> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers. I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.
There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Re…
Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors.
I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…
That algorithm reminds me of raymarching signed distance functions.
Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowled…
Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape? No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
The "human touch" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the "robot touch," thanks very much.
Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…
As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario. Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product. The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a produ…
"In this imaginary world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs, LLMs are the best tool for the job".
Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape? No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
The "human touch" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the "robot touch," thanks very much.
Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers. I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.
There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Re…
You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other questions first, ensure that your account has enough "clout" to overturn stupid closures of questions, and when you have wasted enough time doing that, then you can finally ask your own question. Or you can just go somewhere else that isn't an intellectual charade and circle jerking and figure it out without wasting tons of time chasing clout and hoping a moderator won't just close the question as duplicate. SO was never the best platform, exactly because of its horrendous moderation. It was good, yes. It had the quality assurance, to a degree, yes. But when just asking a question becomes such a monumental task, people will go elsewhere, to better platforms. Which includes other forums, and, LLMs. So no, what you're attributing to LLMs is merely a symptom of the deeper issue.
> 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 a…
I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier". The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead. I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless s…
No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute experts, you also need answer often for something trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.
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.