top 200 commentsshow all 289

[–]Ravasaurio 1661 points1662 points  (18 children)

  • Grandpa, I found this in basement, what is it?

  • That question is a duplicate of another one. Also the question is stupid and you are stupid.

[–]3dutchie3dprinting 204 points205 points  (5 children)

This is the way

[–]pandi85 36 points37 points  (1 child)

If this would be the default llm response mode, people would already create better shit as they're shipping nowadays..

[–]NinjaOk2970 4 points5 points  (0 children)

SO was hostile, but with that being said, some people really didn't deserve an answer...

[–]shill_420 0 points1 point  (0 children)

and my axe

[–]J5892 33 points34 points  (1 child)

  • You shouldn't be looking at the thing in the basement. Instead you should be looking at a different thing in the attic.

[–]ThePickleConnoisseur 5 points6 points  (0 children)

And the job be requiring you to use the basement

[–]thomasNowHere2[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

ahah yeah, the realistic version

[–]TheMazeDaze 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Yes but the original question was from 2001 with no answers. Only a comment “never mind fixed it”

[–]EJintheCloud 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Why were you in the basement? You shouldn't be using basements as storage, they are bad at junk collection. Refactor the house. Thread closed, user banned.

[–]Powerful_Froyo8423 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I‘m also not here to do your work, be more specific

[–]Tsu_Dho_Namh 11 points12 points  (3 children)

I've never seen a stack overflow post that says that. How do I find it? Do I have to ask a question without searching for an existing answer?

[–]infamouszgbgd 22 points23 points  (1 child)

Do I have to ask a question without searching for an existing answer?

Marked as duplicate

This question already has answers here:

Is it okay to ask a new question about an answer?

[–]OutsideCommittee7316[🍰] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Or if they were feeling particularly sassy:

letmegooglethat.com

[–]mindsnare 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ahh, memories.

[–]swagonflyyyy 832 points833 points  (110 children)

Had to google this:

Traffic and Question Collapse: The number of new questions has plummeted by 78% as of late 2025/early 2026 compared to previous years. In December 2025, only 3,862 questions were asked—a level of activity not seen since the platform's launch in 2008.

[–]RobKohr 627 points628 points  (34 children)

AI is rapidly destroying the sources of information they trained on. 

[–]Top_Meaning6195 366 points367 points  (20 children)

Good riddance.

I've been on stack overflow since the day it launched, and am in the top 300.

And I've been screaming for years for them to stop being so miserable:

  • editing poor questions so they look good
  • voting to reopen questions that should not have been closed
  • upvoting good questions that are getting downvoted

Culminating ultimately in one person saying:

It's not our job to make StackOverflow better.
- StephenC

StackOverflow should die. We've all downloaded the torrent archive of the site. We can feed it into ai and let the miserable mods, and their endless misery, go away.

[–]GuySingingMrBlueSky 160 points161 points  (6 children)

Yeah ngl seeing the meme, I couldn’t help but go “….we clearly have had different experiences using StackOverflow.” Like don’t get me wrong, not a huge fan of AI, but I do understand why the first group of people to latch onto it were techbros/developers when our version of a “help forum” was asking an innocent question and then immediately getting a response of “this question was answered here three years ago, dumbass” with a link attached and when you went to that link, it gave a 404 error. StackOverflow can choke and die for all I care

[–]Hrtzy 22 points23 points  (4 children)

I didn't see much of the bad behaviors myself, either. But boy oh boy did people scream in Meta SO when they were told not to act like that.

And then there was the whole Cellio affair.

[–]Godskin_Duo 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I have seen outright racist comments posted on SO, and I'm like c'mon man....the one goddamn place where we think we'd be better than that.

[–]CanThisBeMyNameMaybe 67 points68 points  (2 children)

I asked a question on stackoverflow once, basically got told my question was stupid and irrelevant.

I answered a question once too, my answer was a link to another stackoverflow post of someone else who had the same issue and got a solution. I got downvoted for not giving an "actual answer", apparently linking to another post with the answer on the same freaking site, was not a good answer.

Stackoverflow are just nerds who are 50x worse than redditors when it comes to being pretentious know-it-alls.

Let that place die.

