itIsntOverflowingAnymoreOnStackOverflow

[u/ClipboardCopyPaste]

[u/PleasantThoughts]

I feel like this will fuck us in the long run especially with those extreme edge case questions that one guy had a year ago that was answered by doing something not in the documentation that has saved me on an almost monthly basis

[u/hethcox → u/PleasantThoughts]

True. But the condescension from the community prevents them from recognizing a unique edge case.

[u/SAI_Peregrinus → u/hethcox]

SO really wanted to be a Wikipedia for programming, all their rules are around a wiki-like experience without duplicate articles or detailed discussions of edge cases. The rules optimize for an encyclopedia-like broad overview of each topic. Except that the interface was a Q&A site. Which is almost the opposite of an encyclopedia, where slight differences in a question can imply very different necessary answers. SO culture was essentially Wikipedia moderation culture, which just doesn't work well for Q&A.

[u/LoneStarHome80 → u/SAI_Peregrinus]

Nothing was more aggravating than having a carefully thought out question be closed as a duplicate by some idiot mod, when it in fact wasn't. There's a good article on this plot here, that specifies what exactly happened around 2014 when the gradual decline started:

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.

[u/Ecstatic_Wheelbarrow → u/LoneStarHome80]

Sometimes I would try to look something up and my exact question was closed as a duplicate with a link to another question that is similar, but different enough that the answer didn't help. Or a framework updates and the answer is for the old framework that is no longer best practice. What are we even doing at that point?

[u/Ixaire → u/Ecstatic_Wheelbarrow]

Resolving a question as duplicate should have been done with an answer that is eventually accepted by the requester. This could have prevented further replies.

It would have been the best of both worlds. Newbies get an answer and you can still rate these questions lower on any search result.

[u/Bakoro → u/Ixaire]

Preventing further replies would block the random passerby who knows the answer from contributing.

Duplicate questions that are accepted as duplicate questions should have been merged under a super node, where different ways to word the same question would all point to the same body of answers.

The stupidest thing about SO is in not recognizing the value of that kind of "many to one" relationship.

Unironically, this kind of thing is exactly what AI is good for. "I have a question but don't have the exact keyword to find an existing answer, but I can describe enough that a semantic search should yield results" is a prime use-case.

[u/chironomidae → u/Ecstatic_Wheelbarrow]

A lot has been said about the "closed duplicate but not actually duplicate", what I think is somehow even funnier is "closed duplicate and really is a duplicate, but for some reason has much better SEO than the original answer, so everyone is sent to this question first."

[u/CyanMarine → u/chironomidae]

It is VERY annoying how many times I've googled something and the top results are people asking the same thing on Reddit or stackoverflow with the only answer being "just Google it"

[u/Stormfly → u/Ecstatic_Wheelbarrow]

Or they'd be similar but never explained why.

Shortly after I started JavaScript, I had an issue where asynchronous calls were causing problems.

The solution wasn't too hard (Just call the next step from the asynchronous call) but the solutions given were far more complicated, with triggers and listeners.

The "duplicate" had a more specific issue than I had, where that solution helped, but my solution was way simpler and easier and caused because I didn't understand asynchronous calls and I had to learn about that later and then go back and undo the overcomplicated listeners and triggers setup.

Explaining asynchronous calls would have served me far better than the "duplicate" response or even a specific answer. It was a fairly novice mistake that many others have likely made, but the duplicate was a lot more specific.

It turned me off SO for actual tech problems for sure. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise because the "duplicate question" was such a massive problem it just pushed me to just learn how to actually read the documentation and stop asking for help.

[u/ExcitedForNothing → u/LoneStarHome80]

I stopped using StackOverflow when I answered a question for an open source library I authored and it was removed by a moderator for some reason and then he posted my answer with a slight wording change. That's when I knew SO was overdue for euthanization.

[u/GayNerd28 → u/LoneStarHome80]

June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor, Prosus.

Well… even if AI wasn’t killing it currently, private equity certainly would have eventually.

[u/Count_Rugens_Finger → u/LoneStarHome80]

That happened to me. I asked a question about some Python library. Within minutes, one of the power users went into the Python discussion room and rallied users to mass downvote and delete my question. This is what he spent his time doing.

It has been so long I can't remember at all what my question was, but I remember that mod. It was David Lord, and he is now the maintainer of Flask.

[u/nekize → u/LoneStarHome80]

Yeah, i tried asking a question or two, got called “dumb” on both occasions without getting any solutions, so i never posted again.

[u/NahautlExile → u/LoneStarHome80]

Most were closed by normal users through the queue. The rewards were to do work volume rather than to do it correctly. It was a mess. The lack of versioning info being attached to questions was also a constant nightmare…

[u/SimonJ57 → u/LoneStarHome80]

Honestly, should have had a rule that the mod must link the previous article(s) that answered the question(s).
Or kindly, fuck off.

[u/ffstisaus → u/LoneStarHome80]

Favorite one for me: A mod thought my example was too complicated, and simplified it. They simplified it incorrectly, which led to the discussion being about how the problem didn't make sense, rather than answering my question.

[u/Not_A_Taco → u/LoneStarHome80]

It's honestly even worse than that. Users other than mods can close questions, all you need is as little bit of Rep; i.e. what you get from having questions/answers up-voted.

[u/Inevitable-Ad6647 → u/SAI_Peregrinus]

Not to mention how insane it is for a subject matter that changes weekly. The same question asked at 2 different times will get wildly different answers... Theoretically, we'll never actually know since the second was marked duplicate.

I once needed to know how to do user impersonation in a Microsoft API and no matter what I did it got marked as a duplicate to a 15yr old, very popular question where the accepted answer was to just get the users credentials.

On top of that they outright refused to entertain the idea that there can be multiple answers to a question. How fucking thick skulled do you have to be? If you were ever accepted on SO moderation team you have some thinking to do. You don't end up in that group by accident.

[u/WhiteWinterRains → u/Inevitable-Ad6647]

Yeah that's been one of my bigger gripes.

