r/programming 9h ago

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https://stackoverflow.com/

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470 Upvotes

137 comments sorted by

u/programming-ModTeam 5h ago

r/programming is not a support forum, or the place for AskReddit-type questions.

334

u/axiosjackson 9h ago

The fact you have to join Discord servers for help with plenty of open-source projects is a travesty. The only new data AI is going to get is from a few Reddit posts, unless Discord starts selling their data too.

192

u/meganeyangire 8h ago edited 8h ago

Discord is where knowledge goes to die. Chats there are nearly unsearchable for humans, but perfectly ripe for data harvesting.

95

u/light24bulbs 7h ago edited 7h ago

The undiscovereability makes it completely unsuitable. I'd literally rather have a forum from 2003.

The internet sucks now, I'm sorry but that's my opinion. Unregulated consolidation and a lack of enforced common protocols/OSS has made it bad.

14

u/xian0 7h ago

Discord is an illusion maintained by it's walled garden. It's in an awkward space between a chat and a forum which doesn't work well for much. An active Discord channel would have been considered a weird IRC ghost town. You can expect 700 idle people and a trickle of messages, not free-flowing lines of text with an expert just a command away. For those that care "having a Discord" is more important than talking in the Discord.

13

u/light24bulbs 7h ago

Discord works pretty well for gaming, and that's it.

What bothers me about this whole situation is that with distributed hash table technology and some of the other peer-to-peer and protocol technologies that have been invented, we could build incredible distributed communication systems, if we wanted to. It's hard, but it could be done. Huge sections of the internet could either be p2p or protocols. Reddit itself could easily be a protocol.

20

u/meganeyangire 7h ago

The monkey's paw curls. You get IRC from 2003 without bouncer, but with a bunch of paid emojis.

3

u/PaddiM8 6h ago

Some discord servers are indexed by answeroverflow which means questions there do end up in search engines.

3

u/hedgehog_dragon 7h ago

I love discord, but NOT as a base for projects and documentation...

1

u/Phiive 6h ago

An old student of mine built answeroverflow which aims to solve this problem! It’s actually really great he is an incredible developer and it’s a complete product

38

u/sliminho77 8h ago

The discord-ification of any community and information you need for basically anything online now is going to ruin the internet

1

u/deveronipizza 7h ago

But somehow save us from AI too?

5

u/Norphesius 6h ago

I dunno about that. You could easily have a bot sitting in a discord server slurping up all the chat data as it comes in, feeding it into LLM training sets. 

If you can't/don't want to join a discord, or the discord no longer exists, your only option for Q&A might be AI.

-2

u/orangeyougladiator 7h ago

I mean it existed before the Internet forums took off. IRC was the same thing.

10

u/mobyte 8h ago

You don’t love going into a chatroom where 5 other people are asking questions at the same time and yours gets buried by the other 5 people and tons of people answering their questions instead of yours?

14

u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 8h ago

Discord will obviously sell their/your data. lol

Matrix/Element has real end-to-end encryption, not as strong as Signal, but good enough for most people.

8

u/UnexpectedAnanas 7h ago

The solution to information being privatized isn't to lock data up even tighter. We need more open information on the open web.

1

u/Norphesius 6h ago

But the way things are going now, bots will just suck that open info up from the source, shove it into an LLM, and then everyone will go to that first instead of the origin.

1

u/Zatujit 3h ago

I mean right now AI researchers are buying books, scanning them for AI and then destroying them; what would stop them from making a scrapper for matrix forums for open source projects?

1

u/Zatujit 3h ago

But why do you want end to end encryption for a swe forum just have a website i dont get it

21

u/Optic_Fusion1 9h ago edited 9h ago

I mean, it's certainly not difficult in the slightest to make a forum for programmers but also like.... how's it gonna get funded or get enough users and stuff like that, yk?

edit: Downvote, really? There's literally nothing incorrect about what I said.

