Technology

Hey look everyone it's that retard from stack overflow!

Agree with you, SO is great for finding info. There are solutions on there for niche problems that I haven't been able to find elsewhere, the type of thing where someone actually took the time to type out a step-by-step answer and it's now there and searchable on SO. It's a bummer that so many people seem to hate on the site nowadays.

And lets not forget the whole reason SO came out in the first place, back then web results were littered with question/answer links to sites like Experts-Exchange. I hated trying to figure out if an answer was on there, most of the time you ended up with a link to a question that you think has an answer but oh no you need to subscribe to view an answer that may or may not exist.

best answer is the most visible

no wasting your time

These two points aren't always true in my experience. On more than a few occasions, I have encountered posts that look similar to the problems that I am facing, but because of a slight nuance (on the surface), the answers suggested won't help.

Usually, my search would hit a deadend here. At this point, I guess the best course of action is to create a new post. Unfortunately, these new posts would then get closed as a duplicate of the similar post - even though the problem in that particular context still hasn't been solved

Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?

I’ve had a discussion with someone about this. Apparently, there are people that enjoy the social contact. Some seem to like sitting in a Discord chat all day long and answering the same questions over and over again. Others like to “just ask” someone instead of looking for a solution themselves.

That there’s no clear structure of all the solutions provided via Discord and thus people have to ask the same things, nor a proper way of backing everything up in case Discord goes rogue seems to be blissfully ignored.

It’s probably part of the same phenomenon that, nowadays, people seem unable to write or read a few lines of documentation and instead create/watch 20 minutes on YouTube.

the whole XY Problem

lol. I hate this. Just answer the damn question or don't. I'm not asking you to validate if what I'm doing is weird or not. It's weird! I know! That's none of your business. Just answer the damn question or don't. Simple as.

Said the same thing 3 days ago basically

Problem being that someone else asked the question 10 years ago and the answer is now irrelevant due to version changes. People with high scores are just early adopters who answered all of the easy questions. Hostile users generally can't understand the question. The issue with llms answering your question is that they are going to be stuck in the current time period. In the future their answers will also be irrelevant due to version changes.

I see this hot take often, and it isn’t entirely without merit, but it is mitigated by moderation; in some Stack communities better than others. I’ve been an active member for many years, and in my view it goes like this.

If you contribute a question without reading the rules and How to Ask a Good Question, you don’t provide minimal reproducible steps with code, post images of code, etc. you may get flamed out of town. And that may feel bad and it may be mean if the questioner didn’t know to read those. But they are there for you.

If, however, you ask a thoughtful question, give examples, show what you’ve tried, etc. you definitely can get quality, courteous help.

Doesn’t change that video killed the radio star here. The show is over.

For me, strict rules are what make this website useful. No threads named "help me" is why I like reading it.

For newcomers there is https://stackoverflow.com/staging-ground

If LLMs just copied stack overflow they'd respond to every question with "Closed as duplicate. Question already answered."

This is an area where synthetic data can be useful. For example, you could scrape the documentation and source code for a Python library and then use an existing LLM to generate questions and answers about the content to train future coding assistants on. As long as the training data gets well curated for quality it's perfectly useful for this kind of thing, no need for an actual forum.

AI companies have a lot of clever people working for them, they're aware of these problems.

Same question applies to all the other websites out there being mined to train LLMs. Google search Overviews removes the need for people to visit linked sites. Traffic plummets. Ads dry up, and the sites go out of business. No new content to train on 🤷🏻‍♂️

The need for the service that SO provided won't go away. Eventually people will migrate to new places to discuss. LLM creators will either constantly scrape those as well, forcing them to implement more and more countermeasures and GenAI-poison, or the services themselves will enshittify and sell our content (i.e. the commons) to LLM-creators.

The snake eats its tail and it all degenerates into slop. Happy coding!

What exactly do you accuse Stack Overflow for? As far as I know this service has always been free to use and data is easily downloadable.

That's why people should be posting on fedi and never post on corporate web.

When corporate tells you its a parasite, believe it

I live in the hope that the insightful comments I left on reddit over my long tenure there will eventually be part of a FOSS corpus, once the VCs can't extract anything of competitive value from it anymore. I'll be long dead, but my comments will live on.