Stack Overflow is almost dead • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#51

Post by Gigachad » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

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…

Mixed feelings on SO. It was helpful, but it was also a website you dread having to post on because it was filled with the most intolerable people of the internet who you just had to endure abuse from if you wanted help.

Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#52

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

panstromek wrote: post #8

Doesn'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.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#53

Post by gkoberger » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

CyberMacGyver wrote: post #45

Didn’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...

You don't start and run StackOverflow because of the money. You do it because you really care. Running niche communities isn't a lucrative path, and (as we're seeing now) they can be quite fickle.

Additionally, it's not just the owners... it's the millions of people who contributed.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#54

Post by staircasebug » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

TremendousJudge wrote: post #25

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…

> But now ChatGPT does that in minutes But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?

They're learning from working code in GitHub, IDE "co-pilots"...

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#55

Post by benoau » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

Personally my usage of S.O. was significantly reduced just by sticking to the same stack and tools for the last 7 or 8 years and letting depth accumulate instead of always being in the midst of learning a new framework / language / whatever that necessitated googling how to do x in y or z.

And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don't recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#56

Post by bawolff » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #9

I 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"?

I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity.

Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#57

Post by TremendousJudge » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #29

TremendousJudge wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now ChatGPT does that in minutes But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?

It will steal our own data and we'll have a big "oopsie! didn't mean to!" moment 5-10 years after.

My point is that there won't even be any data to steal! The novel human-written and human-rated answers just won't exist anymore. Where will it get its answers on C++26 features from? Not the non-existing StackOverflow, that's for sure.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#58

Post by coolius » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

Stackoverflow answers kind of provided a source of truth by being confirmed / upvoted by people trying them out. We're completely abandoning this medium (on which LLMs are trained), even as technologies keep changing. Perhaps coding agents should start posting to stackoverflow too...

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#59

Post by tevon » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

bfung wrote: post #10

Where will training data come from for new tech & programming languages if SO dies?

All the same places it comes from for human programmers before a language has many answers on SO.

- Documentation - Open source projects using it - Github issues - Source code - Blogs - Youtube videos

The list goes on

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#60

Post by TremendousJudge » Thu, May 15, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

staircasebug wrote: post #54

TremendousJudge wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now ChatGPT does that in minutes But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?

They're learning from working code in GitHub, IDE "co-pilots"...

But a priori you don't know if the code you find on Github is "good", plus it doesn't come with a handy explanation. The quality of the data is much, much worse.