My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free.
As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more.
So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it.
But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the best!
moribvndvs · 12h ago
The presumption is that things will improve over time, but the big difference in my experience is the assistance I got from SO _worked_ the vast majority of the time, whereas various LLMs I have used generate unusable, misleading, or unreliable results pretty regularly, increasing as complexity or rarity arises. As human-driven knowledge bases backed by actual experience are replaced by inference from models who rely on such inputs, I am concerned about the medium to long term impact. A lot of people grew frustrated with SO for various reasons and went back to unhelpful behaviors that SO resolved at its zenith (rather than dead ends and flame wars in newslists and irc channels, they do it in random subreddits and discord servers instead). Now what if we circle back after degenerative LLM experiences only to find there’s nothing to circle back on?
myvoiceismypass · 10h ago
Personally, I am getting extremely tired of ChatGPT hallucinating npm packages that don't exist, or package imports that do not exist
danjl · 2h ago
Those hallucinated libraries exist in the future where the LLM lives and works. You just haven't caught up in time yet. ;-)
datavirtue · 9h ago
Get a good service. Running it on your old gaming machine?
surgical_fire · 9h ago
Are you implying he is running ChatGPT from his gaming machine?
State of the art models constantly generate bullshit, even if I find them generally useful. Your blind hype does nothing but make people more skeptical of it.
soraminazuki · 5h ago
Maybe at least learn the difference between a web service and a local application before getting carried away by hype.
kulahan · 11h ago
I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”.
It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
tstrimple · 2h ago
There was a time when it was really good. Like legitimately good and useful. But over time it ended up becoming exactly what you describe. But there are still countless examples of the usefulness of SO in Google results. I stopped asking questions in 2012 and stopped answering questions in 2015. Before that though, it was a very useful tool.
NBJack · 11h ago
Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem.
But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
zahlman · 11h ago
"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc.
If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.
But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:
"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
NBJack · 5h ago
> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.
Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.
surgical_fire · 9h ago
> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.
Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
zahlman · 8h ago
>>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
>If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is.
> Either what I was looking for was already there
The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
surgical_fire · 8h ago
> You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
> That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge.
I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply.
That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter.
> The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly).
This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
> When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
soco · 1h ago
Your point makes totally sense and it also sounds like a robotic overlord from some SF dystopia: cold and following its own programmed rules to the painful detail. As the other commenter pointed out: you are definitely right and we see your point. But it's a also because of it that I stopped using SO years except for maybe causally searching. Let me draw an inaccurate parallel: security, if done perfectly, lets nobody achieve anything.
slyfox125 · 8h ago
Even if you - and the stance SO takes/took - are correct, that doesn't erase the fact that the decorum is unpalatable to a vast majority of the user-base.
Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.
zahlman · 8h ago
My experience has overwhelmingly been that people object to being told that they can't just ask the question they want - not to the specific words used.
We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously.
But none of this seems to make a difference. And people come to the site with expectations about politeness that simply aren't conducive to getting people to stop doing things they aren't supposed to do:
Meanwhile, a major reason why people aren't required to explain in a comment why they downvoted a question, is because of the history we've had with downright vitriolic replies from OPs who seem uninterested in the rules:
The last time I used it I was asking a math question that was somewhat beyond me. I'd already spent hours researching it. Part of the problem was I knew I didn't know the right terminology but I could describe the problem in detail. I asked on SO, got one slightly snarky comment that answered the wrong problem. It did give me a clue to the right wording to look for though so in a way I got my answer. But the general attitude, and your attitude, is "why are you asking this question?"
SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.
mvdtnz · 7h ago
If the entire internet is telling you you're hostile, aggressive and hard to work with it would pay to stop explaining why you're right and start looking inwards.
mixmastamyk · 11h ago
Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part.
But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.
No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
zahlman · 11h ago
>No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.
You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).
Gigachad · 12h ago
Mixed feelings on SO. It was helpful, but it was also a website you dread having to post on because it was filled with the most intolerable people of the internet who you just had to endure abuse from if you wanted help.
Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.
awesome_dude · 12h ago
The next AI totally needs to be more snarky to make it feel more like we're dealing with actual "thinksperts", people that think they are experts even if their answers are demonstrably wrong.
NBJack · 11h ago
"You are Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. You are very knowledgeable in the _____ language; in fact, you believe you are the foremost expert on it. You have taken time from your busy schedule to help the unwashed masses by answering the following question..."
Gigachad · 7h ago
>Oh, the pain... the sheer agony of having to explain basic React concepts to someone who likely thinks JSX is a new boy band. But fine. For the sake of humanity—or at least to preserve what little remains of good developer practices—I shall lower myself to answer your question.
Hooks and components in React are as different as a limited-edition issue of Radioactive Man and the garbage they stuff in the Sunday comics.
[...]
If you're writing React without understanding this distinction, please, for the love of all that is unholy in Springfield, step away from the keyboard and go read the official React docs. Twice. Maybe thrice.
ElCapitanMarkla · 11h ago
"Be sure to edit the original question to better fit your answer"
fernirello · 4h ago
I've got valuable advice from SO over the years. There's overlap with LLMs, sure, but it's frequent to have questions that have no answers published anywhere on the web; SO brings people who know out of the woodwork, who create an explanation that didn't exist before. A couple days ago, someone in retrocomputing got to bank-switch a 1983 Radio Shack box... that kind of stuff wasn't published anywhere, until a guy who used to write games for that box answered that question on SO.
bitbasher · 10h ago
Are you talking about Stackoverflow? Every time I asked a detailed question it would be closed within minutes.
I'm not surprised it's on the way out.
bryanlarsen · 9h ago
I've asked dozens of questions on SO, and never had a single one closed. I hear your sentiment often, but have no idea whether my experience or yours is more common.
I've had 3 deleted by Community bot as abandoned, but since they were over a year old when that happened, I couldn't care less.
aquafox · 12h ago
Until there is a radically new version of {popular programming language} with breaking changes and no new and correct answers to train on.
1123581321 · 12h ago
These models can figure out syntax and language features they haven’t seen before. Try it with a few code snippets of your own made-up language. It’s a little freaky.
zahlman · 11h ago
They can implicitly assume that your made-up language is designed to be easy to use by native language speakers, and thus apply their existing understanding of "code" to it, sure.
1123581321 · 6h ago
Yes, that’s part of it, but it can also correctly reason the language is designed to be hard to understand. If you try this exercise, it’ll list its reasoning for what it thinks each unfamiliar piece of syntax might be, and one of its approaches is to bring in analogues to other languages, including other esoterica attempts. If you give it something more inventive, it’ll reason its way to other academic fields to come up with solutions.
It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.
TremendousJudge · 12h ago
> But now ChatGPT does that in minutes
But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?
staircasebug · 12h ago
They're learning from working code in GitHub, IDE "co-pilots"...
TremendousJudge · 12h ago
But a priori you don't know if the code you find on Github is "good", plus it doesn't come with a handy explanation. The quality of the data is much, much worse.
MarcelOlsz · 12h ago
It will steal our own data and we'll have a big "oopsie! didn't mean to!" moment 5-10 years after.
TremendousJudge · 12h ago
My point is that there won't even be any data to steal! The novel human-written and human-rated answers just won't exist anymore. Where will it get its answers on C++26 features from? Not the non-existing StackOverflow, that's for sure.
