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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

#101

Post by ijk »

dpark wrote: post #71
smrq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and…

I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions. I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions…

Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.

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

#102

Post by zamadatix »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #45

Just look at the graph, Covid peak aside its previous peak was in 2016 and it was in continuous decline since then. All LLMS this was increase the slope.

My speed was already declining on the highway after I let off the gas, all the brick stopped truck did was increase the slope.

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

#103

Post by LanceH »

smrq wrote: post #26
alach11 wrote: 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.

Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and…

Don't forget the other way of sidetracking what you're asking for: "Why are you doing this, do something else instead."

I think most of my questions ended up with this, when I had very good reasons for doing it the way I was doing it. I typically wasn't showing it because I had isolated the problem I was facing into the minimal amount of code to duplicate it, or I was stuck with the particular tech I was using and we had 12 years of code built on top of it and I couldn't switch.

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

#104

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

deaton wrote: post #48
conradfr wrote: 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.

Definitely not better off. SO was fairly mean spirited, but nowhere else has such a vast trove of high quality answers to common software problems been collected. SO likely trained many of these models with its answers, and I don't know what software development will look like when it dies.

No where else has such a vast trove of high quality answers been hidden because the question was closed as duplicate when someone else asked that question later.

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

#105

Post by yolo3000 »

zamadatix wrote: post #97
jonas21 wrote: post #18

The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.

What did they change?

1.8bln

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

#107

Post by andrekandre »

conradfr wrote: 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.

was just gonna post the same thing

needed to implement a language feature that was a bit complicated and im not familiar with it so just planned with claude to do it, and after each write/fix cycle it just wouldn't work right.... gave up, went back to SO copy pasted the (not perfect but enough to start from) answer and worked up from there...

at the same time my knowledge grew and im more confident to do this same capability myself whereas reiterating with claude it was just a slog and i didn't learn much...

i think i may be starting to sour on these "do it all for me" usage scenarios for ai... especially for unfamiliar areas...

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

#108

Post by lukan »

dd8601fn wrote: post #38
akkad33 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was funny for me, when I asked it about something specific exotic - and it gave me a confident answer. But checking the sources I discovered it was from my own inquiries on a forum thread about it from the last time I unsuccesfully tried this (before the agents came) And so I knew, that any authorative tone was undeserved.

On the other hand, Claude later nailed this project, where I as a human said before, no, too much extra work.

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

#109

Post by FrustratedMonky »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #65
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, the AI trained on Stack Overflow. So if no one is posting new questions, and new answers. What will AI train on next, for the next thing.

your prompts, and the code you have it review.

Maybe.

I thought point was on Stack Overflow, there were community voting on 'best' answer.

If it is just me and the AI. Then the AI training data, is just whatever I approved the AI to do. Just my opinion.

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

#110

Post by hungryhobbit »

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…

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.
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