, so I sent them my solution which was was the asm calls that the c stdlib decompiled into. 4 years later my company had bought a different company, who happened to be using a newer model of the same board. They asked me how we could use the 12c bus. “Well before you bought us, we emailed the vendor and sent back this C snippet” It was my code, verbatim. I’ve always wondered how many times they passed that bit of code around.
- mcswell 5mo agoSomebody posted a similar comment above yours (somewhere...). I don't think your experience is unique!
- dd8601fn 5mo ago
- hintymad 5mo agoWouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?
- piker 5mo agoYes. Very.
- akkad33 5mo agoPointing them to docs? Which is anyway what stack overflow answers did?
- mlinhares 5mo agoI wrote multiple answers to questions that weren't just "point to docs". And even when it is pointing to docs you are providing the reasoning as to why it works one way or another.
- izacus 5mo agoWhat docs? Who writes docs now that AIs answer everything?
- vanuatu 5mo agoon the contrary, theres more of an incentive for apis to have docs for agent discovery. the docs / interfaces themselves can be auto-gened (stainless / mintlify)
- ethagnawl 5mo agoI know you're being facetious but there may well be docs. It's just that the same AI most likely wrote _them_, too. Did anyone (person or competing LLM) bother to verify that they're correct, though? Who knows! Let the next generation of models worry about that.
- izacus 5mo ago
- nikeshsundar 5mo ago[flagged]
- pkamb 5mo agoForum? What forum? When has Stack Overflow ever been a forum?
- bigfishrunning 5mo agoHow is it not a forum? Sure, it has some search features and a "comments/answers" dichotomy, but at the root it's just phpBB with fancier formatting
- pwdisswordfishq 5mo agoA forum records free-form conversations between specific people, where every post can be edited at most by its original author (if even that). SE sites are libraries of questions that may be generalized beyond the original author's circumstances, and if someone's post does not fit the rigid Q&A form, it may be moderated away.
- shawn_w 5mo agoThe current owners have sure been trying to turn it into one with half-assed "features" like open ended questions and the thankfully killed off (for now) beta redesign.
- jonas21 5mo agoThe author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.
- andomar 5mo agoA firm is sold when its owners believe they will get the best price. The selling itself is more of a symptom than a cause.
- senordevnyc 5mo agoBusinesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.
- selcuka 5mo agoCorrect. I believe the desire to start a new company or to retire would be higher on the list.
- mathattack 5mo agoIt’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years” It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.
- lokar 5mo agoAnd some (Broadcom) see a product in decline, but with some amount of stickiness/lock-in. They cut R&D and extract value as it withers away.
- mathattack 5mo ago
- tantalor 5mo ago[flagged]
- woadwarrior01 5mo agoThis is happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.
- beachy 5mo agoI feel reddit is having a near death moment. There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?" And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing. Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants. There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it. When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.
- bloomca 5mo agoI've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots. I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
- beachy 5mo agoIt could be there's a fork in the road for reddit. Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs. While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans. Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them. Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.
- kenty 5mo agoStack Overflow with all of its shortcomings was a marvel of the internet at it's peak. People especially in early were chasing karma and anything you asked, you were sure to get some answer. Not always right but some answer. While for sure LLMs will give much better answers on average. I feel that it's a piece of humanity we've lost there that should be adequately remembered and the memory cherished.
- throawayonthe 5mo agogetting a wrong answer in a public forum can be great to motivate corrections :p
- theSuda 5mo agoI am also going to miss searching for something, finding a stack overflow thread and noticing that I wrote that answer years ago. :)
- kstrauser 5mo agoThat was always fun! And a few times, coworkers told me they asked a question there and found that I'd answered it. That was kinda nice.
- kstrauser 5mo agoThat was always fun! And a few times, coworkers told me they searched a question there and found that I'd answered it. That was kinda nice.
- mcswell 5mo ago...or I asked the question (and got an answer) years ago, but forgot because I hadn't worked in that programming language in the interim. (That's my excuse, anyway.)
- pjmlp 5mo agoI rather have the myriad of phpBB powered forums that used to exist all over the place, instead of StackOverflow. The irony is that StackOverflow kind of killed them all, and eventually also became a victim of the next wave.
- Animats 5mo agoWow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off. That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?
- saalweachter 5mo agoI know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero. You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.
- bigfishrunning 5mo ago> You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage Slashdot is firmly in this stage of its existence, and honestly it's kinda fun
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoI wonder what stage of the loop HN finds itself in.
- saalweachter 5mo agoSo the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?" For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property does. For others -- which I think HN falls into -- it's just word of mouth about a cool place to hang out, so it will die when there's a cooler place to hang out.
- scotty79 5mo ago> What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Human facing web search. Most SaS.
- jrflo 5mo agoI knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...