MarcelOlsz · 12h ago
Ah in the training data sense, yeah that makes sense. My bet is that "code artisans" will see a revival in the 300k+ usd range that will drop into your codebase like a special forces team to unfuck the AI garbage all the prior "Seniors" implemented.
kulahan · 11h ago
Why does any LLM need new information to do fundamentally the same thing?
And what makes the data outdated? New code? It can train on that. That, or there is simply nothing new to learn, just new ways to express the same thing.
swat535 · 10h ago
> Why does any LLM need new information to do fundamentally the same thing?
What makes you think we will be doing fundamentally the same thing in the future? Language grow and change, systems change, operating systems change, hardware and specs change..
Nothing in computing is ever static.
awesome_dude · 12h ago
Closing this as its a statement not a question
threatofrain · 11h ago
I just hope that we can continue to find sources of high quality training data like SO. If people don't publish their mutual learnings somewhere then there's no data to train on.
Cymatickot · 26m ago
To Ai paraphrase Obi-Wan: I felt a great disturbance in the Force — as if millions of developer voices from the future cried out in confusion and despair, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened to the future of our craft.
In short before we Ctrl+Copy our way to StackOverflow or Forums or IRC and we got collection of responses between good and ugly.
But made us think and read or talk to others.
Now we Ctrl+Copy into LLM into a room of hell.
If LLM function is useful but don't get addicted to like honey.
irrational · 12h ago
> 2014: questions started to decline, which was also when Stack Overflow significantly improved moderator efficiency. From then, questions were closed faster, many more were closed, and “low quality” questions were removed more efficiently. This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site felt unwelcome.
I also felt around that time that it became unwelcoming. I didn’t realize they had revamped the moderator tools. That is the time period when I stopped using it too. Now I know why.
How many other websites have also shot themselves in the foot by tweaking things?
mnky9800n · 11h ago
Yes I felt the same around then. It seemed like stack overflow was sending the message to not ask questions anymore. It was really weird.
D13Fd · 9h ago
Same. I've never been a huge StackOverflow user, but it is so irritating to search and find your exact question on StackOverflow, often as the top result, only to see that it was instantly shut down two years ago as a duplicate of some other question in another context with inapplicable and useless answers.
It is frustrating not only because you can't get instant help, but also because it shows the futility of even trying to post on there.
amy214 · 6h ago
people who own walled gardens often get the idea in their head to prune up the trees a little, make them elegant looking and pretty, that's moderation, deletion, banning,etc. they get a good feeling pruning the tree, making something beautiful, moment of joy, thinking that such a beauticious little garden they've made will make it all the more appealing to visitors and potential garden supporters.
some have a tendency to go overboard with this thinking, only to discover that a heavily pruned tree is now a dead tree, now finding themselves in dead tree garden.
Buttons840 · 9h ago
For a time the "let's interact with people and talk about cool things" group and the "let's build the ultimate knowledge base" group had their incentives aligned.
Then, with better moderator tools, the "ultimate knowledge base" group set out to achieve the ultimate knowledge base by reducing the amount of people who were just there to talk.
Funes- · 11h ago
How ironic. "AI" feeds off structured knowledge, artistic creations and otherwise any human production to generate its output. As a consequence of its widespread adoption, people start to lean even more towards consuming rather than producing, a tendency which was already increasing before the advent of LLMs and modern machine-learning. This, in turn, leaves "AI" implementations with no new human content to feed off of. Now what? The whole process folds onto itself. Are we entering the dark ages of cultural (in the widest sense of the word) production? Not that I don't think that we're already there, in any case, but for other, somewhat related causes...
bloppe · 11h ago
Perhaps the next step is having the LLMs ask questions on SO when they routinely fumble particular topics. I could see a system of knowledge bounties where people are compensated for providing accurate, in-depth training data on niche topics.
zahlman · 11h ago
LLM content is banned everywhere on Stack Overflow, in both questions and answers, by policy, since mere days after the public announcement of ChatGPT (because it was immediately causing a huge problem): https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831
Moderators (actual elected moderators, the two dozen or so that exist for ~29 million user accounts and ~24 million non-deleted questions) went on strike in mid 2023, largely because the site staff/owners interfered with their ability to remove such content (an overwhelmingly popular policy with strong community consensus): https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000 and this decision propagated across the Stack Exchange network (as most SE sites had adopted similar policies): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/
A large fraction of the userbase is explicitly opposed to helping LLMs out in any way whatsoever. I personally have ceased contributing new question or answer content, and only edit existing posts. I contribute new content on Codidact (https://software.codidact.com/) instead (disclosure: I have recently become a moderator there).
trial3 · 11h ago
you’re one or two additional sentences away from the plot to The Matrix
dinfinity · 11h ago
> This, in turn, leaves "AI" implementations with no new human content to feed off of. Now what?
You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor.
It doesn't. Because none of the average SO contributors did.
It is unclear what algorithmic improvements are required to leverage the available data to get AI to AGI, but a lack of data is definitely not the bottleneck.
One could say that these AI systems aren't sharing their solutions (or questions) with other AI systems and that the world would benefit from it if they did, though. Perhaps it's a good idea to have some shared space for AI systems where they share the validated solutions they synthesized.
dragonwriter · 11h ago
> You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor.
Replacing the average SO cobtributor isn't adequate to replace SO, and AI is able to “replace” SO effectively only since major models have gotten not only SO-as-training-data but web search (including SO) for immediate grounding.
And without SO or something like it with active human contributions it’ll have even more trouble replacing the value SO would provide for new questions and new domains where it will neither have SO traijing data nor SO query-time-search-results to use to synthesize answers.
palata · 12h ago
I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say "in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now we are doing it as it was meant to be".
Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
bawolff · 12h ago
I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity.
Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.
Karrot_Kream · 9h ago
The "good" thing is, they're back to 2009 levels of postings. Now obviously that's what the mods let through but my guess is that traffic to the site is down precipitously as well. They can roll back their bureaucracy and head back to a lean path that worked for them in the past.
But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.
motorest · 12h ago
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.
zahlman · 11h ago
>the current StackOverflow moderators
Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing
So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.
> and now it's dying
Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
> Maybe something was better before
Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?
If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.
The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.
palata · 11h ago
> Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators.
I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually).
> Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
zahlman · 10h ago
>You keep saying everything is great.
I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does.
There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose.
> My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add
... And?
> There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions.
As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.
palata · 9h ago
> ... And?
And as far as I can see, it is dying.
> If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem.
So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
> it would become easier to find what you want.
It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions. It has happened, though, that I could not find what I wanted because it was not there. And when I added it, I was closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
Again, I am not saying that it should be forbidden to close questions. What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
zahlman · 9h ago
> And as far as I can see, it is dying.
And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?
> So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
Yes.
You write this as though you think there is a contradiction here. I genuinely don't understand why. There is no contradiction here.
> It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions.
Back when I was trying to sort out the mess more actively, it happened to me daily. I distinctly recall multiple instances of spending hours at a time tearing my hair out over it, and complaining in the corresponding chat about the terrible questions, the unintentional clickbait, and the sensitivity of search engines to minor variations in the query.
> closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
This is said by perhaps 90% of people complaining about their question being closed, and trivially shown to be incorrect in perhaps 90% of those cases.
But also, "people can't figure out what you're trying to ask" counts against your question. By design. Because questions are expected to communicate clearly. So that other people who read them don't have to waste their own time making sure they're in the right place.