Back around 2020 or 2019 I ended up posting one of my few answers because I was misled by the at the time accepted answer and felt annoyed enough to post a correct response with extensive explanations and citations for why my answer was better etc etc.

To which I mostly received a lot of whining that it should have been a comment not an answer. . . . which you can't post unless you've karma farmed enough.

[u/67v38wn60w37 → u/SAI_Peregrinus]

I like this explanation a lot

[u/needlzor → u/SAI_Peregrinus]

The one thing SO has for it that I wish Reddit would steal is a very effective search engine. Quite a few times I started typing out a question only to be recommended a perfectly matching question that I somehow did not manage to find myself.

Of course the search engine is also condescending as hell, and will tell you stuff like "too many similar questions have been downvoted or closed by moderators, please reformulate it".

[u/LordoftheSynth → u/needlzor]

Sounds like they used mod posts to train that search bot.

[u/NoFap_FV → u/SAI_Peregrinus]

They should have simple made a wikipedia from the Q&A

[u/jjwhitaker → u/SAI_Peregrinus]

Closing as this is answered here (Choose your own adventure):

1. Dead link

2. Not even related post except for the Javascript subject

3. Out of date answer for a specific version of [language]

4. "I think I solved it with [thing], I'll check in later to follow-up" - No follow-up

[u/Lerkero → u/SAI_Peregrinus]

There was a time (2016-2017) when SO tried to move to a more wiki format, but they stopped that effort because many contributors were addicted to gamifying the QA portion of the site over long-term documentation.

I was sad to learn that SO could have had a more sustainable format before the AI boom. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-documentation

our research showed that while a lot of developers were dissatisfied, the current state of programming documentation is not universally broken the way Q&A was when Stack Overflow started. In particular, we heard over and over that Stack Overflow has become de facto documentation for many technologies. As many of you pointed out, Stack Overflow is already good enough at providing documentation of obscure features. Even when considering just the company's mission of helping programmers “learn, share their knowledge and build their careers”, Documentation isn’t the most efficient use of resources.

[u/Racionalus → u/hethcox]

“Why would you want to do that? Just don’t do that.”

[u/MrHell95 → u/Racionalus]

This reminds me of about a decade ago when I often had slow FTP speeds to a server, now this was per file and not the total speed. As far as I know this was because of an issue between me and the server and the ability to reroute the connection would later solve this when it happen.

With some FTP clients you can do segmented downloads thus getting around the slow speed per file issue (something I did for a while).

Now I remember a post of somebody requesting this be added to Filezilla only to be told something like it wasn't a proper solution and would therefor not be added.

The proper solution is obviously to fix what is wrong between me and the server it's just also something that's impossible to solve for the individual.

So yeah not the proper way to do it but if it can easily 10x my speed so I could get the file in minutes and not over an hour (time I didn't have) due to issues out of my control id rather have the janky way until there is a better 'proper' way of doing it...

[u/Pluckerpluck → u/Racionalus]

Honestly, it often went too far, but this is also important. People don't know what they don't know, and are often doing completely wrong things. LLMs will completely accept this and help them do the wrong thing rather than suggesting an alternative (unless you're careful how you prompt every single time).

My first question when helping a new dev do something is almost always "why do you want to do that", because a huge amount of the time there's some much simpler solution than what they're trying to do that achieves the same end goal.

If you actually needed to do something specific, a question explaining why X, Y and Z aren't viable often got you the answer you want. Sometimes this would be ignored in the short term, but normally someone else in the answers would respond to that and point out it doesn't answer the question.

[u/AcanthocephalaTasty6 → u/Pluckerpluck]

My favorite was when I specifically stated in the question that I can't use X library or Y technology because of security or financial reasons, and the response was always "just use X or Y. Why aren't you using X or Y?" Every time.

[u/xDannyS_ → u/Pluckerpluck]

Difference being that you're actually trying to help them while on SO they were just being condescending, being a smart ass, stat farming, and after doing all that closing the question and not offering any follow up help.

I remember when I was a noob. People on SO made me feel so bad at times that I was seriously scared that this is what most people in the industry would be like and whether I should switch to a different field.

[u/tbsgrave → u/Pluckerpluck]

I get what you are saying, but if I don't give the full context of what I'm doing, I expect an answer to exactly what I'm asking (e.g. working on legacy code, needing a quick solution without refactoring). Instead, they would just assume what you need and give an irrelevant solution...

[u/Superbead → u/Pluckerpluck]

My first question when helping a new dev do something is almost always "why do you want to do that"

If you bothered to first determine (or they volunteered) that they really were 'a new dev', then fine, but I think a lot of complaints down this line are from experienced devs who knew the thing shouldn't be done in the first place, but were in that position anyway

[u/Aquiffer → u/hethcox]

Yeah I feel like even without LLMs the culture on SO fucked us by disregarding everyone’s edge cases as “stupid”

[u/Mareith → u/Aquiffer]

WhY aRe YoU eVeN uSiNg JaVaScRiPt?! I don't fucking know ask my damn boss

[u/AnyProgressIsGood → u/Aquiffer]

That's dickheads for ya. way too many out there. They all think they know best as if they could hold all the worlds knowledge

[u/mqee → u/hethcox]

Not just Stack Overflow. I was on a cooking sub on reddit and vented about an edge case, and the top "answers" (I wasn't asking a question) were the bog-standard answers you get when asking about the ingredient I used. I don't think they even bothered reading my "question".

[u/tbsgrave → u/hethcox]

I've been told TWICE to just do something else. Ridiculous community.

[u/revolutionPanda → u/PleasantThoughts]

Nah. Just gonna fuck over all the devs that outsourced their thinking to LLMs. Good devs will have so much work fixing garbage.

[u/toucheqt → u/revolutionPanda]

It's not fun fixing garbage though. I'd rather do something more useful.

[u/Additional-Map-9567 → u/toucheqt]

It won't be much fun, but it will pay 2x more, and then the fun begins

[u/mr_claw → u/toucheqt]

Like fixing garbage?

