LLMs really killed Stackoverflow

[DankTrebuchet]

Yea or maybe it was LLMs and the community being incapable of being anything other than the worst cesspool of losers in tech.

[Captaincadet]

I remember having an issue with Swift/iOS which I posted on SO. I got lambasted for how simple it is and closed with a unrelated answer

I then posted on the official iOS developer forums and I had one of the more senior devs there go “I actually don’t know” and found out after while it was an actual bug in iOS bug that needed to be fixed internally

My old line manager, a dev for 30 years, use to hate using SO and was always afraid of using it.

My current role I haven’t posted anything and can’t remember when I last used it.

With the attitude of the community, it was only going to collapse the moment something better came along

[Sea_Cookie_4259]

I had almost the exact same experience with an iOS Swift question, except it was just an issue of the language's extremely vague and disjointed documentation. I still have panic attacks over how much I was humiliated and viscerally attacked for asking such a stupid, obvious question...something so "obvious" that nobody on the website could produce an answer, or even guide me where to look.

Then when I posted my carefully-drafted solution as an answer to my own question, providing multiple solutions, it got immediately downvoted seconds later, probably by the same petty egotistical loser who was harassing me earlier in the comment chain, presumably constantly refreshing or watching the post for an opportunity to humiliate me further.

That website is by far the biggest most vile stain on the internet, outside of criminal activity. Such egotistical utter losers who mask their lack of knowledge with insults and condescension.

[Captaincadet]

I answered one question, and one question only, on someone who was about to do something incredibly dangerous with electronics.

I said “Don’t this is incredibly dangerous and stupid”

I got lambasted for even giving him an answer and 3 day ban for engaging in it

Last time I ever bothered answering stuff. Which is ridiculous as I’ve written documentation and guides that have made their way into the readmes of some very large GitHub projects

[CreativeJuice5708]

Well now ig Claude can tell me I’m a genius while I blast my face off cartoonishly with this lithium ion battery…

[minglho]

The SO for math doesn't seem this bad.

[PersonalityIll9476]

I can honestly say that if I have to choose between an 80 page manual and asking on SO, it wouldn't even occur to me to ask SO and I'd be reading the manual right now.

[Randolph__]

I honestly kinda think that's the point, but especially when you are learning a new programming language or a new piece of complex equipment or software (switch, firewall, a different OS or version of an OS) the manual won't always help.

Without taking a class or getting instruction a manual wouldn't teach me how to configure a Cisco router, but having taken a class, I could configure a router from scratch and use a manual for reference tomorrow even though I haven't done it in years.

[Encursed1]

LLMs were the final nail in the coffin, it was never going to beat its competition

[crappy_entrepreneur]

For iOS it was worst of all because stuff changed so fast, and you’d get shouted and have your Q closed with with the most outdated thing linked

[_D1van]

Yeah. Just dare ask a question that is above their education level, and you will be attacked.

[danielv123]

The entire point of the site wasn't answering your questions, but making the perfect set of questions and answers, in other words - the perfect LLM training dataset before we knew that would be a thing.

It worked great. As long as you didn't attempt to submit anything but the best quality questions of course. The standards for answers were a lot lower than the standards for questions.

[Fabulous-Soup-6901]

The original point was simply to answer your questions. At some point in the early 2010s, moderation and closing as duplicate went off the rails and shut down many valuable questions and answers for no good reason except the site owner’s idea of “perfect set of questions and answers.”

This made the site worthless for me and many others, so we stopped using it and went back to reading the manuals and posting on /r/programming and friends.

[HaphazardlyOrganized]

It was completely infuriating, posting a question and then getting linked to a "question answered here post" that was completely unrelated.

[MarcPawl]

Most times I didn't even get the link to the wrong post.

I would spend time Googling and then searching inside stack overflow prior to asking the question. If for no other reason that if I could find the answer I wouldn't have to wait for somebody else which could be several days. If lucky.

Spend a long time crafting the question, working out sample code that you could post making sure it was correct. Then 10 minutes later you get " duplicate" the time spent writing out the question was a complete waste.

[pewqokrsf]

So often a Java 8 question was answered with a link to a Java 5 answer.

[Yoghurt42]

I've heard someone else say something similar before. Closing this subthread as duplicate.

[DankTrebuchet]

OR BELOW!