Of course, there are other reasons a question might not be understood. But it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology". People are, broadly speaking, just not going around the tags for technologies they don't know about in order to close questions. What on Earth would they get out of that?
> What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
Again: please show a link to an example of a question that you believe was unjustifiably closed, and make sure that you can clearly explain, in terms of existing policy why you believe the closure was invalid.
Or if you have done this in the past, link me an example of that. That's fine here.
bdangubic · 9h ago
And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?
the reality makes this judgment. something that was worth billions of dollars could probably be bought for $50m (this is too much…). a definition of dead
zahlman · 8h ago
I don't think that is relevant, either. Nobody who asks or answers a question on Stack Overflow, nor comments, nor edits an existing post, does so with the specific intent of increasing the market cap of Stack Exchange, Inc.
goobie · 12h ago
AFAICR they've always said these lines about now is about better moderation from the slop. The reality is that the rule of thumb for that moderation was already out of date with advances that preceeded LLMs.. Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few. Content can be triaged from someone who may be human to others who may be human and maybe there's value or maybe you just didn't alienate anyone and some people will still climb to making higher levels of content that is worth condensing.
zahlman · 11h ago
> Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few.
The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.
Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.
Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.
So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
palata · 11h ago
> So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?
I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
zahlman · 10h ago
The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal.
When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
palata · 10h ago
> The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions
I see that you just don't hear the complaints.
I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
zahlman · 9h ago
> I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers.
Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.
goobie · 4h ago
Antisocial people flood the site with low quality answers to low quality questions and not indexing everything to the web is just too hard.. Imagine if every town and school was filled with the same pricks? Your kids are stupid and don't understand PhD level research so they should shut up.
It's all very logical for an older time when global communication was the kind of thing you needed to reserve for the top researchers as your total capacity was less than humanity needed. But now you are just repeating the mantras of older generations in an antisocial way.
outcoldman · 5h ago
It is a bit sad. And obviously the reason why it sees such a decline is because AI (ChatGPT and similar) took the job of answering the basic questions about programming that StackOverflow used to help with.
Looking at my profile since 14 years ago, the most upvoted answer that I solved was about a basic question of how to specify fields properly when you serialize JSON into a C# class.
I do believe the value of StackOverflow was only about people who were lazy enough to read the documentation of the language/framework they were trying to use. I used to be active on StackOverflow back in the days, but in the last 10 years the only value I saw in it was if I needed to get back to some language to just find an answer on how to write a for loop in that specific language (swift vs go vs ...).
I personally do not believe there is much knowledge base on StackOverflow. In most of my questions to "google" for the last 10 years, very rarely would I be directed to StackOverflow for the right answer.
There are a lot of complicated questions on StackOverflow, but the site was flooded by people asking and answering basic questions about programming. And people who are there just to get some karma.
kamaal · 5h ago
>>And obviously the reason why it sees such a decline is because AI (ChatGPT and similar) took the job of answering the basic questions about programming that StackOverflow used to help with.
A big reason why AI is replacing these things. A big part is the experience itself. There are quite a few people who have have been repulsed due to the smugness, or other wise having their questions marked duplicate/irrelevant/stupid etc.
AI is also pretty much instant. You can also talk to it like you are talking to a person.
The killer AI feature!---> AI listens, without judging you.
billy99k · 13h ago
The timing on the sale was genius. Similar to Mark Cuban with Broadcast.com. I guess it's best to sell something before the value plummets to 0.
As far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven't even gone to the site for a couple of years now.
zahlman · 10h ago
The new owners have been trying very hard with the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. They know this is radically against community consensus (it's been shown to them on the meta site over and over) - so they just get sneakier about it.
Where's the AI of tomorrow going to learn from if nobody is posting Q&As online anymore?
stego-tech · 12h ago
That’s a tomorrow problem.
(As someone who is all too often hired tomorrow, at a fraction of the before rates, to clean up this mess)
chickenzzzzu · 12h ago
information will be repackaged like credit default swaps in the mid 2000s.
bawolff · 12h ago
From the official docs? AI is good at sumarizing after all
Buttons840 · 11h ago
I've been trying to get ChatGPT to write some Emacs Lisp for me and it sucks. Few things are better documented than Emacs. There's several hundreds of pages of documentation, and several million lines of Elisp, but apparently that's not enough.
And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess.
Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.
tedunangst · 12h ago
Good luck with that. The last thing I used SO for was getting answers for SwiftUI and I can assure you the official docs did not contain the needed information.
nlawalker · 12h ago
Other people's code on GitHub.
jsheard · 12h ago
The other people's code which will have been AI generated by older, dumber models in many if not most cases? Possibly even written and committed by AI agents with no human review at all? European royalty tried this kind of thing and it didn't end well.
Funes- · 11h ago
You got this exactly right. I've been trying to sound the horn on this issue for years now, since GPT-3 got released and exploded into the mainstream and you could read and hear "you don't need to {x} anymore with AI" all over the place.
mosdl · 13h ago
AI just stole all its content, I wonder if they will choose to sue.
> ... and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to ...
amanaplanacanal · 12h ago
That license comes with obligations that the AI companies aren't following.
bawolff · 12h ago
Its highly debatable if that's true.
The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.
shinycode · 12h ago
Cursor once wrote a comment, I prompted then « what is the source of the comment » and it replaced the comment with a stackoverflow url in which the page contained the said comment verbatim. I didn’t expect cursor to paste the full url
timewizard · 12h ago
Well.. if given the right prompt.. it will effectively fully reproduce a stack overflow post in it's original form then there is no controversy and we can all see plainly what's going on behind the scenes.
bawolff · 12h ago
Will it actually? There have certainly been incidents of that sort of thing, but from what i understand people have not been able to reliably make that happen for specific posts .
timewizard · 10h ago
Define "it."
And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration."
It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach.
The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.
souldeux · 12h ago
A distinction that is unfortunately as important as it is meaningless
panstromek · 12h ago
Doesn't feel like the AI is the main driver. Many things changed over time - dev tools got better, editors got smarter, compilers got better error messages, various primary resources improved, tutorial websites, courses and youtube boomed.
Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
jayflux · 12h ago
One aspect I haven’t seen anyone mention contributing to the decline is GitHub (part of your “improved tooling”)
These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there.
Before GH boomed it was often SO doing this job.
makeitdouble · 12h ago
It could be the most impacting aspect IMHO.
This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.
There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
imglorp · 12h ago
> each new question is more and more likely to be already answered
Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.
ahofmann · 11h ago
I answered one question 13 years ago where I still gets points for. Computing as a whole isn't so much in constant flux, it is only JavaScript that changes so much. Hell, I learned to use Apache 30 years ago, and I didn't need to learn anything new the last 25 years of that.
zahlman · 10h ago
The change to Python 3 effectively either invalidated or deprecated tons of Python questions, or else required new answers to be written. In many cases we ended up with an annoying pair of popular questions to capture major 2->3 differences, because you'd get clueless users who thought they were running a 2.x interpreter but were actually running a 3.x interpreter, and also the other way around.
zahlman · 10h ago
There was a noticeable inflection in the question-rate-vs-time curve around the time that ChatGPT was released.
Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.
