No wonder, the CEO basically said they'll use the free labor of love of all member devs to sell training data for AI in order to replace such devs so why would anyone keep contributing there?
Stack Overflow is almost dead
41–50 of 285 posts
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#42[deleted]
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#43I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say "in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now we are doing it as it was meant to be". Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#44Doesn'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.
> 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. AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.
Yes, it can combine multiple sources and make up an answer that makes no sense. Even if it explains how "it works", it does not help when the API or a function has never existed.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#45Didn’t SamA paid out StackOverflow already?[0] So as far as the owners go they are doing fine.
[0] https://openai.com/index/api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#46stackoverflow started declining long before AI. Their ban-happy moderators were to blame.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#47AI is great but when it gets stuck I go to stack overflow. Happened to me yesterday
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#48They 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 valid questions were closed.
They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#49> 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.
Set up StackOverflow according to "cloud native" recommendations and whoops, that's gonna be quite the bill, which is my point. You'll have Cloudfront for global load balancing, ELB to provide a bridge between Cloudfront and Kubernetes, EFS for storage, RDS for the database, EKS and EC2 for compute, ElastiCache for KV cache, add in CodeBuild for build/deploy pipelines... AWS has quite the hefty overhead.
Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead
#50Of course it's dead, that's what you get for harassing users who try to ask questions.