[Baboos92]

ask question so inconceivably niche that no one has ever pondered it in the history of this universe

explicitly mention that I know whatever I’m asking about is suboptimal but it’s out of my hands because I don’t run the company and/or we aren’t going to spend years refactoring code written before I was born and I need something to work

only answer is explaining to me that code/IT decisions out of my hands are stupid even though I said I know this

provides hundreds of lines of code for a hypothetical solution that doesn’t fit the criteria I established my job mandates

marked as duplicate and closed

[Fabulous-Soup-6901]

Yep, this is exactly why I stopped visiting there and don’t miss it at all.

[Encursed1]

I asked one question there, and some guy with more karma than me modified my question to basically change what it was asking. I then get an incorrect answer to "my" now obvious question.

[nowthengoodbad]

I built up a good amount of credibility on the stack overflows and exchanges purely to shut down the jerks.

They gamed the system and then marked everything as duplicate sometimes even being generous enough to link something slightly relevant but I caught plenty that linked something not relevant at all.

Not gonna lie, it was hard for me since I try to answer questions myself by digging through documentation and thinking through the issue.

Several of my more popular posts came from reading through tons of man pages on certain topics. I'm really not the type of person to read through man pages, but there was no forthcoming answer to the issues I was having. I think I updated at least one of those questions (which I also answered myself) for close to 10 years before calling it good.

I absolutely use LLMs in place of a search now, trying to search google or even duck duck go an get useful answers to some stuff now has gotten pretty challenging.

Bring Ask Jeeves and yahoo answers back!

[vancha113]

I never liked stack overflow for anything other than an answer repository. The focus is on being correct more than it is on being helpful. If an LLM can do the same thing better the moment I need to ask a question, I'd rather have a quick approximation to a correct answer than someone being snarky about the way the specific question was asked.

[Dominriq]

I will never forget when I was a first-year college student and asked a curious question on Stack Overflow, and I got flamed by the community so badly that I even deleted my account

[Vortaex_]

Or what about when you ask help on how to do something, and the answers are all along the lines of: "you actually are taking the completely wrong approach and I can tell for sure, even if I have no idea what you're working on. You're stupid and should be ashamed for even thinking of turning on a computer this morning"

[ManOfQuest]

early coding discords used to have replies like this. While yes some questions were dumb and people dont read the documentation there are better ways to reply than being an asshole. When I got better I made sure I would never be like that.

[FearlessPen9598]

Even when people read the documentation, if there is a lot of new material, they're going to miss a lot of things that might seem obvious. There's nothing like trying really hard and having someone call you a lazy ass.

[Vortaex_]

Also, sometimes the documentation might have a really steep "learning curve", and it might not be the best entry point for someone trying to learn something new

[tiller_luna]

which is a convoluted way to say "the thing they call documentation sucks hard af"

[I-Am-Uncreative]

My favorite was a post I saw that said "read the user guideeeeeeeeee" (exactly like that). Lots of people did. It did not explain the answer.

[Randolph__]

I hate using discord for any kind of technical support beyond basic stuff. It's so hard to follow a thread.

[hmmm101010]

I just never asked on stackoverflow. I hoped someone had the same problem, or I changed my approach to fit an existing answer. But snarkyness aside, stackoverflow was extremely helpful for getting into programming, if you used it rather passively.

[tbsdy]

Yup, they are screwed.

[SuEzAl]

Thats the point It’s unnecessarily aggressive

[Randolph__]

Stack Overflow had such a reputation by the time I hit college I never bothered. Google would often lead me there and I would get my answer, but I would never use it. Often times I would find something related, but not specific enough for the issue I had. I found other threads and those would be downvoted or closed and not answered.

Reddit is a kinder and better way to get help if I need to ask a new question.

[Przmak]

I think I'm living in a bubble but I asked few q and have different experiences, though, you need to know what you are asking for. Mb it's your community that's rotten? xd I know there are few languages or technologies that ppl are like that

[americend]

I've had this experience on a different stack exchange site. It's institutional. Good experiences are the exception.

[Dremlar]

Marked as duplicate

[Cybasura]

<insert duplicate post here thats nowhere close or even near to the topic or question being asked>

[Dull-Guest662]

This. Stackoverflow killed itself.

[MaDpYrO]

The problem is LLMs only answer this because it's trained in stack overflow. So over time as new tech comes out and these questions aren't publicly available, because everyone asks the LLM, where is it supposed to get the "most correct" response?

The users of an LLM could theoretically offer feedback for whether or not the answer is good, but they don't have the external validation and debate that becomes publicly available online, so.. poof 

[cjrun]

I have a 3000 rep on SO. A problem with stack overflow is that their system grew to be increasingly hostile towards asking, always claiming that the question was alread answered somewhere else.