I could spin up a xenforo or phpbb forum or code something from scratch but it's rather useless without enough users and funding to keep it from dying immediately

3

u/f3xjc 8h ago

Maybe it'll be github dev are already there. Then they can feed it to openai.

But these questions are very close to what an ai can most easily answer. They are probably good enough to answer those even for an hypothetical new language. They don't just parrot.

2

u/Optic_Fusion1 8h ago

Yea, there's the AI thing too which can easily kill a new website. I could spin up a default XF install & cleanly merge (to the best of XF's limitations anyways) all SO & the most popular discords but realistically it ain't getting popular enough lol

1

u/PleX 5h ago

I ran several forums and BBS systems (yes I'm old). The access to information is completely getting bent over and not even getting a reach-around.

-2

u/VictoryMotel 8h ago

I mean like, yk???

Edit: really? Downvotes?

2

u/Twig1554 8h ago

I think that new data is going to start to come directly from the environments. Xcode, Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc. The AI assistants that exist withing them will cannibalize the projects that they're used on to learn broader patterns. Sure, you might only use it to solve one tiny problem - but if it can read your whole file, your whole project, it can learn a lot on the process.

Plus, open source isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and those are usually hosted on some public facing site. Even if the users only talk about it on a niche Discord, if the project is up on Github, someone can read it easy enough.

3

u/pragmaticpro 9h ago

Not suggesting this is a good thing by any means, but I imagine "new data" will be derived from the models themselves being used to work through the types of questions and problems people used to use stackoverflow for.

5

u/psioniclizard 8h ago

Probably not as much as you think. At least not officially. All the models have massive data churn just to keep stable and feeding their own results back in will just make the output worse.

In fact they probably go to quite some lengths to keep LLM data out where possible.

7

u/tobotic 8h ago

The problem with that is feedback loops. A small error in the original input data gets compounded as it is fed back into the system generation after generation.

0

u/nanotree 8h ago

I mean, yes, you're absolutely right. It may not be the only source, but eventually it will be a significant source of new data, if not the primary source. And it's anyone's guess to what will happen once the models are trained on 99% AI generated data. It seems like this is a good way for something like LLMs to degrade in output quality (which I'm already not super thrilled with Sonnet all the time, and I've yet to get my hands on Opus). I guess we will be finding out one day, perhaps sooner than later, if the feedback loop degrades the model's performance to the point where output is largely unusable. I doubt the AI companies will let it get to that point before they realize they need to pivot and somehow provide a novel solution.

1

u/StoneTheMoron 8h ago

If this is the case, would you be able to recommend a few? I’ve unfortunately lapsed on programming for something like six years and am trying to get back to working on projects and I’m trying to avoid vibe coding as much as I can

1

u/deveronipizza 7h ago

I bet they will

1

u/ACiD_80 7h ago

Google announced they will not be using reddit data anymore... rightfully so.

1

u/fukijama 6h ago

I refuse

1

u/Dragon_yum 6h ago

This is why I despise discord. Almost all is the niche knowledge it’s now unindexable and inaccessible

1

u/ngless13 6h ago

AI learns from your own success and failures while using AI. It ingests a lot of info via that route.

1

u/PleX 5h ago

I don't care what anyone says, Discord is the fucking death of information. Reddit is killing it too, every damn search on google or any other search engine has to include reddit or you have to scroll 30 pages (300) pages deep.

307

u/Zatujit 9h ago

Stackoverflow survived because it was essential for a long period of time despite the horrendous culture there.

With AI, it just died because people didn't need to go there anymore, don't be surprised people don't want to communicate when the experience just sucks.

177

u/R2_SWE2 9h ago

There was nearly zero attempt from the community to keep it alive. That’s how much it was universally despised.

61

u/__yoshikage_kira 9h ago

Mostly because they actually liked that culture. Even now if you go to stackoverflow and suggest a change you will be downvoted to oblivion.