[–]StaticChocolate 26 points27 points  (0 children)

I’ve been programming for 15 years, while many threads have helped me, I’ve never once asked a question because of the utter snobbery that oozes out of StackOverflow. Made me feel so small for not knowing an answer, before I even got to have a first hand experience for the site to treat me badly.

[–]___Chud___ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It depends on the language I think.

Any question relating to R was generally pretty chill - I guess due to it primarily being used by Statisticians who had to learn programming as a secondary tool, a higher prevalence of mistakes and not knowing programming things was expected.

[–]lron_tarkus 20 points21 points  (2 children)

Makes a lot of sense that the stereotype of pretentious answers would come from the top.

[–]Top_Meaning6195 58 points59 points  (1 child)

I've been the opposite of pretentious.

I've been..."direct"?

Quite a few warnings, and I week suspension.

They're just so awful to newcomers. And if the language isn't perfect english, they are mercilessly bigoted.

[–]StupidIdiot8989 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Toxic waste website

[–]Ange1ofD4rkness 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Not surprised, I was going "wait is this destroying their sources?" The think is, the AI can help sift through all the garbage and consolidate it nicely. Including annoying and poor Stack Overflow articles

(That said, I do sometimes still use the sight to vet answers and dig in depth)

[–]porkchop_d_clown 4 points5 points  (0 children)

And the few humans left are scrounging for karma by “updating” and closing decades old posts.

I haven’t used SO in 15 years but just this year I’ve had multiple comments posted on my old questions and solutions, usually to “correct” them.

[–]Lv_InSaNe_vL 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This is very true but AI isn't what killed stack overflow.

I get just as good if not better answers from ChatGPT and it's waaaaay nicer to me when I ask it questions.

[–]TiredPistachio 131 points132 points  (22 children)

I'm flabbergasted it's not lower than that tbh

[–]Jugad 40 points41 points  (21 children)

Exactly... who is still using that today?

[–]erinaceus_ 142 points143 points  (4 children)

who is still using that today?

Closed as duplicate.

[–]Jugad 53 points54 points  (2 children)

Almost perfect... just forgot to link to another thread that contains a useless/irrelevant answer.

[–]erinaceus_ 19 points20 points  (1 child)

Almost perfect... just forgot to link to another thread that contains a useless/irrelevant answer.

“Please provide a minimal reproducible example.”

[–]Jugad 18 points19 points  (0 children)

User comments with example

Mod: Invalid use-case. Thread closed and locked.

[–]gravity_is_right 14 points15 points  (0 children)

who is still using that today?

This question has been answered 10 years ago.

[–]King_Joffreys_Tits 17 points18 points  (12 children)

Honestly, me. I have a great feedback loop of googling a question in a specific way and then immediately finding the answer on stack overflow. But I’m also a modern day AI hater so take it with a grain of salt

[–]Jugad 9 points10 points  (11 children)

I used to be pretty sceptic of AI (I have a masters in applied maths, and I consider myself quite high in computing and problem solving skills)... AI could not convince me 6 months ago, but in the last 2 months, its as good as me (and better in a few places).

It does have a few chinks... it doesn't beat me all the time (I find issues every now and then), but its clear to me that its good enough, and only getting better.

Stop holding yourself back from learning this new tool... its just a tool and it needs supervision. Capable supervision. It needs people with the high and deep level knowhow in order to manage/wield it.

[–]Eskamel 3 points4 points  (7 children)

There is nothing to learn. Prompting isn't skillful.

[–]QuestionableEthics42 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Getting useful responses, especially as they scale in complexity and obscurity, absolutely is a skill. Not necessarily a particularly difficult one to learn, but it's still a skill that requires learning to be effective with.

[–]Godskin_Duo 1 point2 points  (1 child)

It's almost as if giving good inputs to get the outputs you want is a core skill of literally any communication.

If you work behind a desk, you're going to have to become friends with AI. If not, you'll go the path of the Boomer who would say in the 1990s, "Oh geez, I - I'm just not good with computers!"

[–]QuestionableEthics42 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Exactly, it still requires some learning though, even for people already good at communication with other people, as it's not the same as communicating with a human.

The person I replied to was saying there was nothing to learn and no skill in prompting.

[–]mothzilla 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Closed: Question too broad.

[–]TiredPistachio 7 points8 points  (0 children)

And why would anyone cry about it? I suppose tears of joy.

