Its been a dead end a long time.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
154 points (99.4% liked)
Programming
20294 readers
296 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
There's no one thirstier than someone with a coding question.
In my opinion SO has been replaced by forges discussions/issues. Whenever I have an issue with some library or piece of software, I will always check their repo to see if someone is going through the same thing or how they solved it.
When I tried to engage with SO it was a pain in the ass so I just stopped answering/asking.
SO was incredible. I remember it very fondly circa 2011 thru 2013 while it was still growing and all the questions every thought of hadn't been asked yet.
Obviously as time went on, the challenge of organizing and managing questions once a huge base of knowledge had accumulated, proved to be a much more difficult. I don't think they ever solved that, and ended up rewarding toxic behavior.
It's a shame.
Managing all that data was never a problem for them. They had the technical expertise, paid staff, and plenty of volunteers.
The challenge was not being shitty to people, and they failed. That's why this news gathers so much attention. We are vindicated to see such a horrible group of people brought down.
Maybe?
I tend to think that they treated people shitty because they had no solution to questions that had already been answered, besides closing the question and marking it as duplicate. That the behavior of treating people like shit was a symptom, not the disease.
My favourite closed question is how to do Case-insensitive string comparison in C++ - closed as opinion based!
ChatGPT helped, but this is why you died StackOverflow.
The question asks for "the best" way to do it (making it opinion based) and forbids a potential solution without explaining why (it's clearly some kind of assignment, but that doesn't matter here). And it has plenty of answers both using Boost and in pure C++, so I'm not sure why that wasn't enough for you. Just because it's closed doesn't mean the answers already provided are bad.
By that measure basically every StackOverflow question asking how to do something is opinion based - the very nature of the site is questions asking for the best solutions. The "opinion based" rules is NOT meant to prevent questions like this. This is the kind of useless pedantry that killed StackOverflow.
I think it comes from a fundamental disconnect. You have something like:
- People ask questions like "which programming language is best" or "what's the best game engine" or "should I use tabs or spaces"?
- Someone decided they didn't want StackOverflow being used to debate these things, so they made a rule against opinion-based questions.
- People later come along and blindly apply the rule to ban anything that is worded as if it is an opinion, even if it's a perfectly suitable question.
not sure why that wasn’t enough for you
I never said it wasn't; just that it shouldn't have been closed.
Just because it’s closed doesn’t mean the answers already provided are bad.
Again, I never said otherwise. The point is it shouldn't have been closed.
A lot of people seem to be celebrating this, but I personally think this is a net negative for programming. Are people actually replacing SO with talking to LLMs? If not, where are they going?
I've seen an uptick in people using places like discord to get help. But that's not easily searchable and not in the same format that it is in stackoverflow. SO was meant to organize these answers to make asking questions easier. Now it seems like we're walking away from that, and I can't quite understand why. Is it really because SO is "toxic"?
I'm finding most of what I'd ask on SO can be asked on the tools GitHub issues. If a product doesn't offer a support form or GitHub issues it doesn't get used for me.
Yes. Stack overflow was a cruel, selfish, horrible emperor and now the dynasty of technical knowledge is crumbling.
If everyone moves to LLMs then there will not be a central repository of knowledge. That is the fault of stack overflow. Their self-centered behavior directly caused this fracturing of knowledge.
If they had been decent human beings we would have had a library of information kept current with today's trends and technologies. Instead we're going to have to rely on paid AI models or fucking grok.
This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.
This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.
Who is the "they" in this? The volunteers who contributed to the site? StackOverflow isn't like a company or anything. No one is paid to answer questions there. They're all people who were working hard to make a collection of common questions with the best possible answers, and trying to uphold a certain standard for the content there.
Based on your comment, I think maybe we as a group just don't deserve stackoverflow. If we really are all now turning to LLMs instead (which are not in any way "decentralized") to get a bunch of statistical bullshit spit at us instead of, you know, the actual right answer, then maybe we deserve what will happen next.
it's owned by Prosus, acquired for $1.8 billion in 2021.
Yes, but they're not the ones producing all of the content. Again, that's produced by volunteers.
Again, the attitude comes down from the top. Volunteers whose ethics (contempt and superiority) align with the executive staff are rewarded, and those that don't are let go. I don't know if you're ignorant or being deliberately obtuse? Please think about what I wrote.
