The decline is not surprising. I am sure AI is replacing Stackoverflow for a lot of people. And my experience with asking questions was pretty bad. I asked a few very specific questions about some deep detail in Windows and every time I got only some smug comments about my stupid question or the question got rejected outright. That while a ton of beginner questions were approved. Definitely not a very inviting club. I found i got better responses on Reddit.
AI didn't necessarily kill SO because it was strictly better at giving technical answers (and it certainly wasn't better when GPTs initially burst onto the mass-appeal scene several years ago), but that it provided an alternative (even if subpar) where users could actually get responses to their questions (and furthermore not be ridiculed by psychopaths while doing so was the cherry on top).
The result is not surprising! Many people are now turning to LLMs with their questions instead. This explains the decline in the number of questions asked.
They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.
Other tech support forums are terrible in other ways. AI is a godsend.
Typical response:
I am RJ, an Independent Advisor and Microsoft Gold Certified Support Specialist Enthusiast.
I know how your system is not functioning as desired! Rest assured, I am here to help you resolve this today.
Please follow these steps in order. Do not skip any steps.
Step 1: Reboot your computer
Step 2: Reinstall windows
Step 3: Contact Microsoft support
Did this resolve your issue? [ Yes ] [ No ]
If this helped, please mark this as the Answer and give me a 5-star rating so I can continue providing high-quality, scripted responses to other users!
Standard Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft. I am an independent volunteer who enjoys copying and pasting from a manual written in 2014.
Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe in which the Stackoverflow community was so friendly, welcoming, helpful, and knowledgeable that this seems like a tragedy and motivates people to try to save it.
But in this universe, most people's reaction is just "lol".
There are still airgapped places in the world where transferring information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they’re not worth using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for engineering teams working in these environments.
Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.
So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]
LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls
I do use Claude a lot, but I still regularly ask questions on https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/. It's often just too niche, LLMs hallucinate stuff like an entire non-existent benchmarking feature in Snakemake, or can't explain how I should get transcriptome aligners to give me correct quantifications for a transcript. I guess it's too niche. And as a lonely Bioinformatician it can be nice to get confirmation from other bioinformaticians.
Looking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any LLM.
While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding.
So some possible reasons:
- Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.
- Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users.
- Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam
- Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn.
- Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented
Some non-reasons:
- Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).
Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.
AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).
SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?
They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion".
Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.
Stackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck.
196 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 98.5 ms ] threadI used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.
Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.
PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620
Typical response:
I am RJ, an Independent Advisor and Microsoft Gold Certified Support Specialist Enthusiast.
I know how your system is not functioning as desired! Rest assured, I am here to help you resolve this today.
Please follow these steps in order. Do not skip any steps.
Step 1: Reboot your computer Step 2: Reinstall windows Step 3: Contact Microsoft support
Did this resolve your issue? [ Yes ] [ No ]
If this helped, please mark this as the Answer and give me a 5-star rating so I can continue providing high-quality, scripted responses to other users!
Standard Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft. I am an independent volunteer who enjoys copying and pasting from a manual written in 2014.
But in this universe, most people's reaction is just "lol".
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...
So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]
Only ever asked one question and I tried to answer more than a handful but never really clicked with the site.
I do wonder if it would have faired better under the original ownership before it was sold in 2021-06-02.
Looking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any LLM.
So some possible reasons:
- Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.
- Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users.
- Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam
- Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn.
- Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented
Some non-reasons:
- Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).
AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).
SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?
Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.