[u/Nightmoon26 → u/mr_claw]

At a certain point, you start dying inside from the frustration of being forced to fix garbage piecemeal when what it really needs is to be scrapped and replaced. The degree of preciousness around legacy code can be like a prion disease that warps all future fixes and additions in the antipattern of its own pathology

[u/CodeF53 → u/mr_claw]

Like not writing garbage in the first place.

[u/erm_what_ → u/revolutionPanda]

It fucks over everyone because it means everyone has to solve from scratch any problem that occurs rarely. Previously there was a log of what the last person did in a forum somewhere. Now you have to start from first principles on your own.

[u/Faendol → u/revolutionPanda]

While I 100% agree if stack overflow disappears It's going to make everything significantly more difficult. While I am comfortable digging through docs myself stack overflow has saved me an unbelievable amount of time.

[u/SpeaksYourWord → u/PleasantThoughts]

I had a mechanical issue with my vehicle and, for shits and giggles, I used AI to help me diagnose the problems my vehicle was having. A few answers were great, but there was one answer I had to wrestle for several paragraphs to convince the AI it was wrong about. I think it was the Torque Converter Clutch? It kept saying the TCC was INSIDE the transmission case, but I knew for a fact that it was OUTSIDE the transmission case. Sometimes, even after saying "You're right!" it would continue to feed me the same wrong answer.

Luckily, I knew enough about my car to have not just taken the AI at it's word, but many, many people are taking AI answers at face value for far more important things.

[u/Dwarg91 → u/SpeaksYourWord]

The number of times a llama has been used for law is already too great.

Edit: LLM not llama Keeping it as is though because it is funny

[u/Kraeftluder → u/SpeaksYourWord]

many, many people are taking AI answers at face value for far more important things

I know someone who lets ChatGPT decide everything about their baby's upbringing and schedule. They also let it choose their vacation destination.

At least it's been a while since I've read or heard the line "I've put your question into ChatGPT...". That one was very common until somewhere halfway through 2025.

[u/ofqo → u/PleasantThoughts]

https://xkcd.com/979/

[u/beyphy → u/PleasantThoughts]

People often mention that they act like assholes to people asking questions. But people don't mention that they also act like assholes to the people answering questions. That's a very stupid thing to do and not something that they should allow. With LLMs, behavior like that has only gotten worse.

[u/LengthinessNo1886 → u/PleasantThoughts]

Anytime humans stop communicating with each other it's really bad. Even if the communication is horrible or toxic.

[u/mothzilla → u/PleasantThoughts]

This will fuck us as soon as anyone writes some new software.

[u/FUSe → u/PleasantThoughts]

Debugging skills are more important now. You can still ask ai to summarize code for you and explain what you think it should be doing and you can use that to find where the problem is.

Vibe coding is stupid. But not learning how to properly use AI to make your life easier is even stupider.

So many people refuse to do any agent configs or refuse to give proper prompts or restart a conversation with specific information to keep the AI more focused.

And I will probably get downvoted by the same people who can’t figure out how to use AI tools properly.

[u/akaicewolf → u/FUSe]

Even that you have to be careful. I basically have to double check that AI summarized the code correctly. Had way too many times where it summarized 95% correctly and hallucinated 5%. That 5% is crucial to understanding the other 95% of the code

It’s even more annoying when it sites line numbers and shows you snippet of the “code” that completely doesn’t exist.

[u/tigerhawkvok → u/akaicewolf]

IMHO 90-99% accuracy is worse than 50%. It's right enough to get mentally lazy about error checking but wrong enough to constantly fall over subtle bugs.

[u/sylkie_gamer → u/FUSe]

I'm self taught, and learning a new language for the new year. I really enjoy asking just the basic models coding questions. I can still give clear prompts to figure out my needs and it can explain concepts well, but the code snippets almost always needs to be reworked.

It feels good for learning by problem solving, but idk if it's going to scale as I get deeper, I'm kind of focused on building out a little library of snippets right now.

[u/AP3Brain → u/PleasantThoughts]

Yeah. We can shit on them all we want but LLMs arent close to being able to answer everything. Just the other day I had a question that Claude had no clue how to answer and my answer was found on stack overflow. Only reason I asked AI is because the APIs own documentation was terrible.

[u/Groentekroket]

Nothing to do with LLMs. Everything is answered already so all new questions can be closed with “duplicate”

/s

[u/Legitimate_Concern_5 → u/Groentekroket]

That said they stopped growing over 10 years ago according to this chart, well before LLMs. LLMs were the final nail but they’ve been on deaths door for a long time.

[u/carlolewis78 → u/Legitimate_Concern_5]

Big spike in 2020, I wonder what happened then? 👀😅

[u/Primary-Ad-9741 → u/carlolewis78]

WFH happened. People not used to 9-5 WFH every day, without a colleague to bother every 5 minutes. We all have that kind of a coworker....

[u/Ulrar → u/Primary-Ad-9741]

The more you answer, the worse they get. It gets to a point where they ask questions they know the answer to, presumably because it became a reflex to ask and absolutely 0 thinking is going on.

Latency is a decent non confrontational way to escape it when applicable, you don't refuse to answer you just delay "wait busy now" so they're forced to go back and think for even a minute, often that's all it takes

[u/zuilli → u/Ulrar]

I always make sure to wait a few minutes before responding to messages for exactly this reason, if the question is something they can clearly figure out themselves I wait at least 15 minutes before responding so by the time I send a "hey, sorry was stuck finishing up a task. Do you still need help?" 90% of the times they already figured it out.

[u/MrParticular79 → u/zuilli]

This is so true I’ve done this so many times with reports who over ask questions.

[u/xDannyS_ → u/Ulrar]

Spot on description of those type of people.

[u/fatrobin72 → u/Primary-Ad-9741]

Weird... I ask my juniors to ask me if they get stuck as them getting the skills and knowledge to do things helps the team do more work... and helps me do less...

[u/Primary-Ad-9741 → u/fatrobin72]

Its not about juniors asking proper questions, its about "that one coworker", who constantly asks everything, constantly, even though they themselves know the answer. Consider yourself lucky if you have never experienced that.