(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)
nthingtohide · 12h ago
> Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.
ashirviskas · 12h ago
Yes, it can combine multiple sources and make up an answer that makes no sense. Even if it explains how "it works", it does not help when the API or a function has never existed.
deepsummer · 3h ago
I think "number of questions asked" is the wrong metric. Because it feels like all the questions have already been asked. Whenever I need to know something, I can google it and find answers on Stack Overflow. I can't remember the last time I actually had to ask something. Or the last time I found a question that didn't already have a good answer. Stack Overflow's library of question is pretty complete, and the only reason for new questions are new tools.
Certainly LLMs are a huge factor, but I feel that LLMs rarely give good (and trustworthy!) answers to the things I would check on Stackoverflow. Just like LLMs are no good replacement for API references because they get the details wrong all the time.
mvanveen · 3h ago
I think this is true if there aren't new questions to be asked. But technologies shift and evolve all of the time.
One of my top StackOverflow questions for years was around the viability of ECMAscript 6. It's now essentially irrelevant because it's found wide adoption in browsers etc. but at the time a lot of people appreciated the question because they wanted to adopt the technology but weren't sure what its maturity was.
It's also true that some technology stacks mature to a point where there isn't much more to be asked but I think there will continue to be a place for forums of discussion where you can ask and get answers around newer, bleeding edge technologies, use cases etc.
DoctorMckay101 · 1h ago
My approved to shut down question rate was about 40/60. And within the approved questions, I only got the answers I looked for like 50-60% of the time. Got to 350 points myself. I hated every second of it.
Really aggressive moderation, people trying to score points for a worthless achievement system by spamming comments like "You should narrow the scope of this question"
Having to grind achievements to be able to comment, like or dislike.
I used it for a year or so back in 2013?, went back to posting in forums like XDA developers, Codeguru and Reddit.
bfung · 12h ago
Where will training data come from for new tech & programming languages if SO dies?
tevon · 12h ago
All the same places it comes from for human programmers before a language has many answers on SO.
- Documentation
- Open source projects using it
- Github issues
- Source code
- Blogs
- Youtube videos
The list goes on
bfung · 6h ago
To add a bit more nuance, SO has a question-answer type format, which leads very well into prompt-rely format to train these chat applications. Most of the other sources do not, except for Github issues maybe. Without this question-answer format, there'll be a need for a bigger data labeling effort to train LLMs on new stuff, no?
oliwarner · 11h ago
Woof. Looking at a single metric and extrapolating "LLMs killed the radio star"
Stack Exchange sites are designed to nuke duplicates, help people before they post a new question. It seems a natural conclusion that the number of original questions decreases over time.
I won't pretend that some people live their lives inside and LLM but many of us still use search engines and SO.
croemer · 2h ago
Questions asked isn't the metric to declare it dead. What matters for financial viability is traffic and deals with search engines/indexes (used by LLMs)
For community viability: people will keep using it where LLMs fail. For new problems. It's still the place to go for undocumented workarounds.
Traffic and voting activity is certainly down but there is still immense value and new valuable questions are asked and answered there.
bloppe · 11h ago
This will have interesting implications for the LLMs as well, since SO is a wealth of training data. In my experience, LLMs are pretty useless when it comes to helping me with newer, faster-evolving, experimental tools and libraries, which is not surprising. But, if the SO community really atrophies to the point that a lot fewer people are bothering to answer questions, there won't be another centralized resource for answers. Perhaps that just means balkanized communities like random Slack channels will fill the gap, but those aren't search-indexed and I'd bet getting them all into training corpi won't be as easy either.
Maybe the future involves LLMs asking questions on something like SO when it routinely fumbles a particular topic. People could get paid to answer them and provide more training data. Who knows at this point
benoau · 12h ago
Personally my usage of S.O. was significantly reduced just by sticking to the same stack and tools for the last 7 or 8 years and letting depth accumulate instead of always being in the midst of learning a new framework / language / whatever that necessitated googling how to do x in y or z.
And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don't recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.
h4kunamata · 9h ago
I have mixed feeling about this.
It has helped me in the past but yet, I could not reply nor post anything back to help others when I knew the solution because of the way how it works.
To make matters worse while working in IT, I worked with a guy that didn't know anything, if there was no SO post about the problem, the guy couldn't fix the problem.
I have been using Perplexity AI and it has been awesome, and it does provide all the sources it used making it easy to cross check the answers.
It has helped me to speed my python learning curve, I am not using search engine anymore, and SO has the problems mentioned above so I have zero interest in using it.
Also, the website layout is a mess, I have to use uBlock Origin with a ton of element picker to stop loading half of its crappy.
simonsarris · 9h ago
I used to answer questions a lot, by around 2013 I had answered maybe ~12% of all HTML canvas questions ever asked. To me it declined a lot sooner, 2014 really does feel like the right inflection point.
There was a belief, sometimes unstated but often explicit, that no more (serious) discussion is really to be had, and further wondering how can one stop people from asking. It became difficult to discuss anything if there was even something vaguely related asked before. It was not possible to discuss something you knew the answer to, but did not know why, or wanted to hear arguments for which of 5 ways might be best. All (to me) very worthwhile technical discussions. Totally shut down.
scubadude · 10h ago
I have some minimally popular answers on SO and for years my "points" graph has notched its way upwards. It flatlined at the start of 2024 as people moved to AI.
The best thing about SO is seeing the competing solutions, the discussions, meaning with some discernment you can find that peer-reviewed high quality code snippet. Why would people prefer whatever the AI spits out?
Fortunately I see a few blips on SO so hopefully people are coming back now that the shine has worn off AI.
What is the value of SO to the world economy? Billions. Like the internet archive, it should be some sort of government funded (UN?) library
acyou · 12h ago
I'm curious if Stack Overflow was a good resource for human learning? As in, run into a problem, look through other related questions and answers, check the documentation, struggle for awhile learning and figuring out how to frame and pose the question, struggle some more while you wait to get an answer. I kind of find LLMs "too easy" and can distinctly feel myself "not learning", not the way I used to, but after all I am getting older.
I'm pretty sure you can get a stack overflowy experience out of an llm with the right system prompt, but the human factor might not be the same. Not wanting to be berated by others on the internet is maybe underrated as a motivational tool. How are we going to get that back?
acyou · 11h ago
Not to mention the helping and teaching other people aspect, which feels good, it feels like there isn't as much of that now. Or maybe it has just moved away onto Discord etc, but GitHub definitely doesn't feel like it has that aspect, if you don't also personally know other contributors and reviewers. Curious if others feel this way.
koakuma-chan · 12h ago
Of course it's dead, that's what you get for harassing users who try to ask questions.
IvyMike · 12h ago
How will ChatGPT learn the next computer language now?
bgnn · 12h ago
We are in the future, nothing new needed here.
add-sub-mul-div · 11h ago
How will there be new programming languages after people stop practicing programming and the skills decay because an AI is performing the deliberate practice?
exsomet · 12h ago
Stack Overflow was a question and answer site that discouraged people from asking or answering questions.
LLMs probably sped things up, but it seems like it was inevitable that it would fall into disuse and eventually be overtaken one way or another.
dingaling · 3h ago
Your comment looks like a good one but you've posted it as an answer so I've no choice but to delete it.
When you earn enough reputation please come back and re-post your comment.
