Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time • Hacker News Board

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#151

Post by echelon » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:02 AM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #98

echelon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO…

Fixing loads of LLM-generated content is neither easy nor fun. You'll have a very hard time getting people to do that.

Hardly.

- A huge number of developers will want to use such a tool. Many of them are already using AI in a "single player" experience mode.

- 80% of the answers will be correct when one-shot for questions of moderate difficulty.

- The long tail of "corrector" / "wiki gardening" / pedantic types fill fix the errors. Especially if you gamify it.

Just because someone doesn't like AI doesn't mean the majority share the same opinion. AI products are the fastest growing products in history. ChatGPT has over a billion MAUs. It's effectively won over all of humanity.

I'm not some vibe coder. I've been programming since the 90's, including on extremely critical multi-billion dollar daily transaction volume infra, yet I absolutely love AI. The models have lots of flaws and shortcomings, but they're incredibly useful and growing in capability and scope -- I'll stand up and serve as your counter example.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#152

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:02 AM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #107

palata wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with chal…

[deleted]

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#153

Post by travisgriggs » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:02 AM UTC

While I generally agree with the narrative of the negative arc that stack overflow took, I found (and have as recently as a few months ago) that I could have enjoyable interactions on the math, Ux, written language, and aviation exchanges. The OS ones in the middle (always found the difference between Linux and superuser confusing).

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#154

Post by bluedino » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:02 AM UTC

Avicebron wrote: post #42

Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed. AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of a…

I find a lot of good stuff in GitHub issues

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#155

Post by garganzol » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:03 AM UTC

merek wrote: post #121

Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be? The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?

Incompetent moderation and the air of hostility towards contributing users.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#156

Post by Alupis » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:03 AM UTC

shrx wrote: post #92

echelon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO…

> Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer. Isn't this how Quora is supposed to operate?

Maybe my experience is unique - but Quora seems to be largely filled with adverts-posing-as-answers.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#157

Post by bluedino » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:04 AM UTC

Vaslo wrote: post #16

goldenarm wrote: post #8

Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough? Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.

They would just use documentation. I know there is some synthesis they would lose in the training process but I’m often sending Claude through the context7 MCP to learn documentation for packages that didn’t exist, and it nearly always solves the problem for me.

Aren't a lot of projects using LLMs to generate documentation these days?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#158

Post by bmacho » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:04 AM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #107

palata wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with chal…

> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.

This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.

> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.

This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#159

Post by oxag3n » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:05 AM UTC

Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge?

A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources.

However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb.

LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO.

Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#160

Post by notepad0x90 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:06 AM UTC

I still would like to get other humans' experiences and perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO doesn't go away entirely.

With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that, but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".