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

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

#151

Post by jmyeet »

hintymad wrote: 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?

Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about too. LLMs have basically profited from "stealing" (arguably) user-generated content from a time when there were no LLMs. In the LLM era there won't be a new Stack Overflow to train LLMs on going forward.

We're getting closer to Dead Internet Theory too where a lot of accounts, particularly on Twitter, are just LLMs. I imagine it's a huge problem on Reddit too. Just people farming karma or otherwise involved in influence campaigns or simply grifting to ad revenue.

So we're going to get to a point where the corpus we train LLMs on will itself just be filled with LLM slops. Self-reinforcing slop. Is that the future?

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

#152

Post by kajman »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
hintymad wrote: 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?

Plenty of documentation, and plenty of code that the AI can read itself. E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.

The only way I could see this being surfaced the same is if the code essentially had a SO answer written into the doc comment.

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

#153

Post by JadeNB »

hintymad wrote: post #149
legitster wrote: post #82

Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time: If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only t…

StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.

I think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.

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

#154

Post by mattmanser »

andrekandre wrote: post #116
hungryhobbit wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.

a.k.a enshitification

That's not what we mean when we say that phrase.

They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming.

From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.

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

#155

Post by theSuda »

throawayonthe wrote: post #40
kenty wrote: 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

I am also going to miss searching for something, finding a stack overflow thread and noticing that I wrote that answer years ago. :)

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

#157

Post by janalsncm »

e28eta wrote: post #43
jrflo wrote: post #34

I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...

Clicking through to the query for the first chart, I see the peak of ~300k in May of 2020, and it was ~3k in April of 2026 (the last complete month). I’m flabbergasted. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/193252...

For perspective, 300k per month is one new question every 9 seconds.

3k per month is one question every 15 minutes.

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

#158

Post by bjourne »

hintymad wrote: post #149
legitster wrote: post #82

Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time: If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only t…

StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.

Ime, math.SE had a much friendlier vibe than most other SE sites. Primarily because you could ask about a problem you were struggling with and get help. No moderator would instantly show up and close the question as a dupe of a ten-year-old question about double integration techniques or some such.

People asking questions mostly wanted help, but most moderators thought they were curating some kind of question-answer form encyclopaedia. Very different perspectives.

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

#159

Post by nikole9696 »

Jyaif wrote: post #44
hintymad wrote: 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?

We unironically need an StackOverflow for LLMs. LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research. Unfortunately the LLMs are concentrated into few providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) so there's a chance they each end up doing their own private (and closed) StackOverflows. By leveraging their private StackOverflows, their LLMs will be able to short-circuit complex reasoni…

This actually reminds me of the MCP concept. Similar?

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

#160

Post by JadeNB »

Jyaif wrote: post #44
hintymad wrote: 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?

We unironically need an StackOverflow for LLMs. LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research. Unfortunately the LLMs are concentrated into few providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) so there's a chance they each end up doing their own private (and closed) StackOverflows. By leveraging their private StackOverflows, their LLMs will be able to short-circuit complex reasoni…

> LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.

How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged? If by other LLMs, then we run into a problem of infinite descent. If by humans, then you'd need some way to motivate expert or semi-expert humans (so that their ratings are themselves correct) to participate in a massive project of evaluating the correctness of a constant stream of content from content-generators that never sleep.

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