AdamH12113 · 12h ago
Are there any similar articles on the state of the rest of the Stack Exchange network? There are many, many other SE sites that have nothing to do programming and are often less amenable to being answered via LLM.
dubeye · 11h ago
my business has a similar revenue curve, and of course LLMs are a big cause, but it's more to do with me being distracted from moving with the times. I just didn't fancy the fight and saw enough value in the curve to let it follow ranged decline
I'm assuming the owners of stack felt similar? Don't know anything about them so could be easily wrong
kurtis_reed · 9h ago
A sociological case study. Legit founders, a fruitful niche, immense value. Growth, politics, corporatization. They did so many things right, then so many things wrong.
If it were up to me, moderation would have been overhauled. But it wasn't up to me.
asadm · 12h ago
I don't miss spending hours trying to find the right config to make things work and trying random answers on SO. Overall the dev world is a better place now and MANY dev hours are being saved. Plus, AI can now learn any new framework/language directly from docs. Even obscure ones, just pass all the .md files to gemini and ask!
Buttons840 · 11h ago
StackOverflow should have focused on linking duplicates rather than forbidding duplicates.
No Boilerplate recently said "writing is thinking"[0], and suggested links are the ultimate knowledge graph organizational tool--not tags, not folders--links[1].
StackOverflow tried to prevent all duplicate questions. This was stifling and reduced writing, reduced thought, and most importantly, reduced user engagement.
The people who wanted to write their problems and ask their questions stopped going to StackOverflow. The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow.
Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over. Let the people write their questions, and write their answers and give advice. Instead of preventing duplicates, link duplicate questions together.
> StackOverflow should have focused on linking duplicates rather than forbidding duplicates.... StackOverflow tried to prevent all duplicate questions.
Duplicates are not forbidden on Stack Overflow. Duplicate questions are linked together - that's what "duplicate" means in the system. Beyond that, logged-out users who land on a duplicate question that doesn't have its own answers, will be automatically redirected to the target.
When duplicate question are linked on Stack Overflow (and everywhere else on Stack Exchange), they are automatically closed, which merely prevents new answers. The purpose is to allow high-quality answers to be gathered in one place - on the duplicate target, which in turn is ideally a high-quality version of the question (and a focus for curators to improve further, when they notice that it becomes a common duplicate target).
Deletion of duplicates (and posts in general) is not very well understood and people are not all on the same page - see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214 . But normally duplicates should not be deleted unless they are actively harming the search results (i.e.: it causes people to find the wrong target, because it was written in a way that fools keyword search).
Nobody gets formally sanctioned for posting a duplicate. You just get your question closed, and maybe asked to search a bit more carefully in the future (or shown how to do so).
> The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow. Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over.
People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow. That action is actively counterproductive to what Stack Overflow is trying to accomplish. There are countless discussion forums (and as you say, Discord and IRC channels) already where that behaviour is valued. The Internet should be allowed to have one place where it is not valued - especially when it's a place that was specifically created to accommodate people who want search engines to be useful; who want to write high quality answers once and get many people to read them; etc.
Buttons840 · 10h ago
Maybe "answered by duplicate" would have been a more friendly way to say it--but I hear you, yeah, the closed questions were linked, which is what I was asking for. Whatever the case, a lot of people decided to never use the site because their questions were closed.
> People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow.
I think it's worth asking, why do people give answers on the internet at all? Maybe it's because of internet points, but more often people just like interacting with other humans and teaching.
In the beginning, StackOverflow was a place for people who wanted to interact with other humans, and also a place for people who wanted to build the ultimate knowledge base--for a time their incentives were aligned.
But then over time the space for interacting with other humans got smaller and smaller, and now StackOverflow is almost entirely about maintaining the knowledge base that has been built.
And yeah, like you say, it's okay if StackOverflow isn't the place for human interaction. StackOverflow has built its knowledge base, and some still maintain it, and the long term success of that knowledge base is becoming ever more apparent--which is to say, not very successful--the day may soon come that StackOverflow isn't even hosted anymore.
(Also, I want to ward off the claims that this is because of AI. StackOverflow was in steady decline long before AI was competent at answering questions; even in 2025 the competence of AI is still in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000118)
coolius · 12h ago
Stackoverflow answers kind of provided a source of truth by being confirmed / upvoted by people trying them out. We're completely abandoning this medium (on which LLMs are trained), even as technologies keep changing. Perhaps coding agents should start posting to stackoverflow too...
ghaff · 11h ago
Per the post, it seems as if SO was going to going to slide beneath the surface anyway but that LLMs were one of a number of factors that maybe accelerated the process by maybe a few years. Without having deep knowledge of the area, this feels about right.
CyberMacGyver · 12h ago
Didn’t SamA paid out StackOverflow already?[0] So as far as the owners go they are doing fine.
You don't start and run StackOverflow because of the money. You do it because you really care. Running niche communities isn't a lucrative path, and (as we're seeing now) they can be quite fickle.
Additionally, it's not just the owners... it's the millions of people who contributed.
Gee101 · 12h ago
It looks like Stackoverflow was already in a decline even before Covid.
I wonder what developers started using during that time.
cjs_ac · 12h ago
They still used it, they just didn't contribute. It's not that StackOverflow is useless, but rather that it already answers most questions.
rienbdj · 12h ago
That, and genuinely new questions get aggressively shut down.
Someone · 12h ago
Given the speed at which tech evolves, I do not see how that can be true.
I think it may answer most questions from five years ago, but I would phrase it as “it has answers for most questions, but many are outdated and there’s no easy way to tell whether an answer is outdated”
mixmastamyk · 11h ago
"Rank by recent votes" has been a feature for perhaps five years already.
usefulcat · 12h ago
The graph shows monthly questions asked, not monthly questions answered. It makes total sense that the slope of that graph would be much higher earlier in the life of the site; as time goes on, many common questions will have already been answered.
gitgud · 12h ago
An old fact about StackOverflow is that there’s a disproportionate amount of views compared to questions asked.
Something like 1000x more views than posts/comments… I wonder if that statistic has changed over the years?…
ndneighbor · 11h ago
My day job includes moderation. I think I am more empathetic to the issues that moderators deal with on a day to day basis given that they are underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked.
It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I noticed that SO started getting more strict from 2014 onward, I wouldn't know immediately what to do about the content quality issue.
My take is that, like most things, the medium of the old will be appreciated the way it wasn't in 2014. As the Brian Eno quote goes: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." People will yearn for the human forums the same way they did years past when people tire of the LLM slop. (If they do.)
hnlurker22 · 12h ago
AI is great but when it gets stuck I go to stack overflow. Happened to me yesterday
umvi · 12h ago
I suspect there will always be a place for SO-esque sites, but it will shift to be primarily for creating high quality data for ingestion by LLMs.
bluefirebrand · 12h ago
This is the absolute worst possible outcome! Humans toiling just to produce content to train AI on
What a miserable future to look forward to
zahlman · 11h ago
> This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions.
Respectfully: outsiders like the author of this piece are not the ones entitled to decide whether a question is "legitimate", or "valid" (another term I see used all the time by people who have no understanding either of Stack Overflow's standards or its goals).
Just how is 25K new questions a month dead? Even if it gradually asymptomates to just 1K, the answers to them are enough to continue serving as a critical base layer of high-quality training data for LLMs.
Let's say for the sake of argument that 95% of humanity perished. Is humanity then dead? It isn't.
cadamsdotcom · 10h ago
All things have their time.
Some get superseded.