13

u/KaMaFour 9h ago

survivorship bias plane.jpg

1

u/goos_ 8h ago

Lmao correct

-4

u/Anonymous_user_2022 9h ago

Smart people heed the advice to Simba. We don't go there.

68

u/thevnom 9h ago

The culture was bad, but it was also the only thing making it more useful then quora and all the other bad questions platforms

40

u/Windyvale 9h ago

Quora is the ultimate trash heap

5

u/friendly_gentleman 7h ago

You can put the data center in my bedroom if this contributes to putting quora further in to its digital grave

2

u/PleX 5h ago

I'll carry the data center up and down on my back Sisyphus style just to have Quora die.

-1

u/rafark 7h ago

It was good until it was taken over by a specific demographic that only seems to be interesting in making money. 

19

u/ChemicalRascal 8h ago

Maybe, but the culture, and moreover the moderation that shaped that culture, didn't have to as far as it did to prevent itself from turning into a trash-heap.

The platform, its mods, and its more hardcore userbase needed to recognize that the passage of time can invalidate the contents of a knowledge base. A question asked in 2006 and the same one asked today might be a duplicate, but also really might not be, it's ultimately very contextual.

SO was great when it was in-date. But time moved forward and the platform and its policies weren't built to handle that, and the culture kept it stagnant, I believe.

11

u/meneldal2 8h ago

I think a major issue is people would vote to close questions on subjects they have no knowledge of and they don't understand if the question is actually good or not.

5

u/Twig1554 8h ago

More and more even before the AI age I found it harder to get useful information there. More and more I started to turn to Github issues for up to date information. Like you say, stagnant.

13

u/FalseWait7 9h ago

Exactly this. I mostly hated posting there and only did it when I had no other options left.

If SO had good community, it would still be used today. Probably less than before AI, but folks would stay for the community, not for the questions.

4

u/MooseBoys 8h ago

Nah SO was dying long before AI.

5

u/chubs66 8h ago

I used S/O for 10+ years and never managed to get enough karma to answer questions (even though I knew some answers to some questions and was willing to help).

-6

u/psioniclizard 8h ago

Nar, your question was just already asked and that annoyed you.

I learned so much from there and never had to ask a question because everything I wanted to know had already been asked.

The "culture" exists because of how trash every other forum got full of the same question and "do my homework". Well know people do that with AI, which is fine.

But one day people will say "I want answers from someone who is actually knowledgeable" and wont have anywhere to go. Because why and large people with knowledge don't like answering the same question 100 times.

It's also funny how people think AI is a replace for someone who is actually knowledgeable. It's going to be funny in 12 months time when a lot of programmers realise they have lost their critical thinking skills.

4

u/summerteeth 7h ago edited 4h ago

My dude - I had a question that was closed because the person who decided to vote to close it couldn't be arsed to understand what I was actually asking. I didn't care to fight it because the question already had an answer but it a took a cursory glance the answer in the the duplicate to see that it was a completely different question.

I was a power user with 50k+ points and had conversations with Jeff Atwood in the meta overflow. Still got drive-by closed.

Their moderation strategy is extremely flawed. All I have to do to close a question is just initiate a vote and most people just rubber stamp it.

This is the most common criticism of SO - you can't just be like, "nah it's you".

Or maybe you can, are you an SO mod? :D

-1

u/0xDECAFC0FFEE 6h ago

If the question already had an answer why do you care it was closed?

1

u/0xDECAFC0FFEE 6h ago edited 6h ago

Highkey strongly agree dont know why theres this much random hatred towards stackoverflow it was a great resource and it's sad stackoverflow got distilled and gutted

If someone closed your question for being a dupe just go to the original question for the answer?

No ones getting paid to help you, shouldn't you be appreciative someone is even bothering to point you at the answer?

60

u/obetu5432 9h ago

i liked it 10 years ago, it was already bad 5 years ago

119

u/Optic_Fusion1 9h ago

Honestly Stackoverflow was killing itself even without AI purely because of how the moderation was. There's a reason it's memed about as much as it is yk

104

u/luckyvb 9h ago

Closed as duplicate of this thread.

