Stackoverflow Outage (stackstatus.net)

Didn't notice, as Claude is still up.

Stack Overflow is no longer relevant. Today, you can just ask Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT instead, and you don’t have to deal with the usual condescension.

Status updates for stackoverflow are like: hey look at me, I'm still here.

I thought they're just shutting down because it wasn't worth running the servers anymore.

This is an ill formed question.

Stackoverflow may be up or down.

Please return later when you are able to determine exactly where your problem is and have read all the documentation on Unix, C and the internet.

SO has had an effective outage for years now. Put up a question, get smacked with "it's a duplicate" of an old, no-longer-relevant question, mods don't correct it because the culture is gatekeeping, now you have a dead Q&A site.

With the additional problem that someone invented a way to take your question pages and tailor them to the exact needs of a particular user.

[dead]

Considering how many times a day I used to use StackOverflow, it's wild how long it has been since I last thought about it/visited. LLM's really scraped and dumped, sad.

The crew that runs SO must be aware of the tone in this thread, right?

There always seems to be a strong consensus whenever SO is mentioned on HN, and it’s always very negative. Why don’t they change the moderation rules, if the supposed target audience is constantly frustrated with them?

what's their business model now?

I'm a top 5% contributor to SO with around 300-400 answers (haven't actively answered a question in a while). One of the highlights of my career was seeing people benefit from those answers, post commentary, and update my answers. In the last year, there's actually been 0 engagement on all of my questions. One of the rare/sad aspects of how ChatGPT has impacted our community.

Now that SO is almost dead, how will the AI labs train their LLMs on all the programming edge cases it used to document?

Will synthetic data and documentation RAG really be enough? Or will we be stuck at 2022 debugging knowledge forever?

I find it somewhat sad to see so many people bag on StackOverflow as if it were a total failure. It's true that there were some negatives, but the brusque attitude and rapid question closures were often in response to a genuine flood of junky, repetitive questions. In its time it was unparalleled and even today there's still useful content on there. I also think its rep system is something a lot of sites could learn from in terms of how to gradually increase user privileges.