Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
  • Anders429@programming.dev
    0·
    21 days ago

    A lot of people seem to be celebrating this, but I personally think this is a net negative for programming. Are people actually replacing SO with talking to LLMs? If not, where are they going?

    I’ve seen an uptick in people using places like discord to get help. But that’s not easily searchable and not in the same format that it is in stackoverflow. SO was meant to organize these answers to make asking questions easier. Now it seems like we’re walking away from that, and I can’t quite understand why. Is it really because SO is “toxic”?

    • stinky@redlemmy.comEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      Yes. Stack overflow was a cruel, selfish, horrible emperor and now the dynasty of technical knowledge is crumbling.

      If everyone moves to LLMs then there will not be a central repository of knowledge. That is the fault of stack overflow. Their self-centered behavior directly caused this fracturing of knowledge.

      If they had been decent human beings we would have had a library of information kept current with today’s trends and technologies. Instead we’re going to have to rely on paid AI models or fucking grok.

      This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.

  • PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    22 days ago

    To be honest. (although I am guilty using chatgpt way too often) I have never not found a question + an answer to a similar problem on stackoverflow.

    The realm is saturated. 90 % of the common questions are answered. Complex problems which are not yet asked and answered are probably too difficult to formulate on stackoverflow.

    It should be kept at what it is. An enormous repository of knowledge.

    • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      22 days ago

      This is a huge reason for the question decline! All the easy stuff has been answered, the knowledge is already there. But people are so used to infinite growth that anything contrary = death lol

      People also blame ai, but if people are going to ai to ask the common already answered questions then… good! They’d just get hurt feelings when their question was closed as a dupe

  • Kokesh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    I gave up on it when they decided to sell my answers/questions for AI training. First I wanted to delete my account, but my data would stay. So I started editing my answers to say “fuck ai” (in a nutshell). I got suspended for a couple months to think about what I did. So I dag deep into my consciousness and came up with a better plan. I went through my answers (and questions) and poisoned them little by little every day with errors. After that I haven’t visited that crap network anymore. Before all this I was there all the time, had lots of karma (or whatever it was called there). Couldn’t care less after the AI crap. I honestly hope, that I helped make the AI, that was and probably still is trained on data that the users didn’t consent to be sold, little bit more shitty.

    • Rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      22 days ago

      Yeah the AI without consent thing killed it for me, too. Shame we couldn’t totally tank the whole site with poisoned answers.

      While I find the site so helpful, humans that help AI like the team at StackOverflow did deserve to be on the losing end.

      I am absolutely not above cutting off my nose to spite my face.