Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions

Comments

• rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

  source

  • slate@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Spoiler

      last time this question was answered was for several years older software versions, and the old solutions don’t work anymore

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I was in the middle of making a reply like this but yours is better. Closed as duplicate.

      source
  • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Damn, lol

      source
  • Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yea it sucks, but quality is important so I get it.

    source

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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questions, and technical forums were even worse a lot of the time, but SO’s methods led to the site becoming severely outdated. They really should have introduced a mechanism to mark old content as outdated.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.

      source
• micka190@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

  source

  • chaosCruiser@futurology.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source

    • rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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

      source

      • -> View More Comments
• deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  LLM’s won’t be helping but SE/SO have been fully enshitifying themselves for years.

  It was amazing in yhe early days.

  source

  • MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It was a vast improvement over expert sex change, which was the king before SO.

    source

    • KudoMonstro@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      expertSEXchange dot com hahahahaahahahahahahahaha oh that brought me some dreadful memories! Thanks for the laugh and rhe chills

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • Quexotic@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    How early though? I stopped using them about 12 years ago due to the toxic environment.

    source

    • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

      source
• melfie@lemy.lol ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

  source

  • vane@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    2016 is probably when they removed freedom by introducing aggressive moderation to remove duplicates and ban people

    source

    • skisnow@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

      source
• Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yeah because either you get a “how dumb are you?” Or none

  source

  • HereIAm@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Locking this comment. Duplicate of lemmy.world/comment/21433687

    source

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The complete non-sequitur link really makes it. chef’s kiss

      source
• Hadriscus@jlai.lu ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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

  source

  • DomeGuy@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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

    source
• eronth@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Honestly just funny to see. It makes perfect sense, based on how they made the site hostile to users.

  source

  • bytesonbike@discuss.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I was contributing to SO in 2014-2017 when my job wanted our engineers to be more “visible” online.

    I was in the top 3% and it made me realize how incredibly small the community was. I was probably answering like 5 questions a week. It wasn’t hard. For some perspective, I’m making like 4-5 posts on Lemmy A DAY.

    What made me really pissed was how often a new person would give a really good answer, then some top 1% chucklefuck would literally take that answer, rewrite it, and then have it appear as the top answer. And that happened to me constantly. But again, I didn’t care since I’m just doing this to show my company I’m a “good lil engineer”.

    I stopped participating because of how they treated new users. And around 2020(?), SO made a pledge to be not so douchy and actually allow new users to ask questions. But that 1% chucklefuck crew was still allowed to wave their dicks around and stomp on people’s answers. So yeah, less “Duplicate questions”, more “This has been answered already [link to their own answer that they stole]”.

    So you still had the most sweaty people control how things work. And you can’t grow a community like that.

    source
• Atlas48@ttrpg.network ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Reported for duplicate.

  source
• fibojoly@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Oh no, poor AI won’t know where to feed anymore. Anyway…

  source
• BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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

  source

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source

    • ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If the alternative is the cesspit that is Yahoo Answers and Quora, I’ll take the heavy-handed moderation of StackOverflow.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • theolodis@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I call it “comic book guy” syndrome. The desperate need to feel superior.

      source
    • BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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

      source
  • kazerniel@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source
  • dgmib@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source
  • THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source
• echodot@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s not that developers are switching to AI tools it’s that stack overflow is awful and has been for a long time. The AI tools are simply providing a better alternative, which really demonstrates how awful stack overflow is because the AI tools are not that good.

  source

  • MoffKalast@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Ironic, they’re being closed as duplicate.

    source
  • Gsus4@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    But you agree that the knowledge base of existing answers is useful, no? That is what the islop searches and reproduces.

    source

    • Ledivin@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Most answers on SO are either from a doc page, are common patterns found in multiple books, or is mostly opinion-based. Most code AIs are significantly better at the first two without even being trained on SO (which I wouldn’t want anyway - SO really does suck nowadays)

      source

      • -> View More Comments
• General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Image

  data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/…/1926661#gr…

  Stick a fork in it.

  source
• furzegulo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  go ai, go broke

  source
• gravitywell@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  What are the odds the classic “expertsexchange” ends up out lasting stack exchange?

  source

  • GenosseFlosse@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    expertsexchange I see they have rebranded their domain with a dash. When did that happen?

    source

    • whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      just one dash? hm must be a mistake

      source
• nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ve posted questions, but I don’t usually need to because someone else is almost always posted it before

  source

  • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source

    • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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

      source
    • cherrari@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source

    • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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

      source
  • Gsus4@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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…

    source

    • NikkiDimes@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • falseWhite@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There are free open source models you can run locally and they have all the answers.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
• artwork@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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…

  source

  • AmidFuror@fedia.io ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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…

    source

    • artwork@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Thank you, but I am sorry, but I will not read the output of the LLM.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • nostrauxendar@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Couldn’t correct it yourself? What’s wrong, your brain don’t working so good?

      source
• Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

  source

  • matengor@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    What’s HN?

    source

    • finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Hacker News, probably.

      source
    • chaosCruiser@futurology.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Hacker News?

      source
    • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      As others have said, Hacker News.

      source
• Wispy2891@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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

  source

  • stoly@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The Redditification of SO

    source
• bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  But what will the mods close for arbitrary reasons before there are any responses?

  source

  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’m sorry, but I’ve had to close your comment because it was too speculative.

    source

    • veni_vedi_veni@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Sorry, Betelgeuse is in retrograde, so this post is closed.

      source
• SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “Search before asking!” - Stack Overflow

  source
• thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Stack Overflow lost its job to ai

  source

  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    To AI using Stack Overflow data.

    source
• ramble81@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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).

  source

  • Prox@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

    source
  • xthexder@l.sw0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Image

    source
  • dantheclamman@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I am worried, because there are increasing cases where open source docs are going offline because they can’t take the bandwidth costs of the big LLM bots recrawling hundreds of times per day. Wikipedia is also getting hammered. There is so much waste and diminishing returns

    source
  • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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, …

    source
• MehBlah@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Good. That site has been a toxic hole in the ground for a decade or more.

  source
• bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

  source
• melsaskca@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

  source
• jaykrown@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s all already been used to train AI at this point.

  source
• Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  What? People would rather have their balls licked by AI rather than have some neckbeard moderator change the entire language of their question and not answer shit? Fuck SO. That shit was so ass to interact with.

  source
• DarkSideOfTheMoon@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Who is going to ask there to be harresed

  source
• JTskulk@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Every question has been answered, pack it up boys.

  source
• UltraBlack@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I often feel like every question has been asked and answered already.

  I still like SO

  source