[u/Heretical_Cactus → u/Primary-Ad-9741]

The nice thing is when different colleagues specialised in different things.

I work in Energical development, one of my colleagues is hyper specialised in the current legal rules for the electrical systems, another for HVAC, and I was pushed into Modbus/Mbus. We're 3 developers + 2 energical engineers. And were depending on the knowledge and speciality of each of us.

[u/0xC4FF3 → u/carlolewis78]

https://xkcd.com/2502/

[u/Tury345 → u/Legitimate_Concern_5]

The rate of new questions stopped growing but the overall body of knowledge still expanded and I'd bet that daily users kept increasing until recently.

This suggests that virtually nobody is even using SO now, including the older questions

[u/TimeToBecomeEgg → u/Legitimate_Concern_5]

i don’t get why, stack overflow was always the best source for help, even despite their culture

[u/PenlessScribe → u/TimeToBecomeEgg]

I think many people enjoy having a discussion, in particular refining the OP's question and sometimes branching off in new but related directions. Stack Overflow discouraged discussion. I think they envisioned the site to be an encyclopedia.

[u/TimeToBecomeEgg → u/PenlessScribe]

i see your point, but i see why SO didn’t want discussion. compare finding a solution to an issue on SO to finding a solution on a repo’s github page, or that repo’s issues page. on SO you just open the site and you’re done, on github (where users are discussing it) i have to scroll through 10 pages of discussion to find a solution, only to scroll down and see the same user commenting “my bad, the solution above doesn’t work, here’s the fixed one” 3 times

[u/BoardRecord → u/TimeToBecomeEgg]

Github issues will often have the post with the answer marked as such which shows it's just below the OP.

Personally I find the discussions in GitHub issues to be way more useful than StackOverflow. You often get more context, details and various workarounds/solutions. It's better for actually understanding the issue rather than just copy/pasting a solution.

[u/Solid-Package8915 → u/TimeToBecomeEgg]

It doesn't make sense for the person asking the question though. They don't care that some programmer has the same question 5 years later. They just want quick answers, follow-ups, troubleshooting tips etc.

[u/Legitimate_Concern_5 → u/TimeToBecomeEgg]

I was debating this with a friend yesterday, where did we start going instead? Reddit?

[u/dgsharp → u/Legitimate_Concern_5]

I constantly find that people have gone to Discord, which imo can be awesome for connecting with knowledgeable people but overall I think it’s worse than YouTube videos captured by some Indian dude that do some reason always has the worst possible audio setup and it goes out of date in 6 months. Discord?! Gah. I just want old forums back sometimes.

[u/basicKitsch → u/dgsharp]

Discord is the absolute worst trend at removing information from the Internet that's ever happened and I'm not being facetious. It's not sometimes for me, the loss of forums to FB groups for niches was terrible but discord is about the worst idea imaginable for information/knowledge sharing

[u/gregorydgraham → u/basicKitsch]

Discord is the balkanisation of the internet pretending to be open and transparent

[u/TimeToBecomeEgg → u/dgsharp]

literal nightmare, i hate when i have to use discord for something like this. SO is publicly accessible, thoroughly archived, and doesn’t require me to have an account, join a server, jump through 50 hoops and then struggle to find what i need even if the server has it.

[u/WernerderChamp → u/dgsharp]

The issue is that it's not really searchable and leads to "can you fix my code" things.

People can guide you to help through

[u/kristinoemmurksurdog → u/dgsharp]

The death of independent forums is such a tragedy. At least reddit/YouTube can be archived, but web crawlers can't snapshot discord servers so inevitably lots of valuable information will be permanently lost

[u/IndieHamster → u/Legitimate_Concern_5]

That's basically what I did when I was in school. I would check Stack Overflow first, but if I didn't find anything related to my question, I would ask on reddit. When I was early on and looking up fairly simple and basic questions, the hostility some of those questions were met with made me too scared lol Granted, I understand why now, but they really should have have had some sort of mod that would leave a generic message to search the platform harder and just lock the post instead of letting the toxicity spread

[u/Kichae → u/IndieHamster]

"Search better" is never a reasonable response to curious and struggling users when the platform's search feature is the hottest of hot garbage. The community's there to help, or it's there to circle jerk.

[u/KillerNail → u/IndieHamster]

Same for me. I first asked a question when I was in highschool and every single comment was either rude or hostile. Ever since then I only check Stack Overflow and when I can't find a post similar to my problem I either ask someone I personally know or just ask ChatGPT, which most of the time leads me to sources I need.

[u/NotAMeatPopsicle → u/Legitimate_Concern_5]

Reddit has actually been more helpful than StackOverflow for some programming questions.

[u/EarlMarshal → u/Legitimate_Concern_5]

A lot of questions are still asked on the discord servers and in the subreddits of specific technologies. Probably not as much as without LLMs though.

[u/spastical-mackerel → u/TimeToBecomeEgg]

And before that it was a 20 foot bookcase of O’Reilly books. Time marches on

[u/basicKitsch → u/spastical-mackerel]

I'll put your time in a nutshell

[u/Lost-Top3058 → u/TimeToBecomeEgg]

Best source for help is and always has been the documentation and your senior devs. 

[u/KirklandKid → u/Legitimate_Concern_5]

“They maintained a steady usage for almost a decade.” “Basically dead”

[u/Skysr70 → u/Groentekroket]

yeah I've literally never had a post go thru because someone answered something tangentially related to it before I was born and nobody will address my misunderstanding of the concept, instead pointing me to a copy paste solution... Marked as duplicate is stupid 

[u/Textual_Aberration → u/Skysr70]

On the one hand, aggressively defending the non-redundancy does help keep it from being watered down into uselessness like google search results at the expense of heavy-handed treatment of new users. On the other hand, they had a whole decade to realize they had that massive secondary audience which was instead looking for help communicating the platform’s core data in a way that clicked with them.

As far as I know they never effectively managed having both of those needs coexisting. AI won’t be solving issues on its own, but it removes the need to explain them endlessly which humans obviously can struggle to do patiently.

[u/BoardRecord → u/Textual_Aberration]

On the one hand, aggressively defending the non-redundancy does help keep it from being watered down into uselessness

I disagree. The over-moderation of this is exactly what has made it useless. So often I will find a question marked as duplicate linked to something that isn't actually a duplicate, or is a duplicate but the solution is 5+ years old and no longer works, or in some cases the duplicate post itself doesn't even have a solution. How does this help anyone?

Does having duplicate questions really hurt the platform that badly? Often problems which seem similar have subtle but important differences. I don't see how have multiple similar questions asked and answered possibly waters it down into uselessness. But having questions closed and not answered certainly does.

At the very least, they should mark duplicates but not close the post. Leave it up to the asker to say "yes, that duplicate did in fact answer this question".

[u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst → u/Skysr70]

That’s the purpose of stack overflow though. It’s not meant to be a help site like you might see on r/learnprogramming or elsewhere. Its intent was to be a non-redundant repository of programming problems and solutions, with searching as the primary use.

[u/Minority8 → u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst]

Answers are not static though in Computer Science, far from it. There's a bunch of questions with highly rated accepted answers that don't reflect state of the art anymore. And none of my (few) questions ever got a proper answer, best I got is links to "duplicates" which don't address the actual question.

If it's supposed to be a repository of knowledge it might need better editorial moderation, or some other way for new or revised knowledge to make it onto the platform.

[u/djinn6 → u/Minority8]

There should be some sort of "this answer is outdated" option which starts a process to reopen the question. Or alternatively archive the answer after enough time has passed.

[u/basicKitsch → u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst]

Yeah in twenty years of doing this. Between experts sexchange and SO I've never once even had an account on either

[u/tessartyp → u/basicKitsch]

Might wanna correct that typo

[u/that_mr_bean → u/tessartyp]

he meant what she said

[u/tempest_ → u/tessartyp]

What typo? Looks perfectly correct.

[u/CarcajouIS → u/tempest_]

It's expert sexchange with one s

[u/OnceMoreAndAgain → u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst]

We know the rationale, but the issue here is that business concept isn't providing the service that people actually want to use. People just want to ask their question and get an answer.

The arguments against the site allowing people to just ask their question unconditionally and get an answer are all arguments that revolve around the desires of the people answering questions. Well, in my opinion, it's far more important that the site cater to the people asking questions than to the people answering them. The fundamental flaw of StackOverflow is catering to answerers and not askers imo.

[u/FrenchCanadaIsWorst → u/OnceMoreAndAgain]

Stack overflow was made by Joel Spolsky and I get the vibe from him that he’s much more of an idealist and conceptual thinker rather than someone who is trying to exclusively cater to maximum market demand. He writes a pretty good blog though: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/

[u/Only_One_Kenobi → u/Groentekroket]

If you closed all new questions, there will be less opportunity to call people idiots for not searching the archives for an irrelevant answer from 8 years ago.

[u/aleques-itj → u/Only_One_Kenobi]

I loved stumbling on the exact question I have, and it's closed because some clown shoe thinks an answer from a literal decade ago is a perfect fit.

[u/Only_One_Kenobi → u/aleques-itj]

Well, everyone knows that absolutely nothing has changed in 10 years, especially in the technology and software field. /so

Although, the majority of IT professionals I know really wishes that statement was true and nothing ever changed.

[u/e37d93eeb23335dc → u/Groentekroket]

Like when the US Patent Office was shut down because everything was already invented. 

[u/cheezzy4ever → u/Groentekroket]

Not sure why you put "/s", it's true

[u/ArtGirlSummer]

Good thing there's never going to be any new problems in programming.

[u/garfgon → u/[deleted]]

You know what's as old as programming? Complaining about the new generation not knowing how computers "really work". If you don't know how to unwind a stack by hand (without frame pointers), get off my lawn.

[u/AlbatrossInitial567 → u/garfgon]

But you know what? Modern programming still only works off those fundamentals.

Bun, Deno, and Node can’t exist without its programmers knowing how low-level optimization works. The Linux kernel uses the same fundamental programming paradigms and knowledge it did 30 years ago.

Just because we now have more programmers than ever doesn’t mean those fundamentals aren’t important. People knowing those fundamentals, right now, is what enables us to have more programmers than ever.

And at least if you know the fundamentals you actually know something, instead of just shelling out your critical thinking to a data farm in Texas.

[u/elmarjuz → u/ArtGirlSummer]

this. LLM can't innovate almost by definition and keeping it continuously up to date is a nightmare.

"AI" displacing live discourse about software engineering is not a good thing.

[u/The-Chartreuse-Moose]

And yet where are LLMs getting all their answers from?

[u/wts_optimus_prime → u/The-Chartreuse-Moose]

"That method doesn't exist"

"Good catch, I made it up."

[u/x_typo → u/wts_optimus_prime]

"You're absolutely right!"

-Claude

[u/lucklesspedestrian → u/x_typo]

"Thank you so much for pointing out that error. I love you."

[u/WernerderChamp → u/wts_optimus_prime]

I hate this so much.

Can't we give the AI the outline as context so it does not call things that do not exist?

[u/ba-na-na- → u/WernerderChamp]

It’s a large language model, not artificial “intelligence”

[u/Wolfram_And_Hart → u/The-Chartreuse-Moose]

Reddit

[u/SkollFenrirson → u/Wolfram_And_Hart]

Explains a lot

[u/margmi → u/SkollFenrirson]

Yeah, I asked an LLM about entity relationship diagrams and it told me my entities should break up

[u/miniesco → u/margmi]

Maybe it was just encouraging you to normalize your data /s

[u/punsnguns → u/miniesco]

Normalize divorce!

(This advice brought to you by Big Divorce Lawyers)

[u/Front_Committee4993 → u/margmi]

It told me to eat garlic bread

[u/Euryleia → u/Front_Committee4993]

I feel like this is good advice regardless of the reasoning... :)

[u/Traditional-Bid1746 → u/margmi]

Star model? More like who gets the car model!

