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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

#71

Post by dpark »

smrq wrote: post #26
alach11 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and…

I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions.

I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.

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

#73

Post by crazygringo »

hintymad wrote: post #6

Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?

Plenty of documentation, and plenty of code that the AI can read itself.

E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.

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

#74

Post by bigfishrunning »

saalweachter wrote: post #69
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 t…

> You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage

Slashdot is firmly in this stage of its existence, and honestly it's kinda fun

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

#75

Post by ssl-3 »

Morromist wrote: post #39
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.

One thing that SO had was you could see multiple solutions and implementations for something. Sometimes the "best" solution isn't very readable code, sometimes you are able to understand the problem better when you see a bunch of people solving it in different ways and arguing about it like angry monkeys. It really could be bad though.

The bot can do that kind of thing, too.

"Show me 6 very different solutions, and present arguments for/against each one as if a bunch of angry monkeys."

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

#76

Post by asqueella »

jshen wrote: post #57
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.

https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...

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

#78

Post by StableAlkyne »

ceejayoz wrote: post #29
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…

> against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.

That's the thing though, it was voluntary.

If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.

I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.

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

#79

Post by bhouston »

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.

> Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm.,

That is great to hear. I am glad that the original creators of StackOverflow got their liquidity event and are well off financially I suspect.

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

#80

Post by unshavedyak »

smrq wrote: post #26
alach11 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and…

Exactly.

Ironically i'm probably a better dev purely because after a few experiences on SO, I would rather waste days/weeks banging my head against problems and learning from them than to actually post on SO. It was a miserable experience generally. For context this was probably ~15 years ago now.

This isn't necessarily to say that SO made me a better developer. Rather i'm just saying that i value (correctly or not) those extremely hard fought lessons. Those lessons where it was considerable pain, effort, time, misery, etc. Are they efficient ways to learn? I doubt it. But in my many trips down that road i developed intuition that i'd probably not have otherwise.

So ironically i guess SO made me a better developer by avoiding using SO at all cost. Conversely, i imagine i'd lack this value that i speak of entirely if i was 20 years younger and starting fresh today. Not sure i'd be better off though.

edit: By "using SO" i should be saying posting on SO. I of course searched and used data found on SO as often as i could. So to that end i am grateful for SO existing.

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