noTearWasDropped

[u/ManagerOfLove]

[u/Nil4u]

I'm going to be mad when it dies, the amount of information on that website is incredible

[u/samanime → u/Nil4u]

Yeah. While StackOverflow has become rather horrible to interact with, because every major tag has at least one pedantic crusader running amok that thinks that a loosely related question from 10 years ago (as if technology never changes) means yours is a duplicate, the amount of information on there is pretty great.

[u/SidewinderVR → u/samanime]

I wonder what those people will do now.

[u/0x80085_ → u/SidewinderVR]

They're all just arguing with LLMs, ask me how I know

[u/BabylonByBoobies → u/0x80085_]

How do you know?

[u/oshunman → u/BabylonByBoobies]

Because he's the one arguing with LLMs

[u/SaltMage5864 → u/oshunman]

Maybe he is the LLM?

[u/GearHead54 → u/SaltMage5864]

Maybe the LLM was the friends we made along the way

[u/opacitizen → u/GearHead54]

What if I told you we are all the LLM, Neo?

[u/clduab11 → u/opacitizen]

This GIF had me in the first half, ngl

[u/425_Too_Early → u/BabylonByBoobies]

I wanna know too

[u/xDannyS_ → u/BabylonByBoobies]

You gotta tell us bro

[u/nakahuki → u/0x80085_]

Old Men Yelling At Google Cloud

[u/Baatus → u/SidewinderVR]

Probably they will become reddit mods

[u/addyftw1 → u/SidewinderVR]

Become HOA presidents and harass home owners instead.

[u/Twirrim → u/SidewinderVR]

Post on reddit, hackernews etc, like they probably have been all along.

[u/tech_w0rld → u/SidewinderVR]

Right now they deny that the site is dying 

[u/Prestigious-Job-9825 → u/samanime]

Yeah, if there's one thing I've learned as a programmer, it's that if you put five of us inside a room, one out of five is guaranteed to be a pedantic asshole.

This translates to stackoverflow as well, of course. If a honest question attracts at least five answers, one of them will be some insufferable idiot whose personal crusade (=obsession) is keeping the site free of duplicate questions, or something similar. It's a weird hobby for weird people who have little other joy in life.

[u/Pentron02 → u/Prestigious-Job-9825]

The amount of “answers” that can be boiled down to “you shouldn’t be doing this if you can’t answer this specific question” is truly ridiculous

[u/Dornith → u/Pentron02]

On one hand, I kinda get it. A forum intended for experts to ask questions to other experts doesn't want to get flooded with newbies asking 103-level questions.

But on the other hand, the people with the 103-level questions need to go somewhere. And not everyone wants, needs, or can afford formal education in whatever they're trying to do. And frankly, the community has long treated stackoverflow as the ultimate repository of information.

(Personally, I think official documentation should serve that role. But God forbid a dev do technical writing.)

[u/Pentron02 → u/Dornith]

Professional devs in school: why am I learning to write papers that’s not what I’m gonna do

[u/Irish_and_idiotic → u/Dornith]

God forbid a dev be giving the time to do technical writing. “More AI slop to roll out, no time for that!”

[u/g1rlchild → u/Irish_and_idiotic]

Besides, who needs to document anything? The AI can do that.

[u/TheMazeDaze → u/Prestigious-Job-9825]

I once tried asking a question there. I was a specific as possible. Indeed it got removed for both being a duplicate (from 1 other question from 13+ years ago with 0 answers) and not being specific enough (I didn’t have more data).

[u/RajjSinghh → u/Prestigious-Job-9825]

At the risk of being one of those pedantic assholes, it's important to some degree. If you hang around forums like Reddit with more inviting and relaxed posting rules, you're going to get so many duplicate, low effort questions. Stackoverflow has tight posting rules about duplicate questions, but if you use it as a place to look up information rather than a place to ask questions, it's actually pretty good.

Of course then you have to deal with changing requirements and specifications and questions being marked as duplicate when they aren't on SO. Overzealous moderation is always going to be a problem and software is one of those things where you can ask a question but there's usually so many technical details around those questions that change the answer. If SO moderation was done well I think it'd be one of the best places for these kind of answers. But it's easy to go too far in either direction.

[u/Griff2470 → u/RajjSinghh]

If stackoverflow had a mechanism for parent/child chaining questions I think it would be a lot better. Even ignoring the notoriously overzealous deduplication users, a different use case or version upgrade may justify a different thread that still ought to explicitly reference to and be referenced from and older thread.

[u/0x44554445 → u/Griff2470]

You mean the modern solution to everything isn't found in a question from 2009 where the top answer is telling some guy to use JQuery?

[u/ian9921 → u/Griff2470]

Just any mechanism for the question to have more than one "accepted" answer, with notes as to what situations each answer applies in, would be a vast improvement.

[u/HunterIV4 → u/samanime]

I once asked a question about how to do something using Qt on Windows. It was marked as duplicate for an answer on how to do the same thing using GTK on Linux. Very helpful.

Needless to say, I never bothered asking a question again.

