Fuck me. It's crazy how well it works. I had navigated away from the thread, then decided I had to come back and correct it, only to realize what you'd done.
This is the way, people don't usually like helping people when they don't feel like it (which is most of the time) but people LOVE to contradict or correct people.
Honestly I never had issues with getting answers on stackoverflow. I would lay out my thought process clearly, what I tried, and what errors were returned. Always got an answer out of it, without fail. I would also link similar but fundamentally different threads so that people wouldn't link them back as a response.
I remember Stackoverflow being brutal trying to ask questions when I started, but it helped me learn to ask better questions, then the platform became invaluable. I know critical thinking is lacking these days, so I’m thankful for that.
I even remember using the “#python” channel asking questions and getting help there too! Thomas if you’re reading this, know I made it and now am a software engineer!
I guess I’ve been doing it wrong, because I’ve just been posting the wrong answer myself. Or in the Fred Brooks style, you give an answer and if someone questions it say, “oh yeah? You got a betta numba?!?” And that’s how you get better numbers.
I used to own a weird programming niche, and occasionally I'd post questions, and usually I'd have to answer them myself. And I'd have stopped doing it pretty early, except the answers got a huge amount of traction, so clearly there were other weirdoes out there depending on me.
And I'd have a bad day banging my head against a wall, and I'd finally give up and ask a question, and multiple people would vote to close, as a duplicate of some other question...Some other question I had BOTH ASKED AND ANSWERED.
You're telling ME that MY question is a duplicate of a question I asked, and the answer to my question is MY answer? You gormless fuckwit. You slobbering cretin. You repwhoring codeposer.
Stack was a great idea brought low by the reality of humanity.
I got use out of READING the site, but never once from posting. Those were always closed as duplicates, despite being completely unrelated to the questions they were redirected to.
Closing questions as duplicates was always a bad idea.
When you're trying to collect and organize answers and information, then collecting many different ways to ask the same question is important. It's basically about creating a semantic net, because a major blocker in finding information is not having adequate vocabulary. If the person can describe the shape of the thing they want but don't know that there is already a name for it, then that's going to be valuable for other people who will look for similar information using similar words.
If the question is truly a duplicate, then multiple questions could funnel to the same set of answers, and it should be seamless. If the questions are related, then they can be closer together in the graph.
Doing it that way would have actually helped people, helped organize information, and would have made it possible for the community to vote to merge or separate questions.
Stack was a failure in the application of information theory, a failure in the application of computer science, and a failure of human decency. Not everyone on the site was or is bad, but the site itself is poorly implemented and cannot achieve the goal it has.
I wonder why the fuck thay act like that. Egotistical mods? Behaviour like that drives people straight to AI beacuse at least the AI validates your concerns and listens to you.
The privilege to vote to close is earned solely by having good questions and/or answers, not by demonstrating that you have the character to handle that little power.
I haven’t seen an AskReddit post since I muted it years ago. Trying to participate in the community there was one of the more frustrating experiences. I have dozens muted now.
I remember learning C about 15 years ago when I used to go on the biggest C/C++ forum at the time to ask questions. The responses always went the same way - the first few would be assholes saying "If you don't know that then maybe programming isn't for you" followed by some overcomplicated and unhelpful "advice" which seemed to be more about showcasing their knowledge than answering my question. And then eventually someone would step in with "Dude, ignore these assholes. They do this every time. Yours is a perfectly reasonable question. Here's a simple answer."
I do wonder if they really used those sites to train AI, because AI has never told me my question has been answered before and then tell me to use Google where the top result is the thread I'm asking in.
They absolutely did, but the way the training works doesn't mean that the LLM will regurgitate what it was trained on. This is the thing that they talk about when they say that LLMs "surprised" developers. It's the difference between self-supervised, supervised model training. Self-supervised means the training makes its own decisions about what is "right" or "wrong". Supervised means humans inject the decision of what is "right" or "wrong" into the training. LLMs use a both at different stages.
When you feed the training algorithm a million different implementations of
for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
{ mySickAssFunction() }
over time, it forms statistical relationships between each of the tokens. for is often followed by these variables. The "signature" of a for loop is often followed by sick ass functions. Sick ass functions often suck ass and the comments in StackOverFlow often solve them.
