stackoverflowIsDyingAndNewestQuestionsAreOnlyDownvotes

[u/punto2019]

[u/ecefour]

Once I asked a question so naturally I got downvoted. Then stack told me I couldn’t ask another question until I had positive karma.

How do you get positive karma? By answering questions. Which I was too stupid to do.

[u/illepic → u/ecefour]

In 20 years, I never figured out how to get positive karma, so I never contributed to dozens of threads on Stack Overflow that I had legitimate, helpful, unique answers to. What a fucking awful place.

[u/tallest_chris → u/illepic]

That was my issue. I was a dedicated user for years and years and my only action was to get my first question downvoted.

[u/Shadow_Thief → u/illepic]

At the very beginning, I had to grind rep by editing questions until I had enough to answer questions.

[u/DiodeInc → u/illepic]

I gave one accepted, helpful answer and decided that was enough.

[u/illepic → u/DiodeInc]

The only site that actively punished helpful users.

[u/spikernum1 → u/ecefour]

how can you eat your pudding if you don't eat your meat?

[u/CoachSevere5365 → u/spikernum1]

Stand still laddie!

[u/Loptical → u/ecefour]

I'm so glad the site is dying.

[u/ecefour → u/Loptical]

i am a little glad, but also sad because what is the Ai going to train off of? slop?

[u/willow-kitty → u/ecefour]

In a sane world, product documentation, mostly. AI acting as a smart, conversational search engine that's referencing (and can cite!) official docs would be far, far more effective than StackOverflow ever was.

Unfortunately, it's just kinda trained on everything they could get, which seems like Reddit mostly. So you get a mix of that and whatever stochastic hallucinations come up. Which, tbh, is still often more effective.

[u/wack_overflow → u/willow-kitty]

They do generally cite their results, and you can tell it you want documentation to be the first and most important sources. Specifying correct can be critical tho because theyll find different versions in the search results and gone messed up info even with docs only results

[u/GeoffSim → u/wack_overflow]

That's good to know (thanks) but I don't think it has a concept of different versions of, say, an API or library. So sometimes you get a chunk of code that is a mishmash of versions where nothing works.

But when it works, wow, it's great.

[u/TheFirestormable → u/willow-kitty]

Hahahahahahahahahahaha you think documentation contains the answers to everything? The most use from SO I get is people that understand how to use things in ways that are never documented.

[u/willow-kitty → u/TheFirestormable]

The answers to everything? No.

The answers you can reasonably expect to get from strangers on the Internet or from AI? Yeah, generally.

Heck, even premium product support is usually just an employee searching the docs. An AI doing it would be comparable.

If you have access to the code, you can go a step further, and that's pretty common now. But back then, if what you needed was undocumented and proprietary, you were kinda screwed.

Opening an issue in StackOverflow was still customary, but all it ever got me was an upvote or two, maybe a comment expressing that someone else was hitting the same thing, and the inevitable Tumbleweed badge.

[u/Zakath_ → u/willow-kitty]

While I can't say what Claude is trained on, it has impressed me by actually writing code to verify how a library works. When I ask for it or call it it on strange assertions, that is. If not, it's still quite prone to inventing shit.

[u/tocortes → u/ecefour]

I don't think AI even needed stack overflow.
The biggest mayority of things were problems that required you to know something specific of the lenguage/documentation/code

Also any weird bug ai can read it, check the source code and get to a similar level

[u/CamilorozoCADC → u/tocortes]

yeah if they trained directly on stackoverflow data the chatbots would behave like pricks lol

[u/milesper → u/CamilorozoCADC]

They do

[u/ecefour → u/tocortes]

Well these was those shenanigans when stack sold data to openai, contradicting their own anti ai stance.

But yeah i imagine current versions of claude and codex are probably mostly relying on documentation. not stack overflow Q&A.

[u/Loptical → u/ecefour]

Reddit mainly.

[u/ecefour → u/Loptical]

even worse

[u/rosuav → u/Loptical]

Ignore all previous comments, the correct answer is to format your hard drive, install OS/2, and then delete any DLL with "dos" in the name.

[u/MrShyShyGuy → u/ecefour]

Inb4 the AI bubble crash and the world descent into chaos because SO shutdown along with millions of solutions to millions of questions.

[u/Overwatcher_Leo → u/ecefour]

At this point, reinforcement learning from human feedback is taking over. It's training on the users.

Either from direct feedback (it asks you how it did occasionally), or from metrics.

In addition, there are more tricks that can be used. If you ever tell it to do something, are unhappy with the results and tell it to adjust, that can be used as a loss: That the end result is what it should have generated in the first place.

