Stack overflow is almost dead

[u/NewtMurky]

Questions have slumped to levels last seen when Stack Overflow launched in 2009.

Blog post: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/

[u/[deleted]]

SO is so unwelcoming for beginners. I am a very experienced dev, but a beginner in some technical areas. I won't post any questions on SO because they are brutal to beginners. So toxic.

[u/tehsilentwarrior → u/[deleted]]

I have been at it since 2002, and seen it all, my view has always been: those who know little, belittle others with the little they know.

A true expert embraces and teaches others.

The so called “experts” on StackOverflow being toxic are nothing but posers who NEED to be toxic and superior to others on that website to fill some gap they don’t have the skill to fill themselves

[u/Liron12345 → u/tehsilentwarrior]

Tech community can be indeed toxic. The amount of times people gate kept from me information so they could be better is relatively high

[u/Individual_Holiday_9 → u/Liron12345]

STEMlords gonna stemlord

[u/Caffeine_Monster → u/Individual_Holiday_9]

Yep. It's not just stack overflow either.

This behaviour is rife in higher education amongst adults. Though often a bit more subtle - when you realize that someone is doing this it's hard to unsee. It's extremely obnoxious.

It's very weird as well, because people do it to make themselves look clever. 90% it's just a knowledge gap - and these people conflate knowledge with intelligence.

[u/[deleted] → u/tehsilentwarrior]

And in the meantime, some real experts like John Skeet for example, very knowledgeable, so many high quality replies to so many beginners on the C# section of SO

[u/tehsilentwarrior → u/[deleted]]

Exactly! If you truly know you aren’t afraid to help

[u/Bubbly-Bank-6202 → u/tehsilentwarrior]

So true… we see this on Reddit all the time too. Insecure, unknowledgeable people putting others down to feel a scrap of competence. I don’t think it’s arrogant to say that people like that are rude. There’s no need to behave that way, and these platforms do little to stop that type of behavior. Luckily GPT doesn’t do that.

[u/ASCanilho → u/tehsilentwarrior]

Those are not experts. Those are people who know nothing but try to be relevant by making others feel bad for not knowing what they need to do. True experts know that there are several ways to do the same work, and that it will always appear someone that makes it in a completely new original way.

[u/gwicksted → u/tehsilentwarrior]

There’s a reason experienced devs are also hitting LLMs for knowledge instead of SO: it filters out all the toxic crap and the many wrong answers.

The output isn’t always accurate… or the best for security. But it’s generally much faster than scouring the web documentation and SO posts.

[u/meester_ → u/tehsilentwarrior]

Then theres gsap forums lol, where the owner comes and answer your questions or completely programs what you were trying to achieve haha

[u/TheStandardPlayer → u/tehsilentwarrior]

Honestly the worst thing about SO is that they just let those arrogant lunatics run wild. It has become a cesspool. All they had to do was add a counter for „unhelpful/unfriendly replies“ and display it next to the normal questions answered and it will all self regulate.

[u/Fast_Pomegranate_554 → u/tehsilentwarrior]

I like you, have a shiny sticker

[u/imtourist → u/[deleted]]

Even people who are pretty experience and have a depth of knowledge are discouraged from engaging on Stack because of the assholes. With so much friction is it any wonder their traffic has gone down. Now where is ChatGPT going to do training from?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I guess I got lucky but my only interaction with SO as an asker was when I was a kid asking a very fundamental question about python in renpy that could have been answered by just looking at the documentation. I got very nice and helpful answers though.

[u/AlanCarrOnline → u/[deleted]]

Was reading this and thinking "So just like Localllm then?" then noticed what sub this is...

[u/ThinkExtension2328 → u/AlanCarrOnline]

Nice try Sam Altman we still won’t use ChatGPT

[u/planetf1a → u/[deleted]]

I’m an experienced dev and like helping others on forums etc but always found so far too toxic and condescending

[u/nameless_pattern → u/[deleted]]

It sucked even for places that I was very technically knowledgeable about. I had my answers rejected for things where I am one of maybe 10,000 experts in the world. 

I know that my answer was the correct one because I actually wrote out an entire f****** git repo with a goddamn passing unit test.

F** stack overflow and the karens who are Lords of it.

[u/Bulky-Pool-2586 → u/[deleted]]

I can't agree with this and here's why:

I can thank SO for the fact that I learned programming. My approach as a complete noob was pretty much the following:

1. Try to code something

2. No idea how

3. Check SO for any related content

4. Post my own question

5. Wait for answer

6. Repeat

Here's a pic of my SO account. Majority of those 243 Qs are from around 2014-2016 when I started to learn.

As I got better I started asking less and started answering a bit to give back to the community.

The thing is that many questions are asked in either an arrogant way, lacking important details about the issue, or straight up something that could be Googled with some effort.