10

u/Optic_Fusion1 9h ago

Exactly lmao

As for OP's AI comment, I pretty much only use it because there isn't a single human-led community which is actually as good of not better. All of the discords I've tried are waaaaay to slow, for example

-2

u/eddified 8h ago

Reddit's moderation is even worse....

3

u/psioniclizard 8h ago

Yea, people clearly don't remember what programming forums were like before stack overflow or how just because you can speak more freely on reddit/discord, it just means people talk more crap and ask the same questions over and over.

23

u/swizzcheez 9h ago

Quick, everyone back to https://slashdot.org !

9

u/DNSGeek 9h ago

Left there 20 years ago. Haven't looked back since. Is it still there? It was turning (already was?) a toxic cesspool back then. I can't recall if I ever closed my account or not, but since I haven't logged in to it for over 2 decades I doubt it's still valid, and I don't want to find out.

12

u/mattva01 9h ago

I'd say it's weirdly "boomer-ish" now if that makes any sense. Like a bunch of 50 something programmers complaining about the good old days. Like it's toxic still, but in a way that makes you feel sorry for them

1

u/pdoherty926 9h ago

It is still there and there are still active discussions. I was promoting something I'd written recently and tried to post it and was met with some kind of a karma wall. I don't think that was always the case? It seemed especially weird now that you'd think they'd want more content but maybe their quality>quantity strategy is meeting their goals?

0

u/byutifu 8h ago

Left there about 7/8 years ago. It went from nerd/stuff that matters to political echo chamber. Wahhh

1

u/_illogical_ 7h ago

Slashdot really went downhill after CmdrTaco left, it was never the same.

55

u/n3f4r10us_ 9h ago

It was useful but the community was one of the most toxic on the internet.

21

u/mr_dfuse2 9h ago

I guess I stopped using it before I encountered that. I still remember the days before SO and it was horrendous, almost impossible to find information buried in obscure forums and hundreds of useless replies and dead threads. SO was glorious as long as I used it. That has been like 10 years ago though.

9

u/nvn911 8h ago

SO is exactly like that now. Accepted answers which are incorrect for current APIs. I think actual documentation is so much better these days.

1

u/lottasauce 6h ago

What killed SO for me is how fantastic AI is at scraping through the actual documentation and open source code to find the answers. In a snap it it can extract a workaround or fix or at least clearly point out the limitations of the current system. It will build code to verify and present the problem, and provide potential next steps.

SO can't keep up, and also it's kind of miserable

1

u/nvn911 5h ago

I honestly can't believe you're getting DV because you mentioned AI...

It's ironic how much alike to luddites some of us are, when we've been responsible for massive technology changes in all areas of life...

0

u/psioniclizard 8h ago

It will go back to that, all filtered through AI getting it half right. I find it funny people think stack overflow is so toxic when Quora and Youtube comments exist.

But then again, I never had to ask a question, everything I needed to know had already been asked.

I suspect that is true for a lot of people, they got something closed as a duplication and took it personally.

12

u/pdoherty926 9h ago

This tracks with my experience and I miss it, too. Back in the day, I subscribed to a bunch of topics I was interested in and answered questions when I could or otherwise lurked. I learned quite a lot about Lisp, Haskell, etc. this way. I eventually got to 10K+ reputation which used to mean something when looking for work but now all anyone wants to talk about is agentic caveman tokenmaxxxing bullshit. It's a crying shame that the LLMs got to train on our collective efforts and took the legs out from under the service and the community.

Interestingly, I did a UX study with SO recently and they're at least trying to right the ship. They are attempting solve for some of the toxicity issues (e.g. insta-close) at the UX/UI level and make the site into something more Reddit-like but I think they're probably done for.

