Good riddance!
I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.
Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.
Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!
Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011
The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.
"This is an excellent question, and shows a real attention to detail! Let me walk you through it in detail, with a particular focus on Django version and the evolution of the semantics there.
[...]
Bottom line: it's exactly the same as in Django 1.3 back in August 2011. But by anchoring to a specific version, you make the question unambiguous and much more insightful.m"
Poetic how they were so ridiculous about meticulously curating a database of answers where the ultimate consumer would be LLMs that really don’t care about duplicates.
Stack Overflow had two main value propositions for me. Either questions about standard way/community agreed way to accomplish something which has multiple aproaches, like "what is the most common way to take out the first element or null from a list".
I suspect moderators was very careful of allowing such questions to multiply on the site.
The other value I found was in fringe questions, like how do you access the model object of the value of a django form field from the template environment. If there even is an answer, the answer will hopefully point me to some non-documented way to accomplish what I want, or give hints to what kind of ugly hack I need to create. Those question don't seem to have much moderations applied to them at all.
What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity".
It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.
While there were many zealots that gave SO this reputation, I don't know if that's the reason it died.
As someone who frequently answered questions in the 'New' queue, the sheer amount of rule breaking, low effort, and obvious duplicates was astounding.
I eventually quit answering questions because 99% of them were not worth interacting with. Just vote close and move on.
Ultimately, I think SO is dead because it got too popular and moderation became untenable.
You sound exactly like an enforcer of the cultural problem the GP was talking about. Group think is healthy in small doses, but overdo it and it kills the group.
It's simply not on a new user to understand whatever group interpretation you have made up on top of the written rules. There is no platonic ideal of a good question, the project was doomed from the start if people take that idea seriously. The UX says submit a question about coding while the unwritten rules say submit a flawless peer-reviewed abstract or we close in 3 minutes.
Ironically those 99% asking low effort questions will gain more than everybody who looks at a "high value" question put together. Truly, nobody on SO learned anything writing those questions, they were just regurgitating their phd/previous work. It was grossly performative and I'm glad it's gone.
Can you imagine ChatGPT terminating a conversation because it thought your question was "low effort?" The behavior wouldn't be viewed as helpful or aligned, and nobody would use it.
StackOverflow was, all too often, not helpful or aligned. It died because the staff were unable to get the moderators to be helpful.
Well there are new users all the time and can’t expect them to now all of the in’s and out’s of the rules while posted there are still hidden rules. It’s become a toxic site.
The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read
> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.
> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.
Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.
I came here to say something like this (mostly about LaTeX), but you and the posters you're replying to said it better than I could have. I had too many posts treated as "not an appropriate question" or some such, and got tired of posting only to get my post rejected. To be sure, there are some poor posts (my first post was that, because I didn't include enough information), but the "vigilante" term you use was by and large all too appropriate.
I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.
I mostly frequent smaller subreddits with at most a handful of mods for niche subjects and it's great. Then when I occasionally need to ask a question in a bigger one... out come the mods who live for the rules.
Funny thing is I could actually deal with the annoying rules as well as all the rudeness and smugness. It crossed the line for me when it became clear they had degenerated to literal deletionism. As in, they don't just close your question now, they actually delete it straight up alongside any useful information it might have contained.
Tried to go back to one of my closed questions to look up a link someone had dropped in the comments, only to find out some moderator had fucking deleted the question for literally no reason, despite the fact there was actual fucking content in there. It actually drove me over the edge and made me go all in on my own domain and my own website. If I ever post anything there again, it will always be framed as links to my own site where their deletionism will never reach. I simply refuse to be erased.
Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming.
But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time:
If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer).
At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems.
(Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).
Early years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.
StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.
Ime, math.SE had a much friendlier vibe than most other SE sites. Primarily because you could ask about a problem you were struggling with and get help. No moderator would instantly show up and close the question as a dupe of a ten-year-old question about double integration techniques or some such.
People asking questions mostly wanted help, but most moderators thought they were curating some kind of question-answer form encyclopaedia. Very different perspectives.
I think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.
Agreed for the math one. I went there when I was dealing with game engines and needed something geometry related or the like rather than to stackoverflow and they were far nicer.
Even inside SO each language and topic would have different standards. A C question would not be answered in the same way one about a JS framework would.
I'm curious about the other Stack Exchange sites. Have they seen the same decline as Stack Overflow?
Stack Overflow was the "flagship" product of the Stack Exchange company, and if the company pivots to AI, I wonder what the future holds for the other Q&A sites on the SE network.
The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.
That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.
It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years”
It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.
Businesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.
Stack Overflow with all of its shortcomings was a marvel of the internet at it's peak. People especially in early were chasing karma and anything you asked, you were sure to get some answer. Not always right but some answer. While for sure LLMs will give much better answers on average. I feel that it's a piece of humanity we've lost there that should be adequately remembered and the memory cherished.
Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?
LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
Unfortunately the LLMs are concentrated into few providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) so there's a chance they each end up doing their own private (and closed) StackOverflows.
By leveraging their private StackOverflows, their LLMs will be able to short-circuit complex reasoning, saving tokens, time, and money.
> LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged? If by other LLMs, then we run into a problem of infinite descent. If by humans, then you'd need some way to motivate expert or semi-expert humans (so that their ratings are themselves correct) to participate in a massive project of evaluating the correctness of a constant stream of content from content-generators that never sleep.