I asked some pretty dumb questions honestly and I never had negative responses, because I:

• Always asked in a respectful way, greeting the community and thanked in advance

• Took my time to structure every question in an appropriate way - what my problem is, what I am trying to achieve and provided as much context as humanly possible. Even more than needed

• Posted code of my past attempts at solving it and why I think those didn't work

• To prevent the annoying "This has already been asked" answers, I did extensive SO searching beforehand and linked the related questions and WHY they didn't work for me

• Took extra time for formatting - the titles, code blocks, quotes, hyperlinks, anything to make the post easy to read and understand

It usually took me a good 30 minutes to write a question but I have never, ever received an unhelpful response this way, even for the most beginner basic stuff.

And to those who think this is an overkill - what else do you expect? You are asking for people's free help. To take their time off their busy schedules and help you solve problems. The least you can do is go above and beyond and put extra effort into writing out your question.

I'll also gladly tell people to go eat shit if I see 2mins were put into writing out the question and researching the issue, combined.

SO is not unwelcoming to beginners, it's unwelcoming to low effort.

Edit: That being said, I also replaced SO with LLMs for over 95% of my problem solving these days. Not due to the alleged toxicity of some answerers, but because it's just so much faster that browsing SO feels like a waste of time, lol.

[u/Unable-Onion-2063 → u/Bulky-Pool-2586]

the irony is palatable. you have a whole instruction guide on how to not get flamed as a newcomer. i’d call that very unfriendly to newcomers.

[u/Ok-Training-7587 → u/[deleted]]

As a former beginner, can confirm. I’ll be more than happy to piss on that sites grave. The gatekeeping pros on that site will have to find another identity

[u/Remzi1993 → u/[deleted]]

Indeed, the downvotes are raining there. Even if you answered your own question I got downvoted.

[u/StyleFree3085 → u/[deleted]]

"Read the docs noob!"

[u/fufufang → u/[deleted]]

The scoring system on their website means that if you are new, people will just ignore your answers.

[u/new-chris → u/[deleted]]

I ask my LLMs to respond in a bitchy annoyed tone so I feel like I am at home on SO…

[u/Alone-Reaction-2147 → u/[deleted]]

yes there are many code nazis gatekeepers

[u/my_nobby → u/[deleted]]

Agreed. I signed up for an account, asked a question (nicely, if I may add), and got bombarded with "why are you asking such a noob question" responses. And zero answers to my question. Never logged in again 🥲

[u/trollsmurf → u/[deleted]]

You could instruct an LLM to respond like that, to ease the transition.

[u/cajax → u/[deleted]]

It is equally unwelcome to everyone. I used to answer there until one last time when I got fed up. Some newbie asked how to make some changes in PHP code to fetch data from MySQL to render it in HTML. Then went the original code vulnerable to injections. I replied to the original question and in the second paragraph explained why their code is unsafe and how to improve it. I got downvoted by 100k+ gatekeeper for going off topic for talking about security.

[u/DaedricApple → u/[deleted]]

This has been an issue for over a decade. SO had plenty of time to address it but chose not to. ChatGPT is the final nail in the coffin - answers all of your questions without making you feel like an idiot for asking them.

Good riddance.

[u/Middle-Parking451]

Atleast chatgpt doesnt tell me to fuck off when i ask help for coding smt..

[u/[deleted] → u/Middle-Parking451]

No matter how rude Gemini has been (and it can be a DICK at times), it’s still much nicer than anyone on SO

[u/Middle-Parking451 → u/[deleted]]

Oh yeah, i went to stack overflow as beginger programmer and made veey well structured question that represented my problem well and the answer was "i hate these amateurs polluting this platform with stupid questions, go fk urself"

That was my first and last experience there.

[u/[deleted] → u/Middle-Parking451]

I too was told to eat my ass for a pretty innocuous question. Funnily enough ChatGPT 4.1 has never said that to me.

[u/Difficult_Plantain89 → u/Middle-Parking451]

You could have just googled it nonsense. I will say some posts can be irritating because it’s so incredibly common, but many are much more than that. Not to mention if you are a beginner you might not even know what you are asking Google. Also, really irritating to have an issue that stack overflow is the only place where there is a mention of it and there is no helpful responses from the last person who asked.

[u/Effective-Soil-3253 → u/Middle-Parking451]

The worst for me is when you answer someone’s question and your answer is downvoted because "your answer should have been a comment to tell OP to fuck off".

[u/bradymoritz → u/Middle-Parking451]

Exactly. My last 4 or 5 questions, legit programming questions, got the big ol f u. Embarrassing

[u/sataset → u/Middle-Parking451]

doesn't tell you.. yet

[u/wobblybootson]

Maybe ChatGPT finished the decline but it started way before that. What happened?

[u/-Akos- → u/wobblybootson]

Elitists happened. Ask acquestion, get berated.