Others accelerate their decline through self-foot-shooting and/or enshittification.
Stack Overflow's journey into obscurity is via a mix of private equity indifference, better docs elsewhere, and a lack of leadership over its moderators. It was in decline long before LLMs.
It is not a new story - but it does help map out the modes of platform senescence.
Wasn't the first; won't be the last.
storus · 12h ago
No wonder, the CEO basically said they'll use the free labor of love of all member devs to sell training data for AI in order to replace such devs so why would anyone keep contributing there?
dbg31415 · 12h ago
> June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor, Prosus. In hindsight, the founders – Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky – sold with near-perfect timing, before terminal decline.
Hey, if it all crashes and burns, at least it’s the so-called smartest guys in the room going down with the ship. Just a bunch of VCs learning the hard way that they had no idea how to actually run or grow the company they bought. “Look at how well we optimized it!” Yeah — right into the ground.
hooverd · 12h ago
I wonder how the other -overflows are doing?
cranberryturkey · 12h ago
stackoverflow started declining long before AI. Their ban-happy moderators were to blame.
fullstackchris · 12h ago
the stock market looked like that chart in 2008 and look where we are now
unless LLMs can be instantly trained on all new software frameworks and languages that come out, im not worried stackoverflow will still have a place
mschuster91 · 12h ago
> The question seems to be when Stack Overflow will wind down operations, or the owner sells the site for comparative pennies, not if it will happen.
I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.
Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don't waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.
> I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.
Yeah fuuuuck that. It's so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can't pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA/Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.
Hardware is usually just a small part of running a website.
mschuster91 · 12h ago
Set up StackOverflow according to "cloud native" recommendations and whoops, that's gonna be quite the bill, which is my point. You'll have Cloudfront for global load balancing, ELB to provide a bridge between Cloudfront and Kubernetes, EFS for storage, RDS for the database, EKS and EC2 for compute, ElastiCache for KV cache, add in CodeBuild for build/deploy pipelines... AWS has quite the hefty overhead.
bawolff · 12h ago
Oh definitely. AWS is where you go to set money on fire.
However servers aren't the sort of thing you can just plugin and forget when running a major website. Things go down, users trigger edge cases, people try and DOS you, disks fill up, etc. You do still need some staff to take care of things
paulpauper · 12h ago
All the "overflow/exchange" sites suck, not just the stack overflow. Too many questions being closed. I had a question closed in mathexchange because, I surmise, it was "too obvious" even though easier questions were asked as recently as 2021, even much more elementary ones. Moreover, my specific question had never been asked there before, and the point of math exchange is to ask easier questions, compared to mathoverflow.
But it's also possible it's pivoting to a Wikipedia-like model where it becomes a repository for answers, and less about contributions. In which case, this is not the same as it dying. As seen with Wikipedia, it can still get a lot of traffic and revenue even if few people contribute to it anymore.
IshKebab · 12h ago
They really only have themselves to blame. Yeah AI has massively accelerated the decline but I think it's mainly provided an option that isn't so frustrating to use. ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.
I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many valid questions were closed.
They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
zahlman · 10h ago
> ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.
Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be trying to ask a question at all), so there's no reason to care about whether other people can understand the question - let alone figure out whether it's something they also want to ask.
> I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure. The entire point is that when you come to Stack Overflow, you aren't the one who gets to decide what the standards for questions are, or judge whether your question meets those standards. Because if you were, the standards would effectively not exist.
The people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
> I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work. Famously, a user with over a million reputation once went on a spree of violations (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072) of the best-publicized site policy ever to appear on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/). Many users with 100k+ reputation and/or a 10+ year history have likely never looked at the meta site. (See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224 for someone who first posted on meta after 14 years.)
IshKebab · 4h ago
> It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content.
That's fundamentally where SO went wrong. The mods think they're building programming Wikipedia, but normal users are using it as a Q&A forum.
> Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure.
No it doesn't. It's far too easy to close a question and they very rarely get reopened. The suggestion was that users only get to unilaterally reopen it once.
> I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work.
See this is exactly the problem. You have the mods' view of how it is supposed to work, but that isn't how people want it to work!
Mods want it to be this highly curated reference site where only perfectly written questions that exactly fit an FAQ style of questioning. They don't care that that makes it useless (or at least extremely frustrating) as a Q&A forum.
enriquto · 12h ago
Interestingly, the site stopped growing at about the same time when the "fun killers" [0] took hand of it. Notably, when they deleted the all-time highest voting question
"New programming jargon you coined?".
This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.
State of the art models constantly generate bullshit, even if I find them generally useful. Your blind hype does nothing but make people more skeptical of it.
It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.
It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing.
But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:
"I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there.
"Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658)
"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.
Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.
If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.
Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
>If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is.
> Either what I was looking for was already there
The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
> That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge.
I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply.
That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter.
> The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly).
This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
> When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.
We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously.
But none of this seems to make a difference. And people come to the site with expectations about politeness that simply aren't conducive to getting people to stop doing things they aren't supposed to do:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373801 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334870
Meanwhile, a major reason why people aren't required to explain in a comment why they downvoted a question, is because of the history we've had with downright vitriolic replies from OPs who seem uninterested in the rules:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352575
Rudeness happens all around, really:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326494
Related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/309018/523612
(And, of course, all of this really blows up once assumptions start getting made about who is or isn't especially sensitive: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366665)
SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.
But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.
No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.
You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).
Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.
Hooks and components in React are as different as a limited-edition issue of Radioactive Man and the garbage they stuff in the Sunday comics.
[...]
If you're writing React without understanding this distinction, please, for the love of all that is unholy in Springfield, step away from the keyboard and go read the official React docs. Twice. Maybe thrice.
I'm not surprised it's on the way out.
I've had 3 deleted by Community bot as abandoned, but since they were over a year old when that happened, I couldn't care less.
It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.
But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?
And what makes the data outdated? New code? It can train on that. That, or there is simply nothing new to learn, just new ways to express the same thing.
What makes you think we will be doing fundamentally the same thing in the future? Language grow and change, systems change, operating systems change, hardware and specs change..
Nothing in computing is ever static.
In short before we Ctrl+Copy our way to StackOverflow or Forums or IRC and we got collection of responses between good and ugly. But made us think and read or talk to others.
Now we Ctrl+Copy into LLM into a room of hell.
If LLM function is useful but don't get addicted to like honey.
I also felt around that time that it became unwelcoming. I didn’t realize they had revamped the moderator tools. That is the time period when I stopped using it too. Now I know why.
How many other websites have also shot themselves in the foot by tweaking things?
It is frustrating not only because you can't get instant help, but also because it shows the futility of even trying to post on there.
some have a tendency to go overboard with this thinking, only to discover that a heavily pruned tree is now a dead tree, now finding themselves in dead tree garden.
Then, with better moderator tools, the "ultimate knowledge base" group set out to achieve the ultimate knowledge base by reducing the amount of people who were just there to talk.
Moderators (actual elected moderators, the two dozen or so that exist for ~29 million user accounts and ~24 million non-deleted questions) went on strike in mid 2023, largely because the site staff/owners interfered with their ability to remove such content (an overwhelmingly popular policy with strong community consensus): https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000 and this decision propagated across the Stack Exchange network (as most SE sites had adopted similar policies): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/
A large fraction of the userbase is explicitly opposed to helping LLMs out in any way whatsoever. I personally have ceased contributing new question or answer content, and only edit existing posts. I contribute new content on Codidact (https://software.codidact.com/) instead (disclosure: I have recently become a moderator there).
