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Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

sherwood.news

31–40 of 267 posts

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#31
post #6

Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?

How do you convince people to not want an instant answer? Even if SO didn’t result in so many “What have you tried?” responses and immediate closures, most people would still prefer instant feedback.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#32
post #6

Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?

I don't think its much of an issue

- Rl envs + synthetic data + human annotated

- Usage data from codex/claude code/cursor

Most of the model abilities in coding come from post-training, not pretraining

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#33
post #4

Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.

Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.

Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so.

It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#35
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.

IMO it was a combination of moderators and users Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended…

Could've been a good rule: Unless the XY problem is so severe that X is impossible, you can't heckle or post Y solution unless paired with X solution.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#36
post #4

Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.

Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.

Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency.

Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#37

Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.

Yeah, as I understand it, they wanted to optimize for Google search. This meant having "canonical" answers. This killed the site in the long term. In the short term, it worked wonderfully, and the founders made a (well deserved) killing.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#38
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of what Claude insists you do probably came from SO.

Or Reddit. I don't know about Claude but Gemini has given me answers that are verbatim comments from Reddit.

Claude does it quite a bit when you’re triggering the search tool functions.

It’s fine, and what you would expect for certain prompts, except that the synthesized results often come back communicating more authority than they deserve.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#39
post #5

Call me crazy but sometimes I still find a better solution on StackOverflow than what Claude Code insists to do. I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.

One thing that SO had was you could see multiple solutions and implementations for something. Sometimes the "best" solution isn't very readable code, sometimes you are able to understand the problem better when you see a bunch of people solving it in different ways and arguing about it like angry monkeys.

It really could be bad though.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#40
post #27

Stack Overflow with all of its shortcomings was a marvel of the internet at it's peak. People especially in early were chasing karma and anything you asked, you were sure to get some answer. Not always right but some answer. While for sure LLMs will give much better answers on average. I feel that it's a piece of humanity we've lost there that should be adequately remembered and the memory cherished.

getting a wrong answer in a public forum can be great to motivate corrections :p
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