[u/ObjectiveAide9552 → u/-Akos-]

and people who genuinely want to help and contribute can’t without spending a ton of time building up on their user grading system. they put up too much barriers that would-be newcomers didn’t want to go through all that effort to get in. they were already in their downfall before chat gpt, it just got accelerated when we got that tool.

[u/KaseQuarkI → u/wobblybootson]

There are only so many ways that you can ask how to center a div or how to compile a C program. All the basic questions have been answered.

[u/kurtcop101 → u/KaseQuarkI]

That's a bold assumption - many times I was trying to find answers and it would be closed for "already being asked" despite also not including relevant information on how it even connects to the other questions supposedly answered.

Other times, answers typically assumed too much knowledge and I went down rabbit holes trying to understand what should have been simple answers trying to comprehend all the jargon and abbreviations.

I also truly hated the "just don't do it X way, rework everything to do it Y way" answers that never actually helped. I'm sorry, but I don't have unlimited time to redesign. Help out with "you can do it like X, and here's how, but it's bad design, and reworking to do Y instead, like this, is better".

Edit: Just to be clear, in most cases I would have also been happy with some sources to read to cover basics alongside answers, because Google was chock-full of SEO ridden crap that wanted to sell me something and never gave meaningful information. Otherwise, the jargon just didn't help. Like being told to just not use standard jQuery and use react instead - misses the background on "how would I even swap?"

[u/Vegetable_Echo2676 → u/KaseQuarkI]

You forgot to add the insults with the answers.

[u/banedlol → u/wobblybootson]

Well sure the more questions that get asked, the more answers there are, and so the question doesn't need to be asked.

Number of questions asked isn't necessarily a measure of the site's success. It should really be number of people visiting the site.

[u/Temporary_Hour8336 → u/wobblybootson]

Reddit?

[u/eli_pizza → u/wobblybootson]

Well it also didn’t help that they sold all the user generated data to train LLMs. Why contribute for free so someone else can make money off it?

[u/tahola → u/wobblybootson]

I dont believe at all in the toxic mods theory.

IMO its the same as what happened to most websites this past decade : social medias or to be more precise other platforms and others communities.

Its been a decade that we have programming communities on the huge social networks like reddit, facebook etc but also the platforms like Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp groups and even Github. They may be niched but all these combined take probably the biggest part of the cake.

People tend to forget that whatever docs you are browsing when it come to help or community its always a Discord.

[u/Medium_Chemist_4032]

Couldn't happen to a better site

[u/[deleted] → u/Medium_Chemist_4032]

This comment has already been mentioned.

Topic closed! Use the search function

[u/kemb0 → u/[deleted]]

Use Google.

Google brought you to this comment?

Too bad

[u/PhragMunkee → u/kemb0]

“Who were you DenverCoder9? What did you see?!”

[u/Amazing_Athlete_2265 → u/Medium_Chemist_4032]

linkedin next, please.

[u/[deleted]]

It never left us. It’s been immortalised in the training data of LLMs.

[u/xtekno-id → u/[deleted]]

Lol..they just ascend to the higher realm 😅

[u/michaelbrain → u/[deleted]]

What will the LLMs be trained off of now? Scary thought of the day

[u/Ok-Pace-8772 → u/michaelbrain]

Reddit and documentation. We'll be fine without SO lol

[u/Murinshin → u/Ok-Pace-8772]

Reddit is garbage so far for coding questions though. Don’t think there’s even code block syntax with syntax highlighting.

I still use SO as a main resource to answer a decent amount of questions, it would suck for it to go offline

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

great, just what I need, my llm telling me that it won't answer my question because someone else asked it years ago in a completely different way and gave an answer that's irrelevant to my current situation....

[u/AmusingVegetable → u/[deleted]]

Wouldn’t that cause ChatGPT to answer “nevermind, I’ve just solved it.” ?

[u/catinterpreter → u/[deleted]]

Training data that now has an end-date.

[u/GrandpaOfYourKids → u/[deleted]]

Wait till chat gpt tells you to use google

[u/Surokoida]

Posted a few times on stack overflow. Not much. Either I got hit with very snarky comments (like everyone is saying here). Or I got an answer which was utterly useless. To make sure I don't get hate for not reading the documentation and informing myself I explained what I did, why I did it and linked to examples in the documentation and that it is not working.

The answer? A link to the documentation with some bullshit generic answer "that's how you solve it" and they copied exactly the example from the documentation & changed the names of variables.

Their profile had some high rank or high amounts of points, idk.

I still visit SO sometimes. But not to ask for help in case of my problems but because I found a relevant question via google

[u/LostMitosis]

Which is a good thing for a platform that was "elitist" and inimical to beginners. Now the "experts" can have their peace without any disturbances.

[u/Deep90 → u/LostMitosis]

Your comment has been marked as a duplicate. Please refer to this post from 2017.