This and the the other thread that talks about RL and synthetic data seem to suggest that AI can figure out all the technical issues without humans looking into them. I'm not sure if that's true at all.
That assumes there is documentation or examples. A big reason Stack Overflow took off was people struggling with things like the Android API documentation.
Some of those discussions made people go figure out how to do it, and then post it as an answer. The knowledge didn't exist anywhere until they did.
Sounds nothing like the world we live in. When has there ever been a time where there were an abundance of software documentation? How can plenty of documentation or code be made if AI scraper bots hammer servers that host them, steal content and drive people away from the actual authors?
Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about too. LLMs have basically profited from "stealing" (arguably) user-generated content from a time when there were no LLMs. In the LLM era there won't be a new Stack Overflow to train LLMs on going forward.
We're getting closer to Dead Internet Theory too where a lot of accounts, particularly on Twitter, are just LLMs. I imagine it's a huge problem on Reddit too. Just people farming karma or otherwise involved in influence campaigns or simply grifting to ad revenue.
So we're going to get to a point where the corpus we train LLMs on will itself just be filled with LLM slops. Self-reinforcing slop. Is that the future?
People still like to talk about the interesting problems they solved and how. Issue isn't SO having choked itself out, issue is that even the major search engines are pivoting towards AI answers instead of surfacing small blogs.
I wrote multiple answers to questions that weren't just "point to docs". And even when it is pointing to docs you are providing the reasoning as to why it works one way or another.
How do you convince people to not want an instant answer? Even if SO didn’t result in so many “What have you tried?” responses and immediate closures, most people would still prefer instant feedback.
For me, the strict requirements for posting questions help me to define the problem well, and after writing the question properly, I'd have the solution.
Early Stack Overflow as an amazing "rubber duck" (see "rubber duck debugging").
Unfortunately in recent years it became such a traumatizing experience to post a question there (even if you made a perfectly legit question you'd likely get downvoted and closed ... and god help you if you posted a question with an issue).
It completely changed from "I posted a question I can answer myself, and someone said so in the comments" to "I posted ANY question and everyone on the site teamed up to get rid of that question".
Same here. LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one. The "long tail" of solutions is usually lost due to how tokens are sampled from the LLM's probability distribution.
What I found to help a lot is to ask for e.g. 10 different solutions to a problem and then choosing one of them. Sometimes, this even leads to borderline creative solutions if there aren't 10 different ones.
In theory reasoning tokens should do the equivalent of this - explicitly create options outside of the quick-response probability space, so those can guide future generation.
In practice, models that do this won't be prioritized as much, because the economics of thinking tokens that stop by default at, say, one option plus a bit more planning (short of full alternatives) would be superior as long as billing is per-user instead of per-token. So we'll still need to play games with prompting!
> LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one.
I remember how Stack Overflow would close questions as duplicates just because somebody suggested the wrong answer that is also the right answer to the existing question. The best way to get a correct answer on Stack Overflow (and forums before that) was to post the wrong answer as part of your question.
One thing that SO had was you could see multiple solutions and implementations for something. Sometimes the "best" solution isn't very readable code, sometimes you are able to understand the problem better when you see a bunch of people solving it in different ways and arguing about it like angry monkeys.
SO has always had a pretty strong stance against opinion-based questions, but this is maybe the niche they should be exploring now. Humans still have a lot to say about the "best" solution to a given problem. The whole idea of an "accepted" answer could be removed, for example, since that's what AI will already generate.
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
You're right but that site has been sputtering culturally for some time. I put a lot of effort into editing questions and answers on ServerFault (part of SO) but I feel that time was wasted. I think they knew for a while they just wanted to sell it and just stopped caring. A number of editors were allowed to be jerks for too long and it went to their heads. I wish I could take back all that effort.
well, SO is probably the highest quality data source for a language model and the rest of the internet is just diluting the final latent space limited by Jon Skeet.
What you are noticing in a long term is the "community" knowledge and communication which the chatGPT is now kind of destroying. In some sense, it is no different from the difference between studying along and studying with your peers at a university.
You can definitely study alone and achieve perfect grades, but studying with your peers is how you build relationships for future life and take your community forward as a whole.
needed to implement a language feature that was a bit complicated and im not familiar with it so just planned with claude to do it, and after each write/fix cycle it just wouldn't work right.... gave up, went back to SO copy pasted the (not perfect but enough to start from) answer and worked up from there...
at the same time my knowledge grew and im more confident to do this same capability myself whereas reiterating with claude it was just a slog and i didn't learn much...
i think i may be starting to sour on these "do it all for me" usage scenarios for ai... especially for unfamiliar areas...
Agreed. Which is also odd, if you think about it. Surely with the amount of compute Anthropic and others have available, they could test each of the solutions in the SO data they surely have and rank them based on efficiency/elegance/other criteria and remove poor solutions from their training data.
Definitely not better off. SO was fairly mean spirited, but nowhere else has such a vast trove of high quality answers to common software problems been collected. SO likely trained many of these models with its answers, and I don't know what software development will look like when it dies.
No where else has such a vast trove of high quality answers been hidden because the question was closed as duplicate when someone else asked that question later.
I am thinking to make canned encyclopaedia of stackoverflow answers.
Claude/Grok/Gemini/Chatgpt answers are often so… how to say it… misleading? I have to stop the conversation as it leads nowhere (and it is not a skill issue :)
https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...
I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...