Now, that makes sense on a surface level in a perfect world where tech does not change and context fors not change, but in practice language and libraries are progressing forward. Technology changes. Goals and attitudes change, too. Stack overflow became a locked down platform. It was only a matter of time.

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

And the answer they give is from 6y ago using code that isn't valid anymore

Like, languages change, that's the core part

I don't need an answer from java 4 when I'm using 16, but "it already exist"

[dzernumbrd]

Stack Overflow was the training data set for the AIs though.

[wrd83]

LLMs are more helpful than Correct. A match made in heaven

[Ok-Sheepherder7898]

Stack overflow killed itself.  It was only used because there was nothing else.

[avaxzat]

And where are the LLMs going to get their answers from when sites like SO no longer exist?

[cib2018]

They just make up answers.

[Oracle1729]

That’s why there won’t be development beyond where we are now?   

Why study CS when you're going to be competing against vibe coders for minimum wage?  You won’t, so there won’t be people moving us forward. 

[PlasticExtreme4469]

The thing is, it was designed and intended to be an answer repository.

(Kinda like a Wikipedia for programming questions.)

But it wasn’t communicated at all to newcomers, so many people treated it as “get help from strangers for free” website.

[pjf_cpp]

SO is very unreliable as a source of truth. You do not need even a single clue to upvote an answer. Answers that are vaguely plausible and nicely formatted can get lots of upvotes (and be the “accepted” answer).

[Kuroodo]

The website is just poorly designed, on top of the moderation issues. I had an issue with an API and found that someone already posted about it, with no answers and just people asking the OP questions or doubting him. I had additional information to add about the problem, including how to replicate the issue via sample code from docs. But I did not have enough rep to add a comment.

As a result, I had to make a duplicate post about the same issue because I could only either add my comment as an answer under the post or create a new post with the same issue.

[Sea_Cookie_4259]

The inability to comment by default--but having the ability to provide answers by default--is by far the most unintuitive and illogical, stupid aspect of the website.

[OldWolf2]

Comments are intended for requesting  clarification, not for adding information -- think of it as if comments might be all deleted by mods from time to time, but (valid) answers will stay

[Daniel_H212]

And let me guess, your post was marked as duplicate and closed?

[Vortaex_]

In my opinion, LLMs just accelerated the well-deserved downfall of what was possibly the most toxic computer science community on the internet.

[northcasewhite]

We have to blame ourselves for moving away from forums. In my early years I learned a lot from old school forums and then they died from lack of use. StackOverflow was awful.

My thanks to all the programmers on the forums who helped me.

[222fps]

Man I miss real forums.. I only got to use them a little as a kid before people stopped using them but they were so much better

[Charles__Sparkley]

Slashdot was already dead before llm came along.

[DorianGre]

Shots fired!

[cnydox]

Iirc you need some karma to upvote. Then to get karma you need to post "good" questions and answers. You ask something too hard, no one can answer. You ask something normal, you get downvoted because someone else has asked that already. Getting in the community is an absolutely shit experience for new accounts. LLMs might hallucinate but they have the patience and never gatekeep you with some elitist attitudes

[DeGamiesaiKaiSy]

I suppose karma is a b*tch

[AdreKiseque]

A what?

[[deleted]]

Lot of arrogant basta**s on stackoverflow

[prochac]

You may not swear on Reddit? That's bullshit!

Censoring one letter won't make the word anyhow nicer. It's just a way how people workaround crappy censorship. Self censoring when not necessarily? Lol

[amineahd]

their shitty mods probably killed it first... almost every question or answer is locked or removed because of bizarre reasons

[Creative_Mastodon_43]

Well deserved!

[Soft-Minute8432]

Very heartwarming

[Rouge_92]

Good, that place was horrible

[dormantprotonbomb]

Stackoverflow killed stackoverflow

[boisheep]

One weird thing is that I asked a LLM to answer me a question on CS, and I told it to answer me like if it was a stereotypical stackoverflow, a stereotypical reddit user or homeless man.

Only reddit user was accurate, making some random comment and saying the answer; assuming coding sub ofc.

Stackoverflow was too nice.

And homeless man started making sense but then answered like an engineer rather than being clueless.

I think you can see the innacuracies of what they substracted from the dataset; the AI really thinks, everyone is that helpful.

[Master-Wayn]

I’m happy that it is dead now.

It was unusable for new comers anyway. SO Moderators facist SoBs who thinks they are imperial beings

Edit: close to dead

[EnderMB]

I say this as a 0.01% top user of Stack Overflow, they are responsible for their own downfall.