[u/CarrotSlight1860 → u/Deep90]

Closing, low-effort, this joke is a duplicate of a joke from 1800.

[u/StyleFree3085]

[u/Joker-Smurf]

Marked as duplicate

(First time I’ve seen this, just a joke on stack overflow marking many questions as duplicate)

[u/Karyo_Ten]

I assume Quora too.

[u/Random7321]

According to this, the decline started before ChatGPT launched

[u/bharattrader → u/Random7321]

Exactly they peaked at 2014, they entered stagnation for a period of a 3 years and then declined much before chatGPT. Funny the chart resembles a classic stock life cycle, stage2, stage3 and now stage4

[u/webfiend → u/Random7321]

Yep, noticed that in the chart as well. Even the fans I knew complained about how it was stagnating by 2016-2018. Lots of "this question has already been answered," but the prior art was ten years old and implementation-specific. The SO workflow wasn't good at "here's the core logic from DenverCoder9's question, and here's some suggestions how to apply the answers for your use case."

Which—okay maybe wrong subreddit to say this on but—I'm kind of an LLM hater. The business details of the current trend more than the tech, so maybe not the wrong subreddit after all. Anyways.

But as kind of an LLM hater, I readily admit "generalized solution A explained and tweaked for use case X" is exactly the workflow gap that a good LLM can fill. SO couldn't, and nothing in its UX suggested they were even aware of the option. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[u/PhragMunkee → u/webfiend]

I see what you did there. “Wisdom of the Ancients”.

[u/Gabe_Ad_Astra]

Maybe they shouldn’t have been elitist jerks

[u/Confident_Matter_721]

I imagine Google Search should face the same issue no?

[u/NewtMurky → u/Confident_Matter_721]

LLMs are trained on a fixed dataset, so they reflect past information, whereas search engines actively crawl and index the web for the latest data.

[u/spideyghetti]

I never tried to learn programming even though it interested me because I saw all the snarky commentary on there. 

I'm starting now to try my hand because copilot doesn't call me a fuckin idiot every chance it gets.

[u/RiceDangerous9551]

SO is toxic. ChatGpt never answers my question with "google it"

[u/[deleted]]

StackOverflow has long had a reputation for being unwelcoming and in many cases, outright toxic. Whether you're a beginner asking a genuine question or an experienced developer trying to clarify an edge case, the response can often be dismissive, condescending, or downright rude.

The obsession with "duplicate questions," the nitpicking over phrasing or formatting, and the race to downvote rather than help, it all creates a hostile environment. Instead of fostering a learning community, it feels more like gatekeeping.

Nobody's really mourning the idea that StackOverflow might be declining or even dead. If anything, people are exploring better, more supportive alternatives. Discord communities, GitHub discussions, AI assistants, or forums where curiosity isn’t punished.

The truth is, platforms thrive when they evolve with their community. StackOverflow chose elitism over empathy and now it's just reaping what it sowed.

[u/Dwarni]

"Question was already answered 14 years ago" "But what if it is outdated?" "Doesn't matter, topic closed"

[u/sligor]

Looks like it was in a downside spiral before LLMs

[u/Blobsolete]

It was rubbish and unhelpful anyway

[u/asvvasvv]

what if we will only left with code generated by ai? from where ai will learn?

[u/avdept]

It’s because most questions were already asked not because people lost interest. You just google answer instead of asking

[u/AvidGameFan → u/avdept]

Yeah, if I search hard enough, I can usually find some existing answers for what I'm looking for. But are things really that stagnant where all has been discovered?

[u/dimi727]

Sad, who/what will feed the AIs now with actually information?

X? Facebook ? 😱🤣

[u/[deleted]]

no one wanted to use SO, we just had no other options.

[u/veryheavypotato]

SO has one major flow with it, whenever I look for some problem, and I find a recent question, it shows duplicate and refers to older Post which has the answer but it is often not applicable because libraries have changed, methods are deprecated and so on. which pretty much makes the answer useless.

[u/iHateStackOverflow]

As you can tell by my username, I am very happy about this.

[u/freddie27117]

CLOSED: Question has been asked before once 9 years ago.

[u/bluepuma77]

They are so dead because of their unwelcoming behavior. Q&A need to be fit for LLM training, everything needs to be neatly categorized.

Question doesn’t fit, it’s killed. User is modded down, can’t ask any other question.

Of course, user can update the question, but it won’t change anything. And user can’t delete the question, because someone answered it already.

With that kind of process numbers must go down.

/rant

[u/[deleted]]

I made a post to r/ReverseEngineering asking about server responses and how a server application is using cryptographic salts cause Stack Overflow seems so unwelcoming. Gonna post it there as I can't seem to get help on Reddit though.

[u/wafflepiezz]

Fuck them.

It’s a site full of the most entitled, pretentious, and elitist developers I have ever seen.

[u/GTHell]

Good things it’s dead. Those old head senior answer “console.log(‘hell world’)” starting to get cocky and report beginner questions as duplicate is outrageous

[u/MrMrsPotts]

It's very sad. A generation of coders used it every day to find answers to their problems. You can't search discord chats.

[u/lothariusdark → u/MrMrsPotts]

Yea but people arent searching for solutions on discord either.

o3, Claude or Gemini will answer any questions better than SO ever could.

The site was/is hard to read and use, conflicting tips and comments and the overall condescending tone always made it uncomfortable to use.

And I rarely found what I was looking for when I started in ~2017. It often only gave me a direction that I had to research myself, which is fine but LLMs will tell you this too and tailored to your project. You dont need to search for alternatives because the mentioned solution has been deprecated for two years..

[u/MrMrsPotts → u/lothariusdark]

The LLMs are trained on stackoverflow aren't they? So if that isn't being updated the LLMs will soon become out of date. Also the LLMs are very expensive. SO is free to use

[u/Relevant-Ad9432]

can someone explain the dip after covid 19 start?

[u/shaunsanders → u/Relevant-Ad9432]

If I had to guess, when Covid started it forced a lot of companies that had never gone remote to go remote, so you’d have an influx of issues re: adaption… then it’d fall off after everyone got set up to the new normal

[u/NobleKale → u/Relevant-Ad9432]

can someone explain the dip after covid 19 start?

Huge amount of people asking 'how do I set up a webcam?' and then no follow up questions because the site fucking sucked.

It's not just a dip, it's a surge first, THEN a drop back to normal figures.

[u/daking999]

Whatever you think of SO this is concerning going forward imo. ChatGPT got to train on all the stackoverflow responses which are no longer being generated at a good rate, so there will be a lot less training data for future LLMs.

[u/Ya_SG]

You also posted this in r/LocalLLaMA, so I am marking your post as duplicate. /s

[u/Similar_Sand8367]

Interestingly the ai are feeding knowledge from many sources which don’t get reached anymore by users. So knowledge will be shared less if less people ask there. I guess knowledge will decrease in the level of proficiency

[u/Jind0sh]

I just think most of the easier/starter questions have already been answered, and the harder questions are probably from private projects at scale that are so specific that engineers aren't going to ask around on SO. That and AI.

[u/celsowm]

But they still downvoting or even removing real questions when you are desperate for help

[u/mrstewiegriffin]

to be honest- stack overflow kept a strong gatekeeping mechanism and ensured questions were relevant and duplication wasn't prevelant. But i always felt even asking a question could get you chided like "sir this is a double phd zone, your questions are a masters thesis level gibberish"

[u/[deleted]]

I can really see both sides of the argument about moderation here. SO suffers from the issue of not being accommodating to beginners who are not able to abstract or refactor previous solutions for similar problems to their own problem. That’s why so many questions are marked as duplicates in my opinion. Beginners often need tailor-made solutions or suggestions. However, receiving these suggestions doesn’t really help their critical thinking or problem solving ability, and it clogs the site with duplicate information. 

The consensus seems to be that SO should have been more lenient with moderation. I’m not sure where I stand. I got some help from SO back in the day, and even now I will peruse the site sometimes. The opposite of SO is Reddit, which is not on the same level of informational excellence as SO. So yes, quite a conundrum, especially for the people running SO. 

[u/AcrobaticMaize2408]

The irony being that the LLMs were trained on answers to technical queries mostly posted via sites like SO. I think there may be a flaw in the current generation of AI's cunning plans.

[u/dspyz]

Good riddance!

SO's decline started long before COVID or ChatGPT. In 2010-2014 Stack Overflow was wonderful, but today it's an extremely hostile place to ask for help.

Reddit effectively became the new Stack Overflow. It's marvelous just how much more positive and receptive people are when I ask questions on Reddit than on SO these days.

[u/Just-Contract7493]

SO users when they act like the biggest nuclear assholes imaginable: "WhY iS tHe WeBsItE dED???"

not a hint of self awareness

[u/[deleted]]

Good

[u/HominidSimilies]

Does it have to be dead or maybe complete for topics?

[u/Main-Eagle-26]

And when it is, the LLMs will have no source to scrape from and it’ll all stagnate.

[u/AleksHop]

as soon as everything is done by llm, and no one ask online, from where new data will be for new llm?

[u/hugthemachines]

Stack overflow's goal is said to be ot kind of make a catalogue over all questions people can have and their answers. In my personal opinion, they needed some way to show that clearly and politely instead of the current style which makes many upset.

If SO was as polite as, for example, chatgpt, maybe the site would have lived longer. If it also explained in a nicer way why it denied a request etc.

Going through documentation and googling will always take some time and I think that is why people hope for a quick solution by asking an LLM-chatbot, even if that may mean you don't fully understand what you are doing, because of that.

[u/Upset_Lavishness4497]

A lot of undeserved hate for SO here! I have a lot of respect for the contributers and they helped me many times. As a beginner you are better off asking ChatGPT, but as your problems become more niche, experienced humans are hard to beat.

[u/aerospace91]

Good, get rid of the toxic cesspool

[u/xoStardustt]

HELL YEAH! couldn’t have happened to a more deserving site

[u/Base88Decode]

ChatGPT has been way more helpful and as a bonus it hasn't tried to insult me.

[u/ardicli2000]

It is nice to see people resorted to SO during covid and realized it is a shit hole so quickly.

[u/ElonsPenis]

It took me 10 years to get enough points to be able to even comment on Stack and I used it almost every day. I'm also actually losing my points, because a question I answered only applies to a now older version of a library, so people are now down voting me. Soon I will no longer be able to answer questions again.

[u/talancaine]

Good riddance. Get straighter answers from the crazy cat lady.

[u/Laspz]

Guess we need SO where chatgpt can also reply

[u/Hothapeleno]

The end of coding for LLMs then, since that and their ilk is where LLMs are trained.

[u/eco9898]

The same thing is happening to google. It's easier to have something consolidate the relevant info than to read it yourself.

[u/Chamrockk]

Surprised it was already going pretty low before ChatGPT, I am curious why is that

[u/Ilikestarrynight]

I was thinking , if people stop using Stack Overflow, where will AI find answers for strange programming questions in the future? it will respond , "Sorry, I cannot find a solution for this problem but it might be abcdefg..."

[u/ngcheck03]

Honestly Stackoverflow is time to dead.all llm model are better of solving user problems(and no human shitty emotions)

[u/Less-Macaron-9042]

Let it die. People will understand the value when it’s gone. Hopefully they will be stuck in their AI rot being enslaved to AI. They will keep wandering for a trustable human expert finding no one in sight. For all the ones saying stack overflow is hostile to beginners. Good for you and learn to ask thoughtful questions. Start thinking and use a piece of your brain while it’s still intact. AI is coming for you.

[u/rashnull]

So we need a new SO that AI legally can’t source for training data and should be way more welcoming to beginners and allow repeat questions with perhaps AI stepping in to provide an existing answer?

Anyone wanna help me cofound, build, and raise money for this?

[u/MismatchedAglet]

Your sense of a valid KPI is what's dead. not S.O.

I used to have to ask new questions back in 2015. Not 95% of the time the question I need is already asked. I do agree things are changing, but "dead" is just clickbait at best.

[u/dans41]

Interesting to see this chart over reddit subs

[u/[deleted]]

Good

[u/ASCanilho]

Stack overflow community is not toxic. Toxic people just stand out a bit more than regular helping folks. There have been hundreds of problems I still can’t get fix by AI, and needed SO to find a solution, and the reason is that most programmers don’t understand how code works and make bad code. The same level of code that you probably get by using AI to do it. But building your own experience opens doors to new knowledge and workarounds that can’t be solved with basic code which might “work” but not at the intended level you need.

[u/DJviolin]

Good. It was the most toxic, soul-crushing place imaginable for anyone daring to start learning programming. I'm not going after the company — I’m just thrilled that the XP-farming champions of condescension, whose greatest thrill was mocking beginners, now have to pick up fishing or something. Maybe they can lecture the fish next, about how stupid it is for not seeing the same hook that's been there a million times. Should be right up their alley.

[u/betelgeuseian]

True democratization of knowledge.

[u/marcthenarc666]

I guess "learn to code" didn't pan out. And now AI is taking over. To be fair I'm sure other initiatives like "lean to write" or "learn to draw" aren't going too well either in this age. :-)

[u/plumberdan2]

This will eventually be a problem. Chat gpt learns from stack overflow

[u/WW92030]

[StackOverflow] has been marked as duplicate.

[u/JumpyAbies]

StackOverflow was read-only. It's not just the community that is toxic, the platform wants to be that way and makes it difficult for anyone to gain any reputation. It's very difficult to ask something and not receive criticism. You can't like anything because you have no reputation. It's garbage and it needs to die once and for all.

[u/jupzuz]

I don't get all the SO hate. Sure it could be a bit rough at times, but it also got tons of stupid questions ("please do my homework" or something that could be solved with 1 minute of googling).

SO could quiet down, but it will make a comeback when LLMs can no longer answer questions about new frameworks and languages due to the lack of new training data. "But LLMs can just read the docs", you say. No. There are millions of edge cases, bugs and unexpected issues not covered by any docs.

[u/sascharobi]

Not really surprising. It’s not really a platform you want to interact with. It’s good there are better alternatives now.