1

u/youcangotohellgoto 3h ago

They've been trying for like 5 years; the admins and owners are well aware of the problem but the community itself (higher rep users) keeps enforcing the stupidity.

Like the whole create a question workflow has gone through so many iterations to help users write food questions, find duplicates, or make their question into something that won't be flagged as duplicate. But still some idiot will flag it.

15

u/valkon_gr 9h ago

SO taught me very early as a student to ask clever questions and to not be lazy. I'm not happy that it's dying but my stats tell the story...since 2023 i've been visiting it less and less..

5

u/nvn911 8h ago

SO is dead. Has been for a while. I'll even go as far as it actively poisons my search for the answer as old APIs are accepted answers.

The only true documentation is source.

12

u/WhateverHowever1337 9h ago edited 8h ago

I feel the same thing about programming generally.

I was a script kiddie, because I was a kid. I loved it, facebook groups, subreddits, stackoverflow, etc... The programming experience was really fun. Having to search for hours, talk with other people, try and fail multiple times, it all felt human and an amazing process that can't be replicated elsewhere.

Just when I started university and about to actually do meaningful stuff, all this experience and fun was taken away from me. I do not enjoy chatting to bots, I do not enjoy reviewing their work, I do not enjoy them doing all the debugging, this is simply a nightmare for me.

I was very excited when I started last year and LLMs weren't really that serious, I read the Design patterns (gang of four) book, the pragmatic programmer, I was learning C++ from the reference itself, I was reading books all day long and programming. I had a backlog of maybe 10 books about math, security and programming that I was excited to read. I never felt as happy and fulfilled, I felt like I was just starting what I've always been waiting for.

I am still grieving it a lot, it left really a huge void in me :/ . I envisioned programming as my value and goal, something I get better at daily and provide helpful stuff to society. The idea that all knowledge work might become useless soon enough is just something I can't fathom and makes me unable to sleep sometimes

8

u/ChemicalRascal 8h ago

Software engineering isn't going anywhere. What you're describing is a form of anxiety or depression and it might be worth talking to someone about that, at least to get some coping strategies and the like.

5

u/WhateverHowever1337 8h ago

I do not know.

This is not fear about not having a job, this is fear about my passion and the job I've always been dreaming about disappearing and transforming into something that I do not like.

Since I was 12, I dreamed of working professionally writing code, I had fun even in naming variables, I had fun in designing classes and data, I had fun in deciding if a field should be public or private, I had fun in writing the print statements to track down a bug. Every single mouse or keyboard click was fun, and all of that seems to have gone out of the window.

I too agree I might need help with processing this

0

u/MichaelTheProgrammer 7h ago edited 7h ago

I am struggling in the same way as you, and it has been a massive mental toll for me these last few months. I was comfortable where AI was a year ago as a better Stack Overflow, or good at continuing patterns. Now, it (Claude Opus in particular) definitely seems better than me, and I'm a senior. My life goal is to become one of the greatest software programmers of all time. However, now I don't know what that even looks like. What even distinguishes a great software programmer in the age of AI? I remember reading an article about someone who fixed failing code for a major game by rewriting its code in a weekend and thinking I wanted to be that skilled. Now though, anyone could do that by telling AI to do it for them.

I think one thing that will be important will be to decouple work from fun as AI causes different issues for each. For work, I am the sole financial support for my family, and I am scared about that. So I'm starting to learn new skills, including one that is physical so will not be affected by AI much for a while. So far it's not making much money but if I was without a job I might be able to push it.

However, the bigger issue for you and me seems to be more about for fun. I think this is where it'll be important to find hobby projects without AI. If you could do it faster and better with AI - who cares it's for fun. There's still a chance that the training data AI uses might limit its imagination in certain ways. We can't say for certain yet, but finding a hobby project where you don't use AI might let you get creative in ways that people who use it wouldn't stumble into. Building video games could especially work for this, as a video game you build on your own is guaranteed to come out far differently than a video game you built with the help of AI. On the other hand, building tools (my strength) is more affected by AI, as two tools built for the same purpose probably would come out pretty similar.

