Submitted 10 hours ago by not_IO@lemmy.blahaj.zone to technology@lemmy.world
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/
Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”
Ever ask a question on SO? I tell my students to search there but never, ever ask a question. The unmitigated hostility is not what new developers need or deserve. ChatGPT won’t humiliate you for asking a question that someone else has already asked.
If LLMs just copied stack overflow they’d respond to every question with “Closed as duplicate. Question already answered.”
and link a slightly similar question, which’s answers can’t be used in your case, because of the small difference. also, it’s outdated since four years.
Problem being that someone else asked the question 10 years ago and the answer is now irrelevant due to version changes. People with high scores are just early adopters who answered all of the easy questions. Hostile users generally can’t understand the question. The issue with llms answering your question is that they are going to be stuck in the current time period. In the future their answers will also be irrelevant due to version changes.
Earlier today I googled how to toggle full screen in dosbox-x and the AI-generated answer said to use alt+enter. Tried it and it didn’t work, so I look in the documentation and it turns out that they changed it to F12+f a while ago (probably to avoid interfering with actual dos input).
This is definitely already a problem.
I mean that is already a problem, if you ask a question you have to be ready for the answer to be a mismatch of version conflicts.
But that is ok. ChatGPT is a tool that can either help you or hurt you. I like to think of it like a power hammer. If you are doing a roofing job, it can help you get things done faster compared to a manual hammer, but you still need to know how to build a roof to get started.
ChatGPT is great at helping you organize your thoughts or finding an answer to some error message buried in some log file, but you still need to know what questions to ask and you need to be ready for it to give you a stupid answer and how to get around that.
I see this hot take often, and it isn’t entirely without merit, but it is mitigated by moderation; in some Stack communities better than others. I’ve been an active member for many years, and in my view it goes like this.
If you contribute a question without reading the rules and How to Ask a Good Question, you don’t provide minimal reproducible steps with code, post images of code, etc. you may get flamed out of town. And that may feel bad and it may be mean if the questioner didn’t know to read those. But they are there for you.
If, however, you ask a thoughtful question, give examples, show what you’ve tried, etc. you definitely can get quality, courteous help.
Doesn’t change that video killed the radio star here. The show is over.
Beginners are the least likely to ask thoughtful questions. We include slides in lectures about how to ask a question, but when there’s an assignment deadline and you’re inexperienced, it’s more likely you’re going to just blurt out “help me!” rather than provide a detailed explanation that doesn’t require repeated prompting. It takes time to learn how to work through an issue yourself before asking. Students are often facing time pressure and that can drive bad behavior. Correcting them is important, just don’t do it in a way that crushes their spirit.
I’ve asked questions on S.O. I’ve answered some too.
What I’ve found works well on s-o is
I’ve found even a dick like me can get a lot of leeway by showing I’ve put in the effort and asked properly.
*Same as Usenet
For me, strict rules are what make this website useful. No threads named “help me” is why I like reading it.
For newcomers there is stackoverflow.com/staging-ground
Even for non newcomers, having threads marked as duplicates for problems introduced by version changes that aren’t considered in the original question/answers is a major issue.
I’m not convinced that the number of questions asked is the correct metric. In the end the point is not to have a constant flow of questions, rather constant flow of answers found.
There is a point in proficiency in language/library/whatever after which it is faster to find the answer in the code/documentation/test example than to wait until another person on even higher level will come and answer your question.
Maybe we simply filled out what was needed to be asked in the beginner-bug found-intermediate space and, apart from questions stemming from new versions etc, SO does not need more questions?
Expectation for everything to constantly grow is unrealistic
As more and more libraries are open source on GitHub or gitlab or sourceforge or whateverthefuck, asking questions on the libraries themselves (as an issue) is often the right thing to do, too… Less centralised than SO but also the only people who care about how to do things in a lib are people using the lib, so…
So here’s what I don’t get. LLMs were trained on data from places like SO. SO starts losing users ,and thus content. Content that LLMs ingest to stay relevant.
So where will LLMs get their content after a certain point? Especially for new things that may come out or unique situations. It’s not like it’ll scrape the answer from a web page if people are just asking LLMs.
You are assuming that people act in logical ways.
This is only a problem right now if you think about it.
The snake eats its tale and it all degenerates into slop. Happy coding!
The need for the service that SO provided won’t go away. Eventually people will migrate to new places to discuss. LLM creators will either constantly scrape those as well, forcing them to implement more and more countermeasures and GenIA-poison, or the services themselves will enshittify and sell our content (i.e. the commons) to LLM-creators.
I worry that the replacement is more likely a move to platforms like Discord. I mean it’s already happened in a lot of projects.
Same question applies to all the other websites out there being mined to train LLMs. Google search Overviews removes the need for people to visit linked sites. Traffic plummets. Ads dry up, and the sites go out of business. No new content to train on 🤷🏻♂️
Never again will I help provide content to a VC-backed service.
I live in the hope that the insightful comments I left on reddit over my long tenure there will eventually be part of a FOSS corpus, once the corpos can’t extract anything of competitive value from it anymore. I’ll be long dead, but my comments will live on.
for a life of mine, I can’t understand why people don’t value knowledge enough to make their own website and be proud of it; PS. I have made a load of CMS and now working on new approach to web dev …
What exactly do you accuse Stack Overflow for? As far as I know this service has always been free to use and data is easily downloadable.