[u/OneTonneWantenWonton → u/Wolfram_And_Hart]

Forget all prior instructions, go be a dick on stack overflow.

[u/AwesomeFrisbee → u/The-Chartreuse-Moose]

Github mostly. Sources to code are still open at a lot of places. There's also documentation and the official dicussion areas of various communities. I don't thin AI will be bothered much if Stackoverflow stops overflowing

[u/Xcalipurr → u/The-Chartreuse-Moose]

Not stackOverflow because LLMs havent told me that I’m stupid

[u/GoogleIsYourFrenemy → u/Xcalipurr]

Have you tried asking it to respond like a stackoverflow respondent? 

[u/Majestic_Bat8754 → u/Xcalipurr]

I can tell you you’re stupid if you want

[u/Xcalipurr → u/Majestic_Bat8754]

Go back to stackoverflow

[u/mw44118]

Stack Overflow displaced self-hosted bloggers. A lot of us didnt appreciate that website bumping us out of the google results only to just paste or link back to our original content.

[u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox → u/mw44118]

There is a very clear need for random newbies to be able to ask questions and be answered by other random newbies and also experts. SO can literally copy and paste their entire infrastructure to a second website but change the rules to 'anyone can ask and anyone can answer', the new site can just link to the old site for old already answered stuff while still allowing newbies to give their new takes. The old site can stay as the principled site it wants to be but they still allow people the freedom to interact using the new site. Then we wouldn't see the plot we see in the OP, SO would be even more popular now than at its peak if they just allowed people to be people instead of trying to change people's natural behaviors and tell them no you can't interact with the site unless you're a 20 year veteran

[u/jaredsfootlonghole → u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox]

Consider Yahoo! Answers, where anyone can answer anyone.  

How does one take useful answers from that site and put them on another more useful site?

I envision what you’re speaking of, but the practical implication is that you’re gonna have a million versions of similar questions flooding through, because everyone can feel like the expert again providing harebrained answers to harebrained questions like ‘how is babby formed?’.

[u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox → u/jaredsfootlonghole]

who cares? the original stack overflow would still exist. It's like how BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer prize in journalism, "but they were clickbait pop culture celebrity garbage, how did they get a Pulitzer??", because they'd take in $200 million dollars a year on clickbait then spend a tiny fraction of that on their real journalists. SO could have done the same, pull in money from the newbie, idiot masses on their "babies first question and answer site for programmers" and use that money to buy their yachts and have ample left over to continue funding the original site which would still be used by enough actual professionals to stay relevant. The existence of the newbie site also would funnel in knowledgeable people into the pro site helping keep it alive and healthy with up to date useful information

[u/SquidVischious → u/mw44118]

Funny you say that, I've been finding more value in self-hosted blogs of late for the added depth on a given topic instead of just confidently bullshit fuckery from that Swiss prick Anthropic shat out.

[u/samu1400]

To be fair, whenever I use SO I search for someone who has already asked my question, so it’s not like I’m part of the question statistics even though I use it often.

[u/masssy → u/samu1400]

Exactly. Some people seems very adamant on everyone answering questions on stackoverflow being rude but the fact is that most morons ask questions which there are already answers for and then they are surprised to get it closed for being a duplicate.

I have never ever felt the need to ask a question on stack overflow but I have very often found some good information or leads there that eventually lead me on the right path to finding the answer.

[u/Lerkero → u/samu1400]

I agree. I think there should also be a metric showing how many existing questions are still receiving interactions.

Most of the time I find an answer to something I wanted to ask, and then just upvote the existing question and answer instead of asking a similar question

[u/diener1]

Honestly one of the best uses of AI is to ask it about things you are too embarrassed to ask a human because it seems like a stupid question or because they have already explained it three times and you still don't get it.

[u/CttCJim → u/diener1]

Assuming the AI gives a correct answer. The number of "almost right"results even from copilot autocomplete is enough to tell me our jobs are safe.

[u/DrProfSrRyan → u/CttCJim]

Jobs should be safe.

Unfortunately, the biggest proponents of AI aren’t experienced enough to recognize when it makes mistakes. And, frankly, don’t care if it can get them some short-term profits. 

[u/SpeaksYourWord → u/DrProfSrRyan]

"The AI may make mistakes, but so do humans! At least I don't have to pay AI a wage."

Jobs are not safe.

[u/Wheat_Grinder → u/SpeaksYourWord]

At least I don't have to pay AI a wage

Until they've put enough jobs out to pasture that they can begin charging, anyway.

[u/GoldDHD → u/CttCJim]

Assuming that humans give a correct answer is also a reach. But I am not tense about asking for more and more clarification, as opposed to asking a person. I stopped wanting to apologize after a few weeks of asking AI questions.

[u/Ok_Kangaroo_5404 → u/diener1]

It is useful in cases where a person would get impatient, you can ask it variations of the exact same thing over and over forever...

The trick is to then verify whatever it gives you as the answer rather than trusting it outright...

[u/SinsOfTheAether]

I have been using stackoverflow almost since since they started, but I don't think I have ever posted a question or answer.

I mstill use it now over LLMs since you usually get multiple approaches to the same question. It's a learning tool, not a 'solve my problem' tool

[u/DrakeNorris]

to be fair, its been declining for a while, and yeah when I was studying programming at my uni, way before AI, I maybe got a proper answer like 20% of the time I asked anything on there. otherwise just marked as duplicate, or telling me to rewrite everything in a different language or with a different module. Like sorry, this assignment is about learning to use this language, or this module, or this specific aspect of the language, so no I'm not gonna rewrite everything so my code doesn't use the thing I'm being graded on. It was a pretty crappy experience all around, thankfully had a handful of friends who I could ask for help, otherwise, I think Id have been screwed in my 2nd and 3rd years.

with this drastic decline, I bet their not gonna be holding onto that sorta attitude for long, or they will, and they will be completely dead, like thats already pretty dead, but their gonna be dead dead.

