Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

sherwood.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 267 posts

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

#51

Post by pkamb »

LLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway).

Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc.

But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment.

Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.

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

#52

Post by FrustratedMonky »

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.

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.

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

#53

Post by whateverboat »

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.

What you are noticing in a long term is the "community" knowledge and communication which the chatGPT is now kind of destroying. In some sense, it is no different from the difference between studying along and studying with your peers at a university.

You can definitely study alone and achieve perfect grades, but studying with your peers is how you build relationships for future life and take your community forward as a whole.

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

#54

Post by ethagnawl »

izacus wrote: post #24
akkad33 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing them to docs? Which is anyway what stack overflow answers did?

What docs? Who writes docs now that AIs answer everything?

I know you're being facetious but there may well be docs. It's just that the same AI most likely wrote _them_, too.

Did anyone (person or competing LLM) bother to verify that they're correct, though? Who knows! Let the next generation of models worry about that.

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

#55

Post by cryptoegorophy »

jsLavaGoat wrote: post #2

Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.

This has been my experience. Glad they got what they finally deserved.

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

#56

Post by zem »

jsLavaGoat wrote: post #2

Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.

if the mismoderation did not kill stackoverflow, it at the least made people who might otherwise have supported the site feel like nothing of value was lost.

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

#57

Post by jshen »

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.

We may need to create a community driven version of SO. Hard for it to be a successful business these days.

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

#58

Post by dpark »

alach11 wrote: post #4
jsLavaGoat wrote: post #2

Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.

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.

It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...

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

#59

Post by vanuatu »

torben-friis wrote: post #49
vanuatu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its much of an issue - Rl envs + synthetic data + human annotated - Usage data from codex/claude code/cursor Most of the model abilities in coding come from post-training, not pretraining

A better question is what's left for those who don't have access to that. We went from publicly available to vacuumed from private users

Open source models

unfortunately all the incentives right now are for repos to be private

Post reply on HN