Ai haters out there, doesn't this give a valid use case for LLM?
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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SO is a collaborative encyclopedia of technical discussion that tries to be relevant, be practical, and to not constantly repeat topics.
LLMs can't provide that structure, they just shit out answers.
Most people think SO is a help desk and don't appreciate the structure and just want it to shit out an answer.
Maybe SO isn't dying so much as a cancerous growth is being treated.
Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant?
"That's a stupid question, marked as solved."
marked as duplicate, see <other question from 2005, before LLMs were invented>
It's not dead until I stop getting 10 year old outdated answers in my searches!
I wonder how well LLMs would do without SO's data
Exactly this. LLMs are already bad at answering questions about very old technology, and I assume they are equally bad at answering questions about very new technology. Also bad at answering questions that have never been asked. We're doomed.
Or Reddit, or Linux forums.
I had a decently awarded account on SO because I joined it in 2012. I asked and answered questions. For the first few years it was fucking awesome as a professional developer. Then it's popularity on google search results ended up making it too well known and the comment quality dropped substantially. Then the fucking powerusers popped up and started flagging almost everye one my questions as duplicates while pointing to unrelated questions. The last I really used SO was around 2017. I got too fed up to participate in the platform because when I spent the time to make a well formed question, it would just got shut down and my time wasted.
Had the same experience, almost exactly.
It will endure as long as the LLM's on there know how to misinterpret the question and fire back snarky unhelpful answers about how clueless you are for asking in the first place.
Like it or hate it (personally I prefer the latter, posting there I felt like a middle schooler with a PUNCH ME sticker on my face) it was a great source of indexable data on programming.
I wonder how will this affect future search and llms, now that all similar questions are being asked in private llm threads.
I never once actually asked a question there. Partly because most of the time, the question I was asking had always been asked.
However, I have found the correct answer to 100s of questions there. Usually through google/ddg/kagi searches.
Stack Overflow hasn't been useful for at least 10 years, if not longer.
The flagged "correct" answer is almost always wrong due to idiotic power-users and the vast horde of idiots who upvote obviously wrong answers because they're bootlickers. The real answer is usually buried in between the posts by gatekeepers, pedants, idiots with something to prove, wannabe admins, egotistical idiots, the highly opinionated technologically insecure, etc ad nauseam. Reddit is just as bad for tech questions, if not worse.
Since I started using LLMs (running on my own inference server) I haven't used anything else for tech questions that wasn't opinion-based. Much, much more useful, and it requires you to think seriously about the problem to come up with a good prompt -- which often gives you the answer before you even finish the prompt.
This is interesting because a huge amount of AI "knowledge" comes from stack exchange.
Now I'll go read the other comments and article to see if that's already been mentioned :)
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