Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.

Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!

But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time:

If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer).

At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems.

(Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).

I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.

There's more than one reason that forum is dead.

Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc.

But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment.

Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.

This is just dead man kicking. This will be less and less valuable thing as all sort of info go out of date.

But if it this, and IT WILL go out of date, what will be new learning data for all of those models?

Previously with SO people just enjoyed helping other people. But if they will be helping primarily multibillion dollar "AI" companies, then why would they? If nobody will be doing that then how this knowledge will be shared? There is open source projects and docs but they are blocking stuff more and more and some point I wont be surprised if you will have to log in into Debian or Arch Linux system to be able to read those docs.

But then if those companies and OSS will be not adding to training data what will? Will it be that programmers will be just writing new code for llms, for the money till they will make themselves obsolete?

Or at some point those "AI" companies will use anything they can to get ahead of the competition, even if this is against contracts or the law?

The longer I think about the future the more grim it looks.

That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa...

https://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-audito...

I hope they stay with us. I don't much care for the company or what's left of the community.

Amongst even simple stuff, they refused to update basic library questions when said libraries had new releases with additional calls and performance enhancements.

Sometime in 2018 I went so far as to blacklist the domain so it wouldn't inadvertently pollute research.

I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.

Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345

What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ?

Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need data from real humans figuring stuffs out.

People pivot and leverage what they previously were to become something new all the time.

I recently had a look at my stats (last time I checked was maybe 10 years ago) and I noticed the SO and security line stagnating fir a good few years. They used to be the one raising steeply, but at some point the sites because so toxic, with unsufferable downvoters that I completely gave up.

But other sites rised steadily. There are wonderful sutes in the SE network where you get great answers from very helpful people.

SO and a few other sites are dragging the whole idea to the bottom.

If you want to see unhinged psychopaths in action have a look at SE or SO Meta. Or maybe not.

we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models

I don't care about being sold, bad moderation or other aspects of its decline. AI gives me all answers I need.

One has to appreciate the irony on the use of the word "trust" there ...

I never posted on SO, but I did search it a lot; great resource

I never looked at it as a "community", just a place to find info

Another user that "outranks" you, but knows nothing about subject matter, has changed the content of your post. The great news is, it's still attributed to you. They removed the words "please" and "thank you" and other kind words to make you seem like a dick. Or they may have changed the wording completely to match their completely arbitrary tone and style. Have a nice day and kindly piss off, there's nothing you can do about it, hah, loser.