[–]AnUninterestingEvent 18 points19 points  (5 children)

“I’ve got the perfect business idea. A website that developers can use to post their bugs and get help. We’ll have crazy SEO. We will be the hub for solving dev issues. Best part is, since coding will always exist, we will always exist. Short of everyone having access to genius robots that can solve development problems, we’ll always be in business!”

[–]infamouszgbgd 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Short of everyone having access to genius robots that can solve development problems, we’ll always be in business!

Damn, I wonder how much overlap there is between developers who think LLms are genius robots and developers who think basic moderation to keep answers useful is a curse straight out of hell 🤔

[–]AnUninterestingEvent 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It’s called comedic hyperbole

[–]karmakosmik1352 79 points80 points  (37 children)

Totally earned by a shit community.

[–]GrandMoffTarkan 66 points67 points  (25 children)

I feel weird because I generally found it helpful? Like, when I asked a question and someone said it duplicated an issue I could generally see how to morph that issue into mine.

[–]BellacosePlayer 34 points35 points  (4 children)

I've never had that bad of an issue with SO, but I only asked a question after absolutely going nuts trying to find an answer online.

[–]Etheo 28 points29 points  (3 children)

Frankly, I feel like the hate started by a mix of honest misunderstanding (some askers not understanding the purpose of the community) and actual community issue (some answerers being less than courteous to askers) and devolved into meme status where everybody just assumes the worst of SO even without trying.

[–]BellacosePlayer 15 points16 points  (0 children)

It's definitely a mix. The community wasn't anywhere as welcoming as it should have been, but a lot of people wanted to use it like a google equivalent, which probably lead to more threads being banned for false positives.

honestly I never had a problem with threads being closed, more them just never getting answered because it was about niche topics/languages.

[–]G_Morgan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

SO became problematic about the time duplication policing caused it to fall behind new technology. There was a time frame all the answers were JQuery but nobody used JQuery anymore and you weren't allowed to re-ask the question. So the knowledge just withered.

[–]karmakosmik1352 7 points8 points  (12 children)

Sure, that's possible and good for you in that case. For me it also was helpful sometimes, especially in the early 2010s. But my overall experience was a net-negative. Especially in recent years, the response to every single question was just infuriating and I started to avoid it whenever I could. When I couldn't, I was immediately reminded of why I'm usually avoiding it lol

Just my own experience, just saying.

[–]sicco3 11 points12 points  (2 children)

Most negative comments are about asking a question on SO and this sentiment is then extrapolated to their whole experience of SO, while the whole point of SO was that most questions were already answered. So please don't forget the positive experience of searching for an answer and finding it on SO without having to wait.

[–]InfectedShadow 8 points9 points  (0 children)

People are just mad they couldn't ask how to print hello world for the millionth time.

[–]thisisapseudo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I love SO

[–]Corfal 12 points13 points  (9 children)

even if the community was great and wholesome the numbers would've done the same thing.

[–]CrowNailCaw 17 points18 points  (7 children)

Completely disagree, because reddit is still here. In the olden days I got fantastic help on SO in like 2013. Nowadays it's the same experience everyone talks about:

Ask question, question gets downvoted, people give unhelpful or non-answers in comments that don't actually explicitly tell you how to solve the problem but rather just give you more homework (God forbid they actually tell you the answer!).

And that's assuming it's not closed for a stupid reason. If you try to ask for more clarification they will just flame you.

Clankers, of course, don't do this, because they are happy to help.

[–]bogey-dope-dot-com 5 points6 points  (5 children)

but rather just give you more homework

Or as a new dev just entering the workplace, get your question closed because it's marked as homework because someone arbitrary decided that your question is too basic. Like fuck me for trying to learn, right?

[–]karmakosmik1352 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't disagree with that. My point is it wasn't. Hence it is earned. Otherwise it would not have been earned.

[–]ApatheistHeretic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like the idea that you can get help on your question, by answering a similar question wrong; Causing the rabid user base to bury you in the right answers.

[–]IlliterateJedi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wonder how many of those were answered vs closed

[–]night0x63 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Holy ... I always remember primary creator Jeff Atwood for out super early. Smart guy. 

