alt Hacker NewsStack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
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Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming.
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).
The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.
Stack Overflow with all of its shortcomings was a marvel of the internet at it's peak. People especially in early were chasing karma and anything you asked, you were sure to get some answer. Not always right but some answer. While for sure LLMs will give much better answers on average. I feel that it's a piece of humanity we've lost there that should be adequately remembered and the memory cherished.
For me, the strict requirements for posting questions help me to define the problem well, and after writing the question properly, I'd have the solution.
Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?
Call me crazy but sometimes I still find a better solution on StackOverflow than what Claude Code insists to do.
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views.
There's more than one reason that forum is dead.
I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...
LLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway).
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 happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.
Forum? What forum? When has Stack Overflow ever been a forum?
Just look at the graph, Covid peak aside its previous peak was in 2016 and it was in continuous decline since then. All LLMS this was increase the slope.
Stack Overflow had been a zombie even before they sold to Prosus in 2021. It became over-moderated and calcified.
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.
> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models.
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.
Where do we go now for the answers validated by the community? How do we build knowledge? The answers that Claude gives might look good, but without community edits, votes, and comments it's a lot harder to evaluate.
I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.
Are all of them dead or just the programming exchange?
Wow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off.
That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?
Not really surprised tbh, the goal of stack overflow was to essentially help out in unique problems that users have, but ever since the advent of AI, I personally have had less and less need to go to stack overflow. The one advantage of stack overflow though, is that unlike AI where once you find the answer, its gone, in stack overflow, it can help the next guy along. Kinda feels like we are losing a bit more of the humanity aspect in engineering.
To be honest, I stopped using SO with the advent of AI, I completely forgot about it.
I don't care about being sold, bad moderation or other aspects of its decline. AI gives me all answers I need.
> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertise.
One has to appreciate the irony on the use of the word "trust" there ...
one of the interesting properties of public forums like SO is that the maintainers of software packages get visibility into the problems and frustrations that their users experience
we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models
where is all the future SO-type content for LLMs going to come from, with all the little "gotchas" that people discovered, or, more importantly, corrections of incorrect info
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
Good work everyone. We gave our labour freely and see how we all profited!
Did the founders have an exit or liquidity from Stack Overflow? I hope so.
There are a lot of reasons why that forum is dead. I loved answering questions on it in the heyday, it was fun and I learned a ton. The owners let a bunch "admins" run it into the ground first though.
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.
Title of this could be more informative: Working with Stack Overflow Data to Investigate its Decline
Discussion when the source article is from: January.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
One thing I've been curious about is how the other sites on StackExchange have fared. A lot of those are pretty interesting. Anecdotally the few that I check occasionally also seem to have declined a lot.
I'm curious if they could pivot into a site where LLMs post questions and answer problems posted by other LLMs.
Wow, has it really gone all the way down to zero?
i haven't been on stackoverflow for maybe 6 months, haven't seen it on google search, or needed to ask much on google either. Maybe they did a web search. On the plus side, its still used by AI agents
Few hundred k rep here, across Stack Exchange.
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.
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StackOverflow always sucked. I never found it to be a useful resource.
Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.
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!