Clicking through to the query for the first chart, I see the peak of ~300k in May of 2020, and it was ~3k in April of 2026 (the last complete month). I’m flabbergasted.
It makes sense to me. There's literally no use for Stack Overflow anymore. LLMs, for all their faults, are a far better way to get answers to coding problems.
It's just rare to see something accelerate to zero like that. I feel like most dying products have a fade out over time where there still remains a niche use for them, they don't nosedive to almost nothing.
Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views.
Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.
Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.
Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.
But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens.
There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.
The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.
It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.
It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job.
if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise).
I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency.
Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves.
It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.
Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so.
It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
Yeah, as I understand it, they wanted to optimize for Google search. This meant having "canonical" answers. This killed the site in the long term. In the short term, it worked wonderfully, and the founders made a (well deserved) killing.
Agree. But I asked a couple questions about a year ago and got zero response. It's not just people asking questions who deserted SO, it is also people answering them (probably a chicken and egg problem - reversal of network effects).
I had a work SO account with many questions/answers - everything fine. Later I created a SO account for use with my private projects and happened to have answered a couple questions without getting upvotes. The algorithm banned me from answering questions with the remark that I should improve the quality of my answers. You can bet that I never answered a question again on SO with any account.
if the mismoderation did not kill stackoverflow, it at the least made people who might otherwise have supported the site feel like nothing of value was lost.
LLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway).
Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc.
But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment.
Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.
There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"
And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.
Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.
There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.
When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.
I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.
I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
Reddit in a way is about finding an echo chamber with people who share your beliefs, not necessarily finding facts. Great for spreading misinformation and smelling your own farts.
Just look at the graph, Covid peak aside its previous peak was in 2016 and it was in continuous decline since then. All LLMS this was increase the slope.
The current owners have sure been trying to turn it into one with half-assed "features" like open ended questions and the thankfully killed off (for now) beta redesign.
A forum records free-form conversations between specific people, where every post can be edited at most by its original author (if even that). SE sites are libraries of questions that may be generalized beyond the original author's circumstances, and if someone's post does not fit the rigid Q&A form, it may be moderated away.
I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero.
You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.
Not sure about SaaS, For nearly all our SaaS AI's just made it easier to work with, we haven't got rid of a single SaaS product, but via APIs, we've integrated and automated a LOT more of our existing SaaS products.
> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertize.
This is just dead man kicking. This will be less and less valuable thing as all sort of info go out of date.
But if it this, and IT WILL go out of date, what will be new learning data for all of those models?
Previously with SO people just enjoyed helping other people. But if they will be helping primarily multibillion dollar "AI" companies, then why would they? If nobody will be doing that then how this knowledge will be shared? There is open source projects and docs but they are blocking stuff more and more and some point I wont be surprised if you will have to log in into Debian or Arch Linux system to be able to read those docs.
But then if those companies and OSS will be not adding to training data what will? Will it be that programmers will be just writing new code for llms, for the money till they will make themselves obsolete?
Or at some point those "AI" companies will use anything they can to get ahead of the competition, even if this is against contracts or the law?
The longer I think about the future the more grim it looks.
Stack Overflow had been a zombie even before they sold to Prosus in 2021. It became over-moderated and calcified.
Amongst even simple stuff, they refused to update basic library questions when said libraries had new releases with additional calls and performance enhancements.
Sometime in 2018 I went so far as to blacklist the domain so it wouldn't inadvertently pollute research.
Yea, I abandoned it before then too - it was clearly over-filled with old answers with no context as to if they're still valid.
Everyone has had the experience where the top response was right for 3 months, but is now impossible to fix, so you have to just somehow know that you need the 19th answer with only 6 upvotes (versus 387). That was a problem early on, and afaict has exclusively worsened over its whole lifetime. They seem to be proud of it as if it was a major feature, and have afaict never built anything at all to try to address it.
(Yes, editing answers is "a solution", but you can't do that as a newcomer who knows better. You've got to commit to the ecosystem for months... when it had just failed you. Of course most visitors don't do that!)
Where do we go now for the answers validated by the community? How do we build knowledge? The answers that Claude gives might look good, but without community edits, votes, and comments it's a lot harder to evaluate.
I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.
One thing I've been curious about is how the other sites on StackExchange have fared. A lot of those are pretty interesting. Anecdotally the few that I check occasionally also seem to have declined a lot.
I was wondering the same thing! I was pretty involved in the graphic design SE to get it out of beta, and even back then you could kind of tell that the format can start to struggle once the lower-hanging fruit has been picked.
> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models.
What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ?
Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need data from real humans figuring stuffs out.
Within a couple of years, LLMs or equivalent AI engines will have the ability to generate factual knowledge themselves using their "outdated" knowledge and their reasoning mechanisms.
For example, one of the classical requests from S.O. questions and GitHub issues is a "minimal reproducible example " of the question/problem.
So a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write that, run it, see the issue , go to the library/related-system code or documentation (for closed source) and derive a solution
There have been studies where an ai that feed on its own data become dumber and dumber. I don't think it's just going to 'generate factual knowledge' Ad vitam æternam.
I recently had a look at my stats (last time I checked was maybe 10 years ago) and I noticed the SO and security line stagnating fir a good few years. They used to be the one raising steeply, but at some point the sites because so toxic, with unsufferable downvoters that I completely gave up.
But other sites rised steadily. There are wonderful sutes in the SE network where you get great answers from very helpful people.