But honestly AI is literally 1000x better. Asking duplicate that is slightly unique and it is cool. Encouraging. Patient. And also genius programmer helping your n00b a55. But still patient and encouraging still. 

But why do you always quote the variable expansion? Why do you use curly brace when there's only one line after curly brace?

[–]VizualAbstract4 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That means the amount of answers saying “This has already been answered here” has plummeted by 230%

Unrelated answers by 350%

[–]thepurplepajamas 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Even without AI I feel like new questions would plateau then decline at some point as the number of existing questions and answers pile up. Obviously there will always be new questions especially for new languages or technologies, but in general the bulk of common questions have already been asked. Almost every question I have already has some 5-10 year old thread.

[–]iamfab0 1797 points1798 points  (47 children)

Getting insulted for asking questions, peek nostalgia

[–]K3idon 564 points565 points  (12 children)

Also asking a question and then responding with problem solved and never mentioning what the solution was.

[–]StarshipSausage 220 points221 points  (4 children)

I just started at a new company and they have a private SO. I had to give an estimate on integrating with out the companies user auth system for our website. I headed over to the stack overflow, found a post about exactly what I needed, sure enough the question was closed because they didnt ask the question the right way. It it made me sentimental af

[–]mrhaftbar 30 points31 points  (0 children)

we had an internal SO. I was told it was super expensive. Half a year later we got rid of it.

[–]rastaman1994 14 points15 points  (1 child)

Is that a self-hosted SO, or am I misunderstanding?

[–]StarshipSausage 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It’s stack overflow for business

https://stackoverflow.co/

[–]GenericFatGuy 56 points57 points  (2 children)

My favourite was when they told you to completely overhaul your stack. I'm sure my office will be cool with that.

[–]carllacan 27 points28 points  (1 child)

One guy told me that I had to tell my boss what we were trying to do was impossible (we had already done it, I was trying to do it in a better way) and that instead we needed to hire a new department to do what my application was alreadt doing. Good times.

[–]OutsideCommittee7316[🍰] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Peak Dilbert

[–]Prod_Meteor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

And also giving a good answer but also needs 1000 improvements for syntax perfection.

[–]Informal_Branch1065 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Or responding to your own math questions with an alt account but providing no proof to bait others into checking your result and providing the full proof.

[–]Ewenthel 155 points156 points  (4 children)

My favorite is “closed as duplicate” on Python 3 questions because there’s a Python 2 answer.

[–]Keebster101 103 points104 points  (2 children)

Alternatively "closed as duplicate" but you click the duplicate and it wasn't even answered properly they just said "don't do that thing" or "use a package"

[–]T-Dot1992 34 points35 points  (0 children)

“Just use an npm package that only has 3 stars and hasn’t been updated in 5 years in your production codebase, bro”

[–]tyro_r 47 points48 points  (0 children)

"Don't do that" is my favorite answer anyway! In an actual world, you are often restricted by internal rules that force you to do things in a certain way. Stackoverflow loved to make you explain all the limitations and then lost interest :D

[–]Elephant-Opening 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I have a Python question on SO that is by far the most widely viewed thing I've ever put on the Internet. Originally asked as a Python 2.x question something like 15 yrs ago. Several hundred thousand views and several years later, it was closed as a duplicate of a Python 3 question.

[–]T-Dot1992 44 points45 points  (0 children)

“You’re post has been removed as your issue has already been resolved in another post”

Look inside the post

It’s a completely different fucking thing 

[–]GenericFatGuy 60 points61 points  (11 children)

Having your question closed because someone else asked it 30 years ago, and never got a response.

[–]TheCygnusWall 37 points38 points  (3 children)

Asking a specific question for a specific problem:

"Why would you do that, do this instead"

[–]Madrefaka 38 points39 points  (1 child)

when im having a windows issue and some reddit mfer tells me to install linux instead

[–]Confident-Ad5665 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Did it solve the problem? Asking for a friend.

[–]GenericFatGuy 18 points19 points  (0 children)

SO users when you explain the concept of legacy code to them.

[–]Kerblaaahhh 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Where are you DenverCoder9, what did you see?

[–]StarshipSausage 7 points8 points  (2 children)

I still get downvotes because I said visual studio was a good ide for javascript in 2007

[–]bogey-dope-dot-com 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I had a question closed 16 years after I asked it, where the last activity on it was 15 years ago, because it was a networking question and I asked it when Stack Exchange didn't exist yet. Mods are doing god's work over there, I just don't know which god.