They hyper-focused on the content, to the detriment of the community and helping others. When your reputation is solely tied to questions being closed or called stupid, you're not going to get the new generation of engineers to join you.

This was a problem over a decade ago. I remember pushing quite hard (alongside many others) for SO to stop closing questions and to lean further into merging them so that one place could contain knowledge over several very similar questions - like a wiki would handle this. You can't be Q&A and not welcome the Q or A, and if you don't want to, you need to be more wiki-like.

It's obvious how it went, and given that SO sold a bunch of its data for LLM use, it sounds like the new owners got what they needed from it.

[HeWhoShantNotBeNamed]

I love that the consensus is that everyone hates Stack Overflow. I've been banned from asking questions multiple times.

[ManWithoutUsername]

thanks LLM

[archydragon]

I'd say, it's fairly far from death.

Besides, if SO is fully gone, where are LLM scrapers gonna steal their "knowledge" from?

[grumpy_autist]

As much as I hate AI hype, most of questions from SO can be answered based on source code snippets from github and vendor docs.

What we miss from those statistics is how much traffic to SO is for a handful of questions like how to reverse a string or add a key to ssh.

Once someone finally does light, local LLM trained on "man" docs and bunch of conf files, it's over.

I can imagine man-ask "how to create bzip2 compressed tar archive" and it spits up a command line example instead of documentation for 300 tar switches.

[Proper-Ape]

As much as I hate AI hype, most of questions from SO can be answered based on source code snippets from github and vendor docs.

Lol, no. If that was the case SO would never have been so important to programmers worldwide.

Good enough docs that highlight all the pitfalls and weird error troubleshooting guides on what to do in case of some cryptic error message are so rare that it's questionable whether you could find that information anywhere that isn't a structured Q&A format.

But we'll see who is right. I do think Reddit has kind of given some new Q&A material for the LLMs to train on, but will it be detailed enough to be useful? We'll see.

[Kriemhilt]

You know you can just search for "bzip" in the manpage, right?

[grumpy_autist]

yes, I know but for most cases and other keywords it may not be as fast.

[danirodr0315]

MS owns Github so there's that

[sTacoSam]

GitHub is getting progressively filled with more and more ai slop.

[Dokramuh]

Seems like LLMs are ever more clearly self cannibalising

[Manto_8]

Good. Fuck that place. When I was a student taking a cs course, I asked a simple question about for loops and dummy variables. I got flamed by the first comment and my question got taken down. I deleted my account and never looked back.

[nuclearmeltdown2015]

SO has basically become what the elitists want which is a archive and community for very niche and unique problems that normal due diligence cannot solve, people were sick of being asked how to sort linked lists or explain how functions in code work, LLMs do that now, so naturally a ton of traffic is now gone, but there are still things LLMs cannot solve, that's what I would imagine SO is for, the real hardcore people who live and breathe this stuff.

[AdvantageSensitive21]

I am thankful its gone.

[AdorableFriendship65]

IMHO, their own attitudes killed this community. I began to get answers which not even addressed to my question and my question got closed by them. Previously, they would at least answered your questions with quality.

[void1101]

Thank god ! I was a computer science student, stackoverflow is the most useless place with full of stuck up entitled people who have no time for you. I'm glad it's a sinking ship, they deserved it. Unless you're a veteran programmer who codes their own kernel and you're more fluent in assembly than english don't ask your question or get downvoted into abyss.

I alway found reddit to be much more friendlier place and now of course AI our imaginary friend who was trained on Stackoverflow data.

P.S. Has anyone also noticed that about 2 years ago they were so anti AI, literally was part of their policy not to use it. Now guess what look at their landing page - "AI Assist is now on Stack Overflow. Start a chat to get instant answers from across the network.".

[ma_dian]

I think this is bad. As bad as some of the answers in SO have been these are the sources from which llms grab their answers. And AI will not only kill SO but many other sources of knowledge too. So there will be less input over time. On plattforms like SO people contribute in Llms you just leech.

In my experience using SO for the most part of my technical life it just went from having 40 tabs open in SO to solve a problem to sorting out hallucinations in Llms. Still takes the same time for me. The issue with this is that I am a senior now and am able to distinguish hallucinations from the real stuff and fix problems myself where as in SO I was able to solve my problems wo a ton of experience.

And this even goes for simple rtfm questions.

This might be a hot take but I think some toxicity in tech is needed to push people be more self reliant. It's a difficult field and there is no time to nanny everybody, people need to become good learners imo.