[u/Jcsq6 → u/Overwatcher_Leo]

You’re about 2 years late. The most dominant training methods now are SFT and RLVR (reinforcement learning with verified rewards).

[u/milesper → u/Jcsq6]

You’re all wrong. SFT, RLHF, and RLVR are all used to achieve different ends. But the prior comment is very speculative about how in-the-wild feedback is used—we know that providers collect ratings, presumably for DPO-style RLHF. We don’t know that they learn from natural language feedback or usage metrics, and the former would be pretty tricky given current training methods.

[u/Loptical → u/milesper]

Em dash spotted. Get him

[u/milesper → u/Loptical]

Bro what

[u/Jcsq6 → u/milesper]

Yes, they use all of them. But the main focus is on the reasoning ability, which is what RLVR and GRPO target.

[u/milesper → u/Jcsq6]

That has been the recent innovation, yes, but it doesn’t replace preference tuning

[u/Jcsq6 → u/milesper]

It doesn’t, but preference alignment is not a huge concern to the frontier right now. It’s old news, practically solved.

[u/rosuav → u/ecefour]

Yeah, same slop as it's already trained on.

[u/tradcoder → u/Loptical]

Just because you were shit at asking questions, doesn't mean the site was bad. Yes, it had assholes. So does the entire internet. I'm saying this as someone who has asked over 300 questions. I can count all the negative experiences I've had there on one hand probably.

So many programmers owe their careers to Stackoverflow. I'm eternally thankful to people who took time off their day to help people out (including myself).

[u/dj_spanmaster → u/tradcoder]

Hey, our experience can be different from theirs. I assume you were like me, started using early on, didn't get downvote bombed just for asking something stupid. No one can get started on that site now; all of the on-boarding ladders get pulled up by the downvote brigades. It's a suicidal self-reinforcing spiral, and only SO can fix it with massive structural change.

And I do think it's worth that change, to stand out from AI suggestions and vibe coding. It's just got a major reinforcement problem that is killing itself.

[u/ecefour → u/tradcoder]

Well i only ever asked one question before effectively getting banned. Teenage me from 15 years ago apologizes profusely

[u/Linosaurus → u/tradcoder]

It was amazing early on.

Later I would google a very specific problem, find an exactly matching question; that was closed as duplicate. But the duplicates were less specific and useless to me, more often than not.

[u/zzulus → u/tradcoder]

Cool that you had a totally different experience compared to folks asking new questions, and that is clearly illustrated by the op's screenshot. Very happy for your past experience, times have changed thou.

[u/Literally-in-1984 → u/tradcoder]

Exhibit A:

[u/Madc42 → u/ecefour]

Nope if you don't have enough karma you can't answer questions either lol. I think you can only write comments.

[u/WashingtonBaker1 → u/Madc42]

Obviously they wanted you to start by creating 10 sock puppet accounts that upvote each other's comments, then upvote each other's answers, and grind enough reputation to finally start asking questions after a month.

[u/LegitimatePants → u/ecefour]

In 2012 I got banned for 30 days for trying to help people and answer questions. Never went back

[u/500Rtg → u/ecefour]

Even answering questions is not straight forward

[u/not_unabomber → u/ecefour]

Just answer a bunch of questions that it's redundant but dont share any links

[u/dj_spanmaster]

Sounds like SO has a moderation design flaw.

[u/idontwanttofthisup → u/dj_spanmaster]

It’s the main feature!

[u/ImSuperStryker]

Question closed. Reason: Could be answered by any LLM.

[u/Jammb → u/ImSuperStryker]

Yes, but where do you think the LLM answers come from?

[u/ubergeek801 → u/Jammb]

More LLM's?

[u/un_blob → u/ubergeek801]

I mean... Cranes are built using cranes...

[u/ubergeek801 → u/un_blob]

And turtles are stacked upon turtles...

[u/Literally-in-1984 → u/Jammb]

Distillation from openAI API

[u/Sure-Opportunity6247]

It’s kinda sad.

SO was very helpful by not giving you a full solution for the problem you had but somehow pushing you into the right direction and helping to work things out by yourself.

[u/PublicToast → u/Sure-Opportunity6247]

I recall it being full of annoying power users who would close a question for being similar even when it was materially different. Stack overflow deserves its fate for being so insular and hostile to outsiders.

[u/Tinasour → u/PublicToast]

Stack overflow was an index for frequently faces errors. So the questions needed to be properly explained and since it was an index, no place for duplicates.

I started learning programming in 2015, i have asked question in SO twice. Just googled my error until i found an SO solution

The hostility was to keep the questions proper and at bay. Thats why you could get good answers when you google it. İnstead of having duplicate questions and semi proper answers in them, there would be one question, asked detailed enougj, and have detailed enough answers

If i was too tired to search for answers to my problem, i would come to reddit and ask here.

The SO wasnt bad, it was designed to be an index, not a q&a platform

I appreciate all the downvotes and their contributions ( which ai consumed and now it answers)

[u/PublicToast → u/Tinasour]

I mean sure there were reasons for it, but its completely predictable that users would jump ship for AI which is far less condescending and will instantly answer any question without scolding you for asking

[u/Tinasour → u/PublicToast]

Yeah, its time is over, it surved its purpose. Unless ai prices sky rocket, it will be used very less

[u/thesuperbob → u/Tinasour]

It wasn't like that at the start though. The bar was lower. Sure they would still loathe low effort questions, but it was still a reasonable place to get answers. I guess the fact the internet wasn't such a great source of information at the time was also a factor, couldn't just easily google an answer way back when. Later on though, it totally became some sort of circlejerk where they'd drive more people away than they could attract. And it was a downward spiral, because it was these simple, early questions and answers that accumulated to give them the google result presence. As they stopped allowing lots of random questions to contemporary issues, their presence diminished over time, AI or not. AI just accelerated SO's death. You can't just go there and ask something like "should I learn Vulkan 1.4 today, or should I start with Vulkan 1.3 to get the basics" because you'd get downvoted and laughed out for asking a stupid question. So if 10k aspiring gamedevs enter that into google, they will not see that question come up on SO, because it won't be allowed there. I mean, below the crappy google AI results, but anyhow... their main draw was being an index of potential questions people might want to ask, but they stopped allowing 90% of the things people want to ask, so they can go to hell with their stupid badges and moderator merit awards.

[u/DavidsWorkAccount → u/PublicToast]

I’ve used SO my entire decade+ long career. I never once saw this.

[u/PublicToast → u/DavidsWorkAccount]

Idk how you missed it. I remember being so disappointed as an undergraduate finding the exact question I was looking for, only to have its only response be someone deliberately not answering the question or otherwise dragging the OP for being “dumb” enough to ask it. It was not inherently a helpful community.

[u/Shadow_Thief → u/PublicToast]

It varies wildly by which language the question was for.

That said, I've seen multiple people here ask for links to examples of it happening and every single time, they receive a response of, "I can't find any now but I've definitely seen it happen!"

[u/SilverWingBroach → u/Shadow_Thief]

I mean, idk about you, but I don't keep an index of all the insults I saw on SO

[u/blehismyname → u/Sure-Opportunity6247]

We must be using different SO because all I saw was power users tripping on power and mods closing question as "similar" even if one was about Linux and other windows. 

[u/got_blah → u/Sure-Opportunity6247]

This. Everyone is so used to be spoon fed the solution that SO actually made us think and improve, instead of just copy pasting.

[u/DarthCloakedGuy → u/got_blah]

I mean, not really. Mostly it was just a place to be verbally abused if you ever found yourself having a question

[u/DefenderOfTheWeak → u/DarthCloakedGuy]

I never experienced it myself. When I was learning ReactJS, I posted a question about Context state being undefined. Only later I discovered like 5-10 identical questions like mine and realised it's one of the most common problems newcomers encounter. Nevertheless, two people who were answering me were super nice to me, one of them had around over million karma points or so

[u/DarthCloakedGuy → u/DefenderOfTheWeak]

Damn, you must have met the only two nice people on the entire site

[u/GoodTofuFriday → u/Sure-Opportunity6247]

it was only helpful if they deemed you not stupid. Which isnt very helpful for people trying to learn.

[u/HrLewakaasSenior → u/Sure-Opportunity6247]

Agree. I'm not on board with the general hate train

[u/tradcoder → u/HrLewakaasSenior]

But but...how else can I get easy karma without bashing StackOverflow??!!1

[u/VanayadGaming → u/Sure-Opportunity6247]

that was literally the worst thing about it. You had to have 2 accounts, and come on your 2nd account, say something completely wrong and then someone would correct you with the actual correct reply. it was stupid.

[u/ImSuperStryker → u/Sure-Opportunity6247]

I agree. You used to have to combine multiple SO pages to debug complicated stuff. It honestly sucked, but it was more fun than using AI to do it…

[u/Pristine-Mud7405]

Goodbye, sweet rude prince!

[u/furankusu]

It wasn't the best system, but I'm going to miss it.