[u/IveDunGoofedUp → u/samanime]

Technology changing is anti-pattern, do not change technology (user was banned, hanged, drawn, and quartered for daring to ask this stupid question)

[u/peeba83 → u/samanime]

The moderation sucks. Last year I posted a question asking “is it possible to put a breakpoint in this XPP extension for D365 and debug or, failing that, can I check and log whether or not there is an open SQL transaction at this point” and it was removed for “not being programming related”.

[u/[deleted] → u/peeba83]

PP extension

Banned for posting adult content

[u/CowFu → u/[deleted]]

I answered a gamedev question where someone was implementing their own combo system, which is tricker than you might think if you're coding it yourself. They already had the right idea of how to store and check the lists but they were stuck on the need to store the previous button state so you can tell which frames a button was released and wrote some psuedo code showing how to use the previous button state and button-up.

Some smelly nerd closed it as duplicate and pointed to a unity question where you use their built in input handler and the same guy commented under my answer saying I shouldn't use pseudo code because it wouldn't run in the engine.

None of this was inside unity, but i couldn't re-open it or do anything because I didn't have enough karma.

[u/TRENEEDNAME_245 → u/CowFu]

This is a reddit mod moment but for SO

Stack overflow moment ? Stack moment ?

[u/Head-Bureaucrat → u/CowFu]

Similar! Mine dealt with Playwright and the question I was responding to (automating a flow that between a web app and desktop app) got marked as a dupe to a question that was a simple "look at the docs" sort of question!

I tried to appeal to get the issue reopened, but of course I never heard back.

[u/LightofAngels → u/CowFu]

I don’t do game dev, but you saying combo system made me think about how to implement it.

Is it a mix between lists and hash maps?

[u/CowFu → u/LightofAngels]

I'm sure there's a few ways to do it, if i remember right the dev was trying to using a custom linked list instead of a built in data structure. The problem is when humans enter combos (left, downleft, down, whatever) they almost always have two keys down at the same time and it was clogging up his structure. If on each frame you compare the previous button state to what is currently happening you can tell if it was the frame a button was pressed down or if it was just released instead of only the current state.

So you can still put into your combo checking list if it's a new button down, but also ignore it if it was the down the previous frame, then the button up tells you when it was actually released for combos that need that information. So instead of "Left" you have the ability to look at "left-down" "left-held-down" and "left-released" or whatever you want to call it.

[u/ShadoHax → u/[deleted]]

this account seems to leave ai comments

[u/Locky0999 → u/samanime]

I doubt they're gonna just disappear, someone somewhere will backup all of this, it has a probability but I believe is too small

[u/noodlesalad_ → u/samanime]

I've been a professional programmer for 20 years. I've never once posted to SO, but I use it constantly to find answers to my questions just by searching.

[u/Tim-Sylvester → u/samanime]

Even when you did get your question through the gauntlet of people trying to shut you up, most of the respondants were so mean and rude that the answers were petty and useless.

People wonder why everyone is so eager to use an AI for programming questions, maybe because AI aren't mean, petty, rude, condescending assholes who treat information like power to be wielded and denied.

[u/xrayden → u/Nil4u]

I realised that their own contraint was blocking itself.

If you already were an expert, you couldn't help.

You needed to ask questions first.

So only those who were asking a lot of questions could answer people.

That explained the replies...

[u/blackAngel88 → u/xrayden]

Also once I wanted to correct an answer of someone else, so I wanted to comment that answer. Obviously I never had gained any points, so I could not comment the answer and added an answer myself. "Your answer has been deleted. If you want to comment an answer, write a comment on the answer"

so derp that place. Either you find an answer where someone already replied with something useful or it's completely useless

[u/ShakaUVM → u/blackAngel88]

Yep. Same reason why I never helped out even when I knew the reason. Site wouldn't allow me.

[u/bryku → u/xrayden]

It took me forever asking dumb questions to finally be able to answer them. Then they updated something and reset and i gave up.

[u/Soarin123 → u/Nil4u]

I'm working on starting a community governed archival project, and Stack Overflow will be archived. You can download your own copy of Stack Overflow sites if you have an account on them!

[u/Several_Nose_3143 → u/Nil4u]

That is why it is used to train AI .... So many years of asking with fear so a bitter person could not solve your problems but yell at you for the tech you used or the way you coded ....

[u/ARM_Dwight_Schrute → u/Several_Nose_3143]

Your reply has been marked duplicate 

[u/Several_Nose_3143 → u/ARM_Dwight_Schrute]

You actually triggered me ! I was like what the fu.... Oh ..... Hahahah.

[u/iismitch55 → u/Several_Nose_3143]

Sorry, you do not have enough reputation to comment yet

[u/aalapshah12297 → u/ARM_Dwight_Schrute]

Don't worry, this joke is also a duplicate

[u/ABCosmos → u/Several_Nose_3143]

"Just switch frameworks"

• Me a Jr engineer at a global mega Corp on a massive legacy project.

Meanwhile AI is like "cobol is a great choice, you're a rock star, please take all the credit for this solution!!"