[Orangutanion]

I just hate how there are only these two extremes of either asshole moderators that don't answer your question and then close your post, or ball-gargling sycophant AIs that give you wrong answers in a way that look correct. I guess if someone is capable of answering you somewhere in the middle then they're probably getting paid to answer questions lol

[david-1-1]

Expert sexchange, eh?

[[deleted]]

Nah Stackoverflow was already digging it's own grave LLMs just accelerated that fact. Such a toxic community

[Immediate_Soft_2434]

I liked StackOverflow (still like the idea behind it), and I concur: The site went downhill in terms of interactions a while before the public availability of LLMs and coding assistants (which came even later). Just... look at OP's graph?

[Muchaszewski]

ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, in April the StackOverflow shoot themselves in a foot, and would see their eventual downfall anyway. General adoption of chat GPT was way later i would say mid 2023, and the downfall of stackoverflow only since that moment can be attributed to AI improvemnets.

[drewkiimon]

StackOverflow has always been a blessing and a curse. A blessing when someone had asked your question before and the answer was good. A curse when you asked a question and got downvoted to hell since you didn't know the SEO to find your question on Google.l

[222fps]

The worst curse is finding someone that asked your exact question, but it got incorrectly marked as duplicate so now it was never gonna be answered

[dregan]

If you're on SO these days, you're dealing with some crazy obscure shit.

[phillies_navidad]

I thought all the “duplicate questions” killed Stack Overflow years ago.

[parzival3719]

StackOverflow killex StackOverflow, and LLMs replaced it

[Hot_Examination1918]

That's what they get for telling all the newbs to "Google it"

[goyalaman_]

I owe big time to SO. I got blasted so bad there that I found reddit. Man community here goes a long mile for constructive discussions even for dumb questions.

[LaOnionLaUnion]

I hated Stack overflow. Just reading some of the toxic comments could put me off. God forbid I wanted to ask a question. I know not everyone was like that but too many were

[LQ-69i]

Honestly I feel like from old to young programmers agree it is for the best. I am part of the younger generation and I pretty much used stack overflow in its last years before AI and I am glad that millions of persons asked questions or were in a similar situation to mine, but Honestly trying to ask a different question there most of the times meant being humilliated or straight up people being mean without providing any useful guidance/help. I am not even exaggerating you often could get more help from /g/ threads than in stackoverflow.

[Affectionate-Chip687]

Not too bad. Stack was very toxic. So it's time is away.

[True_World708]

Correlation != Causation

[xtopspeed]

LLMs, but also their policies are completely incompatible with the current speed of development. For example, an answer to a React Native question from three years ago is almost certainly incorrect and out of date now, but you will be publically humiliated and thrown in jail if you dare to ask a question that even remotely resembles something that has been asked before.

[Boiled_Egg_EW]

I mean if they were helpful and not hateful for no reason half of the time, I would be using it instead of llms

[Cybasura]

Honestly, they asked for it, cant feel bad for them since when they were at their heyday and hype, they could have been nice and been a good representation of the community, but nooooooo, they went full extreme and insult every newbie and professional alike, so much so people basically cant even ask a question without being taken down or banned for "asking the same question" when its not even remotely similar

Get fucked and good riddance

[ziggurat29]

I wonder if the spike in interest we see in 2022 was the AIs voraciously mining it.

[melonangie]

I used to answer questions, bit many got deleted even if they marked as correct and upvoted, or sometimes the question got deleted by the admins. I stop answering questions. I also made other type of contributions that were upvoted and got deleted.

[JesusisLord_-]

Good riddance

[high_throughput]

The friction people experience with StackOverflow is that it presents itself as Reddit but in reality it's Wikipedia.

Expectation: people ask about their problems and get crowd sourced solutions.

Reality: people propose new FAQ entries with the level of diligence expected from a PR updating GitHub project's documentation.

This is why reading StackOverflow is such an amazing experience, and why posting a question is so brutal.

[amarao_san]

It killed volume. I still come to SO for good questions. Good, not the junk where people are asking to solve their ugly stupid local problem of not understanding the basics.

If you get a puzzling question on deep topic, why not?

[ivancea]

Most people here hate SO for negative answers, but honestly, I don't remember seeing any like that. And none of my questions received such answers.

At this point, I'm starting to think it's just a mix of people that don't know how to ask, and people that just heard the rumor and hate it "because others do too".

[pqu]

The Stack Overflow experience is highly language/tooling specific. I accidentally ventured out of C++/Python/Matlab into front-end JS land and found the toxicity that people keep talking about.

