← Back to context

Comment by wtfHN26

15 hours ago

Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.

I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.

AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.

18 comments

wtfHN26

Reply
f311a  14 hours ago

The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.

  • mort96  13 hours ago

    Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.

    • rcxdude  4 hours ago

      Well, a combination of that and understanding human psychology. For any of these common issues, SO usually had an answer of what you were supposed to do, but it was usually very counterintuitive.

  • MeetingsBrowser  14 hours ago

    > at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered

    I don’t buy this.

    Programming as an industry is famous for constantly evolving and changing.

    • f311a  11 hours ago

      Yet the most viewed questions are about how to undo git commit, how to sort an array, how to select stuff in jquery, how to group by in SQL and so on.

      General questions about programming languages, SQL and git don't change that much.

pydry  14 hours ago

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

  • embedding-shape  14 hours ago

    - Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only"

    - Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library

    - Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked

    - Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs

    - Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP

    - Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong