There's more than one reason that forum is dead.
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 you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.
But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
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.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
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.
Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.
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.
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.
- Rl envs + synthetic data + human annotated
- Usage data from codex/claude code/cursor
Most of the model abilities in coding come from post-training, not pretraining
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).
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/193252...
The Ghost of Expert Sexchange gets its revenge.
Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc.
But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment.
Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.
> Wikimedia-like foundation
There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"
And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.
Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.
There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.
When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.
I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?
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 to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.
Slashdot is firmly in this stage of its existence, and honestly it's kinda fun
Human facing web search. Most SaS.
we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models
unfortunately all the incentives right now are for repos to be private
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 ones.
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!
I remember how Stack Overflow would close questions as duplicates just because somebody suggested the wrong answer that is also the right answer to the existing question. The best way to get a correct answer on Stack Overflow (and forums before that) was to post the wrong answer as part of your question.
It really could be bad though.
"Show me 6 very different solutions, and present arguments for/against each one as if a bunch of angry monkeys."
You can definitely study alone and achieve perfect grades, but studying with your peers is how you build relationships for future life and take your community forward as a whole.
needed to implement a language feature that was a bit complicated and im not familiar with it so just planned with claude to do it, and after each write/fix cycle it just wouldn't work right.... gave up, went back to SO copy pasted the (not perfect but enough to start from) answer and worked up from there...
at the same time my knowledge grew and im more confident to do this same capability myself whereas reiterating with claude it was just a slog and i didn't learn much...
i think i may be starting to sour on these "do it all for me" usage scenarios for ai... especially for unfamiliar areas...
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 :)
LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
Unfortunately the LLMs are concentrated into few providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) so there's a chance they each end up doing their own private (and closed) StackOverflows. By leveraging their private StackOverflows, their LLMs will be able to short-circuit complex reasoning, saving tokens, time, and money.
Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.
While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.
Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.
Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.
For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.
I thought point was on Stack Overflow, there were community voting on 'best' answer.
If it is just me and the AI. Then the AI training data, is just whatever I approved the AI to do. Just my opinion.
Did anyone (person or competing LLM) bother to verify that they're correct, though? Who knows! Let the next generation of models worry about that.
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.
I think most of my questions ended up with this, when I had very good reasons for doing it the way I was doing it. I typically wasn't showing it because I had isolated the problem I was facing into the minimal amount of code to duplicate it, or I was stuck with the particular tech I was using and we had 12 years of code built on top of it and I couldn't switch.
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.
It’s fine, and what you would expect for certain prompts, except that the synthesized results often come back communicating more authority than they deserve.
On the other hand, Claude later nailed this project, where I as a human said before, no, too much extra work.
4 years later my company had bought a different company, who happened to be using a newer model of the same board. They asked me how we could use the 12c bus. “Well before you bought us, we emailed the vendor and sent back this C snippet”
It was my code, verbatim. I’ve always wondered how many times they passed that bit of code around.
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.
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.
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...
That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect.
The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.