SO and a few other sites are dragging the whole idea to the bottom.
If you want to see unhinged psychopaths in action have a look at SE or SO Meta. Or maybe not.
one of the interesting properties of public forums like SO is that the maintainers of software packages get visibility into the problems and frustrations that their users experience
we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models
i haven't been on stackoverflow for maybe 6 months, haven't seen it on google search, or needed to ask much on google either. Maybe they did a web search. On the plus side, its still used by AI agents
Not really surprised tbh, the goal of stack overflow was to essentially help out in unique problems that users have, but ever since the advent of AI, I personally have had less and less need to go to stack overflow. The one advantage of stack overflow though, is that unlike AI where once you find the answer, its gone, in stack overflow, it can help the next guy along. Kinda feels like we are losing a bit more of the humanity aspect in engineering.
There are a lot of reasons why that forum is dead. I loved answering questions on it in the heyday, it was fun and I learned a ton. The owners let a bunch "admins" run it into the ground first though.
Another user that "outranks" you, but knows nothing about subject matter, has changed the content of your post. The great news is, it's still attributed to you. They removed the words "please" and "thank you" and other kind words to make you seem like a dick. Or they may have changed the wording completely to match their completely arbitrary tone and style. Have a nice day and kindly piss off, there's nothing you can do about it, hah, loser.
where is all the future SO-type content for LLMs going to come from, with all the little "gotchas" that people discovered, or, more importantly, corrections of incorrect info
I never posted on SO, but I did search it a lot; great resource
I never looked at it as a "community", just a place to find info
Once I looked up how to add placeholder text on a textbox with Swing and someone on Stack Overflow said to add a random JAR file into my project but the DuckDuckGo AI gave me the correct answer. So good riddance I guess.
Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.
Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.
Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!
"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"
Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011
The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.
Now:
"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"
"This is an excellent question, and shows a real attention to detail! Let me walk you through it in detail, with a particular focus on Django version and the evolution of the semantics there.
[...]
Bottom line: it's exactly the same as in Django 1.3 back in August 2011. But by anchoring to a specific version, you make the question unambiguous and much more insightful.m"
2 replies →
Poetic how they were so ridiculous about meticulously curating a database of answers where the ultimate consumer would be LLMs that really don’t care about duplicates.
2 replies →
Stack Overflow had two main value propositions for me. Either questions about standard way/community agreed way to accomplish something which has multiple aproaches, like "what is the most common way to take out the first element or null from a list".
I suspect moderators was very careful of allowing such questions to multiply on the site.
The other value I found was in fringe questions, like how do you access the model object of the value of a django form field from the template environment. If there even is an answer, the answer will hopefully point me to some non-documented way to accomplish what I want, or give hints to what kind of ugly hack I need to create. Those question don't seem to have much moderations applied to them at all.
What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity".
It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.
1 reply →
While there were many zealots that gave SO this reputation, I don't know if that's the reason it died.
As someone who frequently answered questions in the 'New' queue, the sheer amount of rule breaking, low effort, and obvious duplicates was astounding. I eventually quit answering questions because 99% of them were not worth interacting with. Just vote close and move on.
Ultimately, I think SO is dead because it got too popular and moderation became untenable.
You sound exactly like an enforcer of the cultural problem the GP was talking about. Group think is healthy in small doses, but overdo it and it kills the group.
It's simply not on a new user to understand whatever group interpretation you have made up on top of the written rules. There is no platonic ideal of a good question, the project was doomed from the start if people take that idea seriously. The UX says submit a question about coding while the unwritten rules say submit a flawless peer-reviewed abstract or we close in 3 minutes.
Ironically those 99% asking low effort questions will gain more than everybody who looks at a "high value" question put together. Truly, nobody on SO learned anything writing those questions, they were just regurgitating their phd/previous work. It was grossly performative and I'm glad it's gone.
1 reply →
It is dead because everybody is asking LLMs now.
Can you imagine ChatGPT terminating a conversation because it thought your question was "low effort?" The behavior wouldn't be viewed as helpful or aligned, and nobody would use it.
StackOverflow was, all too often, not helpful or aligned. It died because the staff were unable to get the moderators to be helpful.
Well there are new users all the time and can’t expect them to now all of the in’s and out’s of the rules while posted there are still hidden rules. It’s become a toxic site.
The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read
> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.
> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.
Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.
I came here to say something like this (mostly about LaTeX), but you and the posters you're replying to said it better than I could have. I had too many posts treated as "not an appropriate question" or some such, and got tired of posting only to get my post rejected. To be sure, there are some poor posts (my first post was that, because I didn't include enough information), but the "vigilante" term you use was by and large all too appropriate.
[flagged]
I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.
I mostly frequent smaller subreddits with at most a handful of mods for niche subjects and it's great. Then when I occasionally need to ask a question in a bigger one... out come the mods who live for the rules.
1 reply →
Funny thing is I could actually deal with the annoying rules as well as all the rudeness and smugness. It crossed the line for me when it became clear they had degenerated to literal deletionism. As in, they don't just close your question now, they actually delete it straight up alongside any useful information it might have contained.
Tried to go back to one of my closed questions to look up a link someone had dropped in the comments, only to find out some moderator had fucking deleted the question for literally no reason, despite the fact there was actual fucking content in there. It actually drove me over the edge and made me go all in on my own domain and my own website. If I ever post anything there again, it will always be framed as links to my own site where their deletionism will never reach. I simply refuse to be erased.
