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

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

#61

Post by ceejayoz »

Paracompact wrote: post #35
StableAlkyne wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it was a combination of moderators and users Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended…

Could've been a good rule: Unless the XY problem is so severe that X is impossible, you can't heckle or post Y solution unless paired with X solution.

X in an XY problem is almost always possible, like "how do we make ship canals and harbors with nukes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) or "I'd like to amputate my hand to fix a hangnail".

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

#62

Post by deaton »

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.

StackOverflow's extremely strict moderation was probably the #1 reason it turned into a high quality resource rather than a dumpster fire like reddit.

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

#63

Post by exe34 »

gpugreg wrote: post #9
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.

Same here. LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one. The "long tail" of solutions is usually lost due to how tokens are sampled from the LLM's probability distribution. What I found to help a lot is to ask for e.g. 10 different solutions to a problem and then choosing one of them. Sometimes, this even leads to borderline creative solutions if there aren't 10 different on…

> LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one.

I remember how Stack Overflow would close questions as duplicates just because somebody suggested the wrong answer that is also the right answer to the existing question. The best way to get a correct answer on Stack Overflow (and forums before that) was to post the wrong answer as part of your question.

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

#64

Post by Morromist »

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've heard this is now most of some CS jobs now. Just writing documentation for AI.

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

#65

Post by bigfishrunning »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #52
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.

your prompts, and the code you have it review.

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

#66

Post by beachy »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #23

This is happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.

I feel reddit is having a near death moment.

There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"

And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.

Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.

There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.

When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.

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

#67

Post by senordevnyc »

andomar wrote: post #42
jonas21 wrote: post #18

The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.

A firm is sold when its owners believe they will get the best price. The selling itself is more of a symptom than a cause.

Businesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.

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

#68

Post by npollock »

one of the interesting properties of public forums like SO is that the maintainers of software packages get visibility into the problems and frustrations that their users experience

we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models

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

#69

Post by saalweachter »

Animats wrote: post #30

Wow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off. That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?

I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero.

You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.

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

#70

Post by ishurand4 »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #52
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.

Stack Overflow and Reddit are still getting threads. And as AI gets smarter, the questions will also expand.
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