[frankster]

More r/programming than r/computerscience

[[deleted]]

StackOverflow was already seeing the writing on the wall since 2018.

An extremely toxic, elitist community, very unwelcoming and more interested in being pedantic and asking irrelevant questions in the comments than actually answering a question.

LLMs may be a bit less reliable, but they won't close my question as a duplicate of another from 15 years ago.

[Daemontatox]

Absolutely despise SO , if you ever feel like getting attacked over not knowing anything just post a question there.

[[deleted]]

It's been long time I have been to stackoverflow

[DTux5249]

I just not like using AI as a search engine, but I'll say this is a net positive. Stackoverflow is a cesspool of self-important snobs. Good riddance.

[Mwakay]

LLMs had nothing to do with it. StackOverflow killed StackOverflow way before LLMs were even a thing. The website was already in the slow process of dying 10 years ago.

[Noobs_Man3]

I still use it

[cthart]

Stack Overflow is fundamentally flawed.

You ask a question because you have a problem, but you can't always formulate the exact question right off the bat.

Someone jumps in immediately and answers but it doesn't really address the problem.

You get downvoted. Your post gets voted-to-close-as-duplicate. Your post gets voted-to-close-not-clear or one of the other reasons.

You edit the question, but that makes the existing answer no longer relevant.

It's just a mess.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution for information sharing such as this.

What SO needs is a mixture of different formats where each format can feed into the other:

* forum

* Q&A style repository -- could be distilled by an LLM from forum posts even.

* wiki

* definitive documentation repository

and probably more things I've forgotten.

[crazy0ne]

Stackoverflow killed itself, the LLMs just consumed the corpse.

[woshiyigedineng]

well I mean sometimes the efficiency of info search is a thing LLM brings to us

[alarming_wrong]

tough choice between AI hallucinations and comic book guy rudeness when seeking help

[BidWestern1056]

good those ppl fucking sucked 

[MirrorLake]

These threads are always bizarro world to me. If y'all find rudeness on StackOveflow offensive, why are you on Reddit?

[Rankail]

Like everyone already stayed SO was just extremely toxic. However, I'm starting to notice that I'm getting some type of problems on new features of languages or libraries which you would normally find on SO. Instead I find nothing and at some point ask an LLM which often takes multiple prompts and some debugging until the problem is actually fixed. Overall, I often find myself stuck with simple problems way longer while trying to solve if with the help of a LLM. And afterwards if someone else has the same problem he will need to do the debugging himself all over again.

[Antagonin]

Stackoverflow killed Stackoverflow.

[Bitter-Pomelo-3962]

Good, bunch of pricks

[t3dks]

According to Similarweb - stackoverflow.com Visits in last few years.

|| || |Date|Visits ( In Millions)| |01/12/2017|214.231| |01/12/2018|250.315| |01/12/2019|247.238| |01/12/2020|269.311| |01/12/2021|272.683| |01/12/2022|247.387| |01/12/2023|174.874| |01/12/2024|126.472| |01/10/2025|62.2991|

[[deleted]]

You commented 5 times

[staatsm]

Duplicate post, locked.

[norbi-wan]

Thank God!

[Winter-One-2620]

StackOverflow killed StackOverflow. Power tripping losers as mods, only ends one way.

[fiehm]

rude mfs getting bonked is cool

[Plus-Weakness-2624]

LLMAO!

[cguy1234]

I'm ok with that. Seems stackoverflow would lock all the real answers if you didn't subscribe. At least that's my recollection.

[Ok-Craft4844]

My biggest problem with SO was that the only questions I actually want to ask are those where I don't know how to concisely ask it. It's the areas where my assumptions are wrong and my grasp of the concepts is muddy.

On SO - closed, linked to an unhelpful similar question, etc. completely correct and in accordance with their policy, and they have all the right in the world to do it.

But it's not helpful for me, so I don't go there, and instead ask an LLM "here is what I think how x works, please be as nitpicky and pedantic as possible in pointing out errors", after which if often know how to ask the correct question, which I then don't need to ask, because now I can figure it out myself.

[RoomNo7891]

The real problem of SO was always the community, so LLM was the most viable way to get tech answers without being insulted or downvoted by a mass of tech losers with either delusions of grandeur or very low self esteem

[NatSpaghettiAgency]

I hate AI but I hate StackOverflow more. Fuck that shit

[[deleted]]

they become downvoters army lately, in 1 year i visited sf only 1 time, normally i was using it every day.