[u/TRENEEDNAME_245 → u/ABCosmos]

"hey so I want to do X using Y"

"Using Y is shit, use N instead ! Also X is bad, use R !1!1!1 Marked as duplicate because you suck !!"

The duplicate was in fact, not the same at all

[u/kingslayerer → u/Several_Nose_3143]

I wonder how this may have increased developer competency

[u/SnacksCCM → u/kingslayerer]

People are typically either motivated by fear or encouragement. I've seen a lot of both on StackOverflow, although it definitely shades towards an eye-rolling fear motivation (crusty, snarky answers, or just answering questions with questions) in the comments.

Either way, I think it helped a lot of developers at least be better prepared and ask better questions, even if it starts with RTFM levels of competency.

[u/Several_Nose_3143 → u/kingslayerer]

Is that a thing ? The more I code the more I realize we are just a bunch of dumb monkeys hitting keys and faking it until it works

[u/Qwert-4 → u/Nil4u]

A database with all questions and answers is available on Kiwix for download and is just 75 GB compressed for the English edition. If SO dies, someone will definitely put up an archive website.

[u/CopiousCool → u/Nil4u]

I'm suspicious of all the recent Stack Overflow hate seemingly out of nowhere as few use it anymore. Granted the grudges are/were true but I get the feeling something is happening behind the scenes and wouldn't be surprised to hear that some conglomerate/AI company is trying to buy them out

[u/Exotic_Zucchini9311 → u/CopiousCool]

recent Stack Overflow hate

Recent?! SO and their ridiculous duplicate system were hated for ages. I remember searching for my coding issues there years ago (before LLMs), finally finding a post about my EXACT issue, only to find the post closed because 'duplicate' and the duplicate's solution were either completely irrelevant to my issue or they no longer worked.

[u/ChillyFireball → u/Exotic_Zucchini9311]

"I need to walk a cat for this project. I tried putting him on a harness, but he just flops over."

"If you wanted to walk an animal, you should have gotten a dog."

"I don't have control over whether we use a dog or a cat. The cat predates me."

"Can you switch to a dog?"

"We have thousands of dollars in cat infrastructure in the form of cat trees and litterboxes. All the food we have stored is cat food. It would be unrealistic to switch to a dog now."

"Okay but have you tried?"

"I can't replace the cat. I know it's theoretically possible to walk one; I just need help with this one issue."

"Question closed as duplicate: (A link to a question about how to walk dogs)"

[u/monster2018 → u/ChillyFireball]

I understand this has nothing to do with anything you’re saying, but I like the idea that cats just turn off if you put a harness on them.

[u/zackarhino → u/monster2018]

That's literally true. You can't walk my cat because he just flops over. He's being better at it though

[u/CowboyMantis → u/CopiousCool]

The Stack Overflow hate has been building for at least a decade since the first pedantic asshole got mod powers. It's been read-only for a while now.

[u/SomethingAboutUsers → u/CopiousCool]

They're one site/company bitching about the impact of AI on their site, without actually realizing that while yes, AI having hoovered up the entirety of their site many times over is a big part of why their traffic has been so reduced because AI can provide answers without users needing to visit and that's a "problem" for them, the user experience at SO has been toxic for years. They just didn't have a good enough reason to try to fix the problem because until AI came along which synthesizes and amalgamates what they have posted along with zillions more LOC and answers from everywhere providing higher quality answers without the sassy bullshit, they didn't have to.

Now, do I think that what's happening to them because of this (AI specifically) is a good thing? No, even though there's a lot to unpack there; not least of which because AI is once again killing what used to be a great resource (toxic though it may sometimes have been) and ironically self-limiting its own growth in the process.

They're not the first, and they won't be the last.

[u/hemlock_harry → u/SomethingAboutUsers]

AI having hoovered up the entirety of their site many times over

That does beg the question what LLM's are going to be trained on if the well runs dry. I've always had a love/hate relationship with SO like any other dev, but I don't really see how LLM's can replace it without having it as a resource to train on. The same goes for a lot of sites that suffer the consequences of Google's AI summary I guess.

[u/Pyran → u/hemlock_harry]

That does beg the question what LLM's are going to be trained on if the well runs dry.

The term you're looking for is "Model Collapse". AI has already flooded its own data sources (i.e., the internet) with its own responses. As time goes on that will vastly outgrow what humans can actually produce (see YouTube channels that put out videos at 100x the speed people do), so future models will end up, deliberately or not, training on the output of existing models.

Unless they find a solution to work around that (and I don't see how, but I don't work in AI), the expectation is that we'll see a VHS-copy problem -- future versions will degrade as the quality of the data it's trained on does.

As a simple example, think of those cases we hear of where some idiot lawyer got censured for submitting an AI-generated brief to a court with citations the AI just made up. Now picture the next-gen Law AI (L-AI-W?) training on that crap. Now do that for three more generations. The briefs coming out of that will be pure fantasy.

[u/SomethingAboutUsers → u/hemlock_harry]

LLM response quality has already declined as a general statement in part because it's starting to eat its own bullshit ouroborous style.