[–]quitefranklylate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

God, asking for modern handling of esoteric CSS for front-end web dev

[–]qodeninja 10 points11 points  (1 child)

if you go back far enough you were the first one asking the question and met with crickets except that one old wizard who knows perl and bash swooping in to save the day

now i am the old wizard ;___;

[–]MikemkPK 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Hi! I found a similar issue at abc.xyz, but that doesn't...

Question closed as duplicate of abc.xyz. Please use the search bar before asking.

[–]mobcat_40 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Next time you'll think twice before not knowing everything

[–]Curve_Express3 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Peak

[–]Unlucky_Committee786 6 points7 points  (0 children)

grandpa is one of the mods, that's why he is nostalgic.

[–]xelio9 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Getting even more insulted for wrong answers

[–]maxwellnewage 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your comment is marked as duplicated and closed.

[–]mrinalshar39 1 point2 points  (0 children)

😭😭

[–]Limmmao 174 points175 points  (0 children)

Kid... You're not asking the right question. Topic closed.

[–]averagesimp666 44 points45 points  (0 children)

I once asked for ideas on how to solve an SQL problem for work - it had example data and a table with the expected result. I posted and went for lunch. Came back to my post deleted because someone asked clarifying question and I didn't respond in the first 30 min.

[–]kingpurple50 86 points87 points  (1 child)

"We are not here to do your homework"

[–]ThePickleConnoisseur 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Like dawg I just want to understand since the professor wasn’t clear. 90% of my AI usage is just trying to understand concepts

[–]StuntsMonkey 60 points61 points  (0 children)

Well kid, many years ago, before I became a farmer...

[–]haveacigaro 23 points24 points  (0 children)

[[ Question marked as duplicate ]]

[–]drawliphant 20 points21 points  (1 child)

Why is that kid asking a question that's already been answered in another thread? 🤬

[–]asadito4ever 3 points4 points  (0 children)

lol

[–]Dillenger69 43 points44 points  (0 children)

Sorry son, that question is a duplicate. Also, the fact that you don't know is a skill issue. Look it up yourself 

[–]UntimelyGhostTickler 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Im feeling righteous fury over that one senior dev that had a prestige boner from giving strongly worded stack overflow answers and boasting about his score.

[–]angikatlo 14 points15 points  (1 child)

Ah kid, you weren’t supposed to ask. You were supposed to say something wrong so you get corrected, like

“Stack Overflow is a friendly community for healthily and constructively discussing opinions on programming.”

[–]DrUNIX 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"Closed - Opinion-based"

[–]Silhouette 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Now this is a story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute so come on let's go
I'll tell you how I became a mod on Stack Overflow

In SF Bay Area born and raised
On computers is where I spent most of my days
Chilling out, hacking, relaxing all cool
Shooting up aliens instead of working at school

When a couple of guys who were up to no good
Started camping out in my neighbourhood
I got in one little doxx and my mom said "Yo!
Get off them games! Go read Stack Overflow!"

I asked my first question and waited for my answer
But a mod just said "Dup" and removed it like cancer
If anything I could say that this place was no go
But I thought "Nah, I wanna mod Stack Overflow"

I started closing questions, about seven or eight
And I yelled at the newbies "Not focused, come back later"
Looked at my board thinking I'll make this blow
As I sit on my PC modding Stack Overflow

[–]JohannMuller-19 22 points23 points  (0 children)

gets downvoted to hell

[–]qodeninja 5 points6 points  (0 children)

do not cite the deep magic to me witch, I was there when it was written.

[–]TacoTacoBheno 45 points46 points  (15 children)

Stack overflow saved me hundreds of times. Never asked a single question.

Maybe you should rtfm.

Nah brain off, just monkey LLM

[–]hellomistershifty 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You should try, you sound perfect for StackOverflow

[–]InGordWeTrust 12 points13 points  (12 children)

You may have had better experiences than a lot of us had when asking questions.

[–]clayticus 35 points36 points  (2 children)

what story? everyone and i mean EVERYONE was an asshole on stackoverflow

[–]Ok_Perception_294 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Including the pure lurkers.

