alt Hacker NewsTotal monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
Comments
Not surprising. It's very often a toxic, unhelpful, stubborn community. I think maybe once or twice in years of use did I ever find it genuinely welcoming and helpful. Frequently instead I thought "Why should I even bother to post this? It'll just get either downvoted, deleted, or ignored."
End of an era. :-(
A death graph.
Kind of sad that they ran out of ideas how to fix SO.
Gee...I wonder why it's almost dead (again)?
Someone turn off the lights on the way out
LLMs are dogshit in many ways but when it comes to programming they are faster than people, respond instantaneously to further information, and can iterate until they understand the problem fully.
Bonus is that you don’t get some dipshit being snarky.
>This post was not virtue signaling enough and therefore closed as duplicate.
SO had the greatest minds but the shitiest moderation
StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs.
Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of course, but I wanted to do so out of principle.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough?
Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.
Eternal September is finally over =)
It was impossible to ask certain programming questions. Asking there was truly last resort.
Derivative of S curve
I not even hearing stack overflow survey for 2025
damn bro, its sad how "tradition" is gone now
edit: I know they still doing it but usually there is "viral" post,yt video etc for developer talking about it in my feed
now??? less people talk about it anymore
I mean, I kinda of miss it. But man it was a hostile place for newcomers.
Only ever asked one question and I tried to answer more than a handful but never really clicked with the site.
I do wonder if it would have faired better under the original ownership before it was sold in 2021-06-02.
I’m glad it’s dead. They were super rude.
llm killed stackoverflow
Now the real question is...
Which AI company will acquire whats left of StackOverflow and all the years of question/answer data?
This is incredible. Anyone who claims LLMs aren't useful will need to explain how come almost every programmer can solve 95% of his problems with an LLM without needing anything else. This is real usefulness right here.
EDIT: I'm not saying I'm loving what happened and what is becoming of our roles and careers, I'm just saying things have changed forever; there's still a (shrinking) minority of people who seem to not be convinced.
What an incredible graph
Flag it as off topic
Another note to add here: The whole system was stupid, too! What do you mean, I can only give answers, but not comment?
While there is much more to say about SO's demise, the "interaction" on the platform was definitely not one of its strengths, either.
Cool, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344599
Wonder why my submission wasn't featured and this one went to #1 immediately ... oh wait I actually know :^)!
For those who have historically wondered about or objected to "moderation" (people usually mean curation here; as the overwhelming majority of the actions they're talking about are not performed by moderators) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-picked list of important discussions from the meta site explaining some policy basics:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 If your question was not well received, read this before you post your next question
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254358 Why the backlash against poor questions?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 What is Stack Overflow’s goal?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262446 Are we being "elitist"? Is there something wrong with that?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791 The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high (N.B.: linked specifically for the satire in the top-voted answer)
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 Why is "Can someone help me?" not a useful question?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/309208 Are there questions that are too trivial to answer?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 Why isn't it required to provide comments/feedback for downvotes, and why are proposals suggesting this so negatively received?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366757 On the false dichotomy between quality and kindness
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 Can we make it more obvious to new users that downvotes on the main site are not insults and in fact can help them help themselves?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 Comments asking for clarification or an MCVE are not rude/abusive
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/370792 Is this really what we should consider "unwelcoming"?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (fd: my self-answered Q&A)
Note that IDs are in chronological order. The rate of new meta.stackoverflow.com posts fell off dramatically at some point because of the formation of a network-wide meta.stackexchange.com. The earliest entries listed here are from 2014.
Holy shit.
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Stackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom. Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is mainly about asking and answering questions.
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Since the trend must go on, we expect StackExchange to now offer answers, and the user responses need to be questions. We could even make a quiz game show out of that! /s
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it died
The most toxic, degrading, and insulting forum for people. My questions, as well as my answers, always got poisonous criticism. Good.
I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.