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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

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

> Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.

Fourteenth clear as imagined in their head XY problem of the day.

By far most of the "XY problems" I saw, on SO or elsewhere, were actually "XY problem problems" - i.e. a responder having so limited imagination and character (or, to be charitable, just running very low on energy and focus), that upon coming across a question they couldn't comprehend, they would assume the person asking the question must be confused instead.

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

#82

Post by legitster »

Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming.

But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time:

If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer).

At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems.

(Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).

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

#83

Post by mathattack »

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.

It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years”

It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.

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

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #78
ceejayoz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reall…

This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week.

Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...

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

#86

Post by allknowingfrog »

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.

SO has always had a pretty strong stance against opinion-based questions, but this is maybe the niche they should be exploring now. Humans still have a lot to say about the "best" solution to a given problem. The whole idea of an "accepted" answer could be removed, for example, since that's what AI will already generate.

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

#87

Post by worthless-trash »

akkad33 wrote: post #10
ceejayoz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of what Claude insists you do probably came from SO.

Or Reddit. I don't know about Claude but Gemini has given me answers that are verbatim comments from Reddit.

I have seen it quote my own code back at me, including comments word for word.

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

#88

Post by jsLavaGoat »

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.

Why are you trying to do that? You should do this totally different thing that I do because I know how to do it.

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

#89

Post by 20k »

ceejayoz wrote: post #7
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.

Much of what Claude insists you do probably came from SO.

I've seen chatgpt word for word plagiarise stack overflow answers

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

#90

Post by sixtyj »

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.

I am thinking to make canned encyclopaedia of stackoverflow answers.

Claude/Grok/Gemini/Chatgpt answers are often so… how to say it… misleading? I have to stop the conversation as it leads nowhere (and it is not a skill issue :)

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