Are there any similar articles on the state of the rest of the Stack Exchange network? There are many, many other SE sites that have nothing to do programming and are often less amenable to being answered via LLM.
Stack Overflow is almost dead
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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#32My 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…
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 on such inputs, I am concerned about the medium to long term impact. A lot of people grew frustrated with SO for various reasons and went back to unhelpful behaviors that SO resolved at its zenith (rather than dead ends and flame wars in newslists and irc channels, they do it in random subreddits and discord servers instead). Now what if we circle back after degenerative LLM experiences only to find there’s nothing to circle back on?
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#33The timing on the sale was genius. Similar to Mark Cuban with Broadcast.com. I guess it's best to sell something before the value plummets to 0. As far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven't even gone to the site for a couple of years now.
Where's the AI of tomorrow going to learn from if nobody is posting Q&As online anymore?
From the official docs? AI is good at sumarizing after all
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#34How will ChatGPT learn the next computer language now?
We are in the future, nothing new needed here.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#35> The question seems to be when Stack Overflow will wind down operations, or the owner sells the site for comparative pennies, not if it will happen.
I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.
Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don't waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.
> I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.
Yeah fuuuuck that. It's so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can't pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA/Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#36It looks like Stackoverflow was already in a decline even before Covid. I wonder what developers started using during that time.
They still used it, they just didn't contribute. It's not that StackOverflow is useless, but rather that it already answers most questions.
Given the speed at which tech evolves, I do not see how that can be true.
I think it may answer most questions from five years ago, but I would phrase it as “it has answers for most questions, but many are outdated and there’s no easy way to tell whether an answer is outdated”
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack overflow never owned the content, it is and was Creative Commons: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
That license comes with obligations that the AI companies aren't following.
Its highly debatable if that's true.
The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where's the AI of tomorrow going to learn from if nobody is posting Q&As online anymore?
From the official docs? AI is good at sumarizing after all
Good luck with that. The last thing I used SO for was getting answers for SwiftUI and I can assure you the official docs did not contain the needed information.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#39Doesn't feel like the AI is the main driver. Many things changed over time - dev tools got better, editors got smarter, compilers got better error messages, various primary resources improved, tutorial websites, courses and youtube boomed. Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
One aspect I haven’t seen anyone mention contributing to the decline is GitHub (part of your “improved tooling”) These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there. Before GH boomed it was often SO doing this job.
It could be the most impacting aspect IMHO.
This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.
There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#40> The question seems to be when Stack Overflow will wind down operations, or the owner sells the site for comparative pennies, not if it will happen. I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a de…
Hardware is usually just a small part of running a website.