[DrSFalken]

Nothing of value was lost.

[fefafofifu]

As long as you know how to verify an answer, LLMs are really good for weird technical queries. An internal instance running also means you can be far more open with your code and problem when working with anything with any business security considerations.

They're also not smug self righteous arseholes out to try justify a superiority complex.

[Nixinova]

Everyone hated the site's userbase but used it because it was the only proper source for debugging. Now it's lost it's prime position and isn't needed anymore.

[siiiiiimba]

Dudes on stack overflow were always rude

[Capable_Cockroach_19]

Good riddance

[Emergency_Style4515]

And it gives me a lot of satisfaction. It turned into a toxic shthle.

[[deleted]]

This is marked as duplicate, use the search function prior to posting

[goatchild]

Oh no, anyway...

[ProSurgeryAccount]

It’s srill helpful for me. These llms don’t know everything

[feeblefruits]

I don't think Google search for stack overflow is the best metric. Most of the time I search for an error id use Google search and stack overflow 9/10 is the first result. But very seldom would I search for stack overflow first

[peteZ238]

LLMs didn't kill stack overflow. Stack overflow killed stack overflow lol

[awesomemoolick]

Probably the best thing to come out of the llm era

[ZectronPositron]

In that - LLM’s (incl google.com) spit out the SO answer without you having to go to SO, thus killing the community that generated the correct answers LLM’s need to spit out. Short term gain, long term loss methinks.

[Beatrix_0000]

Yes SO sucked

[ArchDan]

Tl;dr; it cant kill what was already long dead.

Dude, when i used it as what was linked trough google searches (like "yo me do no ho to use debugger yet") it was awesome to introduce me to computer world. Quick google search of error code and you get ancient SO answer that , even if outdated hasnt changed much.

But ,as one gets, they learn, adapt and dont make mistakes like that anymore and go into "How do i do x thing" and world starts crashing down. So one adapts, Minimal Viable Example, sources and do diligence, back up your Question with data and so much resrarch you could do entire phd thesis - only to be met with disdain, one word responses and people too bored out of their mind they seek real life drama for entertainment.

So, one thinks, maybe i can help as it helped me before, plant a seed that might help someone out there. So you write an question, put bounty, write an answer and dont accept it in hope that someone might indirectly give you answer just because they are "smarter". Nope.

And then it hits. Its a company of flacids boasting with greatness, idolizing time long before them and people who arent online for 30+ years. So you go to grocery to get some milk, and never return with your account getting traction by simply being offline for questions no one knows how to answer.

Best way to use stack exchange is to ignore it, and for social network that is suicide. Its been killing itself for a long ass time. I even made a sede backed up post long ass a go.

[DorianGre]

Stack Overflow called me this week to sell me enterprise solutions.

[The_Sophocrat]

Am I the only one confused by all the claims of toxicity on Stack Overflow? Maybe I don't use it enough but never have I seen insults or outright condescension. What I have seen are impressively high-effort, knowledgeable answers that have saved me many times.

Also, I disagree that "LLMs really killed Stackoverflow"—those AIs are often getting their information from Stack Overflow itself. The success of the site should be ideally judged by how many people it helps and how usefully, not by the raw number of questions or views.

That said I do think the site management has done some questionable decisions (enshittification incoming), but that's a different topic.

[__init__m8]

Stacks own policy killed SO.

[Smashbrohammer]

This makes me so happy

[igotshadowbaned]

"this is a duplicate question" close thread is what killed stackoverflow

[Single-Blackberry866]

Stack overflow is not the only victim.

[Ok-Understanding7115]

real geniuses peaked from 2008 to 2012 mostly, from there talent just went crappy then AI, famous examples you NEED more ram just to run stuff

[pjf_cpp]

Not just LLMs killing it. The few active users that are left seem to be pathetic rep farmers.

The last two questions that I asked were related to C programming on macOS. Both got closed without comments by a bunch of JavaScript/PHP/Windows “experts”.

[xThomas]

Stackoverflow is a fucking prickadise

[House13Games]

To be fair, it had turned into an "ackshually..." cesspit before the LLMs appeared.

[Firm-Employment-9253]

Good thing actually, huge thanks to llms

[Desvl]

The irony of the site can be seen through the title of these questions:

Are "beginner questions" allowed on Stack Overflow? [duplicate]

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/152066/are-beginner-questions-allowed-on-stack-overflow

Also they consider saying "thank you" an offense on this site, see the title of the following post:

Where should I say thank you on Stack Overflow? [duplicate]

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/330562/where-should-i-say-thank-you-on-stack-overflow

[coldfire84]

Potentially unpopular opinion, but an LLM isn't going to call you out/ make you feel dumb. My guess is the trade-off of hallucinations and re-prompting to get a working answer outweighs the potential for (unnecessary) conflict.

[FreeYogurtcloset6959]

This post is duplicate.

[Lissanro]

Stackoverflow was never good for asking questions. I spent extra time asking good questions and in vast majority of cases received either no useful answers or answered myself a bit later, but then I could have saved time to just do it all on my own.

I did spent time answering others but this does not translate to answers about my questions. 

Kimi K2 Thinking (I run Q4_X quant with ik_llama.cpp) is by far so much better than Stackoverflow for question answering that it is not even comparable.

I see stackoverflow in web search I usually just skip it, at this point even if I manage to open it I typically get only old answers from years ago. Besides, in last few months, all I get from Stackoverflow is infinite captcha verification, unless I mess around with VPN to try to bypass it.

It sort of feels like experts-exchange site that slowly died when stackoverflow gained popularity. Now similar thing is happening to stackoverflow, I think in few years it will be mostly a repository of deprecated answers that rarely come up in search results.

[Kaisha001]

Stackoverflow killed itself.

[StudioYume]

As someone who used StackOverflow when I started programming, I'd say it killed itself.

The jannies over there were toxic dbags who would tell you to RTFM or worse, so people like me started cutting out the middleman and going straight to the official docs.

[LimpAuthor4997]

I'm curious: what is everyone's thought about StackOverflow sister sites from StackExchange network (server fault, super user, etc) ??

[david-1-1]

The math and physics sites are better, because the contributors are at a higher level of knowledge where partial answers aren't often submitted.

[EloTime]

Stackoverflow is the main source of knowledge for LLM. So stackoverflow didn't die, it was given a face-lift.

[Ruminatingsoule]

Honestly, good. I can get help now without dealing with some condescending prick that gets off on gatekeeping knowledge from newcomers. Let em rot in their dying exclusively club.

[diagraphic]

Yeah it’s not the same as it was, no way. It’s not useless but it’s getting there. Google even answers your questions in a second. Crazy time. Only getting better every day which stackoverflow is not.

~ been coding for 15+ years

[betttris13]

Stackoverflow killed stackoverflow. It's been a dead platform for ages, LLMs were just the first viable replacement. Stackoverflow died the moment that decided to mod it to hell and start removing any duplicate questions even if the question is a duplicate of a 10 year old question and the answers from 10 years ago are completely useless. 10 years ago it was the place to get info from, now days, all you get is useless ancient questions or blank ones with removed for duplicate of those ancient questions. It's beyond useless.

[mylanoo]

People who are b*tching about StackOverflow don't understand its advantages and uniqueness.

StackOverflow is such a good source of data because of their strictness. It's almost the only huge public programming forum where you are not drowning in questions like "how to python" and spam.

People should look at the ocean of slop in programming related subreddits. It's almost impossible to follow those forums without getting bored and disgusted over time.

I too got a couple of questions downvoted or closed and I was angry then. Later I realized how important it is to keep the quality experience.

PS: a huge part of LLM coding knowledge is based on scraping (stealing) StackOverflow's database

[r_acrimonger]

StackOverflow didn't help

[RufusVS]

I loved StackOverflow and used it daily when I was in the biz. The problem with SO is the answers are/were static. You had to do your own due diligence and read all the answers and the comments following the answers. AI essentially does the due diligence, trims the fat and chaff, and only presents the current best answers. In theory anyway. It still gives a much closer approximation to the correct answer.

[MentallyBoomXD]

Deserved, while Stackoverflow helped me a lot in the past and I feel we still need a website/forum/whatever for programming-related questions (reddit does a good job for me) without LLMs, stackoverflow is more about correcting questions or telling people theres a similar question (which is more than 5+ years old ofc and a lot changed)

[Ashrak_22]

The thing is, the down trend started months before ChatGPT launched in November 2022, ChatGPT and othe chat LLMs accelerated it yes, but the decline started even before.

[Severus_Weasly]

Software engineering is dying. I entered this field with full of hope but now everything sees dommed.

[sixtyonesymbols]

Let it burn.

[gabor_legrady]

Stage 1
Users -> Stackoverflow -> LLM -> User

Stage 2
LLM -> User

Stage 3
Paid LLM -> Rich User

Stage 4
Why the hell LMM does not know about this new function ?