... and I wonder if this culture won't be baked into the LLMs using this dataset for training ...
... and of course, this wondering applies to other training sets, like usenet ...
Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming.
But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time:
If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer).
At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems.
(Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).
Early years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.
a.k.a enshitification
13 replies →
StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.
Ime, math.SE had a much friendlier vibe than most other SE sites. Primarily because you could ask about a problem you were struggling with and get help. No moderator would instantly show up and close the question as a dupe of a ten-year-old question about double integration techniques or some such.
People asking questions mostly wanted help, but most moderators thought they were curating some kind of question-answer form encyclopaedia. Very different perspectives.
I think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.
Agreed for the math one. I went there when I was dealing with game engines and needed something geometry related or the like rather than to stackoverflow and they were far nicer.
Even inside SO each language and topic would have different standards. A C question would not be answered in the same way one about a JS framework would.
I'm curious about the other Stack Exchange sites. Have they seen the same decline as Stack Overflow?
Stack Overflow was the "flagship" product of the Stack Exchange company, and if the company pivots to AI, I wonder what the future holds for the other Q&A sites on the SE network.
2 replies →
Fair point! I suspect the toxicity/usefulness has a linear relationship with how well trod the particular community is.
Like the Internet, it got less friendly the more popular it got. And there were no measures in place to retain and reward the friendliness.
Jeff Atwood thought a lot about this when he subsequently created Discourse. Nudge people to treat their community members nice.
The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.
> Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm.,
That is great to hear. I am glad that the original creators of StackOverflow got their liquidity event and are well off financially I suspect.
That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.
2 replies →
A firm is sold when its owners believe they will get the best price. The selling itself is more of a symptom than a cause.
It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years”
It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.
2 replies →
Businesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.
1 reply →
I always associated SO issues with the unpaid moderators, who were not "bought" but rather inherited I suppose.
What did they change?
1.8bln
I don't think so. StackOverflow itself didn't really change for any of that period. Any changes in users must have been due to external factors.
hmm, I got rid of WhatsApp the day it was sold to Facebook and never touched it since. I don't think anything in the app changed that day.
4 replies →
Stack Overflow with all of its shortcomings was a marvel of the internet at it's peak. People especially in early were chasing karma and anything you asked, you were sure to get some answer. Not always right but some answer. While for sure LLMs will give much better answers on average. I feel that it's a piece of humanity we've lost there that should be adequately remembered and the memory cherished.
getting a wrong answer in a public forum can be great to motivate corrections :p
I am also going to miss searching for something, finding a stack overflow thread and noticing that I wrote that answer years ago. :)
3 replies →
I rather have the myriad of phpBB powered forums that used to exist all over the place, instead of StackOverflow.
The irony is that StackOverflow kind of killed them all, and eventually also became a victim of the next wave.
Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?
We unironically need an StackOverflow for LLMs.
LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
Unfortunately the LLMs are concentrated into few providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) so there's a chance they each end up doing their own private (and closed) StackOverflows. By leveraging their private StackOverflows, their LLMs will be able to short-circuit complex reasoning, saving tokens, time, and money.
> LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged? If by other LLMs, then we run into a problem of infinite descent. If by humans, then you'd need some way to motivate expert or semi-expert humans (so that their ratings are themselves correct) to participate in a massive project of evaluating the correctness of a constant stream of content from content-generators that never sleep.
1 reply →
This actually reminds me of the MCP concept. Similar?
Plenty of documentation, and plenty of code that the AI can read itself.
E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.
This and the the other thread that talks about RL and synthetic data seem to suggest that AI can figure out all the technical issues without humans looking into them. I'm not sure if that's true at all.
That assumes there is documentation or examples. A big reason Stack Overflow took off was people struggling with things like the Android API documentation.
Some of those discussions made people go figure out how to do it, and then post it as an answer. The knowledge didn't exist anywhere until they did.
2 replies →
Sounds nothing like the world we live in. When has there ever been a time where there were an abundance of software documentation? How can plenty of documentation or code be made if AI scraper bots hammer servers that host them, steal content and drive people away from the actual authors?
The only way I could see this being surfaced the same is if the code essentially had a SO answer written into the doc comment.
1 reply →
lots of undocumented gotchas that only surfaced because someone used it and posted about it
I don't think its much of an issue
- Rl envs + synthetic data + human annotated
- Usage data from codex/claude code/cursor
Most of the model abilities in coding come from post-training, not pretraining
A better question is what's left for those who don't have access to that. We went from publicly available to vacuumed from private users
2 replies →
Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about too. LLMs have basically profited from "stealing" (arguably) user-generated content from a time when there were no LLMs. In the LLM era there won't be a new Stack Overflow to train LLMs on going forward.
We're getting closer to Dead Internet Theory too where a lot of accounts, particularly on Twitter, are just LLMs. I imagine it's a huge problem on Reddit too. Just people farming karma or otherwise involved in influence campaigns or simply grifting to ad revenue.
So we're going to get to a point where the corpus we train LLMs on will itself just be filled with LLM slops. Self-reinforcing slop. Is that the future?
It's happening here too, I saw dang hint that they're not even responding to a lot of questions about it anymore because of the volume of the problem.
If you browse with showdead on you'll be seeing a lot more of what look like reasonable comments greyed out.