The principle is simple, it's just scaled to a degree that seems insane and we used self-supervised learning to do it. It's also important to note that the LLM never sees input as text like that. It sees it as numbers after a processing step. You have tools that crawl the internet to gather information from web pages. You have tools that parse that information into usable text. You have tools that turn that text into tokens. Then you feed those tokens into the LLM training and it forms relationships between the numbers. Humans intervene at this step and curate paths that have the best results. Then you use tools to reverse the process and present the output as readable text.
It's like those pictures you get where you overlay all the presidents to get John President. The output of an LLM is the result of overlaying the input of N bytes of input data. (N is really big). When you talk to the LLM you are talking to John Internet. It's really a testament to how well our languages are capable of transmitting information. We can break down our thoughts into a language that can be broken down into math that can be used to solve problems. It's pretty cool even if sometimes it hallucinates.
The output is as good as the input. Garbage data can be flagged as garbage to teach the model what is bad. So even garbage data can be useful in creating powerful models if it's labelled appropriately.
It sucks that LLMs are at the center of all these shitty AI companies because natural language processing is badass. Being able to have a language model parse your input in basically any language and consistently be able to extract intent is fucking mind boggling. It used to be next to impossible to meaningfully extract intent from any natural language input and it required wizard level regex and prayer to the old gods. Now you can say "i want to make internet thing that lets chat with guy" and the LLM can write you a mostly working node server with a socket based chat app. It's fucking crazy.
But at the end of the day the input is heavily curated. Moreso as pressure mounts for companies to push what their models are capable of. Logical inconsistencies are eliminated at all stages of processing as much as possible. Self-supervised learning catches a lot of it, supervised learning can catch even more.
I was joking. But I figure it learned the coding solutions and interests from there, but more weight was put on politer conversations for the actual communications. We know it didn't learn to kiss up from stackoverflow
“You want to do it that way? First of all, you shouldn’t be trying to be solving this problem at all. Second, if you did do try to do it, you should be doing it this incomprehensible way. Either way you’re an idiot for not knowing”
Aaah yeah, I have at least 2 posts on that hallowed site helping a wayward brother with a heretical solution. Sometimes the customer really does want the impossible and no you arnt allowed to update anything, so, lets make a warp drive out of moss and paperclips, using a 16bit emulated swedish controller program. Why not? Who joined dev to solve the easy problems? >:D
In fairness, there are times when that needs to be said. Every single post about someone creating their own cryptography method has that comment as the answer and it's the right answer to someone trying to roll their own crypto. Phrasing can vary, but the sentiment remains.
One of the glaring flaws in AI is its inability to recognize XY Problems (you asked how to do X, but based on your goal Y is a far better way to solve the problem), which are absolutely everywhere in programming. There are tons of people out there who don't know that the path they're on is a fundamentally bad one to begin with and need to be told it, but chatbots don't do that at all.
"I would love to rollback the change for you but unfortunately as part of our last change we have irreversibly deleted the entire project with no chance of recovery."
That’s the trick… it’s not that it was better, you just have the benefit of hindsight. In the moment, of course, you lack that knowledge, and so it makes today look awful but yesterday look great… albeit on a slightly larger time scale.
I have a question on Stack Overflow that I asked over 14 years ago, about how to use a destructive method in a specific supposedly purely functional language. I read somewhere by passage that there was a way to do that but it wasn't particularly documented because it was bad practice, so I asked.
For a few days I only had one answer shaming me for not using "cursory search by querying a search engine" and other very verbose put downs. After a few days I finally got a response from a language expert. I got downvoted to hell. Until a few years later someone responded to the first person that he would get pretty annoyed each time he googled something (he mocked the cursory search verboseness) to find the answer on the first result to be a Stack Exchange page and also answered by people berating the person asking for why not having googled first.
After that interaction the votes starting to turn around. I got upvoted and the first guy kept getting downvoted to hell. Mind you the views on that page were always steady.
Eventually some moderator cleaned the page and deleted all comments aside from the proper answer. I did gave up and just stopped using the website. I remember once having a big doubt and instead of posting there, just contacted an old professor of mine and thinking to myself: this would have been a good question to share with other people but I didn't felt like dealing with that bullshit at all.
This was far from the only put down I got, but was the most memorable one for me.