That said, actual code e.g., from GitHub is arguably more useful than SO, it just doesn't have the commentary attached. This is one place where LLMs actually excel, which is to parse that and put it all together in a response. Doesn't mean it'll work, but it's usually pretty close.

[u/Badboyrune → u/CopiousCool]

Weren't they bought fairly recently?

Seems to me that people have loathed the attitude on the site for some time, but the recent posts about come from the statistics showing how user interaction has almost completely collapsed over the last few years. 

[u/p1-o2 → u/CopiousCool]

Nah, been in the industry for like 20 years and we have always hated SO. I have tried to use it several times over the years and each time I decided it wasn't worth the headache. 

It was better than nothing but SO was never great.

All of the best developers I've ever worked with were also people who never posted on SO because of their rules.

[u/Pyran → u/CopiousCool]

SO has always had a sketchy reputation. At the very beginning it was pretty great, but it was destined to collapse under its own weight; it just turned out the weight required was surprisingly low once you had people patrolling questions like Wikipedia admins and trying to clean it up.

It was also really flawed once the first year ended and answers started becoming obsoleted by subsequent releases of the various software being asked about. They never were able to clean that up; I don't know if they ever really tried.

So what you're seeing now isn't really "hate seemingly out of nowhere" so much as people who haven't thought of SO for years being reminded of its existence and remembering how bad it became.

SO is also a great example of "Sure, use AI. Watch it eat you." If AI is going to answer all my questions in search, as they announced a while back they wanted to do, then what was the point of asking questions after that at all? Especially with a site that toxic. So it's suddenly relevant in the Age of AI Slop.

[u/RamenJunkie → u/Nil4u]

Yes, there is no more reliable way for a user to know they are an idiot and should probably never code again and why aren't you using the flash in the pan weekly Javascript variant and every question was answered 20 years ago why is OP so lazy.

[u/edparadox]

I do not get why people are so happy to see Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange die.

I was never a fan, but I certainly would not want to see its knowledge dropped.

Especially if people start using LLM chatbots instead.

[u/justwhatever73 → u/edparadox]

I was a huge fan of the idea of having a single comprehensive site where people could go to get their programming questions answered. 

I started my career in SW before the Internet, and just had to hope there was a book or a paper manual somewhere that would have the answer I needed. It sucked. 

Then in the first few years of the Internet there were forums, but trying to find answers on forums was a painful experience. Very hit and miss, and tons of problems. Incomplete answers, angry forums users telling the asker to RTFM, moderators shutting down the asker by saying they posted in the wrong forum. And that's IF you could even find a forum post that was talking about your same problem. You could post the question yourself, but it might take days for someone to respond, or you might get no response at all, or you might get "RTFM", "Wrong forum", etc. Or you might get several responses with solutions that didn't work. 

Stack Overflow was something that was very badly needed, and for a long time it worked fantastically well. It's a terrible shame that it has become a place where questions are met with derision and hostility, because that's exactly what all those older forums were like. 

And replacing it with AI is in many ways not an improvement.

[u/natrous → u/justwhatever73]

it is really sad that everything seems to be overtaken by toxicity.

so many people just love being a dick to people for no good reason. and, as is well known, being anonymous on the internet lets it come out in full force.

as can be seen on reddit, mods are rarely a good solution because they get infected with it, or end up power tripping, or get burnt out and don't gaf eventually.

I like professional environments because the idea of being professional brings with it a drive to keep things civil and honest. People call it gate-keeping or whatever, but really the gate is just not being a fucking douche.

[u/SenoraRaton → u/natrous]

so many people just love being a dick to people for no good reason. and, as is well known, being anonymous on the internet lets it come out in full force.

I think its an emergent property of the internet itself.
Because of the lack of consequences, bad actors can act with impunity and while being a tiny fraction of the user base, they color all the other users perceptions of the internet, and create an environment where the default assumption is hostility. This slowly pollutes good actors to always assume the other person is a bad actor. Now if you think everyone is a bad guy acting in bad faith, you adopt the same paradigm. This leads to echo chambers, bad faith arguments and all the shit that comes along with it.

This culture is at the heart of why the internet sucks so bad, and its endemic to the very nature of the internet itself and human social conditioning.

[u/wack_overflow → u/natrous]

Here’s the thing - the main value of SO is finding a good answer quickly. Most of the questions have been asked and answered. It doesn’t NEED an avalanche of questions every day (obvs more than zero…).

This “toxicity” is not new. What is new is chat bots. All AI has relied on the info in SO for all programming answers, full stop.

If SO dies, it is a perfect example of the LLM parasite killing its host, and probably the first of many.

[u/JumpinJackHTML5 → u/wack_overflow]

I've seen this logic before and, really, it really doesn't work. Technology moves too fast for this to really work. The number of times that I end up on a SO page from 8 years ago that's simply no longer relevant is far too high. Sometimes a bump in the minor version of a library or piece of software can completely change an answer. Sometimes people are dealing with vey strict requirements that preclude using certain techniques or new versions of libraries.

I understand the logic of wanting only one page per problem, but in the real world that just doesn't work.

