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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

#91

Post by dv_dt »

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…

They also neglected to solve the problem of differentiating answers to previous generations of software. How many python2 answers does one have to sift through to get a python3 answer - maybe the weight of answers finally tilted over the probabilities. Even just adding the right tags would have made it easier, but it wasn't ever solved in any way as far as I could tell. And the old answers are there like potholes to fall into.

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

#93

Post by ijk »

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.

A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens.

There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.

The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.

It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5

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

#94

Post by btown »

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…

In theory reasoning tokens should do the equivalent of this - explicitly create options outside of the quick-response probability space, so those can guide future generation.

In practice, models that do this won't be prioritized as much, because the economics of thinking tokens that stop by default at, say, one option plus a bit more planning (short of full alternatives) would be superior as long as billing is per-user instead of per-token. So we'll still need to play games with prompting!

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

#95

Post by baq »

dpark wrote: post #71
smrq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What’s crazy is with the current gen of LLMs you could 100% rein in the abusive mods. SO could reinvent itself as a place for coding agents to get clankermotiomal support after they ‘hear’ ‘WHY THE F DID YOU DO THAT’. (Seriously a hook could draft a submission and then set up a listener for responses. Who would be answering is an interesting question tho)

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

#96

Post by IshKebab »

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.

Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves.

It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.

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

#97

Post by zamadatix »

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.

What did they change?

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

#98

Post by tliltocatl »

btown wrote: post #94
gpugreg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In theory reasoning tokens should do the equivalent of this - explicitly create options outside of the quick-response probability space, so those can guide future generation. In practice, models that do this won't be prioritized as much, because the economics of thinking tokens that stop by default at, say, one option plus a bit more planning (short of full alternatives) would be superior as long as billing is per-us…

Without continuous feedback from real world, lower-probability token (and soon high-probability ones as well) will be complete garbage.

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

#99

Post by huhkerrf »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #8
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.

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…

It's hard for me to imagine a user base more pedantic and judgy than reddit. It must have been really bad.

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

#100

Post by Fabricio20 »

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?

Ever since the AI stuff started rolling around on coding i've seen MORE documentation, theres a big incentive to properly document your API endpoints so LLMs can figure it out from specs, and even when not documented the llms can also just read the code and figure it out directly (for libraries and similar). And at least in my experience they tend to document or write it down for future sessions too!
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