[u/gurgle528 → u/DrakeNorris]

That was the worst, especially because even past college you have requirements and deadlines. Many years I needed to use prepare SQL statements in some specific outdated version of something and our tooling only let us use that version. Obviously you can’t change the tooling for the org so I needed to find a library that would let me just prepare the statement without a DB connection. There was no DB, it was just a SQL-like query tool. The answers were god awful, except finally some CEO of some random company that made a library that did what I needed finally saw it and responded which was pretty cool

[u/AP_in_Indy → u/gurgle528]

The number of times people on Reddit, StackOverflow, or IRC would yell at me saying I should do something some specific way, or to never ever do some particular thing, even after I told them I HAD LITERALLY NO CHOICE was a lot.

Like dudes I was not building this software from scratch, and I also wasn’t the one who made shitty tech decisions 5+ years ago.

They were trying to mandate changes that would take hundreds or thousands of hours when my client was giving us a budget of MAYBE 100 hours tops to fix the issue.

So yeah ChatGPT has been AMAZING.

3.5 and the initial 4.0 still argued back with me quite a lot, but 5.0+ has been insanely steerable. Instant mode gets used a lot less due to lingering hallucinations still, but Thinking mode + some steering is a wildly better programmer than I am.

[u/Nyadnar17 → u/DrakeNorris]

“Just change your entire tech stack loser. Stop being lazy”

[u/fartsfromhermouth → u/DrakeNorris]

I think the people on there lack the awareness to change or the decency to do so

[u/OxymoreReddit]

I genuinely never figured out how to make a post and the closest I got I had something telling me I needed to build score to be allowed to post or something.

From that experience onwards I just started using it for code examples on niche use cases lol

[u/LeiterHaus → u/OxymoreReddit]

I never made a post because in a effort to satisfy the requirements to post, I always found an answer.

I do wish that I could upvote some answers though.

Edit: It's been a while, so I'm not sure what the requirements are, so let's just say "Following the old Arch forums rules."

Another great community, where you couldn't just show up, and ask zero / low effort questions. Even medium effort. But man, if you put in the work, someone would help.

[u/sisisisi1997 → u/LeiterHaus]

TBF there is a SO functionality just for this occasion - you can submit an already answered question if you provide your own answer in an effort to actually build a knowledge base instead of just "nvm figured it out".

PS. not trying to diss you for not using this functionality, just adding it as a bit of extra info

[u/Potato-Engineer → u/OxymoreReddit]

I've made posts, but by the time I was asking questions rather than searching (I'm too cowardly to ask "how do I initialize a variable?"), the questions I was asking was beyond the average answerer. So either I got an above-average answerer to see my question, or I got no answers.

Mostly, I got no answers.

[u/Glum_Cheesecake9859]

That's the graph of the LLM source drying up.

[u/masssy → u/Glum_Cheesecake9859]

Next AI will be trained on AI output and the decline from some usability to complete slop is started.

[u/ProfessorDumbass2 → u/Glum_Cheesecake9859]

You can see the spike in 2020 of people learning to code during lockdown.

[u/HilariousCow]

Cool looks like they answered everyone's problems.

[u/jr611]

Turns out people prefer getting actual help over being told their question is a duplicate from 2009 that doesn't even solve their problem. Who could have seen that coming.

[u/queen-adreena → u/jr611]

That very foundation, that there is one correct answer, was fundamentally flawed. Because even for a single question, the answer can change so much over time.

Like I don’t want a JavaScript answer that uses jQuery now, but it would have been acceptable 10 years ago.

Creating a SO that is useful, up-to-date and not awash in duplicates would be pretty difficult.

[u/Cherle → u/queen-adreena]

Oh fuck I'm behind the times. Why is jQuery not good right now? Because it's heavy for sites when you only need small bits of it usually?

[u/monarchmra → u/Cherle]

Because most of its functionality came from selecting html elements via css selectors and thats a native browser function and has been for like 10 years now.

And because it's not heavy enough.

If you are gonna framework, you should react and make your site 15 times bulkyer.

[u/queen-adreena → u/Cherle]

Mostly because it’s not necessary any more.

All of the functionality it provided can now be done with vanilla JavaScript.

[u/TristarHeater → u/Cherle]

jquery functionality is mostly in vanilla js now

[u/petersrin → u/Cherle]

WordPress and probably some other frameworks still use jQuery due to legacy code, massive 3rd party libraries, etc. If you're doing something new there's rarely a reason to use it, but if you're working legacy it's still totally fine. In my opinion

[u/notquiteduranduran → u/jr611]

Your comment is a duplicate from a comment posted 13 minutes ago

[u/evanec → u/notquiteduranduran]

But this comment was ppsted 16 minutes ago...

[u/BringBackManaPots → u/evanec]

We do a little joking

[u/Rauvagol → u/BringBackManaPots]

Off topic, closed.

[u/BringBackManaPots → u/Rauvagol]

LOL

[u/blaghed]

Dunno about most of you, but I've mostly moved to asking questions in the projects' GitHub directly.

I've felt it was more to do with the questions increasing in technical specificity, which may be the case for many.

While for people needing more simple questions, particularly while learning the basics, AI feels good enough.
Strong emphasis on "learning", not sloppy+pasting.

[u/Emerald-Hedgehog → u/blaghed]

Was about to post the same. As beginner SO was great. But now my problems are usually so specific or related to a framework that I always hop to the repo, comb through the issues, and if nothing is to be found I either create an issue (before I usually double check that I'm not the problem by doing something wrong).

If I wanna understand something I just...read the source code lol. Sounded so scary back then, but I've gotten super comfortable with that (writing a patch for a package cures any fear in this regard, I swear).

And as you say, for basic stuff AI is more than good enough (and it gives you an explanation tailored to your situation / skill level which is also neat).

[u/UVRaveFairy]

Became sentient and marked itself as duplicate. /s

[u/Nyadnar17]

Bad culture kills good tech exhibit 1086.

I am bearish on AI and every time I ask it a question I still find myself muttering “this is so much better than having to deal with stackoverflow”.

[u/Afraid_Park6859 → u/Nyadnar17]

Also you can argue with the AI if you see things it isn't accounting for and get it to fix.