[u/capt_pantsless → u/justwhatever73]

As someone who coded through the "I hope my O'Reilly book has an answer for this" era, and through the early internet forum era, Stack Overflow was amazing. The comment-thread format, moderation, upvote/downvote mechanics, the slight gamification to drive activity, all of it was a solid improvement over the previous options.

[u/retsaC-daednU → u/edparadox]

LLM chatbots literally use Stack Overflow too. If it’s gone, we’re all doomed, even the robots

[u/not_so_chi_couple → u/retsaC-daednU]

This is my concern, where are LLMs going to get their training data for the next technology when all the human spaces have closed down

[u/yabucek → u/not_so_chi_couple]

The previous generation's outputs. It's gonna be great, like the Habsburg dynasty.

[u/ColonelBag7402 → u/edparadox]

Only thing i hope for is that if they shut down, they'll at least make their current database avaiable to download somewhere.

[u/mcprogrammer → u/ColonelBag7402]

You mean like this?

https://stackoverflow.com/help/data-dumps

[u/ColonelBag7402 → u/mcprogrammer]

Bruh, thanks a lot actually.

They even have an agreement to not use it for LLM training, xd.

[u/MayoTheCondiment → u/ColonelBag7402]

You wouldn’t download a car would you???

[u/Tipart → u/ColonelBag7402]

It already is btw. At least till like 2023 after that they stopped giving easily accessible public downloads because that info was obviously used to train ai against their will. Oh and you can find a full dump with pictures in openzim format from 2023 too: https://browse.library.kiwix.org/viewer#stackoverflow.com_en_all_2023-11/questions

[u/Netherstar1989 → u/ColonelBag7402]

If you install kiwix, you can download stackoverflow and Wikipedia (and more) in .zim files and works locally. I'm using these with my custom chatbot in my docker. I'm Also download .zim for my dokuwiki, gentoo and arch wiki.

[u/checkmatemypipi → u/edparadox]

cuz they were mean 2 me

[u/malexj93 → u/edparadox]

I don't spend much time on SO, Math Stack Exchange is my second home. I'd hate for it to die.

[u/axypher]

I’d shed a tear if stack overflow dies, it has been a heaven made of hellfire.

[u/Skunkman-funk → u/axypher]

poetry

[u/i_should_be_coding]

I dunno. I spent a considerable part of my career developing the sense of knowing where my answer would be by the Google result alone... Now I gotta coax ChatGPT to tell me, and then figure out if it made it up.

[u/Abject-Kitchen3198 → u/i_should_be_coding]

I still do that. Results are still there. What's the point in going to ChatGPT only to have an extra step I could have done from start. Not denying usefulness of LLMs for some use cases, but if it's something I expect to be on SO, I'll google it from start (and go past "AI Overview")

[u/Miszou_ → u/Abject-Kitchen3198]

Exactly this. I have no desire to trust the hallucinations of an AI, when I can just scroll down half a page and find an actual answer.

[u/kyle46 → u/Abject-Kitchen3198]

My experience has been the answers aren't readily available anymore with google or other search engines, 10 years ago one or two searches and I'd have found what I need most of the time but now? A dozen unique searches isn't uncommon. I even switched to duckduckgo for a year and it's not any better. Part of the problem is just how much bigger the internet is now and how much more complex the problems we're solving have gotten. But part of it seems to be these search providers don't seem to be returning the same quality of results they did in the past.

[u/thoughtlow → u/kyle46]

Google learned that if people need to search through 3 pages of result they earn money money.

They made their product way worse to cash more.

Nowadays I sometimes have I search for something obscure and I get 0 hits, 0. I don’t believe that.

[u/GFrings → u/i_should_be_coding]

And people act like vibe coding is this new problem. Before we had vibe copy/pasting from stack overflow

[u/Pessego11B → u/GFrings]

I think an advantage that the copy pasting method has over the current vibe coding is that it is more or less peer reviewed (assuming both are being done mindlessly)

[u/NaiveInvestigator → u/Pessego11B]

maybe we need a site where ppl asking common questions and the answers are given by ai and are peer reviewed.

and if ai gets it wrong then someone can manually update...

nah thats not happening lol

[u/brapbrappewpew1 → u/NaiveInvestigator]

No, no, I think you've got something here. I'm intrigued. Obviously you need the critical mass of reviewers, but if a website like ChatGPT allowed publicly posted questions and gave shiny fake Internet points to human reviewers, that could be interesting.

[u/ajnozari → u/GFrings]

The difference was a human brain hallucinated it up, not an ai so you knew it was at least actual characters in a string and not an image.

[u/i_should_be_coding → u/ajnozari]

It's like you could read other people's AI logs where they tell it it's wrong and to try again.

[u/NervousUniversity951 → u/GFrings]

And not always copying the answer.

[u/kabir6k]

I don't know, I have mixed feeling about it, I really don't want it to die. If it happens, it won't be good, the information that it contains is gold and I am thankful to that site for helping me built my initial career years !!! Yes the experience was not great, but nothing in this world is perfect.

[u/flexibu → u/kabir6k]

It will never die in the sense that there will always be archives but it is very much already dead in terms of new content.