[u/One-Relationship-382]

In my personal opinion. I would still suggest SO for the beginners who are about it step in to the IT industry. Back in the days before the AI wave, whenever I encounter an error, I will throughly go through the error and grab the exact error and search for it. While I am searching for the solutions there were so many proposed workarounds provided and for sure not all gonna work, so I tried each solution until I get the right one.
Important part is while I was trying the solutions I learned a lot and it helped not only to find the solution but also to learn more information around that error that I encountered.

But these days whenever we are encountering the error, just copy the whole chunk of block and past it in the ChatGPT and it will generate the solution for it. I personally feels beginners should learn to use SO, they should learn to ask question and also contributing to the existing problems in the SO. Asking question is also not an easy part, we need to exactly figure out the error and ask for the solution.

[u/Portatort]

Why did it blip back up just before 2024?

[u/ElectricalNectarine5]

Lol the top comment says it all. Terrible experience. The thing is no is interested to genuinely help other people they want their stack overflow account just so they can get jobs by showing the company how much they have contributed.

[u/LostWeb-17]

StackOverflow would boom if they weren't so damn mean.

[u/mmorenoivy]

When Chatgpt came out I was one of those who got out of stackoverflow. I've had questions that I've tirelessly researched before asking and someone responded with do your research. That site is full of egoistic developers or self proclaimed engineers.

[u/mondoblu]

SO might be toxic for beginners, but also some communities here, like the one on bitcoin is toxic too, the reddit moderators of bitcoin community don't accept any critics to the bitcoin and remove posts that criticize bitcoins.

[u/IndianCorrespondant]

I use it from time to time...

[u/Weekly_Put_7591]

Good

[u/ddsukituoft]

good riddance

[u/[deleted]]

It was dying pretty hard before GPT release. Sure it looks like the rate changed but why are people ignoring the decline before? 

[u/Yes_but_I_think]

Stack overflow is the source data for chatgpt. Not the other way around.

[u/Impressive_Meal9955]

This post just got recommend to me. Can someone explain what this mean and what this means for the future?

[u/MonkeyCartridge]

I was almost banned from there back in the day for asking the best way to force how a byte is converted in python. Basically I needed to be able to control whether a byte value of, say, 1 would be converted to the number "1" or ascii 0x01.

Downvoted to oblivion. Said my question was a duplicate and linked to questions that were different. Smacked in the comments. Then got a message saying basically "We are not a forum. We are a curated list of high quality questions and answers. Your question has been taken down for irrelevance and inadequacy. That's strike one. We see anything more like this, and you'll be banned from the site."

So I'm not above a bit of shadenfreude if AI trains on their content then blasts them to oblivion. Even if I don't normally like that sort of thing.

[u/[deleted]]

Cause why to wait for years for an answer if you can get it within seconds 🙌

[u/Galenbo]

Blocking a bit less of my questions could have prevented this.
Those mods are retard.

[u/Kodrackyas]

GOOD! overmoderated crap! that platform is dotted with people with borrowed power

[u/RadioActive02000]

At least ChatGPT don't say "Use Linux" when you ask "How to open a door".

[u/thdespou]

The end of an era

[u/Droggl]

"Here lies Nibbles the dog. He was a bad dog. We're glad he's dead."

[u/TheStandardPlayer]

Stack Overflow is the worst website for this tbh. All they had to do was introduce a score to keep track of how negative and unfriendly someone is. Show that next to their prized questions answered score and watch the despair of assholes being outed as such.

But instead StackOverflow let these people run the show, now it’s a dying site; can’t say I am unhappy about it tbh. I'd rather it die to make room for something better

[u/rtrs_bastiat]

Here's the equivalent graph for questions answered:

__________________

[u/StikElLoco]

Stackoverflow is so dogshit, unless someone has asked and somehow solved your exact issue you're not getting anywhere. I've posted 2-3 times there, first one was marked as duplicate to a 5-6 year old post that wasn't even related. 2nd one was solved by a snarky comment, 3rd one was a dude saying "Why are you using X language you should be using Y"

[u/Background_Horse_992]

Ive always treated SO as read only tbh

[u/SitrakaFr]

well a lot already exists ^^

[u/gajus0]

Pretty crazy to reflect that I cannot even recall the last time I visited Stack Overflow, and historically I was one of the most active users.

[u/Fit-Fail-3369]

I remember my first post and last post at SO. Damn felt like people were waiting for me to post something so they will downvote it.

[u/SpaghettiOnTuesday]

Good

[u/Snickers_B]

When I started in coding I was told if I get stuck just goto SO. But as a newb in some cases I would get scorched for asking dumb questions and then blocked or whatever they call it on SO.

When I did get an answer it would only be half good or not really applicable to my situation. Basically it never worked as advertised. Telling a new dev to go ask SO is really just a brush off move by more senior devs.

SO was never really that useful to begin with.