You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor. It doesn't. Because none of the average SO contributors did.
It is unclear what algorithmic improvements are required to leverage the available data to get AI to AGI, but a lack of data is definitely not the bottleneck.
One could say that these AI systems aren't sharing their solutions (or questions) with other AI systems and that the world would benefit from it if they did, though. Perhaps it's a good idea to have some shared space for AI systems where they share the validated solutions they synthesized.
Replacing the average SO cobtributor isn't adequate to replace SO, and AI is able to “replace” SO effectively only since major models have gotten not only SO-as-training-data but web search (including SO) for immediate grounding.
And without SO or something like it with active human contributions it’ll have even more trouble replacing the value SO would provide for new questions and new domains where it will neither have SO traijing data nor SO query-time-search-results to use to synthesize answers.
Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.
But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.
You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.
Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing
So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.
> and now it's dying
Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
> Maybe something was better before
Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?
If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.
The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.
I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually).
> Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does.
There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose.
> My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add
... And?
> There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions.
As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.
And as far as I can see, it is dying.
> If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem.
So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
> it would become easier to find what you want.
It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions. It has happened, though, that I could not find what I wanted because it was not there. And when I added it, I was closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
Again, I am not saying that it should be forbidden to close questions. What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?
> So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
Yes.
You write this as though you think there is a contradiction here. I genuinely don't understand why. There is no contradiction here.
QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either (https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html).
> It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions.
Back when I was trying to sort out the mess more actively, it happened to me daily. I distinctly recall multiple instances of spending hours at a time tearing my hair out over it, and complaining in the corresponding chat about the terrible questions, the unintentional clickbait, and the sensitivity of search engines to minor variations in the query.
> closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
This is said by perhaps 90% of people complaining about their question being closed, and trivially shown to be incorrect in perhaps 90% of those cases.
But also, "people can't figure out what you're trying to ask" counts against your question. By design. Because questions are expected to communicate clearly. So that other people who read them don't have to waste their own time making sure they're in the right place.
Of course, there are other reasons a question might not be understood. But it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology". People are, broadly speaking, just not going around the tags for technologies they don't know about in order to close questions. What on Earth would they get out of that?
> What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
Again: please show a link to an example of a question that you believe was unjustifiably closed, and make sure that you can clearly explain, in terms of existing policy why you believe the closure was invalid.
Do this on https://meta.stackoverflow.com, where it belongs.
Or if you have done this in the past, link me an example of that. That's fine here.
the reality makes this judgment. something that was worth billions of dollars could probably be bought for $50m (this is too much…). a definition of dead
The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.
Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.
Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.
So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?
I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
I see that you just don't hear the complaints.
I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers.
Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.
It's all very logical for an older time when global communication was the kind of thing you needed to reserve for the top researchers as your total capacity was less than humanity needed. But now you are just repeating the mantras of older generations in an antisocial way.
Looking at my profile since 14 years ago, the most upvoted answer that I solved was about a basic question of how to specify fields properly when you serialize JSON into a C# class.
I do believe the value of StackOverflow was only about people who were lazy enough to read the documentation of the language/framework they were trying to use. I used to be active on StackOverflow back in the days, but in the last 10 years the only value I saw in it was if I needed to get back to some language to just find an answer on how to write a for loop in that specific language (swift vs go vs ...).
I personally do not believe there is much knowledge base on StackOverflow. In most of my questions to "google" for the last 10 years, very rarely would I be directed to StackOverflow for the right answer.
There are a lot of complicated questions on StackOverflow, but the site was flooded by people asking and answering basic questions about programming. And people who are there just to get some karma.
A big reason why AI is replacing these things. A big part is the experience itself. There are quite a few people who have have been repulsed due to the smugness, or other wise having their questions marked duplicate/irrelevant/stupid etc.
AI is also pretty much instant. You can also talk to it like you are talking to a person.
The killer AI feature!---> AI listens, without judging you.
As far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven't even gone to the site for a couple of years now.
Notably, after getting completely humiliated with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 in June 2023 (right after a moderator strike had just started, protesting the staff trying to prevent them from removing AI content from the site), and getting embarrassing feedback on the feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162), they came back last November with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 and have been forcing it through.
(As someone who is all too often hired tomorrow, at a fraction of the before rates, to clean up this mess)
And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess.
Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.
> ... and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to ...
The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.
And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration."
It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach.
The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.
Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there.
Before GH boomed it was often SO doing this job.
This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.
There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.
Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.
(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)
AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.
Certainly LLMs are a huge factor, but I feel that LLMs rarely give good (and trustworthy!) answers to the things I would check on Stackoverflow. Just like LLMs are no good replacement for API references because they get the details wrong all the time.
One of my top StackOverflow questions for years was around the viability of ECMAscript 6. It's now essentially irrelevant because it's found wide adoption in browsers etc. but at the time a lot of people appreciated the question because they wanted to adopt the technology but weren't sure what its maturity was.
It's also true that some technology stacks mature to a point where there isn't much more to be asked but I think there will continue to be a place for forums of discussion where you can ask and get answers around newer, bleeding edge technologies, use cases etc.
Really aggressive moderation, people trying to score points for a worthless achievement system by spamming comments like "You should narrow the scope of this question"
Having to grind achievements to be able to comment, like or dislike.
I used it for a year or so back in 2013?, went back to posting in forums like XDA developers, Codeguru and Reddit.
- Documentation - Open source projects using it - Github issues - Source code - Blogs - Youtube videos
The list goes on
Stack Exchange sites are designed to nuke duplicates, help people before they post a new question. It seems a natural conclusion that the number of original questions decreases over time.
I won't pretend that some people live their lives inside and LLM but many of us still use search engines and SO.
For community viability: people will keep using it where LLMs fail. For new problems. It's still the place to go for undocumented workarounds.
Traffic and voting activity is certainly down but there is still immense value and new valuable questions are asked and answered there.
Maybe the future involves LLMs asking questions on something like SO when it routinely fumbles a particular topic. People could get paid to answer them and provide more training data. Who knows at this point
And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don't recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.
It has helped me in the past but yet, I could not reply nor post anything back to help others when I knew the solution because of the way how it works.
To make matters worse while working in IT, I worked with a guy that didn't know anything, if there was no SO post about the problem, the guy couldn't fix the problem.
I have been using Perplexity AI and it has been awesome, and it does provide all the sources it used making it easy to cross check the answers. It has helped me to speed my python learning curve, I am not using search engine anymore, and SO has the problems mentioned above so I have zero interest in using it.
Also, the website layout is a mess, I have to use uBlock Origin with a ton of element picker to stop loading half of its crappy.
There was a belief, sometimes unstated but often explicit, that no more (serious) discussion is really to be had, and further wondering how can one stop people from asking. It became difficult to discuss anything if there was even something vaguely related asked before. It was not possible to discuss something you knew the answer to, but did not know why, or wanted to hear arguments for which of 5 ways might be best. All (to me) very worthwhile technical discussions. Totally shut down.
The best thing about SO is seeing the competing solutions, the discussions, meaning with some discernment you can find that peer-reviewed high quality code snippet. Why would people prefer whatever the AI spits out?
