Honestly just funny to see. It makes perfect sense, based on how they made the site hostile to users.
Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions
Submitted 1 day ago by Gsus4@mander.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
eronth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 day ago
TBH asking questions on SO (and most similar platforms) fucking sucks, no surprise that users jump at the first opportunity at getting answers another way.
slate@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Removed. Someone else already said this before. Also, please ensure you stick to the stlye guides next time, and be less ambiguous. SO could mean a plethora of things.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 day ago
Spoiler
last time this question was answered was for several years older software versions, and the old solutions don’t work anymore
Supervisor194@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
I was in the middle of making a reply like this but yours is better. Closed as duplicate.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.
The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.
Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 20 hours ago
Damn, lol
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 1 day ago
Yea it sucks, but quality is important so I get it.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 day ago
I do understand being rigorous about questions, and technical forums were even worse a lot of the time, but SO’s methods led to the site becoming severely outdated. They really should have introduced a mechanism to mark old content as outdated. It should have been obvious like 10 years ago that solutions often stop working come next major version or the programming language, framework or operating system.
melfie@lemy.lol 17 hours ago
This is not because AI is good at answering programming questions accurately, it’s because SO sucks. Sites like SO where experienced humans can give insightful answers to obscure programming questions are clearly still needed. Every time I ask AI a programming question about something obscure, it usually knows less than I do, and if I can’t find a post where another human had the same problem, I’m usually left to figure it out for myself.
vane@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
2016 is probably when they removed freedom by introducing aggressive moderation to remove duplicates and ban people
skisnow@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
It was a toxic garbage heap way before 2016. I remember creating an account to try building karma there back in about 2011 when doing that was seen as a good way to land senior job roles. Gave up very quickly.
micka190@lemmy.world 1 day ago
According to a Stack Overflow survey from 2025, 84 percent of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76 percent a year earlier. This rapid adoption partly explains the decline in forum activity.
As someone who participated in the survey, I’d recommend everyone take anything regarding SO’s recent surveys with a truckfull of salt. The recent surveys have been unbelievable biased with tons of leading questions that force you to answer in specific ways. They’re basically completely worthless in terms of statistics.
chaosCruiser@futurology.today 1 day ago
Realistically though, asking an LLM what’s wrong with my code is a lot faster than scrolling through 50 posts and reading the ones that talk about something almost relevant.
rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s even faster to ask your own armpit what’s wrong with your code, but that alone doesn’t mean you’re getting a good answer from it
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Already before the LLMs for me it was the last chance before I would post over there. The desperation move. It was too toxic and I would always get pissed to get my question closed because too similar or too easy or whatever. Hey I wasted 15 minutes to type that, if the other question solved the problem I wouldn’t post again…
In the beginning it wasn’t like that…
I went to watch my stack overflow account and the first questions that I posted (and that gave me 2000 karma) would have been almost all of them rejected and removed
stoly@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
The Redditification of SO
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Even before AI I stopped asking any questions or even answering for that matter on that website within like the first few months of using it. Just not worth the hassle of dealing with the mods and I didn’t want my account to get suspended in case I really needed to ask an actual question in the future, now I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to any stack website and it does not show up in the Google search results anymore, they dug their own grave
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn’t copy/pasting code.
And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.
But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don’t have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren’t really upset at “having” to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I call it “comic book guy” syndrome. The desperate need to feel superior.
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
That last part is so true, some people are just miserable and want to spread that misery to others to make themselves feel better
JackbyDev@programming.dev 14 hours ago
The humans of StackOverflow have been pricks for so long. If they fixed that problem years ago they would have been in a great position with the advent of AI. They could’ve marketed themselves as a site for humans. But no, fuckfacepoweruser found an answer to a different question he believes answers your question so marked your question as a duplicate and fuckfacerubberstamper voted to close it in the queue without critically thinking about it.
theolodis@feddit.org 4 hours ago
I used to moderate and answer questions on SO, but stopped because at some point you see the 500th question about how to use some javascript function.
Of course I flagged them all as duplicate and linked them to an extensive answer about the specific function, explaining all aspects and edge cases, because I don’t think there need to be 500 similatlr answers (who’s going to maintain them?)
But yeah, sorry that I didn’t fix YOUR code sample, and you had to actually do your homework by yourself.
ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
If the alternative is the cesspit that is Yahoo Answers and Quora, I’ll take the heavy-handed moderation of StackOverflow.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Hear hear, it was the hostile atmosphere that pushed me away from Stack Exchange years before LLMs were a thing. That very clear impression that the site does not exist to help specific people, but a vague audience, and the treatment of every question and answer is subjugated to that. Since then I just ask/answer questions on platforms like Lemmy, Reddit, Discord, or the Discourse forums ran by various organisations, it’s a much more pleasant experience.
dgmib@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
The stupidest part is that their aggressive hostility against new questions means that the content is becoming dated. The answers to many, many questions will change as the tech evolves.
And since AI’s ability to answer tech questions depends heavily on a similar question being in the training dataset, all the AIs are going to increasingly give outdated answers.
They really have shot themselves in the foot for at best some short term gain.
THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
This was my issue. The two times I posted real, actual questions that I needed help with, and tried to provide as much detail as possible while saying I didn’t understand the subject,
I got clowned on, immediately downvoted negative, and got no actual help whatsoever. Now I just hope someone else had a similar issue.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
But what will the mods close for arbitrary reasons before there are any responses?
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
“Search before asking!” - Stack Overflow
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 1 day ago
LLM’s won’t be helping but SE/SO have been fully enshitifying themselves for years.
It was amazing in yhe early days.
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
It was a vast improvement over expert sex change, which was the king before SO.
KudoMonstro@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
expertSEXchange dot com hahahahaahahahahahahahaha oh that brought me some dreadful memories! Thanks for the laugh and rhe chills
Quexotic@infosec.pub 17 hours ago
How early though? I stopped using them about 12 years ago due to the toxic environment.
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 11 hours ago
When it was just SO I think… if my memory serves. When it was small enough that only a (relative) few programmers were using it and generally behaving well.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
I’ve posted questions, but I don’t usually need to because someone else is almost always posted it before
rumba@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Works well for now. Wait until there’s something new that it hasn’t been trained on. It needs that Stack Exchange data to train on.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
Yes, I think this will create a problem. new things won’t be created very often because there will be a barrier of training corporate controlled AI to learn them
cherrari@feddit.org 9 hours ago
I don’t think so. All AI needs now is formal specs of some technical subject, not even human readable docs, let alone translations to other languages. In some ways, this is really beautiful.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
The hot concept around the late 2000’s and early 2010’s was crowdsourcing: leveraging the expertise of volunteers to build consensus. Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and similar sites came up in that time frame where people would freely lend their expertise on a platform because that platform had a pretty good rule set for encouraging that kind of collaboration and consensus building.
Monetizing that goodwill didn’t just ruin the look and feel of the sites: it permanently altered people’s willingness to participate in those communities. Some, of course, don’t mind contributing. But many do choose to sit things out when they see the whole arrangement as enriching an undeserving middleman.
rumba@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Probably explains why quora started sending me multiple daily emails about shit i didn’t care about and removed unsubscribe buttons form the emails.
I don’t delete many accounts… but that was one of them
Gsus4@mander.xyz 12 hours ago
What we’re all afraid is that cheap slop is going to make stack broke/close/bought/private and then it will be removed from the public domain…then jack up the price of slop when the alternative is gone…
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I do wonder then, as new languages and tools are developed, how quickly will AI models be able to parrot information on their use, if sources like stackoverflow cease to exist.
falseWhite@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
There are free open source models you can run locally and they have all the answers.
thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
Stack Overflow lost its job to ai
Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
Yeah because either you get a “how dumb are you?” Or none
HereIAm@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Locking this comment. Duplicate of lemmy.world/comment/21433687
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 11 hours ago
The complete non-sequitur link really makes it. chef’s kiss
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
Oh no, poor AI won’t know where to feed anymore. Anyway…
General_Effort@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
MehBlah@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Good. That site has been a toxic hole in the ground for a decade or more.
UltraBlack@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
That site is an incredible resource
stoly@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
How much longer will 15 year old answers be useful?
derpgon@programming.dev 4 hours ago
Archive it and move on
MehBlah@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Its been less than useless for a decade. Full of toxic trash and old wrong answers.
