Stack overflow is almost dead

Comments

• untakenusername@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ai haters out there, doesn’t this give a valid use case for LLM?

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• mhague@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  SO is a collaborative encyclopedia of technical discussion that tries to be relevant, be practical, and to not constantly repeat topics.

  LLMs can’t provide that structure, they just shit out answers.

  Most people think SO is a help desk and don’t appreciate the structure and just want it to shit out an answer.

  Maybe SO isn’t dying so much as a cancerous growth is being sawed off.

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• eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant?

  “That’s a stupid question, marked as solved.”

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  • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    marked as duplicate, see <other question from 2005, before LLMs were invented>

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• JTskulk@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s not dead until I stop getting 10 year old outdated answers in my searches!

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• zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I wonder how well LLMs would do without SO’s data

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  • imposedsensation@lemmynsfw.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Exactly this. LLMs are already bad at answering questions about very old technology, and I assume they are equally bad at answering questions about very new technology. Also bad at answering questions that have never been asked. We’re doomed.

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  • tehn00bi@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Or Reddit, or Linux forums.

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• wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I had a decently awarded account on SO because I joined it in 2012. I asked and answered questions. For the first few years it was fucking awesome as a professional developer. Then it’s popularity on google search results ended up making it too well known and the comment quality dropped substantially. Then the fucking powerusers popped up and started flagging almost everye one my questions as duplicates while pointing to unrelated questions. The last I really used SO was around 2017. I got too fed up to participate in the platform because when I spent the time to make a well formed question, it would just got shut down and my time wasted.

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  • BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Had the same experience, almost exactly.

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• MehBlah@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It will endure as long as the LLM’s on there know how to misinterpret the question and fire back snarky unhelpful answers about how clueless you are for asking in the first place.

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• Maxxie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Like it or hate it (personally I prefer the latter, posting there I felt like a middle schooler with a PUNCH ME sticker on my face) it was a great source of indexable data on programming.

  I wonder how will this affect future search and llms, now that all similar questions are being asked in private llm threads.

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  • ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I never once actually asked a question there. Partly because most of the time, the question I was asking had always been asked.

    However, I have found the correct answer to 100s of questions there. Usually through google/ddg/kagi searches.

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• hexonxonx@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Stack Overflow hasn’t been useful for at least 10 years, if not longer.

  The flagged “correct” answer is almost always wrong due to idiotic power-users and the vast horde of idiots who upvote obviously wrong answers because they’re bootlickers. The real answer is usually buried in between the posts by gatekeepers, pedants, idiots with something to prove, wannabe admins, egotistical idiots, the highly opinionated technologically insecure, etc ad nauseam. Reddit is just as bad for tech questions, if not worse.

  Since I started using LLMs (running on my own inference server) I haven’t used anything else for tech questions that wasn’t opinion-based. Much, much more useful, and it requires you to think seriously about the problem to come up with a good prompt – which often gives you the answer before you even finish the prompt.

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• ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is interesting because a huge amount of AI “knowledge” comes from stack exchange.

  Now I’ll go read the other comments and article to see if that’s already been mentioned :)

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• shiroininja@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Sucks because I prefer stack overflow in searches because I get more of a human explanation and wisdom. With llm i have to figure out what it’s_trying to do_ , debug it, and god forbid you want various ways of doing the same thing. I hate LLMs for coding. I hate clients for trying to force me to use it when most of the time now they admit they’re hiring me because AI failed in the first place

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• gianni@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Anyone remember experts-exchange?

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  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Ah yes, the place that never answered anything.

    The sloppiest of slops before we got AI slop.

    It was the pinterest of answering stuff

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    • irinotecan@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Or if they had an answer, they paywalled it, until Google got pissed at them for including the answer in their SEO but blocking it once the user clicked through. Then they maliciously complied with Google’s demand to not censor by burying the answer under layers upon layers of ads and other “related” questions.

      I was so glad to see SO eat their lunch.

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    • gianni@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I used it in earnest! (to write shitty VB scripts and PHP websites)

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  • Bruncvik@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I remember when it didn’t have a dash. Until people started making fun of the old URL…

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    • gianni@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      So easily avoided too

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• JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Not necessarily directly, many people may have abandoned learning programming because of LLMs, rather than Stack Overflow specifically.

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  • surph_ninja@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You’re pulling this out of your ass. That is completely made up.

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  • INeedMana@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t think such trend would be so big. And anyone who has used any LLM for programming learns very quickly that those are very far from replacing anyone

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    • AAA@feddit.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      People who know programming already, yes. People who are getting into it / want to get into it, see it as an amazing shortcut.

      I had two working students already, who thought and communicated that they don’t really need to learn programming, because they can do it with ChatGPT / Q. It was quite infuriating.

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    • skisnow@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      For real. You can tell how good a programmer someone is, by how good they think an LLM is at programming.

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• Shirasho@lemmings.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  My experience with SO is that I’ll look up a question about how to do something using X method and all the answers are like “why are you using X?” or “here’s how to do it using Y.”. You rarely find people answering the questions and instead find people trying to spread gospel about a certain tech that you aren’t using.