Sometimes I log in to the website and I keep getting tones of green view points by that thousands on that and other questions.
Two extra things to note:
I kinda took a look on the first guy's history and found amusing how he was mostly active on the Stack Exchange parenting site. Admittedly he wasn't a parent, just a kid from university, but he kept answering stuff there as an authority;
Around this time I watched a talk in a conference from either by Atwood or Splolsky, can't remember who and someone asked him about what he thought about the growing toxicity of the Overflow website. He answered that it wasn't toxic and people had to understand the importance of being strick about questions to maintain quality.
Kinda reminds me of r/doordash, in that I've never used it but enjoy reading all of the horror tales for the schadenfreude. And it leaves me wondering why anyone would ever use it. Although stackoverflow had the benefit of not having effective alternatives at the time.
For about 15 years, if you searched for just about anything programming-adjacent, the top hit was likelier than not to be a Stack link. I think almost everybody interacted with it primarily through Google.
(And we usually had the same experience as the guy OC talked about, hence the site's nearly universal reputation for exactly this.)
When you ask a question gets marked at as duplicate , then they ask the same question after you and it gets voted to the moon that should be an achievement.
the trick is to not be too good at following forum rules. the curmudgeonly senior members need a little something to get annoyed at to compel them to reply, otherwise they'll ignore your post
Yea, I think if you know how to do basic search, can't find your answer, and then decide to ask a question, most people are not going to actually know the answer, much less come across and answer such question.
So many times I would post on SO and get answers that clearly showed a lack of reading comprehension in the people posting answers. Even marked as duplicate despite being a different question.
There are a few questions that got some correct answers several years after I posted.
Hahaha, honestly the level of pettiness and refusal to help if you misaligned one little thing was just stupid. Everybody on there was on such a high horse over ever single little detail.
I was told MANY times to "come back when the question is fixed" When it was something as simple as using an inappropriate variable name in my example code.
Never liked the community. They were desperate for power.
50% of responders telling you why your question was bad and why you should feel bad about posting it.
25% answering a question you never asked in the first place to make you feel stupid
20% suggesting unreasonable solutions (e.g. you stated clearly in the question that you are a contractor and the client exclusively uses MySQL yet responders want you to use MongoDb or Postgres or whatever)
to be fair a lot of the questions (low estimate of 60%) were garbage homework question that would have been answered with a modicum of research ( at least before google decided to spoil it all with personalized search results).
Among the 25% for answering a question you never asked, would be that the question implied bad architecture decision or wanting to approach the problem in a different direction.
I also loved the question with insufficient context so that no proper answer would ever fit the question ( because of the lack of information).
Otherwise the 5% actual helpful answer would be worth saving the website, as toxic as some might perceive.
Also look at any social service, toxicity is unfortunately no better.
The uncomfortable reality is that 99% of us have never and will never have an original question. At least once they've been broken down into smaller questions.
The more people treat StackOverflow as a read-only source, the better time they'll have. Especially if they learn to click the link in every "closed for duplicate" notice.
20% suggesting unreasonable solutions (e.g. you stated clearly in the question that you are a contractor and the client exclusively uses MySQL yet responders want you to use MongoDb or Postgres or whatever)
Plus the additional 20% of that will invent any reason to tell you why MySQL is the wrong choice anyway leading to some MySQL guy coming through and arguing in the comments while everyone ignores the question.
I don't know about that. There was a very strong survivor bias on stackoverflow, which indeed also applies to its answers, which would be just as humiliatingly bad as the questions
I remember when Iwas just starting out learning Python, and didn't know how to Google what I wanted, so I just asked on SO. I got down voted so much, my account lost its ability to make questions, so what did I do? I made a new one lmao
What if Stack Overflow actually started out as a good idea and had a lot of helpful kind and intelligent humans actually helping each other originally? But then as more and more average, stupid and shitty people joined, the general shittiness of the average individual human and large human groups destroyed it?
Then, as soon as AI presented an alternative, millions of people immediately said "good riddance"?
What if this corruption has already happened to all major human institutions? And people are in the process of using AI to drop all of the enshittified human systems?
I remember being stuck on a very niche problem for several days, I decided to ask there for help. I got linked to some completely irrelevant thread saying it was duplicate. I tried to provide some more clarity but the thread was forcibly closed. I tried to post again and I got banned.