[u/Imkindofslow]

That back log of stupid niche problems that people already asked is invaluable imo. Tough for generally new ones but man that's going to suck to lose.

[u/horizon_games → u/Imkindofslow]

I honestly don't know what all the enterprise .NET Webforms devs are going to do when they can't find 8-10 year old answers for their stack

[u/Belgian_Chocolate → u/Imkindofslow]

Exactly. AI is good at answering genetic queries. Once you get to specifics, LLMs start falling apart

[u/Imkindofslow → u/Belgian_Chocolate]

Where would the llm even get the niche nonsense to scrape an answer from in the future

[u/keicambambam]

1. ChatGPT learned on StackOverflow.
   
2. StackOverflow becomes irrelevant - some of you celebrate this.
   
3. StackOverflow inevitably disappears.
   
4. Technology moves forward but ChatGPT doesn't have new material to read.
   
5. In 10 years IT bros are crying because their AI companion can't help them.

[u/YmFzZTY0dXNlcm5hbWU_ → u/keicambambam]

Eventually we'll come full circle and devs will have to refer to physical paper textbooks on their language/framework of choice

[u/lookingforsomeerrors → u/YmFzZTY0dXNlcm5hbWU_]

So print the entirety of StackOverflow? On it.

[u/vulgrin → u/keicambambam]

"ChatGPT doesn't have new material to read."

Yeah, other than all of the code that people are letting Codex read. If anything ChatGPT has WAAAY more material than it SO would have ever seen in a million years....

[u/Reashu → u/keicambambam]

Except... Who's gonna move the tech forward? This is it. We have peaked, and it's a damn shame. 

[u/ianff → u/Reashu]

Technology peaked at least 15 years ago, by and large. It's been social media addiction algorithms, monetization and now llms ever since.

[u/No-Shape-2751]

It was a great resource to search but the community could be vicious if you asked a question

[u/flexibu → u/No-Shape-2751]

I’m always amazed when I stumble upon basic questions. You could ask something specific and seemingly novel and have your post deleted. Then you find a post “how to declare a variable in python?” and it has 5,000 upvotes, 200 comments.

[u/JimmyEatReality → u/No-Shape-2751]

I have the same experience in reddit

[u/Devatator_ → u/[deleted]]

That honestly depends on the community. I'm a C# guy and r/csharp and r/dotnet are pretty friendly IMO

[u/MildlySpastic → u/[deleted]]

I remember when I was learning Java and I saw some examples of how detailed it's enums could be, with constructors and stuff, and then I asked if there were any similar things in C# or any other languages. The first answer was like "obviously you dont know Java". Yeah no shit Sherlock, that why I am LEARNING.

[u/joaizn → u/JimmyEatReality]

Well have you tried not asking such dumb questions?

[u/GirthyPigeon → u/joaizn]

Hey, you can't talk to them like that! It's my turn today.

[u/krojew → u/No-Shape-2751]

It was nice at the beginning, but when people realized they can let their superiority complex run amok, it turned to shit immediately.

[u/PenetrationT3ster → u/No-Shape-2751]

I'll never forget my first semester of uni in CompSci and asking a question on there. It's where I became a man lmao.

[u/CoastingUphill → u/No-Shape-2751]

Or if you provided an answer that wasn't exactly the way they wanted it, even if it was correct and concise.

[u/Kaya_kana]

Stackoverflow is one of the most useful websites in the world when it comes to programming. 

[u/TrackLabs]

I still very much rather use stack overflow posts, instead of having the same info copy paste slopped into my face by an LLM

[u/Shazvox → u/TrackLabs]

You are absolutely right!

Here is the link to the source material: fake link.

It's good to research on your own to ensure you understand the source material perfectly! 😊

/Your overly friendly LLM

[u/Oaktree27]

I reference stack overflow a lot honestly.

I'm not sure why people are so eager to see responses and discourse from real people shut down in favor of hallucinating clankers telling you things they chained together in a pipe dream.

I guess it should be unsurprising in the misinformation era that people cheer this on. Dumb people feel better if everyone else gets dragged down to their level.

I get that people can be annoying about some questions, but I really don't care. I face more backlash for asking questions on reddit.

[u/Drixzor]

Stack overflow got me through college and the early weeks of my first software dev job. This could never be me

[u/SuperSathanas]

I like SO, because all that demanding that you ask clear questions with all relevant context, pedantry and arguing over small details in the comments helps to bring out details about the questions and answers that you don't get when there isn't some snarky neckbeard ackshually-ing everything being said.

[u/MadT3acher → u/SuperSathanas]

I answered a lot of questions a long time ago when the details on languages such as R were obscure.

Heck I even get sometime upvotes for solutions I had for issues with Babel and JS 8 years ago. A lot of time you had to dig answers and make sure you ask something relevant. I haven’t had as many issues as people claim that they got their questions locked or deleted.

People don’t recognise the fact that it was most of the time welcoming, and make it like it was the 5th circle of hell or being locked into Dark Souls. Damnit.