One thing I can recommend is trying to find some puzzles, and learning to not look up answers. For me, I've gone into puzzle games. My favorite two are Outer Wilds and Tunic. Outer Wilds is combat free and Tunic has a setting to turn combat off, so even if you aren't that familiar with combat in games, they are still playable. You might want to try them! Another recommendation is Isles of Sea and Sky.

Still I am struggling a lot. My job throughout the years has been a lot of fun. One time I dug into a buggy piece of software and found the bug wasn't a bug - it was something like 5 bugs strung together. I'd fix one and then discover the next. And I still got it working! Another is the work I've done on a feature that involves intercepting Windows functions, doing man in the middle to add features in a non-malicious way. It's some of the most clever code I've ever worked on. It initially launched through a button but I was able to get it able to launch automatically by hooking into some callback that occurred when the window was still invisible.

The problem I have now is that these were for work, and when it comes to work, there is no benefit to the company compared to just me asking an AI to figure out these problems for me. So I'm going to need to learn how to build things for fun without AI, just like how I play video game puzzles that other people have solved but I don't look up their solutions because I want to solve it myself.

2

u/boringfantasy 8h ago

Nah. Software engineering is done. I denied it for a long time but the recent progress has left me bereft. What a terrible time for us all. Godspeed.

1

u/rafark 7h ago edited 7h ago

Yes it is. Software is now worth a dime a dozen unfortunately. Everything else is just cope because these damn ai’s will keep getting better and better. Imagine the growth in capabilities 3 or 5 years from now. Growth is exponential and the cat is out of the bag. 

I understand executives and investors loving ai but I don’t get how most of my peers seem to be fully in bed with ai too. Blinded as if under the influence of a powerful drug. Digging their graves without realizing it. 

There’s probably going to be a market for hand crafted software but it’ll be niche. 

11

u/lihispyk 9h ago

I never thought that highly of stack overflow tbh, rather the opposite. Yes good and valuable posts exist, but imo more than half+++ of whatever I googled or stumbled upon was either suuper outdated or simply not good advice. This is before AI and mostly spring boot + angular tech stack.

Still, you're right about one thing, it was a place for direct and concrete technical/implementation questions, I wouldn't know of an alternative. It that sense it's a pity.

3

u/4kidsinatrenchcoat 9h ago

I, for one, will not mourn SO. 16 years ago it was great. Now? I haven’t been there in YEARS

3

u/ACiD_80 7h ago

Internet is being killed by spambots, propaganda, social engineering and the degeneracy that follows it.

1

u/rolland_87 6h ago edited 6h ago

I wonder if it would be possible to build a parallel internet without AI, bots, and with transparent algorithms.

And I wonder whether people would be willing to pay to browse a place like that. I know I would.

1

u/ACiD_80 6h ago

What?! " parallel internet powered by AI, bots " Why?!

1

u/rolland_87 6h ago

Haha, I meant parallel, without AI, bots, and with transparent algorithms. My translator let me down.

1

u/ACiD_80 6h ago

I just want 2000s internet back. Forums used to be amazing. Now every idiot with a phone has access and foreign adversaries are blasting it with crap posts.. Could turn out to be a good thing for society though. People will get tired of the absolute shitshow on social media and start having a real life social society again.

3

u/red_hare 8h ago

I liked programming.

3

u/aes110 6h ago

I really liked SO, It was pretty rare for me to ask questions, but when I did, I got the answers that I needed, and I loved browsing people's questions and figuring out solutions for stuff other people are working on.

I'll be honest, In the many years I used it I very rarely encountered rude or toxic culture, hell its a site for people helping each other for free, it was a site for building a large collection of Q&As, figuring out solutions as a community, and generally be the place to click to find a trusted answer, not just a site for people to let other people do their jobs for them.