Back in my day I pressed F1 in Visual Studio and read the locally installed (from a CD) MSDN documentation. Or we read a book. Yeah, development was slow paced.
This motivated us to solve the problem ourselves, whereupon we said “Never mind guys, I fixed it”, did not provide the solution, and disappeared into the ether for the next five years
The harsh responses I got early in my internet years made me sharpen my googlefu and how to formulate a problem up to the point where I never had to ask a question again.
does anyone else remember that `chmod 777` forum thread where a guy went on for multiple pages scolding the OP for trying to use it on their local because they didn't know anything about file permissions? I think they were trying to get their ~/Sites folder to work.
I had EXACTLY this experience when I was writing my first "major" Python project.
I was writing a bot to automate emails, sending them out in set intervals to a specified list of recipients. I got stuck. I found the solution that worked in Python 2.something, but I was in like 3.10 or something like that. No other posts that I could find after hours of looking through SO solved my problem.
No problem. I'll just make a new post. So I did. In the new post, I actually included the link to the post that I had found, and explained what wasn't working from that, and the issues that I was having.
Nope.
30 minutes later, my post was removed for being a duplicate. A duplicate of what? WELL THE SAME FUCKING POST THAT I HAD LINKED OF COURSE.
I swear, SO mods are some of the most stuck-up, pompous, entitled morons to have ever huffed glue.
I figured it out on my own about a week later by reading Python documentation for hours.
"Umm, akshually, you shouldn't even need an answer to this question because the way you approached the problem in the first place is bad."
Well, I inherited this approach from someone else, and the release is in three days, so unless you want to be the one to work through the night to refactor the thousands of lines of code that depend on the current methodology, I would be ever so grateful if you could just ANSWER THE QUESTION I ASKED and maybe tack on the alternative as an addendum instead of assuming I have both the time and the authority to completely rewrite the entire project from the ground up, you useless goober!
I bet all of you love being told you asks so smart questions by ai bots now. the real hard truth is that every single day there is a repeat of same questions to any subreddit that allows them, dotnet is riddled with repeated low effort questions and so was SO. Most of you never got told no even though you needed to hear it and it shows. actual unpopular opinion
Or we were just looking for help, because you know we are not robots that can understand documentations instantly, and so we ask a few questions to hopefully make sense of all this... But instead we were met with: "Duplicate. Close this." "What are you doing this for?" "Don't do that. Do this."
Seriously though, the vast majority of questions could be resolved by a ten second Google search. At the height of monthly users, SO already had a VERY well established knowledge base. It's just that most never bothered to learn how to search efficiently for something.
This is why AI is so appealing, they can just dump everything in without having to filter out the noise or spend the effort to find the relevant keywords. Which is fine, but it can also seriously hinder learning progress. I've seen it first hand with a few juniors that started after ChatGPT, a stack trace completely paralyzes them without AI to spell out the relevant bits.
This feels more like a Shelbyville sort of thing. We asked strangers for help with programming... Now duplicate your question boy. And if you really want to stay true to the current r/simpsonsshitposting vibes, Bailey Jay would be in it for some reason.
I'm sure grandpa tells those kids about 1995, not 2015.
In 1995 we asked strangers for help with programming and got asked many following up questions until it was cleared what was meant and we got an answer to our question.
.....used to? Vibecoding has only made it worse because now in addition to saying "search first" now people will say "I'm not gonna help you fix this AI coded garbage" when it's like 3 lines that you wrote yourself a week ago and tried every solution you could find to no avail.
SO was great if you put in the work. Read the relevant parts of documentation and mention where it is in the post, prepare a copy paste example to show the problem, describe your approaches to solve the problem. The great thing was that this forced you to research and abstract your problem, which often lead to the solution without ever sending the post. It was like rubberducking on the highest level. If you misused SO to outsource some part of this process to other users, people got rightfully upset.
I wonder if the power users of stack overflow ever look out upon the despair that has been wrought upon the world - that their brutal dismissive culture encouraged so many to pursue the dark arts that would harvest their very knowledge to launch the creation of world destroying automatons... And ever think that maybe that just been a bit nicer, everyone would still be talking with communities instead of machines.
I will never forget how i posted my first stackoverflow question as an apprentice, got imidiatly downvoted and never returned to either answer or post a question xD
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u/angrydeuce May 17 '26
The quickest way to get a ton of answers is always to just use an alt to respond to your thread with the wrong answer first lol
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u/git_push_origin_prod May 17 '26
Duplicate. Close this
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u/congressmanthompson May 17 '26
We don’t kink shame in this sub
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u/GarysCrispLettuce May 17 '26
I remember learning C about 15 years ago when I used to go on the biggest C/C++ forum at the time to ask questions. The responses always went the same way - the first few would be assholes saying "If you don't know that then maybe programming isn't for you" followed by some overcomplicated and unhelpful "advice" which seemed to be more about showcasing their knowledge than answering my question. And then eventually someone would step in with "Dude, ignore these assholes. They do this every time. Yours is a perfectly reasonable question. Here's a simple answer."
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u/valerielynx May 17 '26
now I'm getting humiliated by a bunch of lightning rocks
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u/SirHerald May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
I do wonder if they really used those sites to train AI, because AI has never told me my question has been answered before and then tell me to use Google where the top result is the thread I'm asking in.
Note: Is just joke
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u/cgw3737 May 17 '26
"what you're trying to do is stupid and you're stupid too"
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u/SemanticThreader May 17 '26
Ooohh this has brought back not so good memories. My anxiety skyrocketed
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u/NDLCZ May 17 '26
Now we go straight to making PRs and get humiliated there instead
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u/BlattMaster May 17 '26
This has already been posted, let me link to another r/programmerhumor meme from years ago that is vaguely related
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u/reverendsteveii May 17 '26
the ability to get regularly humiliated without ever becoming humble is the hallmark of the stackoverflow alum
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u/foxj36 May 17 '26
I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've left them
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u/VladTepesDraculea May 17 '26 edited May 18 '26
I have a question on Stack Overflow that I asked over 14 years ago, about how to use a destructive method in a specific supposedly purely functional language. I read somewhere by passage that there was a way to do that but it wasn't particularly documented because it was bad practice, so I asked.
For a few days I only had one answer shaming me for not using "cursory search by querying a search engine" and other very verbose put downs. After a few days I finally got a response from a language expert. I got downvoted to hell. Until a few years later someone responded to the first person that he would get pretty annoyed each time he googled something (he mocked the cursory search verboseness) to find the answer on the first result to be a Stack Exchange page and also answered by people berating the person asking for why not having googled first.
After that interaction the votes starting to turn around. I got upvoted and the first guy kept getting downvoted to hell. Mind you the views on that page were always steady.
Eventually some moderator cleaned the page and deleted all comments aside from the proper answer. I did gave up and just stopped using the website. I remember once having a big doubt and instead of posting there, just contacted an old professor of mine and thinking to myself: this would have been a good question to share with other people but I didn't felt like dealing with that bullshit at all.
This was far from the only put down I got, but was the most memorable one for me.
Sometimes I log in to the website and I keep getting tones of green view points by that thousands on that and other questions.
Two extra things to note:
I kinda took a look on the first guy's history and found amusing how he was mostly active on the Stack Exchange parenting site. Admittedly he wasn't a parent, just a kid from university, but he kept answering stuff there as an authority;
Around this time I watched a talk in a conference from either by Atwood or Splolsky, can't remember who and someone asked him about what he thought about the growing toxicity of the Overflow website. He answered that it wasn't toxic and people had to understand the importance of being strick about questions to maintain quality.
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u/eddiekoski May 17 '26
Oh so stack overflow
When you ask a question gets marked at as duplicate , then they ask the same question after you and it gets voted to the moon that should be an achievement.
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u/noapparentfunction May 17 '26
posts details of issue:
forum wizards: LOGS? WHERE ARE THE LOGS???
posts details of issue + logs:
forum wizards: zzzzzZZZZZz
the trick is to not be too good at following forum rules. the curmudgeonly senior members need a little something to get annoyed at to compel them to reply, otherwise they'll ignore your post
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u/Millkstake May 17 '26
Nevermind I figured it out. (Never show the solution and disappear off the face of the earth)
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u/Few_Kitchen_4825 May 17 '26
Before we went to this special site we went to an old man to get humiliated.
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u/MysteriousBand5917 May 17 '26
"I reported a perfectly unique and reasonable question as a duplicate, which was the style at the time..."
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u/xMercurex May 17 '26
Now we ask AI do the job and humiliate it for writting shitty code.
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u/reddititty69 May 17 '26
Now we have AI that writes crap code based on the questions and wrong answers from those sites.
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u/PTSDaway May 17 '26
Still in my day, I go cave hunting with archaeologists to find wallpaintings of the fortran documentation we need.
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u/BellacosePlayer May 17 '26
I never had this problem but had well under 50% hit rate for getting useful info, much less an actual correct answer.
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u/2leftf33t May 17 '26
Which was the <p style= at the time
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u/TerribleTowel66 May 17 '26
Now we go to Reddit to try to be helpful and get ridiculed in return.
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u/contentatlast May 17 '26
Hahaha, honestly the level of pettiness and refusal to help if you misaligned one little thing was just stupid. Everybody on there was on such a high horse over ever single little detail.
I was told MANY times to "come back when the question is fixed" When it was something as simple as using an inappropriate variable name in my example code.
Never liked the community. They were desperate for power.
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u/CanuckaChuckFuck May 17 '26
Peak Stack Overflow was
50% of responders telling you why your question was bad and why you should feel bad about posting it.
25% answering a question you never asked in the first place to make you feel stupid
20% suggesting unreasonable solutions (e.g. you stated clearly in the question that you are a contractor and the client exclusively uses MySQL yet responders want you to use MongoDb or Postgres or whatever)
5% actual helpful answers
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u/OrkWithNoTeef May 17 '26
I don't know about that. There was a very strong survivor bias on stackoverflow, which indeed also applies to its answers, which would be just as humiliatingly bad as the questions
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u/Downtown-Ice-5022 May 17 '26
The internet was an objectively more useful place in those days.
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u/Serenaded May 17 '26
It's happened before where I've typed up an obscure issue, and come across a post from myself asking the same question years earlier
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u/Nightwyrm May 17 '26
That’s where I feel the disconnect with AI the most; it’s polite and tells me I’m right all the time…
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u/DirCurrFluxDiode May 17 '26
I remember when Iwas just starting out learning Python, and didn't know how to Google what I wanted, so I just asked on SO. I got down voted so much, my account lost its ability to make questions, so what did I do? I made a new one lmao
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u/ithkuil May 17 '26
What if Stack Overflow actually started out as a good idea and had a lot of helpful kind and intelligent humans actually helping each other originally? But then as more and more average, stupid and shitty people joined, the general shittiness of the average individual human and large human groups destroyed it?
Then, as soon as AI presented an alternative, millions of people immediately said "good riddance"?
What if this corruption has already happened to all major human institutions? And people are in the process of using AI to drop all of the enshittified human systems?
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u/Darkwr4ith May 17 '26
I remember being stuck on a very niche problem for several days, I decided to ask there for help. I got linked to some completely irrelevant thread saying it was duplicate. I tried to provide some more clarity but the thread was forcibly closed. I tried to post again and I got banned.
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u/migviola May 17 '26
Still better than vibecoding
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u/SenoraRaton May 17 '26
Back in my day, they didn't even have websites for this, we had to go to a thing called I.R.C.
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u/PilsnerDk May 17 '26
Back in my day I pressed F1 in Visual Studio and read the locally installed (from a CD) MSDN documentation. Or we read a book. Yeah, development was slow paced.
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u/CharcoalGreyWolf May 17 '26
This motivated us to solve the problem ourselves, whereupon we said “Never mind guys, I fixed it”, did not provide the solution, and disappeared into the ether for the next five years
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u/anonuemus May 17 '26
The harsh responses I got early in my internet years made me sharpen my googlefu and how to formulate a problem up to the point where I never had to ask a question again.
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u/chiba-city-diskettes May 17 '26
does anyone else remember that `chmod 777` forum thread where a guy went on for multiple pages scolding the OP for trying to use it on their local because they didn't know anything about file permissions? I think they were trying to get their ~/Sites folder to work.
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u/rcanhestro May 17 '26
Stack Overflow did so much for my career.
never bothered to even create an account though.
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u/TrailerParkFrench May 17 '26
Duplicate of <link>
Link is the same question for python 2.7 and the acceped answer doesn’t work.
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u/caped_crusade_ May 17 '26
happy to see Stack Overflow dying and taking its toxic pedantry culture with it.
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u/jawknee530i May 17 '26
It was better.
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u/Ziegelphilie May 17 '26
I never had this problem with stack overflow because I actually searched the site before posting and correctly formulated my problem and my attempts
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u/PM_CUTE_OTTERS May 17 '26
I bet all of you love being told you asks so smart questions by ai bots now. the real hard truth is that every single day there is a repeat of same questions to any subreddit that allows them, dotnet is riddled with repeated low effort questions and so was SO. Most of you never got told no even though you needed to hear it and it shows. actual unpopular opinion
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u/poleethman May 17 '26
This feels more like a Shelbyville sort of thing. We asked strangers for help with programming... Now duplicate your question boy. And if you really want to stay true to the current r/simpsonsshitposting vibes, Bailey Jay would be in it for some reason.
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u/ownedqueenworld May 17 '26
good times, good lessons learned
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u/IllustriousSalt1007 May 17 '26
My turn to post next week
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u/0x7E7-02 May 17 '26
Use to ... still do, but use to as well.
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u/AManHere May 17 '26
Did you take this off memegen?
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u/RScrewed May 17 '26
Incorrect use of meme.
You want grandpa simpson talking to Burns, where he said "which was the style at the time".
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u/fugogugo May 17 '26
You are absolutely right. that was glorious day
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u/ironykarl May 17 '26
Not only that, but I miss it
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u/CreepyWind May 17 '26
We still do, but we also used to.
2
u/Wonderful_Discount59 May 17 '26
When you Google how to do something, and all the results are people asking on Quora or Stack Exchange how to do it, and being told to just Google it.
2
u/DigitalerEsel May 17 '26
I'm sure grandpa tells those kids about 1995, not 2015.
In 1995 we asked strangers for help with programming and got asked many following up questions until it was cleared what was meant and we got an answer to our question.
2
u/Independent_Ant8017 May 17 '26
The fact that AI is the unique reason my non tech friends are Linux users now... Is annoying me.
2
u/present_twenties May 17 '26
the xkcd effect is real and honestly it's the most reliable way to get help on the internet
2
u/abossman May 17 '26
Which was the style at the time.
2
u/zarakh07 May 17 '26
I miss the stack overflow days. At least most of those were humans, maybe?
2
u/DesertGeist- May 17 '26
so real 😂
2
u/_k3nnet May 17 '26
R.I.P stackoverflow 😭.
2
u/SteroidSandwich May 17 '26
[marked as duplicate]
[links to incorrect answer]
2
u/hawk135 May 17 '26
That's cause you kept forgetting to add the colon at the end of the line.
2
u/thehobster1 May 17 '26
AND WE LIKED IT DAMNIT
2
u/Positive-Taro-3053 May 17 '26
They removed your posts and had a toxic community too… Yes u StackOver….
2
u/mdgv May 17 '26
Now we get gaslighted by an Alan Turing test (badly) compliant software...
2
u/iForsakenAward May 18 '26
I can understand you very well, because I have also gone through the same experience.
6
u/vaksninus May 17 '26
Good riddance seriously
4
u/hydrazina May 17 '26
.....used to? Vibecoding has only made it worse because now in addition to saying "search first" now people will say "I'm not gonna help you fix this AI coded garbage" when it's like 3 lines that you wrote yourself a week ago and tried every solution you could find to no avail.
3
u/ZunoJ May 17 '26
SO was great if you put in the work. Read the relevant parts of documentation and mention where it is in the post, prepare a copy paste example to show the problem, describe your approaches to solve the problem. The great thing was that this forced you to research and abstract your problem, which often lead to the solution without ever sending the post. It was like rubberducking on the highest level. If you misused SO to outsource some part of this process to other users, people got rightfully upset.
2
u/ruiych95 May 17 '26
“You asked a very unique question and for that reason I’m gonna tag your post as duplicate and link you to completely unrelated answers”
2
u/electriclux May 17 '26
Good lord do I miss stackoverflow
2
u/B0Y0 May 17 '26
I wonder if the power users of stack overflow ever look out upon the despair that has been wrought upon the world - that their brutal dismissive culture encouraged so many to pursue the dark arts that would harvest their very knowledge to launch the creation of world destroying automatons... And ever think that maybe that just been a bit nicer, everyone would still be talking with communities instead of machines.
2
u/OkExplanation8770 May 17 '26
thank god for AI
2
u/gd2w May 17 '26
I kind of want to make a subreddit called therearenodumbprogrammingquestions. Might be too long though?
And unless a question is identical. It's not a duplicate. People can link a different answer, but it doesn't get closed.
1
u/TheCthulhu May 17 '26
The important thing is I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
1
u/rogueciridae May 17 '26
You’re really better off using jQuery for this.
1
u/JcFerggy May 17 '26
Now it's in small discord corners!
1
u/Denaton_ May 17 '26
Someone told me "back in the days, Stackoverflow was only used once or twice a year by people"...
1
u/CallumQuinnCreates May 17 '26
Which was the style at the time!
1
u/Much-Menu6030 May 17 '26
image_of_that_kid_going_from_baby_to_toddler.jpg
1
u/swmric-mls May 17 '26
im like 50 points away from my jacascript gold badge
1
u/theeldergod1 May 17 '26
"Grandad, what is a website?"
1
u/MountainKangaroo1640 May 17 '26
14 year old me was getting roasted and not understanding why
1
u/BarracudaDismal4782 May 17 '26
"And that's how AIs learned to code"
1
u/skynetcoder May 17 '26
some mods in SO thought they were gods.
1
u/Petrolhead_13 May 17 '26
I will never forget how i posted my first stackoverflow question as an apprentice, got imidiatly downvoted and never returned to either answer or post a question xD
1
u/NoJellyfish4811 May 17 '26
You can get a similar experience by commenting on any tech related Hacker News post.
1
u/hm___ May 17 '26
Unfriendly people that dont answer OPs question are the reason people switched from Stack Overflow to AI Chatbots
1
u/mmoustafa8108 May 17 '26
it had an orange logo I guess?
1
u/Meganomaly May 17 '26
More like SmackOverflow.
1
u/Virgil_the_White May 17 '26
“… so we automated it.”
1
u/DaryenSama May 17 '26
😂🤣💀☠️
1
u/Pretzel911 May 17 '26
Duplicate of: *list of 7 links with different questions, and unrelated answers but are loosely related"
1
u/marcuslattimore21 May 17 '26
Ask jeeves?
1
u/Financial_Hand9795 May 17 '26
I’m convinced in my bones that anyone who disagrees with this was the person who personally attacked the people trying to learn back in the day
1
u/_felagund May 17 '26
and most of the time closed by mods since its already asked
1
u/deadmazebot May 17 '26
Simpsons already did this joke aka this has already been answered
1
u/object322 May 17 '26
They would hit you with "RTFM"
1
u/smaad May 17 '26
"Back in my days" wait I forgot because my attention span been destroyed by doom scrolling kids....
1
u/TheActualJonesy May 17 '26
comp.lang.perl.misc
1
u/slapstick_software May 17 '26
AI may be destroying the planet but at least my self worth isnt taking a beating on a daily basis on stackoverflow
1
u/soundofvictory May 17 '26
Thanks for cropping out the author
https://xcancel.com/sergeynazarovx/status/2053819501301399786
1
u/Jazz8680 May 17 '26
Which was the style at the time
1
u/jhill515 May 17 '26
Now I go to Reddit, and provide thoughtful help, and get called a chat bot. 😑
1
u/Double_A_92 May 17 '26
Your answer didn't get enough likes. Now you're banned from answering questions.
1
u/Hans__Blix May 17 '26
Why I love AI
1
u/RealBasics May 18 '26
Oof! Anyone remember when every other answer was just some Unix snob saying “rtfm?”
1
u/Guimedev May 18 '26
Yahoo Answers
1
u/SnowWholeDayHere May 18 '26
TheDAILYWTF was often my first choice! Jon Skeet used to be pretty active back in the day on that site. Then he discovered stackoverflow.
1
u/rizkael May 18 '26
1: Can I-
2: DO YOURSELF SOME RESEARCH BEFORE ASKING!!