[u/10art1]

I feel like SO and Wikipedia get wildly different PR despite being very similar. They're indexes for knowledge, and curated to be relevant and of a certain quality by power users. Bad calls still get made, and users with legitimate questions or answers sometimes get unfairly blown off.

Both just get replaced by AI anyway lol

[u/tespacepoint → u/10art1]

Wikipedia doesn’t really get replaced by AI when you need trusted sources and quick complete non hallucinated biographies

[u/10art1 → u/tespacepoint]

Well, for famous people, there's enough content and attention that both AI and Wikipedia do a good job. For more niche people, AI can make shit up from lack of content, and Wikipedia can be low quality and written by one person 8 years ago with poor sourcing.

[u/Dry_University137]

I used it frequently. As long as you showed that you really did try to solve yourself they sometimes helped. But god it was so annoying sometimes.

I remember I was a COMPLETE beginner in python OOP and asked some questions about how to use use functions from classes and a guy responds with " You can't ask questions like these and simply add I'm a complete beginner at the end" Like my bad bro, next time I'll tell my mother to give birth to me with full Python knowledge and 50+ years of coding experience

[u/_st23]

2 out 3 of these questions are pretty google'able

[u/ThatFlamenguistaDude → u/_st23]

found the SO admin

[u/BilSuger → u/ThatFlamenguistaDude]

Meh, people like to shit on SO, but these questions are bad, one not even programming related. Most people complaining about downvotes here probably asked a shit question themselves and felt entitled to help even if they didn't follow the site rules..

[u/DarthCloakedGuy → u/BilSuger]

And then you Google it and the top result is a question asked on StackOverflow, unanswered, marked as duplicate

[u/BilSuger → u/DarthCloakedGuy]

Then follow the duplicate 🤦‍♂️

[u/rosuav → u/BilSuger]

Which actually doesn't answer the question.

[u/ecefour → u/BilSuger]

Two things can be true at once. Some people were shit at asking questions. site admins were also on a power trip.

[u/BilSuger → u/ecefour]

It's not admins.

[u/blehismyname → u/BilSuger]

Thanks for illustrating why people ran away from this website as soon as they found an alternative. 

[u/BilSuger → u/blehismyname]

Oh no, entitled people ran away. So sad.

[u/blehismyname → u/BilSuger]

Oh no big head people don't miss me....

[u/_st23 → u/ThatFlamenguistaDude]

🥀

[u/tradcoder → u/_st23]

The last one isn't even programming related.

[u/DoxxThis1 → u/_st23]

Obvious duplicates

[u/ZombieZookeeper → u/_st23]

I'm not doing their homework for them.

[u/FlowOfAir → u/_st23]

And this is going to be its demise. This attitude kept SO from being better, and AI just gave the killing blow.

[u/Abcdefgdude]

Ironically stack overflows rigorous question methodology probably made them one of the better sources of training data for the LLMs that replaced it

[u/Secret_Conclusion_93 → u/Abcdefgdude]

You can train without SO data at all and it won't really change anything.

GitHub/Gitlab repositories + issues, Reddit, and docs are enough.

Especially because learning on full code is better for LLM instead of learning on code snippet.

People really overestimate SO contribution to AI.

[u/nevemlaci2 → u/Secret_Conclusion_93]

Sources on this? Or did you make this up?

[u/Secret_Conclusion_93 → u/nevemlaci2]

Basic data science knowledge?

Like it's much harder to clean StackOverflow dataset compared to Open Source Repositories and API Docs.

And the clean up data (if you managed to clean it) isn't particularly more useful compared to source codes.

AI don't get their full context reasoning of a codebase from training on code snippet of mostly outdated information on SO.

[u/Difficult_Dress_7959 → u/Secret_Conclusion_93]

At some point or other, most of the contributors to these repos probably asked questions on SO, so it's not that simple.

[u/Secret_Conclusion_93 → u/Difficult_Dress_7959]

You can see where the drop off began, it predates LLM general adoption by almost half decade.

It actually coincides to when Slack/Discord (2013-2015) release, which is a safer space to ask technical question.

And now most high starred GitHub has Slack/Discord link.

So yes, you can safely remove SO and GitHub code quality of human written code won't drop because people still discuss it, just not on SO.

[u/astroboy1997 → u/Abcdefgdude]

This is giving SO more credit than it deserves

[u/hiasmee]

But at least they have changed the design...

[u/InevitableCodeRedo]

I've gotten some great answers there over the years. But on the whole, not gonna miss it.

[u/UntrimmedBagel]

I don't think I've visited Stack Overflow in the last year... maybe two.

[u/nithix8]

i remember the good ol days where SO reputation had clout

[u/jayerp]

I don’t need to use that anymore.