W h a t ? I couldn't disagree with your comment more.
StackOverflow, and the slew of substacks, are/were almost entirely volunteer run. From the questions, to the answers, to the moderation.
Like yeah, there's assholes everywhere, and yeah tech jockies are always snooty when they think they know better. I don't think any of this is the fault of StackOverflow necessarily, it's just a format that isn't a forum. They were, and are, a QA site where they wanted answers from the people that knew. Not discussions. Not the same question asked a hundred times. Not quick homework answers.
StackOverflow is one of the defacto ways I still get programming answers and knowledge from. So much so that I haven't needed to ask a question in a long time. It's robotic, it's uniform, it's boring, but it's is/was such a useful website.
IMO it's downfall was not promoting more community and branching our beyond QA and into discussion based topics and chats. Not being able to see that people needed a space outside their QA model and not trying to harness that in their hay day cost them everything. Now AI has scrapped all their content.
the culture of contempt comes down from the top. it's owned by Prosus, acquired for $1.8 billion in 2021.
I think a big problem was how new users had to unlock things like the ability to comment. Probably a lot of new users really should have added comments to previous questions to clarify things, but instead the site tells them to create a new question first to get reputation points. So they do, but what they want isn't really a unique question, just clarification on a previous question.
Once you get enough reputation to be "in," suddenly the whole site opens up and you can do everything you need to. But a new user has to get to that point, and that is daunting if they're new to programming.
I also think that SO selling their data for training AI really rubbed a lot of old timers the wrong way too. If they had not given in to that, I wonder if the decline would have been nearly as sharp. There were users active there daily, finding questions to answer and evaluating others answers. Now there really aren't.
SO selling their data for training AI really rubbed a lot of old timers the wrong way too
If they didn't sell it, it would've just been scraped anyway. The AI companies give zero fucks. May as well try to get some money out of it
Good. StackOverflow is toxic, while I was in school I would ask questions that were “obvious” I guess. I’d get told that I’m dumb (didn’t get those words but it was implied) when trying to ask for clarification. Then I got banned from posting anymore questions due to downvotes. Like imo how can you learn if people shun you for asking questions?
Reddits programming community was more welcoming and kinder than the stuck up folk on SO.
It's mainly a different model, but I totally sympathize that it's the opposite of welcoming or encouraging.
SO recognizes that many, many questions are really just rephrasings of the same underlying question, and the aim is to find and provide the best answer to those. It explicitly does not want to repeatedly answer the same question, and given how few people find out how it works before simply asking, they have to be pretty ruthless about it. The result is that usually the most active and fleshed out questions and answers are very informative. So there's a big upside in trade for those downsides. Answers are meant to be durable, ~singular, and authoritative.
Reddit is basically halfway between that, and Discord. Discord is the polar opposite, questions and answers are naturally ephemeral, duplication happens constantly, and quality of responses is all over the map.
I greatly prefer the StackOverflow model, and - to be very clear - I have never once asked (to say nothing of answering) a question of my own there, lmao.
I get that, in my case it was stuff I couldn’t find and even if it’s something that was already asked it tended to be slightly different than what I wanted causing more confusion still lol
Yeah, it's certainly not a perfect model :) and I will absolutely acknowledge that some folks seem to delight in their own smugness and knowledge and seem to enjoy opportunities to shit on someone. The way the platform works probably amounts to a certain "gravity" pulling those personalities in, TBH.
Yeah the issue then becomes trying to understand how else it could be phrased or what the underlying mechanism is to truly understand how to ask the proper question (or find the proper answer), I find LLMs helpful in those instances as it can help me get to the root of whatever issue more easily then trying to wade through the ocean of information online.
It's because all the questions have already been answered. How many times can you answer how to reverse an array in javascript?
This is exactly what I came here to say. They are militantly against duplicates. Doesn't that mean on a long enough timeline the number of new questions have to eventually reach zero?
I use stack overflow every day and have for years. I have never once had to ask a question.
I haven't used it a lot even before AI.
... ... How do you reverse an array in Javascript?
marked as duplicate. closed.
array.reverse() should do the trick 😆
view more: next ›