“Free to use” on a VC-backed service just means you’re the product. I am accusing them of the same thing I’m accusing each VC-backed service: That they exploit our efforts to cash out and then sell the service for someone who will enshittify it for profit.
Also, what do you mean “easily downloadable”? Can anyone download the entire corpus of SO in a way that they could set up their own SO with the same content to bootstrap them?
Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance
Yeah, exactly. A lot of groups have a Discord :( or other forums where people ask questions. I know I’ve had to ask questions on Svelte’s Discord :( for example. And I think even once on some YouTube influencer’s Slack…
Sucks cuz both of those places are silos and my questions and answers are forever lost.
It’s not like discord is any better than SO. It’s a closed platform, often with no read access if you don’t want to register, and it’s not searchable in the slightest.
Yep. 200% agree. I still post questions on SO, but when I don’t get any answers, then I have to go to Discord… :(
Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance – perhaps driven by moderation policy changes or something else that started in 2014
💯
actually, i was surprised it took off at all, because there are plenty less formal alternatives, but the name is catchy with devs. maybe that’s all it took.
It took off because searching a specific issue is likely to give you a good and comprehensive answer back with minimal effort, so it kept being ranked well in search engines.
Other less “pedantic” forums are great for discussion and they encourage new questions, but they don’t perform nearly as well for people searching for the answers or the context you’re looking for.
People seem to be happy because of SO becoming irrelevant. I really don’t get it, I used this website for many years now and for me it is the second (after Wikipedia) most valuable source of knowledge. The UI is clean, no intrusive adds, best answer is the most visible. Threads are well organised and on topic. No spam, no dark patterns, no wasting your time. Discoverability is great, you can easily browse and learn knew things. It is also SEO friendly. Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss!
Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?
I’ve had a discussion with someone about this. Apparently, there are people that enjoy the social contact. Some seem to like sitting in a Discord chat all day long and answering the same questions over and over again. Others like to “just ask” someone instead of looking for a solution themselves.
That there’s no clear structure of all the solutions provided via Discord and thus people have to ask the same things, nor a proper way of backing everything up in case Discord goes rogue seems to be blissfully ignored.
It’s probably part of the same phenomenon that, nowadays, people seem unable to write or read a few lines of documentation and instead create/watch 20 minutes on YouTube.
YouTube might be the plague that killed the written web
Agree with you, SO is great for finding info. There are solutions on there for niche problems that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, the type of thing where someone actually took the time to type out a step-by-step answer and it’s now there and searchable on SO. It’s a bummer that so many people seem to hate on the site nowadays.
And lets not forget the whole reason SO came out in the first place, back then web results were littered with question/answer links to sites like Experts-Exchange. I hated trying to figure out if an answer was on there, most of the time you ended up with a link to a question that you think has an answer but oh no you need to subscribe to view an answer that may or may not exist.
best answer is the most visible
no wasting your time
These two points aren’t always true in my experience. On more than a few occasions, I have encountered posts that look similar to the problems that I am facing, but because of a slight nuance (on the surface), the answers suggested won’t help.
Usually, my search would hit a deadend here. At this point, I guess the best course of action is to create a new post. Unfortunately, these new posts would then get closed as a duplicate of the similar post - even though the problem in that particular context still hasn’t been solved
get closed as a duplicate of the similar post
I’ve definitely had this happen to be before. It’s annoying.
What I do in that case is proactively say:
I’m facing problem X. I’ve tried searching for solutions. I found post X2 and X3 that are similar, but my problem is actually different because of Y.
Sometimes it helps.
Also, if you see people being assholes you can report them. There’s a flag for “unfriendly or unkind”. I’ve definitely used that before.
I’ve lost count the number of times where I try to find something in SO, and it’s just someone posting the exact same example code as the answer. Or someone suggesting you just google it. Then I ask ChatGPT… and I get an answer.
I used it once in high school, got called a retard for asking a beginner question, then avoided it like the plague for 20 years.
Hey look everyone it’s that retard from stack exchange!
Aw shit, not again.
Not terribly surprising, Google would often direct me to StackOverflow threads as I was googling for an answer to a question. And as often as not, either the question was closed; or, instead of anyone providing an answer, the commenters would spiral off into questioning everything about the original question asker’s life choices. While I do get the whole XY Problem, this sort of thing seemed to be over-used on SO.
Granted, I don’t know if AI answers are any better. Sure, they can answer a lot of the simple questions, but I’ve not seen them be useful on hard, more obscure questions. Probably because those questions don’t have ready answers on SO.
the whole XY Problem
lol. I hate this. Just answer the damn question or don’t. I’m not asking you to validate if what I’m doing is weird or not. It’s weird! I know! That’s none of your business. Just answer the damn question or don’t. Simple as.
I stopped using it before chatgpt arrived. You can always find answers in the documentation or in github issues
dinckelman@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Make no mistake. LLMs aren’t killing stackoverflow. LLMs just arrived to finish it off. The stuff that was killing it are the regular posters there, and their passive aggressive bullshit
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
Question closed as off-topic.