Fortunately I see a few blips on SO so hopefully people are coming back now that the shine has worn off AI.
What is the value of SO to the world economy? Billions. Like the internet archive, it should be some sort of government funded (UN?) library
I'm pretty sure you can get a stack overflowy experience out of an llm with the right system prompt, but the human factor might not be the same. Not wanting to be berated by others on the internet is maybe underrated as a motivational tool. How are we going to get that back?
LLMs probably sped things up, but it seems like it was inevitable that it would fall into disuse and eventually be overtaken one way or another.
When you earn enough reputation please come back and re-post your comment.
I'm assuming the owners of stack felt similar? Don't know anything about them so could be easily wrong
If it were up to me, moderation would have been overhauled. But it wasn't up to me.
No Boilerplate recently said "writing is thinking"[0], and suggested links are the ultimate knowledge graph organizational tool--not tags, not folders--links[1].
StackOverflow tried to prevent all duplicate questions. This was stifling and reduced writing, reduced thought, and most importantly, reduced user engagement.
The people who wanted to write their problems and ask their questions stopped going to StackOverflow. The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow.
Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over. Let the people write their questions, and write their answers and give advice. Instead of preventing duplicates, link duplicate questions together.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqm4-B07LsE [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0yAy2j-9V0
Duplicates are not forbidden on Stack Overflow. Duplicate questions are linked together - that's what "duplicate" means in the system. Beyond that, logged-out users who land on a duplicate question that doesn't have its own answers, will be automatically redirected to the target.
When duplicate question are linked on Stack Overflow (and everywhere else on Stack Exchange), they are automatically closed, which merely prevents new answers. The purpose is to allow high-quality answers to be gathered in one place - on the duplicate target, which in turn is ideally a high-quality version of the question (and a focus for curators to improve further, when they notice that it becomes a common duplicate target).
Deletion of duplicates (and posts in general) is not very well understood and people are not all on the same page - see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214 . But normally duplicates should not be deleted unless they are actively harming the search results (i.e.: it causes people to find the wrong target, because it was written in a way that fools keyword search).
Nobody gets formally sanctioned for posting a duplicate. You just get your question closed, and maybe asked to search a bit more carefully in the future (or shown how to do so).
> The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow. Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over.
People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow. That action is actively counterproductive to what Stack Overflow is trying to accomplish. There are countless discussion forums (and as you say, Discord and IRC channels) already where that behaviour is valued. The Internet should be allowed to have one place where it is not valued - especially when it's a place that was specifically created to accommodate people who want search engines to be useful; who want to write high quality answers once and get many people to read them; etc.
> People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow.
I think it's worth asking, why do people give answers on the internet at all? Maybe it's because of internet points, but more often people just like interacting with other humans and teaching.
In the beginning, StackOverflow was a place for people who wanted to interact with other humans, and also a place for people who wanted to build the ultimate knowledge base--for a time their incentives were aligned.
But then over time the space for interacting with other humans got smaller and smaller, and now StackOverflow is almost entirely about maintaining the knowledge base that has been built.
And yeah, like you say, it's okay if StackOverflow isn't the place for human interaction. StackOverflow has built its knowledge base, and some still maintain it, and the long term success of that knowledge base is becoming ever more apparent--which is to say, not very successful--the day may soon come that StackOverflow isn't even hosted anymore.
(Also, I want to ward off the claims that this is because of AI. StackOverflow was in steady decline long before AI was competent at answering questions; even in 2025 the competence of AI is still in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000118)
[0] https://openai.com/index/api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...
Additionally, it's not just the owners... it's the millions of people who contributed.
I wonder what developers started using during that time.
I think it may answer most questions from five years ago, but I would phrase it as “it has answers for most questions, but many are outdated and there’s no easy way to tell whether an answer is outdated”
Something like 1000x more views than posts/comments… I wonder if that statistic has changed over the years?…
It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I noticed that SO started getting more strict from 2014 onward, I wouldn't know immediately what to do about the content quality issue.
My take is that, like most things, the medium of the old will be appreciated the way it wasn't in 2014. As the Brian Eno quote goes: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." People will yearn for the human forums the same way they did years past when people tire of the LLM slop. (If they do.)
What a miserable future to look forward to
Respectfully: outsiders like the author of this piece are not the ones entitled to decide whether a question is "legitimate", or "valid" (another term I see used all the time by people who have no understanding either of Stack Overflow's standards or its goals).
Reference reading:
What is Stack Overflow’s goal? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770)
How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592)
Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476)
How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263)
A satirical answer to "The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/_/309018#309...)
What is the point of closing questions for details and clarity, debugging details, needs more focus, or very low quality? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405519)
Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808)
Why is the rate of positively scoring questions and answers steadily declining? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393032)
When is Stack Overflow going to stop demonizing the quality-concerned users who have made the site a success? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366858)
Is ChatGPT and LLM killing Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430994)
Let's say for the sake of argument that 95% of humanity perished. Is humanity then dead? It isn't.
Some get superseded.
Others accelerate their decline through self-foot-shooting and/or enshittification.
Stack Overflow's journey into obscurity is via a mix of private equity indifference, better docs elsewhere, and a lack of leadership over its moderators. It was in decline long before LLMs.
It is not a new story - but it does help map out the modes of platform senescence.
Wasn't the first; won't be the last.
Hey, if it all crashes and burns, at least it’s the so-called smartest guys in the room going down with the ship. Just a bunch of VCs learning the hard way that they had no idea how to actually run or grow the company they bought. “Look at how well we optimized it!” Yeah — right into the ground.
unless LLMs can be instantly trained on all new software frameworks and languages that come out, im not worried stackoverflow will still have a place
I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.
Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don't waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.
> I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.
Yeah fuuuuck that. It's so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can't pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA/Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843
However servers aren't the sort of thing you can just plugin and forget when running a major website. Things go down, users trigger edge cases, people try and DOS you, disks fill up, etc. You do still need some staff to take care of things
But it's also possible it's pivoting to a Wikipedia-like model where it becomes a repository for answers, and less about contributions. In which case, this is not the same as it dying. As seen with Wikipedia, it can still get a lot of traffic and revenue even if few people contribute to it anymore.
I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many valid questions were closed.
They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be trying to ask a question at all), so there's no reason to care about whether other people can understand the question - let alone figure out whether it's something they also want to ask.
> I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure. The entire point is that when you come to Stack Overflow, you aren't the one who gets to decide what the standards for questions are, or judge whether your question meets those standards. Because if you were, the standards would effectively not exist.
The people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
> I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work. Famously, a user with over a million reputation once went on a spree of violations (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072) of the best-publicized site policy ever to appear on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/). Many users with 100k+ reputation and/or a 10+ year history have likely never looked at the meta site. (See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224 for someone who first posted on meta after 14 years.)
That's fundamentally where SO went wrong. The mods think they're building programming Wikipedia, but normal users are using it as a Q&A forum.
> Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure.
No it doesn't. It's far too easy to close a question and they very rarely get reopened. The suggestion was that users only get to unilaterally reopen it once.
> I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work.
See this is exactly the problem. You have the mods' view of how it is supposed to work, but that isn't how people want it to work!
Mods want it to be this highly curated reference site where only perfectly written questions that exactly fit an FAQ style of questioning. They don't care that that makes it useless (or at least extremely frustrating) as a Q&A forum.
This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.
[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/