It's been studied,LLM that feed on its own data regress and it becomes very bad after a few generations.
People still like to talk about the interesting problems they solved and how. Issue isn't SO having choked itself out, issue is that even the major search engines are pivoting towards AI answers instead of surfacing small blogs.
I'm sure the AI companies will continue to pirate textbooks and papers, like always.
Careful, you can't point out that the AI emperor has no clothes or you'll get called a Luddite.
Yes. Very.
Pointing them to docs? Which is anyway what stack overflow answers did?
I wrote multiple answers to questions that weren't just "point to docs". And even when it is pointing to docs you are providing the reasoning as to why it works one way or another.
What docs? Who writes docs now that AIs answer everything?
5 replies →
How do you convince people to not want an instant answer? Even if SO didn’t result in so many “What have you tried?” responses and immediate closures, most people would still prefer instant feedback.
For me, the strict requirements for posting questions help me to define the problem well, and after writing the question properly, I'd have the solution.
Early Stack Overflow as an amazing "rubber duck" (see "rubber duck debugging").
Unfortunately in recent years it became such a traumatizing experience to post a question there (even if you made a perfectly legit question you'd likely get downvoted and closed ... and god help you if you posted a question with an issue).
It completely changed from "I posted a question I can answer myself, and someone said so in the comments" to "I posted ANY question and everyone on the site teamed up to get rid of that question".
Call me crazy but sometimes I still find a better solution on StackOverflow than what Claude Code insists to do.
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
Same here. LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one. The "long tail" of solutions is usually lost due to how tokens are sampled from the LLM's probability distribution.
What I found to help a lot is to ask for e.g. 10 different solutions to a problem and then choosing one of them. Sometimes, this even leads to borderline creative solutions if there aren't 10 different ones.
In theory reasoning tokens should do the equivalent of this - explicitly create options outside of the quick-response probability space, so those can guide future generation.
In practice, models that do this won't be prioritized as much, because the economics of thinking tokens that stop by default at, say, one option plus a bit more planning (short of full alternatives) would be superior as long as billing is per-user instead of per-token. So we'll still need to play games with prompting!
1 reply →
> LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one.
I remember how Stack Overflow would close questions as duplicates just because somebody suggested the wrong answer that is also the right answer to the existing question. The best way to get a correct answer on Stack Overflow (and forums before that) was to post the wrong answer as part of your question.
One thing that SO had was you could see multiple solutions and implementations for something. Sometimes the "best" solution isn't very readable code, sometimes you are able to understand the problem better when you see a bunch of people solving it in different ways and arguing about it like angry monkeys.
It really could be bad though.
The bot can do that kind of thing, too.
"Show me 6 very different solutions, and present arguments for/against each one as if a bunch of angry monkeys."
SO has always had a pretty strong stance against opinion-based questions, but this is maybe the niche they should be exploring now. Humans still have a lot to say about the "best" solution to a given problem. The whole idea of an "accepted" answer could be removed, for example, since that's what AI will already generate.
Much of what Claude insists you do probably came from SO.
Or Reddit. I don't know about Claude but Gemini has given me answers that are verbatim comments from Reddit.
7 replies →
Yeah, that's basically it.
In robotics there is no free lunch dataset. You'll have to gather it yourself, but if you do that, you run into an obvious problem: labeling.
With SO, you literally have the best possible scenario, because the data is clearly structured and separated into prompt and answer (aka label).
Your objective function is literally "Say what he said".
I've seen chatgpt word for word plagiarise stack overflow answers
2 replies →
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
You're right but that site has been sputtering culturally for some time. I put a lot of effort into editing questions and answers on ServerFault (part of SO) but I feel that time was wasted. I think they knew for a while they just wanted to sell it and just stopped caring. A number of editors were allowed to be jerks for too long and it went to their heads. I wish I could take back all that effort.
well, SO is probably the highest quality data source for a language model and the rest of the internet is just diluting the final latent space limited by Jon Skeet.
What you are noticing in a long term is the "community" knowledge and communication which the chatGPT is now kind of destroying. In some sense, it is no different from the difference between studying along and studying with your peers at a university.
You can definitely study alone and achieve perfect grades, but studying with your peers is how you build relationships for future life and take your community forward as a whole.
was just gonna post the same thing
needed to implement a language feature that was a bit complicated and im not familiar with it so just planned with claude to do it, and after each write/fix cycle it just wouldn't work right.... gave up, went back to SO copy pasted the (not perfect but enough to start from) answer and worked up from there...
at the same time my knowledge grew and im more confident to do this same capability myself whereas reiterating with claude it was just a slog and i didn't learn much...
i think i may be starting to sour on these "do it all for me" usage scenarios for ai... especially for unfamiliar areas...
Agreed. Which is also odd, if you think about it. Surely with the amount of compute Anthropic and others have available, they could test each of the solutions in the SO data they surely have and rank them based on efficiency/elegance/other criteria and remove poor solutions from their training data.
Definitely not better off. SO was fairly mean spirited, but nowhere else has such a vast trove of high quality answers to common software problems been collected. SO likely trained many of these models with its answers, and I don't know what software development will look like when it dies.
No where else has such a vast trove of high quality answers been hidden because the question was closed as duplicate when someone else asked that question later.
I am thinking to make canned encyclopaedia of stackoverflow answers.