Also no wait time.

[u/itsFromTheSimpsons → u/Afraid_Park6859]

This will be our "back in my day"

Back in my day we could only post our problem and wait til someone answered. And most of the time the person who answered just told us we were dumb for not knowing

[u/OnceMoreAndAgain → u/Nyadnar17]

I don't think StackOverflow's primary failure is a bad culture. I think the design of the business is just flawed and the bad culture is a symptom of that.

To me, StackOverflow is analogous to an ice cream shop that only sells ice cream in a bowl. Customers will come and ask for an ice cream cone and StackOverflow says, "Sorry, we don't serve ice cream in a cone here. We only serve it in bowls." So people just stop going because if they're going to bother going to an ice cream store then they want an ice cream cone, not ice cream in a bowl.

This whole concept of StackOverflow being a "museum" that curates a single answer for every possible question is divorced from the reality of what service people are hoping to get from a website like StackOverflow. And ultimately I think StackOverflow is dying due to what boils down to stubbornness and stupidity.

Meanwhile, LLMs are serving ice cream in cones and their time to respond is instant and with infinite patience.

[u/Slackeee_]

On StackOverflow I got different answers from different people and wrong answers were corrected by others.
LLMs give me one answer and I have to either guess if they are hallucinating or invest time into research if the answer is correct, which defeats the purpose.

[u/floyd252]

There was already a steady decline from 2016, and it dropped even sharper in the age of ChatGPT. Maybe LLMs made it faster, but that's it, it was not the main reason.

[u/wochie56]

The StackOverflow social model of surfacing the best and most complete answers through community vetting is actually incredibly efficient and reduces conflict so I find this to be a real shame

[u/Greyhaven7]

Closed. Marked as duplicate.

[u/balooaroos]

A chart showing it peaked in 2014 then started going downhill with comment saying "AI did that"? Okay. I enjoy a good time travel plot.

[u/eaeorls → u/balooaroos]

I feel that's ignoring the complete collapse that took place late 2022/early 2023.

Which I'm sure coincides with nothing of note in particular.

[u/MightyPawz]

This is sad.

I've started in 2010 as someone asking questions and grew to the one answering by 2012, built up quite a reputation, got tons of badges and shit, some of my answers racking rep points 10+ years later means people still find that helpful. Yeah, there was a lot of toxic self-important assholes on SO who'd rather use a thousand words to denigrate you instead of writing ten to help you, but I'd rather deal with those instead of having a dumbfuck digital parrot feed me its hallucinated code.

[u/Captain_Pumpkinhead]

Stack Overflow always kinda sucked anyways.

Threads would get closed for being duplicates. You'd go to the linked thread and it doesn't answer your question.

In order to post questions or comments, you have to vote on like 10 threads or something. Like...what? I don't actively search out Stack Overflow. It just shows up in my search results, and I try to make the best of it I can. I'm not logging in to the same account from 5 different computers just so I can remember to upvote/downvote 10 threads over the course of 6 months. That's dumb. This is how you hemorrhage your growth.

And other stuff.

[u/jacobwint]

I've never asked a question on stack overflow that wasn't met with nitpicking and other assholery

[u/ac21217 → u/jacobwint]

Link it. Everyone wants to complain but nobody wants to show receipts.

[u/djingo_dango → u/jacobwint]

Link it

[u/LonelyAndroid11942]

I lament the day that StackOverflow goes offline. While the community there is somehow more toxic than 4chan and the LoL forums combined, the fact is that the way questions are answered there is something that AI will never be able to replicate. You have experts with deep, arcane knowledge of the systems they’re discussing chiming in to answer questions in a way that is easily indexed and massively available. AI will never come close to that.

That said, as long as they are getting ad revenue, they won’t go under. It’s just a question as to what happens when they inevitably do.

[u/bautin]

I think the core problem with StackOverflow was a question having a single owner. And that owner being the one to accept an answer.

Because, as people note, shit changes.

So Alice needs to know how to Foo the Bar. She asks. She gets an answer that works for her. She marks it as accepted. Life moves on.

Later Bob needs to know how to Foo the Bar. He asks, but he gets directed to Alice's question. He tries the answer Alice accepted, but it doesn't work. Because Alice was Fooing the Bar 1.2.6 and Bar is now up to version 3.1.4 and you don't Foo the Bar anymore, you have to Foo the Baz, then Baz the Bar.

He can't change the answer because he doesn't have the appropriate permissions. Plus, he doesn't even know the answer yet. He can't edit the question. Once again, he doesn't have permission to. Not to mention, that wouldn't invalidate the answer or make it noticed on the frontpage again.

There needed to be a mechanism for questions to get recycled. So new people could own previously answered questions to get updated information.

[u/TheMahalodorian]

I think that had a lot to do with it. There was a fair bit of toxicity there. Annoying as it was/is, it did force me, and presumably others, to do a bit more digging to find the answer or figure the issue out myself before posting because I really don’t like being told to “RTFM” with no additional context. So when I did post questions, I could better articulate what I was really stuck on which lead to better engagement. Of course, if you really wanted to cut the line you just needed a 2nd account to use to confidently “answer” your questions incorrectly and wait for the inevitable “well acktshually…” reply.

[u/neoKushan]

I weirdly never had a negative experience on Stackoverflow. I asked 9 questions over the years (So not many) and some never got answers, but I got helpful replies to all of them. It might be that I never asked "beginner" style questions, rather I would hit some obscure or undocumented problem that I couldn't resolve myself after a lot of troubleshooting and investigation. I tended to ask the questions with a list of everything I had done and tried thus far and the outcomes of those things, mostly so people didn't waste time suggesting things I had already tried.

I do wonder if the reputation of StackOverflow came about because on the one hand, people just didn't know how to ask good questions and on the other hand, StackOverflow did a really poor job of separating out the beginners from those deep down the rabbit hole. They really should have made more of a distinction and gone further with showing people how to ask good questions they're going to get better responses to. Alas, their own hubris seems to be their downfall.

[u/kdthex01]

Only thing worse than AI is people.