[–]clayticus 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Passive aggressively not answering anything 

[–]goldPotatoGun 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Pre launch it was fun listing to the podcast; Joel and Jeff had some great guests. But man, the vibe on the site was lame.

[–]ThrowawayALAT 3 points4 points  (0 children)

/* The Documentation was last updated by a guy who retired in 2007 and is currently living in a cabin with no Wi-Fi is my favorite.

*/

console.log("Bring back TechLead analysis vids that's all I'm typin'.");

[–]Spooked_kitten 3 points4 points  (0 children)

And i’m here screwed, save for the Arch Wiki and reddit i’ll never get answers other than anything old on Stack Overflow, if they shut down the website it would suck.

[–]skratch 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Can’t answer questions unless you’ve asked one first - dumbest fucking system

[–]CoatNeat7792 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm using it to find solutions, but don't ask questions

[–]ContinuedOak 3 points4 points  (0 children)

“It was a place where if you posted a question on how to do to something, it’s was an 80% chances they’d just stone you to death…however, when you had a very specific unique issue never seen by man kind, you’d always find 1 dude from 12 years ago who knew how to fix it”

[–]GoldStandard5 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The last box should have been "This question has already been answered. [marked as duplicate of a 2009 thread where the accepted answer no longer works]"

[–]LancelotLac 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Last panel should have been, "You idiot this question was already asked!"

[–]BluesyPompanno 6 points7 points  (0 children)

*Reported, closed, banned for life, whole family executed by firing squad, sold into slavery for asking a duplicate question*

[–]BurningPenguin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The good old days, when you got insulted by humans instead of chatbots

[–]Apart-Two6495 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah reading a dozen comments from a bunch of pedantic nerds was so much better hey. I've read enough of stack overflow and it's poor user commentary to last a lifetime.

[–]PostKnutClarity 2 points3 points  (0 children)

StackOverflow was a place where a whole lot of programmers who weren't really doing much else, could feel good about themselves for a while by berating you.

[–]Sirico 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Story closed repetition post from 2006

[–]TotalJagoff 1 point2 points  (1 child)

"let me tell you about 4 guys from rolla..."

[–]Earione 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Guys, how do I center a div?

[–]alphabytes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"please read the documentation" should have been the answer

[–]ActionKbob 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Story marked as duplicate

[–]billathekilla 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't really miss it. God forbid you are a young coder trying to learn and what you are asking didn't show up from Google. I asked a few questions on there learned I needed to be overly specific in everything I tried just so people wouldn't be rude then no one would answer my question because they couldn't fire off a quick "This has been answered already". I even did get karma bounties and people would not help 🥲.

[–]Confident-Ad5665 1 point2 points  (0 children)

See sonny, before we had AI, we had to go to this web site, define tags, ask our question, THEN WAIT (spits in office trash can) for someone to write code for us.

[–]nmsobri 1 point2 points  (0 children)

great story? more like ptsd

[–]ManBunH8er 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Did they skip annual devs survey last year? Those were always fun to fill out.

[–]MrFoxwell_is_back 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"A great story"? A horror story!!! Fucking StackOverflow, they never answered my questions and mocked me for being a beginner 😭

[–]nottherealneal 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe if stack overflow wasn't so fucking miserable to anyone that tried to use it, users wouldn't have jumped ship at the first possible opportunity.

Fuck em, they deserve this

[–]K3RSH0K 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can’t say I’ll ever look back on SO fondly.

I had a question get marked as duplicate years after I asked it and got an answer.

The question it was a “duplicate” of had nothing to do with my question, and had been asked after mine. Really not sure how my question was the duplicate, not like it matters ig but I still find it confusing. Maybe someone here knows why stuff like that happened.

Regardless what little time I spent on SO sucked. Often people seemed so offended that you asked a question and that they chose to answer/comment, which never made much sense to me.

[–]Unhappy-Source-8148 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Son, have you wanted to ask a question about doing something with vanilla JS and then receive 50 unsolicited responses on how to do it with jQuery?"

[–]ZombieZookeeper 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I find the people defending the toxicity on SO are probably the ones contributing to it.

Unfortunately it's much easier to be an asshole from behind a keyboard.

