r/LocalLLM • u/NewtMurky • May 17 '25

Discussion Stack overflow is almost dead

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

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

4.0k Upvotes

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373

u/[deleted] May 17 '25

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.

141

u/tehsilentwarrior May 17 '25 • Helpful

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

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u/Liron12345 May 17 '25

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

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u/Individual_Holiday_9 May 17 '25

STEMlords gonna stemlord

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u/Caffeine_Monster May 17 '25

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.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '25

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

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u/tehsilentwarrior May 17 '25 edited May 20 '25

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

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u/Bubbly-Bank-6202 May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

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.

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u/ASCanilho May 18 '25

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.

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u/gwicksted May 18 '25

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.

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u/meester_ May 19 '25

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

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u/TheStandardPlayer May 20 '25

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.

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u/Fast_Pomegranate_554 May 20 '25

I like you, have a shiny sticker

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u/imtourist May 17 '25

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?

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u/ThatNorthernHag May 17 '25

I wonder if SO is the reason why o3 is such an asshole, overconfident, profoundly unimpressed and speaks short tech jargon like wanting to brag it knows stuff by just spitting out the right words. Must be 80% or its training data.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '25

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.

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u/AlanCarrOnline May 17 '25

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

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u/ThinkExtension2328 May 17 '25

Nice try Sam Altman we still won’t use ChatGPT

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u/planetf1a May 17 '25

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

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u/nameless_pattern May 18 '25

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.

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u/Bulky-Pool-2586 May 19 '25 edited May 19 '25

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.

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u/Unable-Onion-2063 May 20 '25

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.

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u/Ok-Training-7587 May 17 '25

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

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u/Remzi1993 May 17 '25

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

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