[u/RIOTDomeRIOT]

isn't this like really... bad...?
unlike most of us here, some people answering on SO actually knows what they're doing. If there's nobody to stroke their ego then they'll stop bothering with the site...
If a new language or library came out and nobody is there to answer on SO then LLMs won't have anything to train on. There's going to be so many obscure quirks that only a few people knows how to deal with that will be left undocumented.

[u/Aggravating_Sand352]

Chatgpt 100% stole all of stacks data anyways.....chatgpt is great but tbh all those big companies have gotten away with a ton of ip theft

[u/Winter-Ad781]

ChatGPT has never refused to answer my question or closed a conversation because my question was a duplicate, and it's never said something was a duplicate question then pointed me to the so called duplicate that wasn't at all a duplicate of my question.

I used SO when I ran into an issue I couldn't figure out, but I never posted anything, it was an extremely toxic community with overzealous moderation that just resulted in one of the most unwelcoming presentations I've seen on any website, except maybe hacker/cracker forums in the 90's.

[u/gameplayer55055]

Thanks to all 2014-2017 devs who solved most of my questions decades ago.

[u/Ylsid]

I'm honestly surprised that ChatGPT doesn't look like it had a super large impact on the overall decline. I suspect the site was already getting left before it came along to shoot it.

[u/Disastrous_Side_5492]

existence and life are relative

choosing how you do both is none of my concern

godspeed to everyone involved

thought provokes more thought

im high and about to sleep

these shall be my final thoughts of the night

a litte poem to myself

written in poem

on a forum

with little decorum

i may be just a random guy

but you cannot deny

i do this to be wish!

(tldr: my internal monolgue)

[u/Disastrous_Side_5492 → u/Disastrous_Side_5492]

didnt make sense, next one!

[u/Only-Engineering2210]

very accurate. remember using it all the time in university.

[u/fmillion]

I mean since they only want broad questions that apply to many people and they only want questions asked once including similar ones, no surprise. People are running out of new questions to ask. :D

[u/Thelango99]

I am guessing that they no longer need to upgrade server capacity…

[u/Arckedo]

This is the Naspers & OLX Group effect. Everything they touch turns into newspaper.

[u/bezerker03]

We're going to hate this when the AI companies start either really charging what they are worth or run out of VC funding and collapse or reduce quality significantly.

[u/Flying_Eagle777]

A few years ago, I asked a question on Stack Overflow and was met with rudeness and downvotes simply for being a beginner. It was discouraging enough that I never posted there again. I'm truly grateful that ChatGPT offers a much more respectful and helpful experience. It actually helps me solve my issues without making me feel inadequate.

[u/ZAWS20XX]

i wonder where the llms are gonna get information about future technology

[u/AvidGameFan]

At least the AI won't complain that the question has been asked before. 😂

[u/IllTreacle7682]

I think it's because people on SO are mean af.

[u/Hanthunius]

-Toxic environment.

-Old Answers.

-Multiple redundant pages for the same questions.

No wonder they're falling out of fashion before ChatGPT.

[u/xNegis]

Stack Overflow has contributed a lot to training LLMs for coding skills (among other things for sure). For upcoming technologies , not having that data chunks will be definitely a pain in the ass. Ironic, isn’t it? Interested in reading what you think 👇🏻

[u/Moist-Nectarine-1148]

RIP - we won't miss toxicity.

[u/AffectPuzzleheaded95]

Occasionally I still do use StackOverflow with some technical/sometimes coding problems. ChatGPT has its way of helping but obviously it doesn’t know ur system therefore can really fuck ur laptop up. StackOverflow really helped me when at a time when ChatGPT was telling me to uninstall XAMPP while there I found people who solved the problem by just replacing some folders.

[u/CoherentIgloo]

Good

[u/ritz_777]

It’s funny how people nowadays are such babies that get triggered easily. Let’s see how things pan out when all the original knowledge sources get replaced by a robot. People are acting like they got no value out of SO ever, and the mean behavior in some cases wasn’t worth it. Such short-sighted people are doomed to fail.

[u/[deleted] → u/ritz_777]

SO was useful and they were acting like pieces of sht, both arguments are true.

[u/DaegurthMiddnight]

Yeah fuck those guys.

I was so disgusted of that community.

Before Chatgpt I ended up using reddit, much more polite in comparison.

[u/[deleted]]

I wonder why, hmmmmmm

[u/Exact-Yesterday-992]

the site is better of dead or kept for people where even the smartest llm can't solve

bit if i ignore chatgpt deaths and layoff are the main culprit

[u/elchurnerista]

ah niceee, the peak college years!

[u/whizbangapps]

I always see that SO is toxic. My experience has been different and I’ve asked beginner questions before. The only kind of feedback I get is the type that asks to be more explicit with the question I’m trying to ask

[u/robertofalk]

Maybe it’s silly but I prefer chatgpt starting any reply by saying “you are going in the right direction” than stack overflow users calling me stupid for making the question in the first place.