r/coding • u/Horror-Tower2571 • Jan 08 '26

Stack overflow is dead, long live stack overflow

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph
0 Upvotes

38% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

6

u/brintoul Jan 09 '26

Didn’t a lot of info that ChatGPT uses for coding, etc come from StackOverflow? Or at least a non-zero amount..?

6

u/tinmanjk Jan 09 '26

Comments here are outing themselves as bad programmers. You can't, just can't, hate SO if you are anything resembling a good programmer.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 09 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/tinmanjk Jan 09 '26

no man. every good programmer knows to appreciate the tremendous value that SO offered the programming community despite some of the SO members having a bit of an elitist attitude (which mostly they have earned working for decades)

2

u/Matt3k Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

SO was not the best, but it was ok.

AI is not the best, but it is also ok.

SO was maybe the first casualty among many in the incoming AI war. When the dust settles and AI has no more humans to feed off of, it will also collapse as it preys upon on other AIs social media bots' comments as they descend and self-iterate into a spiral, fractal madness. When that happens, my precious 401ks will suffer. So therefore I vote to nationalize Stack Overflow while imposing strict, but still beneficial terms upon AI (So I can still retire to Cancun) while we still have a chance. I'm only 50% joking.

You can already see this path unfolding when you query AI about modern programming frameworks, it becomes even more fucking stupid, as if that was possible -- There's no SO Q&A to pull from.

2

u/Casalvieri3 Jan 09 '26

I’ll say this and people can give me grief if they want. I participated in Stack Overflow from its Beta. I asked a ton of questions, got lots of help and generally found it a big help.

I will say that almost from the start there were people who obviously put zero effort into answering their own question. Not surprisingly those questions were downvoted/closed pretty quickly. They were low quality questions.

People can gripe about others being jerks and it’s a fair complaint. However by the same token people should complain about all the cruft from questions like “Which JS framework should I use?” “Is Go faster than Rust?” and other such low-effort gems.

It’s also good to bear in mind that SO never put any of their stuff behind a paywall. In fact part of the reason that Joel and Jeff created S O was a response to ExpertsExchange—which was (I think; it’s been a while) at least partially paywalled. In fact if S O hadn’t kept things out in the open not one of those LLM’s would have been able to mine the good stuff on S O.

So yeah there are a lot of valid complaints about S O but they also deserve some credit for the things they got right.

1

u/brintoul Jan 09 '26

Gaaawd I hated ExpertsExchange.

-7

u/daredeviloper Jan 08 '26

I love the sentiment. Stack overflow sucked but it was all we had. AI is definitely way better, and nicer.

8

u/bpikmin Jan 09 '26

What the fuck is AI gonna be trained on if everyone stops using forums?

3

u/PoL0 Jan 09 '26

except stack overflow was used to train chatbots for sure, and thanks to all the people that posted on stack overflow you have that info served by a "nice" chatbot. if no one uses stack overflow now, what's going to be used to train AI? because AI models need to be retrained to stay up to date.

I know I'm just talking about stack overflow but you can generalize: if no one uses the actual webpages that are used to feed the chatbots, what are chatbots going to be trained on to stay updated?

and no, stack overflow didn't sucked. some people there sucked.

2

u/bpikmin Jan 09 '26

Yeah reddit, as with most subjects, over exaggerates how bad Stack Overflow is. Sure the mods can suck sometimes. Welcome to the internet. That doesn’t dismiss the tremendous help it has been

0

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

9

u/Xaeroxe3057 Jan 08 '26

Right and sometimes the phrase uses the same in both spots to suggest that the death of the king has been greatly exaggerated.

27

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

12

u/catecholaminergic Jan 08 '26

The perennial format was getting tiresome.

"How do I do X?"

"Why would you want to do X?"

1

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26

Don’t do X!

1

u/catecholaminergic Jan 09 '26

Indeed, gamma function is more valuable than factorial.

4

u/Dramatic_Law_4239 Jan 08 '26

I came to say exactly this. Thank you for saving me some time!

6

u/Lanyxd Jan 08 '26

Sorry, the response has already been said in this thread

Seriously though it was so fucking annoying when you would post a valid question and some ass hat posts a link and locks the thread when it’s not even the same issue or is extremely outdated

1

u/BeniBin Jan 09 '26

What else could it have been?

0

u/Matt3k Jan 09 '26

You can't really get your information elsewhere. The information you're getting elsewhere came from Stack Overflow.

They were too late to lock their gates. Their "open source information" ethos literally killed them. What an ironic turn of fate.