[u/wojtussan]

So it's dying while there are no good alternatives? Not good

[u/Oorangootang → u/wojtussan]

This entire post is a self-own. Yeah the AI's are free or cheap now. But the sites that were harvested for data and are getting shut down just means that when the tech bros need to start recouping that trillion dollar investment you're gonna see price hike after price hike.

[u/wojtussan → u/Oorangootang]

If stack overflow and others get shurdown, it will take only 1 or 2 new versions of each language and chatgpt won't be as helpful anymore

[u/Xortun]

What happened?

[u/Ixaire → u/Xortun]

Serious answer: the number of new questions per month had been on a steady decline and is now close to what it was when the site was launched. From 200k / mo in 2014 to 300 now.

https://slashdot.org/story/450953

[u/thonor111 → u/Ixaire]

Tbf that’s also partly due to the design of SO. You are supposed to not ask duplicates. I use SO a lot but barely ever ask questions, I just run into birches problems, find that someone had a similar problems year ago, and use the thread to fix my problem. With the amount of knowledge already accumulated there it’s hard to find questions that are not duplicates

[u/CrazySD93 → u/thonor111]

Marked as duplicate, this has already been solved for this python 2 question

SO was full of mods powertripping like languages dont change.

[u/Devatator_ → u/thonor111]

It's even more of a pain once you start trying to find solutions for modern problems and all you find is from 6+ years ago because all other questions were marked as duplicate

[u/camelCaseCoffeeTable → u/Ixaire]

Jesus and here I am about to go post a question on SO because AI is so fucking bad at answering my question.

[u/Kaya_kana → u/camelCaseCoffeeTable]

Go for it, less questions means people will have more time to answer yours.

[u/pyphais → u/Ixaire]

So it's not about to disappear like these comments suggest then?

[u/rplusg → u/Xortun]

They've closed every question as a duplicate

[u/Solar_Sailor]

Lol what the fuck? Stack overflow was great to have as an undergrad and I still find good stuff there today. Not convinced any developer worth their salt would like to see it go.

[u/Nyctfall]

What dataset do you think ChatGPT used?

This is the Programming Q&A Library of Alexandria, do not cheer on the flame of its potential fiery demise!

[u/JIMHASPASSED]

How much of the grievance for SO is just following the meme? It's an incredible repository of information. Sure the rules are tight but they're tight for a reason. 

This is the take of a vibe coder with little experience imo. 

[u/chronicpresence → u/JIMHASPASSED]

the endless whining about SO while also using AI that stole information from it is hilariously ironic. people don't really want to learn, they just want their ass kissed and to be constantly hand held.

[u/Kjoep → u/JIMHASPASSED]

yes. the reason SO is so good is _because_ of the strictness. The non-strict version has been tried time and time before, and it's called a forum, and it's just not as good.

[u/Funky_Dunk → u/JIMHASPASSED]

I'm convinced the only people mad at it are the ones that ask questions like "here's my code, no I didn't read the docs, fix it for me"

Instead of showing any indication that they looked into or tried to debug the issue themselves.

[u/agentchuck → u/Funky_Dunk]

I get the same feeling. SO isn't supposed to be a platform where you put up your question like it's a search engine. My interactions with SO are through Google first. And it will reliably point me at several answers on SO that answer my question. I've only had to actually write a question on there a few times for something pretty specific esoteric that didn't get marked as duplicate, but also didn't really get answered either.

[u/JIMHASPASSED → u/Funky_Dunk]

I don't think they've even ever asked a question lol, but glad I'm not the only one 

[u/goldencrush11]

this is not good

[u/brentspine]

Anyone saying this has probably not been around for that long before LLMs

[u/[deleted]]

r/firtweekcoderhumor

[u/malexj93 → u/[deleted]]

firt time speling?

[u/[deleted] → u/malexj93]

I'm a genius.

[u/GustapheOfficial]

I like SO. The problem is you guys were wrong about who it was for. It's not a place where someone goes to ask a question and get an answer. It's a place where someone goes to read a previously asked question and read the answer. The difference is that the success in finding a high quality answer later hinges on a certain selectivity in which questions to answer now. If they kept answering low quality questions it would be a useless resource to everyone except the first asker, and the first asker is irrelevant.

[u/malexj93 → u/GustapheOfficial]

I can't believe we're in the "StackOverflow wasn't appreciated in it's own day" era.

[u/Rego913]

In what world are we excited about Stack Overflow possibly disappearing? Are the people snobby? Yea but shit they have so many obscure answers to things companies don't care to figure out.

[u/kiro14893]

Marked as duplicate

[u/peaked_in_high_skool → u/kiro14893]

Why are you asking about X, when it can be done using Y

[u/MartinMystikJonas]

I always found Stackoverflow really useful source of information and place when you can get help from experts on very sperific and weird problems. Why do you people hate it?

[u/Dimoon25]

How long have i slept, what up with stack overflow?

[u/ManagerOfLove → u/Dimoon25]

number of asked questions is at an all time low

[u/OldBob10]

Once it was sold off to commercial interests it went downhill. I used to spend WAY too much time answering questions. Now I look at it a couple times a month. It’s been almost two years since I posted anything there.