It's not surprising at all that the people who celebrate their AI doing all their work for them were the first to celebrate SO's death

7

u/taw 9h ago

Letting anyone else that the asker close a question as "duplicate" might have been the single most toxic design decision in history of the internet.

3

u/VikingFjorden 8h ago

That would have made SO useless, though. Nobody would bother answering, because it's the same 10 questions hundreds of times per day, because no new user bothers searching for the answer prior to bumbling out their question with only half of the information necessary to answer it.

The close-as-duplicate thing was never a tool to bully new users with, it was a stop-gap to try to make it so that existing answers to questions didn't have to be re-stated ad nauseum, re: the initial paragraph. It was curation.

Were some people dicks amidst that? Sure. But most of them weren't. Most of them were just following the site rules - and all the users who took "closed as off-topic" or "closed as duplicate" to be toxic... were sort of the problem for SO to begin with, the very users who made those tools a necessity. Nobody was saying your question didn't deserve answering, they said your question was either posed in the wrong place or it already had an answer already. The fact that people found that to be toxic isn't a condemnation of SO, it's a sign that people were increasingly becoming too sensitive for their own good.

1

u/taw 4m ago

You can suggest that their question looks like a duplicate, but if the asker say it isn't a duplicate, then it isn't, end of story.

This would cut toxicity by 90%.

14

u/meowsqueak 9h ago

As soon as AI became capable of answering my technical questions without snarkiness, rudeness, condescension, abuse or total lack of respect, I naturally switched to asking my friendly AI instead of those awful S.O. people.

9

u/peakzorro 9h ago

Hell, even if it was rude at least it would answer the question without closing the question as off-topic.

-6

u/psioniclizard 8h ago

you AI doesn't have a personality. It's not friendly. Putting a personality onto it is ... kinda weird

8

u/kisielk 9h ago

Stackoverflow was great 15+ years ago, and has been declining ever since.

8

u/q120 9h ago

Useful sometimes but the people on there were the worst. They were the worst gatekeepers ever and were dicks to newbies.

4

u/Adventurous-Hunter98 9h ago

I remember asking about a question for my java project and some random guy come in told me I shouldnt be writing any code if I dont even know the thing I asked, lmao

2

u/q120 9h ago

Seriously... I know someone who asked a very simple question about cookies and how to use them correctly and the trolls on there jumped on him accusing him of doing sketchy cookie stuffing when he was literally just asking how browsers handle certain cookies.

Also saw one where somebody asked a question and, similar to what you said, they more or less said "if you don't know this, you shouldn't be coding yet". STFU and answer my question

2

u/clkou 8h ago

I remember listening to their podcast as the web site was being built and it started off pretty good but I remember at one point it was like asking questions became discouraged 😆 AI will render many apps, websites, and communities either useless or not as valuable as they once were and this is a prime example.

2

u/VictoryMotel 8h ago

Someone already said they liked stack overflow 6 years ago, post closed.

2

u/Ameisen 8h ago

There are topic-specific IRC channels still as well... many are still heavily trafficked.

2

u/FoeHammer99099 7h ago

Answering questions on SO was a very formative experience for me as a young dev. Trying to tease out someone's actual problem from a rambling story about an error message they didn't read all of, how to support a technical argument with references to documentation and code examples, staying polite and professional even when someone is being an idiot, coding without an IDE or even a text editor beyond the SO answer prompt, having older and wiser programmers tell me that I need to go read the docs... I don't know if I would have gotten this far without it.

2

u/xian0 6h ago

I'm fine with Stackoverflow as it is now, there are enough new answers/answer edits/comments for me. Most questions have been asked already. There isn't anything new that's worth of a new tag and hundreds of questions. I don't know why we haven't made anything but that's not a Stackoverflow issue (or there is and I can't see it through all the AI spam recently).

5

u/HighImDude 8h ago

In >15 years of developing software I probably used it less than 10 times, no matter how much effort I put into asking a question it never got a helpful reply, and replying to questions was hard and contrived as well

I'm personally very happy it died.