- e28eta 5mo agoClicking through to the query for the first chart, I see the peak of ~300k in May of 2020, and it was ~3k in April of 2026 (the last complete month). I’m flabbergasted. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/1932522/2374035/questions-per-month-including-deleted https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/193252...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo agoNah.... surely not. [looking at the link] Holy shitsnacks... I gotta be reading this wrong. Is it really dying? Like seriously, wtf. The Ghost of Expert Sexchange gets its revenge.
- janalsncm 5mo agoFor perspective, 300k per month is one new question every 9 seconds. 3k per month is one question every 15 minutes.
- IAmGraydon 5mo agoIt makes sense to me. There's literally no use for Stack Overflow anymore. LLMs, for all their faults, are a far better way to get answers to coding problems.
- jrflo 5mo agoIt's just rare to see something accelerate to zero like that. I feel like most dying products have a fade out over time where there still remains a niche use for them, they don't nosedive to almost nothing.
- _aavaa_ 5mo agoJust look at the graph, Covid peak aside its previous peak was in 2016 and it was in continuous decline since then. All LLMS this was increase the slope.
- zamadatix 5mo agoMy speed was already declining on the highway after I let off the gas, all the brick stopped truck did was increase the slope.
- pkamb 5mo agoLLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway). Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc. But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment. Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.
- andrekandre 5mo agoto paraphrase a bad movie: what does a qa site need with 1.8 billion dollars? > Wikimedia-like foundation agree, best way to preserve the original goal imo
- m3kw9 5mo agoi haven't been on stackoverflow for maybe 6 months, haven't seen it on google search, or needed to ask much on google either. Maybe they did a web search. On the plus side, its still used by AI agents
- npollock 5mo agoone of the interesting properties of public forums like SO is that the maintainers of software packages get visibility into the problems and frustrations that their users experience we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models
- bhouston 5mo agoDid the founders have an exit or liquidity from Stack Overflow? I hope so.
- pkamb 5mo agohttps://blog.codinghorror.com/launching-the-rural-guaranteed-minimum-income-initiative/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/launching-the-rural-guaranteed...
- legitster 5mo agoStack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time: If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer). At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems. (Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoEarly years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.
- andrekandre 5mo agoa.k.a enshitification
- mattmanser 5mo agoThat's not what we mean when we say that phrase. They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming. From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.
- bjourne 5mo ago
- AlienRobot 5mo agoWow, has it really gone all the way down to zero?
- BoppreH 5mo agoWhere do we go now for the answers validated by the community? How do we build knowledge? The answers that Claude gives might look good, but without community edits, votes, and comments it's a lot harder to evaluate. I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.
- BrenBarn 5mo agoOne thing I've been curious about is how the other sites on StackExchange have fared. A lot of those are pretty interesting. Anecdotally the few that I check occasionally also seem to have declined a lot.
- Brendinooo 5mo agoI was wondering the same thing! I was pretty involved in the graphic design SE to get it out of beta, and even back then you could kind of tell that the format can start to struggle once the lower-hanging fruit has been picked.
- exabrial 5mo agoThere are a lot of reasons why that forum is dead. I loved answering questions on it in the heyday, it was fun and I learned a ton. The owners let a bunch "admins" run it into the ground first though. Another user that "outranks" you, but knows nothing about subject matter, has changed the content of your post. The great news is, it's still attributed to you. They removed the words "please" and "thank you" and other kind words to make you seem like a dick. Or they may have changed the wording completely to match their completely arbitrary tone and style. Have a nice day and kindly piss off, there's nothing you can do about it, hah, loser.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoDiscussion when the source article is from: January. Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoTitle of this could be more informative: Working with Stack Overflow Data to Investigate its Decline
- calmbonsai 5mo agoStack Overflow had been a zombie even before they sold to Prosus in 2021. It became over-moderated and calcified. Amongst even simple stuff, they refused to update basic library questions when said libraries had new releases with additional calls and performance enhancements. Sometime in 2018 I went so far as to blacklist the domain so it wouldn't inadvertently pollute research.
- Groxx 5mo agoYea, I abandoned it before then too - it was clearly over-filled with old answers with no context as to if they're still valid. Everyone has had the experience where the top response was right for 3 months, but is now impossible to fix, so you have to just somehow know that you need the 19th answer with only 6 upvotes (versus 387). That was a problem early on, and afaict has exclusively worsened over its whole lifetime. They seem to be proud of it as if it was a major feature, and have afaict never built anything at all to try to address it. (Yes, editing answers is "a solution", but you can't do that as a newcomer who knows better. You've got to commit to the ecosystem for months... when it had just failed you. Of course most visitors don't do that!)
- BrandoElFollito 5mo agoFew hundred k rep here, across Stack Exchange. I recently had a look at my stats (last time I checked was maybe 10 years ago) and I noticed the SO and security line stagnating fir a good few years. They used to be the one raising steeply, but at some point the sites because so toxic, with unsufferable downvoters that I completely gave up. But other sites rised steadily. There are wonderful sutes in the SE network where you get great answers from very helpful people. SO and a few other sites are dragging the whole idea to the bottom. If you want to see unhinged psychopaths in action have a look at SE or SO Meta. Or maybe not.
- kelvinjps10 5mo agoFor me, the strict requirements for posting questions help me to define the problem well, and after writing the question properly, I'd have the solution.
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoEarly Stack Overflow as an amazing "rubber duck" (see "rubber duck debugging"). Unfortunately in recent years it became such a traumatizing experience to post a question there (even if you made a perfectly legit question you'd likely get downvoted and closed ... and god help you if you posted a question with an issue). It completely changed from "I posted a question I can answer myself, and someone said so in the comments" to "I posted ANY question and everyone on the site teamed up to get rid of that question".
- tpoacher 5mo ago> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertise. One has to appreciate the irony on the use of the word "trust" there ...
- Kuyawa 5mo agoTo be honest, I stopped using SO with the advent of AI, I completely forgot about it. I don't care about being sold, bad moderation or other aspects of its decline. AI gives me all answers I need.
- 4ndrewl 5mo agoGood work everyone. We gave our labour freely and see how we all profited!
- Crimson_Fool 5mo agoNot really surprised tbh, the goal of stack overflow was to essentially help out in unique problems that users have, but ever since the advent of AI, I personally have had less and less need to go to stack overflow. The one advantage of stack overflow though, is that unlike AI where once you find the answer, its gone, in stack overflow, it can help the next guy along. Kinda feels like we are losing a bit more of the humanity aspect in engineering.
- crispyambulance 5mo agoGood riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!
- kstrauser 5mo ago"How do I do this thing in Django 6?" Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011 The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.
- torben-friis 5mo agoWhat I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity". It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.
- kstrauser 5mo agoOMG, so much. I was quite ruthless about rolling back those vandalisms. If I’d have meant X, I’d have said X in the first place. I didn’t, so I didn’t.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 5mo agoPoetic how they were so ridiculous about meticulously curating a database of answers where the ultimate consumer would be LLMs that really don’t care about duplicates.
- aucisson_masque 5mo ago> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models. What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ? Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need data from real humans figuring stuffs out.
- xtracto 5mo agoWithin a couple of years, LLMs or equivalent AI engines will have the ability to generate factual knowledge themselves using their "outdated" knowledge and their reasoning mechanisms. For example, one of the classical requests from S.O. questions and GitHub issues is a "minimal reproducible example " of the question/problem. So a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write that, run it, see the issue , go to the library/related-system code or documentation (for closed source) and derive a solution
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoThere have been studies where an ai that feed on its own data become dumber and dumber. I don't think it's just going to 'generate factual knowledge' Ad vitam æternam.
- altcognito 5mo agoAre all of them dead or just the programming exchange?
- insane_dreamer 5mo agowhere is all the future SO-type content for LLMs going to come from, with all the little "gotchas" that people discovered, or, more importantly, corrections of incorrect info I never posted on SO, but I did search it a lot; great resource I never looked at it as a "community", just a place to find info
- rich_sasha 5mo agoSome of my favourite SO posts (not all funny): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-want-to-kill-any-more-mice-but-my-advisor-insists-that-i-must-in-order https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa... https://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-auditor-is-an-idiot-how-do-i-give-him-the-information-he-wants https://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-audito... I hope they stay with us. I don't much care for the company or what's left of the community.
- npodbielski 5mo ago> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertize. This is just dead man kicking. This will be less and less valuable thing as all sort of info go out of date. But if it this, and IT WILL go out of date, what will be new learning data for all of those models? Previously with SO people just enjoyed helping other people. But if they will be helping primarily multibillion dollar "AI" companies, then why would they? If nobody will be doing that then how this knowledge will be shared? There is open source projects and docs but they are blocking stuff more and more and some point I wont be surprised if you will have to log in into Debian or Arch Linux system to be able to read those docs. But then if those companies and OSS will be not adding to training data what will? Will it be that programmers will be just writing new code for llms, for the money till they will make themselves obsolete? Or at some point those "AI" companies will use anything they can to get ahead of the competition, even if this is against contracts or the law? The longer I think about the future the more grim it looks.
- feckeneejit 5mo agoThey never liked my answers. Not once. So they can eat dust!
- onesingleblast 5mo agoOnce I looked up how to add placeholder text on a textbox with Swing and someone on Stack Overflow said to add a random JAR file into my project but the DuckDuckGo AI gave me the correct answer. So good riddance I guess.
- willyv3 5mo ago[flagged]
- AbstractH24 5mo agoDoes anyone even remember that foursquare was once a social media app? People pivot and leverage what they previously were to become something new all the time.