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Stack Overflow is almost dead

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#161

Post by IshKebab »

zahlman wrote: post #126
IshKebab wrote: post #48

They really only have themselves to blame. Yeah AI has massively accelerated the decline but I think it's mainly provided an option that isn't so frustrating to use. ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic. I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many val…

> ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic. Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be…

> It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content.

That's fundamentally where SO went wrong. The mods think they're building programming Wikipedia, but normal users are using it as a Q&A forum.

> Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure.

No it doesn't. It's far too easy to close a question and they very rarely get reopened. The suggestion was that users only get to unilaterally reopen it once.

> I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work.

See this is exactly the problem. You have the mods' view of how it is supposed to work, but that isn't how people want it to work!

Mods want it to be this highly curated reference site where only perfectly written questions that exactly fit an FAQ style of questioning. They don't care that that makes it useless (or at least extremely frustrating) as a Q&A forum.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#162

Post by dingaling »

exsomet wrote: post #70

Stack Overflow was a question and answer site that discouraged people from asking or answering questions. LLMs probably sped things up, but it seems like it was inevitable that it would fall into disuse and eventually be overtaken one way or another.

Your comment looks like a good one but you've posted it as an answer so I've no choice but to delete it.

When you earn enough reputation please come back and re-post your comment.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#163

Post by deepsummer »

I think "number of questions asked" is the wrong metric. Because it feels like all the questions have already been asked. Whenever I need to know something, I can google it and find answers on Stack Overflow. I can't remember the last time I actually had to ask something. Or the last time I found a question that didn't already have a good answer. Stack Overflow's library of question is pretty complete, and the only reason for new questions are new tools.

Certainly LLMs are a huge factor, but I feel that LLMs rarely give good (and trustworthy!) answers to the things I would check on Stackoverflow. Just like LLMs are no good replacement for API references because they get the details wrong all the time.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#164

Post by mvanveen »

deepsummer wrote: post #163

I think "number of questions asked" is the wrong metric. Because it feels like all the questions have already been asked. Whenever I need to know something, I can google it and find answers on Stack Overflow. I can't remember the last time I actually had to ask something. Or the last time I found a question that didn't already have a good answer. Stack Overflow's library of question is pretty complete, and the only r…

I think this is true if there aren't new questions to be asked. But technologies shift and evolve all of the time.

One of my top StackOverflow questions for years was around the viability of ECMAscript 6. It's now essentially irrelevant because it's found wide adoption in browsers etc. but at the time a lot of people appreciated the question because they wanted to adopt the technology but weren't sure what its maturity was.

It's also true that some technology stacks mature to a point where there isn't much more to be asked but I think there will continue to be a place for forums of discussion where you can ask and get answers around newer, bleeding edge technologies, use cases etc.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#165

Post by danjl »

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #116
moribvndvs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The presumption is that things will improve over time, but the big difference in my experience is the assistance I got from SO _worked_ the vast majority of the time, whereas various LLMs I have used generate unusable, misleading, or unreliable results pretty regularly, increasing as complexity or rarity arises. As human-driven knowledge bases backed by actual experience are replaced by inference from models who rely…

Personally, I am getting extremely tired of ChatGPT hallucinating npm packages that don't exist, or package imports that do not exist

Those hallucinated libraries exist in the future where the LLM lives and works. You just haven't caught up in time yet. ;-)

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#166

Post by croemer »

Questions asked isn't the metric to declare it dead. What matters for financial viability is traffic and deals with search engines/indexes (used by LLMs)

For community viability: people will keep using it where LLMs fail. For new problems. It's still the place to go for undocumented workarounds.

Traffic and voting activity is certainly down but there is still immense value and new valuable questions are asked and answered there.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#167

Post by tstrimple »

kulahan wrote: post #80
louison11 wrote: post #12

My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the…

I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”. It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.

There was a time when it was really good. Like legitimately good and useful. But over time it ended up becoming exactly what you describe. But there are still countless examples of the usefulness of SO in Google results. I stopped asking questions in 2012 and stopped answering questions in 2015. Before that though, it was a very useful tool.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#168

Post by DoctorMckay101 »

My approved to shut down question rate was about 40/60. And within the approved questions, I only got the answers I looked for like 50-60% of the time. Got to 350 points myself. I hated every second of it.

Really aggressive moderation, people trying to score points for a worthless achievement system by spamming comments like "You should narrow the scope of this question"

Having to grind achievements to be able to comment, like or dislike.

I used it for a year or so back in 2013?, went back to posting in forums like XDA developers, Codeguru and Reddit.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#169

Post by soco »

zahlman wrote: post #145
surgical_fire wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted…

>>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered , you can solve the underlying problem yourself. >If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer . That is: we…

Your point makes totally sense and it also sounds like a robotic overlord from some SF dystopia: cold and following its own programmed rules to the painful detail. As the other commenter pointed out: you are definitely right and we see your point. But it's a also because of it that I stopped using SO years except for maybe causally searching. Let me draw an inaccurate parallel: security, if done perfectly, lets nobody achieve anything.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#170

Post by Cymatickot »

To Ai paraphrase Obi-Wan: I felt a great disturbance in the Force — as if millions of developer voices from the future cried out in confusion and despair, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened to the future of our craft.

In short before we Ctrl+Copy our way to StackOverflow or Forums or IRC and we got collection of responses between good and ugly. But made us think and read or talk to others.

Now we Ctrl+Copy into LLM into a room of hell.

If LLM function is useful but don't get addicted to like honey.

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