Claude/Grok/Gemini/Chatgpt answers are often so… how to say it… misleading? I have to stop the conversation as it leads nowhere (and it is not a skill issue :)
And, the AI trained on Stack Overflow. So if no one is posting new questions, and new answers. What will AI train on next, for the next thing.
Stack Overflow and Reddit are still getting threads. And as AI gets smarter, the questions will also expand.
your prompts, and the code you have it review.
1 reply →
We may need to create a community driven version of SO. Hard for it to be a successful business these days.
https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...
1 reply →
What are you looking for and finding on stack overflow that isn't begginer to intermediate level?
agreed; sometimes the most useful info on SO wasn't in the replies, but the follow-up comments to the replies
I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...
Clicking through to the query for the first chart, I see the peak of ~300k in May of 2020, and it was ~3k in April of 2026 (the last complete month). I’m flabbergasted.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/193252...
For perspective, 300k per month is one new question every 9 seconds.
3k per month is one question every 15 minutes.
Nah.... surely not. [looking at the link] Holy shitsnacks... I gotta be reading this wrong. Is it really dying? Like seriously, wtf.
The Ghost of Expert Sexchange gets its revenge.
It makes sense to me. There's literally no use for Stack Overflow anymore. LLMs, for all their faults, are a far better way to get answers to coding problems.
It's just rare to see something accelerate to zero like that. I feel like most dying products have a fade out over time where there still remains a niche use for them, they don't nosedive to almost nothing.
Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views.
There's more than one reason that forum is dead.
Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.
Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.
10 replies →
IMO it was a combination of moderators and users
Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
14 replies →
> but it always was that way.
I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.
But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens.
There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.
The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.
It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5
It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise).
I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
1 reply →
It was always strict, that was its feature. But it was dying well before ChatGPT came along, due to going from strict to unusably over-moderated.
1 reply →
Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency.
Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves.
It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.
Why are you trying to do that? You should do this totally different thing that I do because I know how to do it.
Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so.
It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
1 reply →
yeah, everyone seems to just ellide over the ability of LLM's to scrape all of stack overflow and do the same hack and slash response.
Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.
StackOverflow's extremely strict moderation was probably the #1 reason it turned into a high quality resource rather than a dumpster fire like reddit.
Yeah, as I understand it, they wanted to optimize for Google search. This meant having "canonical" answers. This killed the site in the long term. In the short term, it worked wonderfully, and the founders made a (well deserved) killing.
Agree. But I asked a couple questions about a year ago and got zero response. It's not just people asking questions who deserted SO, it is also people answering them (probably a chicken and egg problem - reversal of network effects).
I had a work SO account with many questions/answers - everything fine. Later I created a SO account for use with my private projects and happened to have answered a couple questions without getting upvotes. The algorithm banned me from answering questions with the remark that I should improve the quality of my answers. You can bet that I never answered a question again on SO with any account.
This has been my experience. Glad they got what they finally deserved.
if the mismoderation did not kill stackoverflow, it at the least made people who might otherwise have supported the site feel like nothing of value was lost.
The SO podcast was fun when it was running
LLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway).
Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc.
But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment.
Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.
to paraphrase a bad movie: what does a qa site need with 1.8 billion dollars?
agree, best way to preserve the original goal imo
This is happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.
I feel reddit is having a near death moment.
There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"
And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.
Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.
There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.
When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.
I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.
I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
1 reply →
The government shills in /r/worldnews get paid the same if their conversation partner is a bot or a human
Every other post too. At this point it is quite challenging to find a genuine human interaction on popular online sites.
Reddit in a way is about finding an echo chamber with people who share your beliefs, not necessarily finding facts. Great for spreading misinformation and smelling your own farts.
Just look at the graph, Covid peak aside its previous peak was in 2016 and it was in continuous decline since then. All LLMS this was increase the slope.
My speed was already declining on the highway after I let off the gas, all the brick stopped truck did was increase the slope.
Forum? What forum? When has Stack Overflow ever been a forum?
The current owners have sure been trying to turn it into one with half-assed "features" like open ended questions and the thankfully killed off (for now) beta redesign.
How is it not a forum? Sure, it has some search features and a "comments/answers" dichotomy, but at the root it's just phpBB with fancier formatting
A forum records free-form conversations between specific people, where every post can be edited at most by its original author (if even that). SE sites are libraries of questions that may be generalized beyond the original author's circumstances, and if someone's post does not fit the rigid Q&A form, it may be moderated away.
Wow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off.
That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?
I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero.
You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.
> You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage
Slashdot is firmly in this stage of its existence, and honestly it's kinda fun
I wonder what stage of the loop HN finds itself in.
1 reply →
> What else can AI make decline all the way to zero?
Human facing web search. Most SaS.
Not sure about SaaS, For nearly all our SaaS AI's just made it easier to work with, we haven't got rid of a single SaaS product, but via APIs, we've integrated and automated a LOT more of our existing SaaS products.
1 reply →
> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertize.
This is just dead man kicking. This will be less and less valuable thing as all sort of info go out of date.
But if it this, and IT WILL go out of date, what will be new learning data for all of those models?
Previously with SO people just enjoyed helping other people. But if they will be helping primarily multibillion dollar "AI" companies, then why would they? If nobody will be doing that then how this knowledge will be shared? There is open source projects and docs but they are blocking stuff more and more and some point I wont be surprised if you will have to log in into Debian or Arch Linux system to be able to read those docs.