InFerNo@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago
Start archivin’
furzegulo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
go ai, go broke
Hadriscus@jlai.lu 1 day ago
imho the experience is miserable, they went out of their way to strip all warmth from messages (they have a whole automated thing to get rid of all greetings and things considered superfluous) and there are many incentives to score points by answering which frankly I find sad, it doesn’t look like a forum where people exchange, it looks like a permanent run to answer
DomeGuy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Stackexchange sites aren’t intended as forums, they’re supposed to be “places to find answers to questions”.
The more you get away from stack overflow itself the worse they get, though, because anything beyond “how can I fix this tech problem” doesn’t necessarily have an answer at all, much less a single best one
gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
What are the odds the classic “expertsexchange” ends up out lasting stack exchange?
GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 22 hours ago
expertsexchange I see they have rebranded their domain with a dash. When did that happen?
whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
just one dash? hm must be a mistake
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
Worrying that forums will dissappear too.
The only answer you’ll get are SKUM sponsored bullshit with embedded ads.
Remember before they destroyed the internet? Good times.
melfie@lemy.lol 13 hours ago
A product I use still has an old school forum. The mods asked a while back whether to switch to Discord, and the responses were a resounding “NO”. It’s nice to have discussions organized by topics with descriptive titles that are indexed by search engines and are self-hosted by each organization instead of being centrally owned and controlled.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’m happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.
ramble81@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
Serious question here. LLMs trained their data off SO. Developers now ask LLMs for solutions instead of SO. New technology comes out that LLMs don’t have indexed. Where will LLMs get their data to train on for new technologies? You can’t exactly feed it a manual and expect it to extrapolate or understand (for that matter “what manual).
ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
From the questions people ask and from online accounts.
Prox@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Yes, that is the major problem with LLMs in general. There is no solution aside from “train in another different source (like Reddit)”, but then we rinse & repeat.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 13 hours ago
General_Effort@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
You can’t exactly feed it a manual and expect it to extrapolate or understand (for that matter “what manual).
You can do that to a degree (RLVR). They are also paying human experts. But that’s the situation now. Who knows how it will be in a couple more years. Maybe training AIs will be like writing a library, framework, …
artwork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s worth to mention that the StackOverflow survey referenced does not include many countries with also great developers, including Russia.
I never seriously used, now dropped, nor will use any LLM in my work, art, or research… I prefer people, communication, discoveries, effort, creativity, and human art…
Meanwhile… so freaking, incredibly many developers, artists are left without attribution… So many people atrophy their skils for learning, contribution, researching skills… So much human precious time is wasted… So much gets devalued…
This is so heartache… sorrowful…
AmidFuror@fedia.io 1 day ago
I asked ChatGPT to correct your grammar, and here is what I got back. I hope it helps.
It is worth mentioning that the referenced Stack Overflow survey does not include many countries that also have excellent developers, including Russia.
I have never seriously used, do not use now, and will not use any LLM in my work, art, or research.
I prefer people, communication, discovery, effort, creativity, and human art.Meanwhile, so incredibly many developers and artists are left without attribution, respect, or gratitude.
So many people atrophy their skills for learning, contribution, research, accumulation, and self-organization.
So much precious human time is wasted.
So much is devalued.Time will show, and only a few who are actually accountable will probably recover.
This is heartbreaking… sorrowful…artwork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Thank you, but I am sorry, but I will not read the output of the LLM.
nostrauxendar@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Couldn’t correct it yourself? What’s wrong, your brain don’t working so good?
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 1 day ago
I mean, people who don't want their questions or answers included in an LLM won't use SO. When people want to ask a question and not be shut down or berated, they'll probably end up on HN.
matengor@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
What’s HN?
finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Hacker News, probably.
chaosCruiser@futurology.today 1 day ago
Hacker News?
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 23 hours ago
As others have said, Hacker News.
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
I think a lot of good information is being scrubbed or controlled and, very soon, what was once free, you will be charged for.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 15 hours ago
A SO paywall would be ironic, as one of the main reasons for its creation was that experts(-)exchange was paywalled and annoying
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com 8 hours ago
It’s like reddit. Could can create content that others will sell to AI companies while showing you ads.
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 16 hours ago
I can’t even sign up to their website for some wird reason. Guess its their fault then.
UltraBlack@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I often feel like every question has been asked and answered already.
I still like SO
Atlas48@ttrpg.network 6 hours ago
Reported for duplicate.