Ask HN: Is Stack Overflow Dead? With the explosion of AI tools in our workflows this year, I stopped using Stack Overflow and copilot. Previously, SO was an unavoidable step of my programming effort for navigating or learning new frameworks, for exploring solutions, for debugging strange cases.... But now , it has been a long while since I visited the site. Are you still using SO, reading, searching, contributing? |
- How will they survive?
- What happens with all those unsolved problems, those that AIs haven't found a source with the solution to scrape from?
First, a disclaimer: I do not speak for other elected moderators, nor for Stack Exchange Inc. My views are my own.
Site traffic has been declining for a long time and that's not a mystery. Empirically, the rise of Large Language Models has sped up the decline or at least did not reverse the trend. This is both good and bad. Good because LLM's capture the vast majority of questions that would be quickly closed — underspecified, unclear, duplicate, not actually about programming, and so on. This increases the signal-to-noise ratio and average usefulness of SO questions. Bad because of all the implications of declining traffic that everyone can imagine.
Is it dead? No. In fact, SO has a great opportunity to specialize in answering questions that LLMs cannot answer (bleeding edge technology, complex debugging problems, emerging issues, you name it.) The community is still alive. Whether Stack Exchange Inc. is able to understand and adapt to this shift is unclear.
Company aside, the biggest challenge we moderators are facing is to identify and remove LLM-generated content. Keeping SO free of LLM-generated content is critical in helping the site maintain an edge against AI tools that provide quick and confident-sounding answers to whatever problem you throw at them. It's an uphill battle though, and one that is probably unwinnable, but the community hasn't given up yet.
But they are missing that opportunity because such questions typically get no answer and no votes (or sometimes even downvoted as some users tend to downvote questions they don't understand), which caused them to be automatically deleted later. And some of these questions will be closed e.g. as too niche (complex debugging problems). I've posted over 7000 questions across Stack Exchange and that's my experience.
> quick and confident-sounding answers to whatever problem you throw at them.
Just like an answer on Stack Overflow.
Now, the rare times I've asked a question, I've violate some rule I've forgotten. Or that's new (they're SO AI allergic).
Reddit, interestingly, has continued to thrive. I think in party because its still largely fun and there are literally millions of communities.
Stackoverflow once benefited from its pedantry, now there's not much value in such pedantry, and its just not a fun place to hang out.
I wanted to do a pause of 1 second in Chez Scheme, but I din't know the spell. I tried Google and Gemini gave me an example. It didn't work because the parameter were in the reverse order (seconds vs nanoseconds). So after looking at the manual and trying both orders, I got the result I wanted. (And reduced the time to .2 seconds, because 1 second was too long.)
In an hypothetical case that it were a SO question, I don't see why my answer would not be good.
Unrelated to AI, I haven't really had a positive experience on StackOverflow in 7+ years. The way they aggressively close questions as duplicates despite the previous questions having incomplete or outdated answers was already making it a much less useful site.
It would be better if closing questions would cost 1000 reputation. That's one advantage AI has over it - it will at least try to answer your question every time and not just randomly shut you down for its own (wrong) reasons.
Too often old answers would be frozen in time, not being updated for new software and better solutions. Similarly most questions got closed as "duplicate" even when they were not.
You can find questions such as "My DNS isn't working", with answers like "Have you tried disabling your firewall?" and it's feels like the blind leading the blind, like PHP developers fixing installations via "chmod 777".
LLMs are terrible, but stackoverflow is definitely worse.
Exactly. Some stackoverflow users keep complaining about AI slop but they fail to realize that human slop is much more rampant.
(My experience here was with Kagi, I’m not sure how Google and others are with this)
As for Stack Overflow, the number of questions has decreased 25-fold (!) since 2018. A single person could now answer all new questions if they had nothing else to do.
I don't answer for SO points but dropping below a certain threshold removes features.
I'm done with the place.
There is also a higher tolerance for newbie questions and duplicates