But then if those companies and OSS will be not adding to training data what will? Will it be that programmers will be just writing new code for llms, for the money till they will make themselves obsolete?
Or at some point those "AI" companies will use anything they can to get ahead of the competition, even if this is against contracts or the law?
The longer I think about the future the more grim it looks.
Stack Overflow had been a zombie even before they sold to Prosus in 2021. It became over-moderated and calcified.
Amongst even simple stuff, they refused to update basic library questions when said libraries had new releases with additional calls and performance enhancements.
Sometime in 2018 I went so far as to blacklist the domain so it wouldn't inadvertently pollute research.
Yea, I abandoned it before then too - it was clearly over-filled with old answers with no context as to if they're still valid.
Everyone has had the experience where the top response was right for 3 months, but is now impossible to fix, so you have to just somehow know that you need the 19th answer with only 6 upvotes (versus 387). That was a problem early on, and afaict has exclusively worsened over its whole lifetime. They seem to be proud of it as if it was a major feature, and have afaict never built anything at all to try to address it.
(Yes, editing answers is "a solution", but you can't do that as a newcomer who knows better. You've got to commit to the ecosystem for months... when it had just failed you. Of course most visitors don't do that!)
Where do we go now for the answers validated by the community? How do we build knowledge? The answers that Claude gives might look good, but without community edits, votes, and comments it's a lot harder to evaluate.
I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.
Some of my favourite SO posts (not all funny):
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa...
https://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-audito...
I hope they stay with us. I don't much care for the company or what's left of the community.
Discussion when the source article is from: January.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345
One thing I've been curious about is how the other sites on StackExchange have fared. A lot of those are pretty interesting. Anecdotally the few that I check occasionally also seem to have declined a lot.
I was wondering the same thing! I was pretty involved in the graphic design SE to get it out of beta, and even back then you could kind of tell that the format can start to struggle once the lower-hanging fruit has been picked.
> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models.
What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ?
Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need data from real humans figuring stuffs out.
Within a couple of years, LLMs or equivalent AI engines will have the ability to generate factual knowledge themselves using their "outdated" knowledge and their reasoning mechanisms.
For example, one of the classical requests from S.O. questions and GitHub issues is a "minimal reproducible example " of the question/problem.
So a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write that, run it, see the issue , go to the library/related-system code or documentation (for closed source) and derive a solution
There have been studies where an ai that feed on its own data become dumber and dumber. I don't think it's just going to 'generate factual knowledge' Ad vitam æternam.
Title of this could be more informative: Working with Stack Overflow Data to Investigate its Decline
Few hundred k rep here, across Stack Exchange.
I recently had a look at my stats (last time I checked was maybe 10 years ago) and I noticed the SO and security line stagnating fir a good few years. They used to be the one raising steeply, but at some point the sites because so toxic, with unsufferable downvoters that I completely gave up.
But other sites rised steadily. There are wonderful sutes in the SE network where you get great answers from very helpful people.
SO and a few other sites are dragging the whole idea to the bottom.
If you want to see unhinged psychopaths in action have a look at SE or SO Meta. Or maybe not.
one of the interesting properties of public forums like SO is that the maintainers of software packages get visibility into the problems and frustrations that their users experience
we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models
i haven't been on stackoverflow for maybe 6 months, haven't seen it on google search, or needed to ask much on google either. Maybe they did a web search. On the plus side, its still used by AI agents
Not really surprised tbh, the goal of stack overflow was to essentially help out in unique problems that users have, but ever since the advent of AI, I personally have had less and less need to go to stack overflow. The one advantage of stack overflow though, is that unlike AI where once you find the answer, its gone, in stack overflow, it can help the next guy along. Kinda feels like we are losing a bit more of the humanity aspect in engineering.
To be honest, I stopped using SO with the advent of AI, I completely forgot about it.
I don't care about being sold, bad moderation or other aspects of its decline. AI gives me all answers I need.
> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertise.
One has to appreciate the irony on the use of the word "trust" there ...
Does anyone even remember that foursquare was once a social media app?
People pivot and leverage what they previously were to become something new all the time.
I'm curious if they could pivot into a site where LLMs post questions and answer problems posted by other LLMs.
There are a lot of reasons why that forum is dead. I loved answering questions on it in the heyday, it was fun and I learned a ton. The owners let a bunch "admins" run it into the ground first though.
Another user that "outranks" you, but knows nothing about subject matter, has changed the content of your post. The great news is, it's still attributed to you. They removed the words "please" and "thank you" and other kind words to make you seem like a dick. Or they may have changed the wording completely to match their completely arbitrary tone and style. Have a nice day and kindly piss off, there's nothing you can do about it, hah, loser.
where is all the future SO-type content for LLMs going to come from, with all the little "gotchas" that people discovered, or, more importantly, corrections of incorrect info
I never posted on SO, but I did search it a lot; great resource
I never looked at it as a "community", just a place to find info
Did the founders have an exit or liquidity from Stack Overflow? I hope so.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/launching-the-rural-guaranteed...
Good work everyone. We gave our labour freely and see how we all profited!
They never liked my answers. Not once. So they can eat dust!
Are all of them dead or just the programming exchange?
Wow, has it really gone all the way down to zero?
[flagged]
[flagged]
Once I looked up how to add placeholder text on a textbox with Swing and someone on Stack Overflow said to add a random JAR file into my project but the DuckDuckGo AI gave me the correct answer. So good riddance I guess.
[flagged]