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  • JackAttack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This was the majority of my experience as well. As a newer programmer, I’m more than happy to always know a better option. But if the way I’m looking to solve my problem is wrong, don’t just give me Y, explain to me why it may not work how I think it will. Tell me about X and some pitfalls or reasoning for it not going to work, then recommend why. Because if others only see the Y answer to my question about X, they’ll probably just keep searching for a solution to X not knowing it may not work like I didn’t know.

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  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yep, they aggressively XY problem your question until you give up. Also why many questions do not give the answer to the problem what most people asking that question would ask.

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    • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Then the author marks the question as answered because doing Y solves their problem…

      Good for you, but I actually need to do X and Y wouldn’t work for me. At least change the title so it doesn’t come up as the top result in search engines.

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  • gradual@lemmings.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s strange. It’s almost never my experience on stack overflow.

    What you’re describing happens mostly on reddit and lemmy.

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    • ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Thats been my experience as well.

      On SO it seems much more likely that the answers answering a different question have a negative score.

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  • Gronk@aussie.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is honestly the reason why it’s going downhill, forcing people to do Y or use Z because of some problem irrelevant to the question being asked.

    It limits creativity and depth of discussion on a forum designed to discuss all principles of programming

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  • lutillian@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think all that needs to be said is if you search how to install a new CA in a given runtimes cert store, odds are the first and accepted answer will almost without fail describe how to disable ssl.

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  • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    My experience with SO is somewhat the same, but sometimes (actually maybe most times) you’re trying to use a hammer instead of a screwdriver. If you read the suggestions and take them into account you can often find the actual question, and then the actual answer.

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    • immutable@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.

      1. Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
      2. See if this is an XY problem.

      I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.

      The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.

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    • Zron@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My experience has been more like this:

      OP: I’m trying to make lasagna from scratch but my noodles aren’t turning out right. Here’s my noodle recipe and settings for my pasta machine.

      Mod: duplicate post of “How to make canned spaghetti bolognese” thread locked.

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  • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    In my experience has been like “that’s a bug and was solved on version 2.1, update” and I’m having the exact problem in version 2.2 so what now?

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    • 5too@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Or I don’t actually get to update the version my company is using, is there a workaround?

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  • orcrist@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’ve been in your position and in the other person’s position many times. It can be frustrating but we need to think about the big picture. It’s possible you hadn’t considered a certain approach, and it’s probable that many other future readers will not have considered a certain approach. So even though you might have said that you want to do something specific, it’s often helpful to some people to provide general information of another way to tackle the same issue.

    And of course you know your own situation, so now there are these comments that appear off topic, and they kind of are, for you, and that’s just how it is on forums.

    The other situation that comes up a lot is that people are doing it wrong. They are misusing some piece of technology and while their kluge might kind of work right now, it’s setting themselves up for bigger issues in the future. Of course no one appreciates it when you tell them they’re doing it wrong.

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    • warbond@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      People don’t like when you don’t answer their question because it doesn’t give them an answer to their question. Just answer the question first and then hop on your high horse to tell them why it’s not going to work.

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• Mubelotix@jlai.lu ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I stopped using it before chatgpt arrived. You can always find answers in the documentation or in github issues

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• CaptPretentious@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• dinckelman@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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

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  • dantheclamman@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I never asked a question, despite using it daily. Too afraid of being berated 😅

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  • skisnow@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yup. I once decided to spend an afternoon answering questions on a framework I was expert in, as a kind of profile-building exercise to help with job hunting, and after around the third smug self-satisfied comment picking me up on some piece of irrelevant bullshit I deleted my account.

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    • lars@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I hate how cathartic it is to watch that mountain of bullies burn to the ground 😌

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  • SnortsGarlicPowder@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Nothing passive about them it was just regular aggressive. Made my programming coursework so much worse. Indian guys on YouTube however, now those guys were helpful!

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  • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Question closed as off-topic.

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    • Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Question closed as off-topic.

      Removed as duplicate of #264826376: "Question closed as duplicate."

      Sometimes my jokes need explaining...

      I’m pointing out that questions on SO too often get closed as duplicates of adjacent (but distinctly different) questions, and I did so in the most confusing, recursive way possible.

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• paequ2@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Projects that use Discord for support piss me right off. What a stupid way to keep answering the same question over and over again.

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  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Can people access to discord from corporate networks? I’m fucked if the Google answer gave me reddit or github as the answers because they’re blocked.

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    • paequ2@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yep. 200% agree. I still post questions on SO, but when I don’t get any answers, then I have to go to Discord… :(

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• INeedMana@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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

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  • notfromhere@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Honestly using the existing question stock to generate current-version answers using the current documentation as synthetic training data is probably the way to go.

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  • silasmariner@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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…

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• Sabata11792@ani.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • gradual@lemmings.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I highly doubt they called you a retard.

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Hey look everyone it’s that retard from stack exchange!

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    • Sabata11792@ani.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Aw shit, not again.

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• vermaterc@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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!

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  • Feathercrown@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    People got butthurt after being told their beginner question has already been answered

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  • gradual@lemmings.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Most people can’t think for themselves and will say whatever makes them fit in with their peers.

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  • brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Endmaker@ani.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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

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    • paequ2@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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• sylver_dragon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• TomMasz@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• ramble81@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Never again will I help provide content to a VC-backed service.

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• Endmaker@ani.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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

  💯

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