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This threw me off so much when I got started with programming. Like why are the people who have the most questions, not allowed to ask any...?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Long before LLMs. Setting aside peak-COVID as a weird aberration, question volume has been in decline since 2014 or maybe 2016.
Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO…
Isn't this how Quora is supposed to operate?
Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008)
Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)
While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding. So some possible reasons: - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask. - Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messa…
I think this is one major factor that is not getting enough consideration in this comment thread. By 2018-2020, it felt like the number of times that someone else had already asked the question had increased to the point that there was no reason to bother asking it. Google also continued to do a better and better job of surfacing the right StackOverflow thread, even if the SO search didn't.
In 2012 you might search Google, not find what you needed, go to StackOverflow, search and have no better luck, then make a post (and get flamed for it being a frequently-asked question but you were phrasing yours in a different / incorrect way and didn't find the "real" answer).
In 2017, you would search Google and the relevant StackOverflow thread would be in the top few results, so you wouldn't need to post and ask.
In 2020, Google's "rich snippets" were showing you the quick answers in the screen real estate that is now used by the AI Overview answers, and those often times had surfaced some info taken from StackOverflow.
And then, at the very end of 2022, ChatGPT came along and effectively acted as the StackOverflow search that you always wanted - you could phrase your question as poorly as you want, no one would flame you, and you'd get some semblance of the correct answer (at least for simple questions).
I think StackOverflow was ultimately a victim of it's own success. Most of the questions that would be asked by your normal "question asker" type of user were eventually "solved" and it was just a matter of how easy it was to find them. Google, ChatGPT, "AI Overviews", Claude Code, etc have simply made finding those long-answered questions much easier, as well as answering all of the "new" questions that could be posed - and without all of the drama and hassle of dealing with a human-moderated site.
I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (…
It's flat wrong to suggest SO had the right answer all the time, and in fact in my experience for trickier work it was often wrong or missing entirely. LLMs have a better hit rate with me.
Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
>For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Long before LLMs. Setting aside peak-COVID as a weird aberration, question volume has been in decline since 2014 or maybe 2016.
Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO…
LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls
In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.
What should worry everyone is what system will come after LLMs. Data is being centralized and hoarded by giant corporations, and not shared publicly. And the data that is shared is generated by LLMs. We're poisoning the well of information with no fallback mechanism.
When Hans Passant (OGs will know) left, followed by SE doing literally nothing, that was the first clue for me personally that SE stopped caring.
That said, it is a bit shocking how close to zero it is.