My almost 150k reputation means nothing

This is just silly, just meaningless internet points in a very ephemeral medium

1

u/dom_ding_dong 5h ago

Just because it's a ephemoral ans you do not get get to sit on top of a literal mountain of skulls does not mean that it's not real.

It's unfortunate it didn't work out for you, but it worked out for a lot of people for a long time. I think it's okay to decide when something good passes and not be a total fucking asshole about it.

3

u/sultan_papagani 7h ago

i miss it too... non programmers will always complain about it tho. its not like they have ever asked or read a question there. theyre just vibeimagining it..

i wish ai never existed. but i use it all the time too.. its just.. erased all the passion

4

u/Prudent_Beyond3456 8h ago

IMO: SO had his deathmark before AI. 99% of questions where answered with "shame on you" from old users or incorrect duplicated answers.

SO already had 99% of possible coding questions already answered,

> but I always assumed they are used by developers, not for noobs.

SO wasn't a place for noobs anyway.

3

u/Grouchy-Librarian638 8h ago

It was always a cesspool of toxicness. You could sometimes get a hint to why you had a problem and how to solve it but 9 times out of 10 it was someone belittling and bullying.

Rose colored glasses and all that.

2

u/oldmanhero 8h ago

Definitely does not reflect my experience with the site for its first few years of existence. It did quickly become that once users gained certain unlocked abilities and the culture shifted hard towards killing questions that weren't perfectly unique and objective, but in the beginning it was just helpful, all day every day.

2

u/2B-Pencil 8h ago

Spend lots of hours contributing to stackoverflow for fake internet points. Must be European lol

1

u/Jmc_da_boss 8h ago

The rude culture was a feature not a bug, I miss it greatly as a core source of knowledge. LLMs are incredibly unpleasant to use

1

u/_kellythomas_ 7h ago

The rise and fall of Stack Overflow

https://imgur.com/a/UwJYX1w

1

u/shizzy0 6h ago

I think the stackoverflow guy must have been like the beanie baby guy, who was convinced there was one perfect stuffed animal and he was going to find it. The SO guy must have been after the one good question and just left a bunch of topics in his wake in his search like the beanie baby guy left stuffies.

1

u/Dunge 6h ago

I mean, personally if I have a question that isn't a simple answer and I don't trust that AI has just decided a direction to answer without a real reasoning behind it (as it always does), I will definitely still go and ask it on StackOverflow. It isn't dead to me.

1

u/deanroiditz 5h ago

It's over. Online now filled with many bots.

1

u/varinator 9h ago

The pronouns affair 6 years ago, not sure who still remembers it. It was a big thing back then but now completely meaningless as the site is almost dead

1

u/ozyx7 8h ago edited 7h ago

It certainly didn't help that the people actually running StackOverflow (not the moderators) made a number of very unpopular changes, seemed to ignore a lot of the criticisms, and drove away a lot of the people who liked answering questions.

0

u/ClemencyOSRS 8h ago

Stack overflow was a great resource when you weren’t contributing to it and the worst resource when you were. I’m very glad AI has replaced SO and their utterly shambolic ways of moderating a knowledge bank.

0

u/mogadichu 8h ago

Stack Overflow was awful. It was easier to just figure out the solution to your problem than it was to get any useful answer to any question. You were lucky just to have your question not closed. And even then, only about one in ten got any useful answer, and even then, rarely to any difficult question.

0

u/[deleted] 9h ago

[deleted]

0

u/matt95110 8h ago

Stackoverflow is full of gatekeeping assholes who can't read and are the rudest people ever.

0

u/yellowbluetwo 8h ago

The culture there was so toxic that most users are very happy to leave it behind at first opportunity.

I know it was better since all the answers were public compared to the current discord and LLM chats. But I don't miss it.

-1

u/qwerty8082 8h ago

That site sucked.