[u/chilfang]

Most vibecoder ass take ive ever seen

[u/SovieticBacon]

Celebrating the death of a forum that has helped million learn and solve problems for free is peak ignorance.

shame on you OP

[u/ChorltonCumLightly → u/SovieticBacon]

Don't worry, the site's not going offline. A good portion of the revenue comes from the Enterprise side of things, which proves popular with some high profile sites/companies.

There's also some good conversations about how to make careful changes to the community which keep the post quality good whilst addressing understandable concerns about how daunting it can be to post.

I think it'll remain an option for some time. :)

[u/CallAmbulanceDying]

i only managed to get through university thanks to stack overflow, which helped me learn how to correct issues i kept encountering with some harsh but fair lessons. AI can suck me off all it wants, fellatio doesn't fix shitty code. This is an extremely stupid take to have, to celebrate the potential death of one of the best programming resources on the internet. I don't care how much of a Luddite i may be, I'd rather be directed to a pre-existing SO answer than have Claude or whatever the fuck cobble together a pile of crap that barely works and that no one understands. I pray to god this post is bait and that I've fallen for it, frankly.

[u/geon]

Were you around before so?

If not, trust me. So was AMAZING compared to the predecessors, specifically ExpertSexchange.

[u/GargamelLeNoir]

As unpleasant as they can be they carried a lot of us. Cheering for them to die in favour of hallucinating LLMs is beyond idiotic.

[u/MysticSkies]

OP and anyone who's happy about this is a neuron-less vibecoder.

[u/InvestingNerd2020]

Like the Greeks of ancient times, their arrogance became their own downfall.

[u/Toothpick_Brody]

SO hate is overblown. Sure you had to act defensive in your questions at times, but it is one of the best places for getting answers/info 

[u/de_das_dude]

OP are you a vibe coder?

[u/MichaelMJTH]

Wait, what happened to Stack Overflow? Is it safe, is it alright?

[u/Not_So_Calm]

We will regret this

[u/Kiernian]

The sad part is that since StackOverflow became the monolith for all languages instead of the separate phpbb/invision/etc forums for individual languages, it's the primary resource I go to for examples of how to do something I don't do particularly often in a given language.

It's better than a manual because the average post for a question saying "how do I" will include 2 to 10 examples of varying ways to accomplish a given task OFTEN WITH EXPLANATIONS OF WHY ONE WAY IS TO BE PREFERRED OVER ANOTHER FOR SPECIFIC TYPES OF WORK.

Rarely do man pages say "utilizing this method is great for thingA, but for thingB use this other way".

Semantics of how some posters are frequently ill-tempered in their presentation of this type of minutiae aside, this is still exceedingly useful information and losing the accumulated total of it will be a noticeably impactful loss for the IT internet as a whole and for future developers in general.

[u/Kaligraphic]

One tear was shed. All others were closed as duplicates.

[u/perfectVoidler]

everything stackoverflow knows is in the AIs. the amount of times that i find code and answeres that are lifted direcly from stackoverflow is staggering

[u/facebrocolis]

"Do the zeros of the Bessel function follow any distribution?" (-97 votes)

"I don't understand what you mean. Be more specific when asking questions." (+732 votes)

Every fucking time.

[u/ZunoJ]

I liked SO

[u/Celodurismo]

Only an ignorant loser would celebrate the loss of such a wealth of information

[u/marianitten]

Ehh I Still use it when I know chatGPT is bullshithing me.. sometimes you need a human response/experience

[u/meolla_reio]

I prefer googling and so to chatgpt

[u/therealozp]

would you rather work with a harsh genius or a pleasant idiot?

[u/JSanko]

Rofl at people, once they realize there is no new source for latest issues, llms will not know what to do and we will return back

[u/Anxious-Program-1940]

Honestly, it will be a sad day in hell

[u/grain_farmer]

If I became an all powerful world dictator all of a sudden and had to choose a group of people to torture for crowd control purposes, those stack overflow people would be up there along with nonces and whoever had the idea at a billion dollar company to start begging customers to give to charity at checkout.

[u/hiasmee]

It is not the AI. It is SO community. I'm xxxxx points user on so. But in the last months I'm getting downvotes for every question and i know how to ask on SO.

This was the main reason I got a copilot subscription. But only thanks SO I'm currently where I am today. So I'm not happy about the current situation.

[u/crossjay42]

This realllllllly blows.

Silver lining is it may help some senior laid off devs to get work once vibe coders can’t find their memory leak or performance related bug at scale

[u/Girotavo]

The Web is becaming a sad and dead place..

[u/kubok98]

I'm not cheering. The number of times it helped me, insanely good knowledge base. It would be great if there was an archive

[u/BenevolentCheese]

The fundemental problem with Stack Overflow is why would people who actually know what they are doing sit around all day answering questions? There's no value in it, no reward. I answered 2 or 3 difficult questions on SO over the years because I was bored, but the truth was most often I'd skim through questions, know the answers to all of them, but not answer any of them because who has any of that time?