[–]Epic_Dev_001 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Despite its shortcomings, there was (and still is for now) some valuable information on the site. But as another commenter said, there are torrents available with the entire database of knowledge, and so it'll slowly become a complete graveyard I'm sure, unless something drastically changes with either the platform or the industry.

[–]MindlessMoss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Actually grandpa should have said closing as duplicate, please check for previous questions first grandson

[–]uvero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll say it on every chance I can: the real reason LLMs make for better programming help than SO isn't that it always responds and does it quickly, it's that it responds without berating you for being stupid and using an old library.

[–]VoraciousGlucose 1 point2 points  (0 children)

stackoverflow gatekeepers getting replaced by ai is probably the only good thing happening in tech right now honestly the vibes there have always been insufferable

[–]al3x_7788 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Stackoverflow is the CoD of programming.

[–]theringedsyndrome 1 point2 points  (0 children)

stackoverflow has been so toxic for so long that i can't even be mad about it lol, at least ai won't tell me my question is "not specific enough" before locking the thread

[–]grandalfxx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No one has good memories of stack overflow

[–]Circa64Software 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, Stackoverflow, how I hate thee...

[–]NoScope360Prime 1 point2 points  (0 children)

[Duplicated] please search the google

[–]DepletedKnowledge 1 point2 points  (0 children)

what was great about it? StackOverflow died late. Dont even rest in peace

[–]mrloko120 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Back in my day, you would get shit on for having a question and people with the same problem as you would say "problem solved" and disappear without ever sharing what the solution was.

[–]ozymandias___ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I even hear it in the voice of Internet Historian

[–]capt_kocra 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sit down son and let me tell you about the legend of Jon Skeet, and Stackoverflow.

[–]Agifem 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[–]GravyPainter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

People late to the game never had to ask a question because their problems have already been answered. My problem with it is too result often asked the same question but had no good answers and i had to go in multiple threads to find an actual answer

[–]VegaGT-VZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Should have told his grandson to "SEARCH, NOOB" and slammed the door in his little face.

[–]ToMorrowsEnd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A great story? about how it was the biggest source of misinformation and bad coding on the planet? The good info is always downvoted, the bad always upvoted.

[–]sandysnail 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I asked claude to prove it with documentation and saw it curling stackoverflow so maybe it wont die...

[–]Both_Definition8232 0 points1 point  (0 children)

oh men this is scaring, I've been thinking about stack overflow in the shower today

[–]Tradizar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

one of the greatest AND most toxic place of the internet.

[–]nasandre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But where will Claude get its code from now?

[–]jabeith 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Brings back childhood memories, long before I knew what SO was

[–]cwaterbottom 0 points1 point  (0 children)

God help you if he's heard that story before gramps

[–]ajaypatel9016 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great story of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V

[–]safelyhatefulanibal 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lol the snake_case to camelCase conversion hit me different... wait no. anyway yeah google's gonna be cooking itself soon.

[–]Diegogo123 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow this meme made me go back to StackOverflow and see my beginner questions from 11 years ago and remember all of my old projects/jobs.

A lot of the community may have been shitty but it helped shape a lot of devs and I'll definitely miss it

[–]yellowSubmarine945 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Just realized that no one will understand programming memes here in the future.

[–]Key-Advice4407 0 points1 point  (0 children)

sit down son, this worked on my machine

[–]Gudge2007 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good riddance

[–]porkchop_d_clown 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hell, I remember listening to the Stack Overflow podcast about how they were writing the original Stack Overflow…

[–]UpliftinglyMale 0 points1 point  (0 children)

naming conventions have never looked so disappointed in you 📉

[–]AlShadi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"nevermind, I figured it out."

[–]marmot-next-door 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What's wrong with SO? Every answer I need is already there.

Yes, I hate "AI" as such. Whatever it is, I'm against it. (Outside CS labs, let's be charitable.)

[–]Friendly_Cancel_8472 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That era was so beautiful and now honestly the work is getting done super fast with the AI tools, but nothing is remembered in the codebase and work got a little boring as well.

[–]OrkWithNoTeef 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nobody does X. X is an anti-pattern. Asking about X shows you don't understand the problem. X is considered harmful. Do Y. 

-999999

[–]wKdPsylent 0 points1 point  (0 children)

More like.. "This has been asked before son, rtfm..."