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Stack Overflow is almost dead

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#71

Post by acyou »

I'm curious if Stack Overflow was a good resource for human learning? As in, run into a problem, look through other related questions and answers, check the documentation, struggle for awhile learning and figuring out how to frame and pose the question, struggle some more while you wait to get an answer. I kind of find LLMs "too easy" and can distinctly feel myself "not learning", not the way I used to, but after all I am getting older.

I'm pretty sure you can get a stack overflowy experience out of an llm with the right system prompt, but the human factor might not be the same. Not wanting to be berated by others on the internet is maybe underrated as a motivational tool. How are we going to get that back?

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#72

Post by jsheard »

nlawalker wrote: post #61
jsheard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the AI of tomorrow going to learn from if nobody is posting Q&As online anymore?

Other people's code on GitHub.

The other people's code which will have been AI generated by older, dumber models in many if not most cases? Possibly even written and committed by AI agents with no human review at all? European royalty tried this kind of thing and it didn't end well.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#73

Post by asadm »

I don't miss spending hours trying to find the right config to make things work and trying random answers on SO. Overall the dev world is a better place now and MANY dev hours are being saved. Plus, AI can now learn any new framework/language directly from docs. Even obscure ones, just pass all the .md files to gemini and ask!

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#74

Post by imglorp »

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.

> each new question is more and more likely to be already answered

Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#75

Post by irrational »

> 2014: questions started to decline, which was also when Stack Overflow significantly improved moderator efficiency. From then, questions were closed faster, many more were closed, and “low quality” questions were removed more efficiently. This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site felt unwelcome.

I also felt around that time that it became unwelcoming. I didn’t realize they had revamped the moderator tools. That is the time period when I stopped using it too. Now I know why.

How many other websites have also shot themselves in the foot by tweaking things?

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#76

Post by MarcelOlsz »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #57
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah in the training data sense, yeah that makes sense. My bet is that "code artisans" will see a revival in the 300k+ usd range that will drop into your codebase like a special forces team to unfuck the AI garbage all the prior "Seniors" implemented.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#77

Post by awesome_dude »

Gigachad wrote: post #51
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.

The next AI totally needs to be more snarky to make it feel more like we're dealing with actual "thinksperts", people that think they are experts even if their answers are demonstrably wrong.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#78

Post by acyou »

acyou wrote: post #71

I'm curious if Stack Overflow was a good resource for human learning? As in, run into a problem, look through other related questions and answers, check the documentation, struggle for awhile learning and figuring out how to frame and pose the question, struggle some more while you wait to get an answer. I kind of find LLMs "too easy" and can distinctly feel myself "not learning", not the way I used to, but after all…

Not to mention the helping and teaching other people aspect, which feels good, it feels like there isn't as much of that now. Or maybe it has just moved away onto Discord etc, but GitHub definitely doesn't feel like it has that aspect, if you don't also personally know other contributors and reviewers. Curious if others feel this way.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#79

Post by zahlman »

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"?

>the current StackOverflow moderators

Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.

> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing

So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.

> and now it's dying

Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?

> Maybe something was better before

Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?

If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.

The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#80

Post by kulahan »

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…

I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”.

It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.

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