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Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?
96 points by __all__ on Jan 29, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 189 comments
During last years I started seeing less good answers, and discussions around that website.

It's clear Google Search algorithm is favoring other websites. And probably AI and the new LLM models are being another reason devs will stop going directly to StackOverflow.

What do you think? Will StackOverflow keep up, or will slowly dye?




I have a fair number of points on SO from asking and answering some common (and esoteric) questions. But I stopped, as a lot of folks don't mark answers as correct, so good answers don't get highlighted. Why give good advice if it's not marked as such?

I got an email a few months ago that one of my answers had been edited. It turns out that someone who—as best as I can tell—hasn't ever actually answered a question had reworded my answer, removed a ton of context, and in effect, made my answer incorrect.

I immediately changed it back. The person who edited my answer was doing this to farm points. With no understanding of the problem or my solution, they were racking up points simply by "cleaning up" answers.

I'm not going to say that this is killing SO. But it does seem like there are some perverse incentives that make it easy for folks to accrue points without actually being competent. And as long as SO points are considered a sign of competence, people will keep doing it.


I have a suspicion that there are coding bootcamps or whatever that tell their students to do these things, as I've noticed multiple users doing basically the same (apparently point farming) thing.

Gamification works until it gets gamed.


I find the gamification on SO overwhelming. So many badges and stars and points for things I don't really understand because I haven't investigated.

Badges are dumb.


Badges don't do anything at all on SO. Only points actually do anything. You get more privileges/capabilities with more points.


Gold badge for a tag lets you close questions with that tag unilaterally instead of needing 3 users to vote on it. It's assumed you know enough about the topic you can do that, and it can still be overridden by 3 votes to reopen from other users.


That makes the situation even more confusing because a lot of emphasis is put on badges and less on points.


People still want anything like badge that doesn't do anything, see game lootbox


I never got into the "game" aspect on Stack Overflow, that is, to fully participate you have to get a certain number of points and I've never been motivated to play along.

Sites like SO are bad at recognizing the kind of knowledge you got because you spent three years training in the mountains, which I've got some of (as well as opinions about as well founded as those of David Brooks or Jim Cramer)

There was a trade publication that licensed the SO software and I made myself the #2 user on their instance by simply asking a large number of good questions. I could have dethroned the #1 user but didn't want to because he was a knowledgeable guy who wrote great answers. I went looking at SO to see if anyone had gotten to the top of the leaderboard by this strategy and didn't find any so they've got to have some different mechanisms that make this hard.


I saw this happening in sort of slow-mo, but didn't know who to tell or what to do, so here you go.

Around 2017-18 I was pretty involved in the bootcamp/learning programming community, and I noticed my fellow teachers recommending students to "do not ask question on StackOverflow, if you have an issue it' better to ask in Github to the library author, people are more polite and you get better answers".

As an Open Source dev myself, this left a slightly bad taste, but couldn't exactly disagree since SO culture IS brutal (specially in the tight timeframe). I did explain when I could that the best is actually to learn to ask the right question, and that often this is part of the debug experience for yourself, but I was but a little pebble against the stream. This had probably gone for a while, and it was then also when we saw a lot of talk about burnout in open source devs. At some point it seemed there was someone burning out every other week!

Everyone can put 2 and 2 together to see what was happening; low-quality questions were not being asked in StackOverflow anymore and now they were dumped to random OSS devs who didn't sign for it and were forced to move from a collaborative environment that was Github back then to a more customer-facing environment it became.

The "interesting" part is what happened as a consequence. Today if you do Open Source, become semi-famous and want to continue, it's pretty clear that you have to have a thick skin and do a combination of: just shut down ALL issues/support in popular repos[1], or get used to tell people NO quick and easily, or take regular breaks, or I guess be part of a big company being paid to deal with issues as part of your job.


Personally the only websites I see displacing SO on Google results are sites that reuse SO content and game Google to get ad revenue.


This is the main use I have for browser addins that block sites in search results.


Not a browser add-on but changing to self-hosted searxNG. Proxy searches to your engines of choice, filter and rewrite urls to your liking (like yt->piped, medium->scripe.rip).


You can actually pair this with a browser extension: Privacy Redirect[0].

You can setup your own self-hosted instances or existing third party ones. It's a game changer both for privacy and UX.

[0]: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect


Which add on do you recommend? I’ve often thought, after clicking on some search result that instantly leads me to a full page splash, “I want to never see that domain again”


I use uBlacklist. It supports 10 search engines.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist


Try Kagi, I used a while ago and was amazing, now I default to DDG, I don’t see any cloned content sites or just too few that I don’t notice them.


Google and DDG should add a Kagi feature, where you can set the priority of the sites or even block them.


I just started using Kagi, and the ability to just bump Wikipedia as first results has been great so far.

I really need to try using Kagi more.


USD10 per month is too steep for me.


You do you, but it comes out to pennies per search for me. 1000¢ / 30 days / 5 searches/day = 6.6¢/search, and that would be a slow day.


That's less than what you spend of coffee each month


Affordability isn’t the only input into the decision of spending money on something.


That's certainly not true of everyone. We don't all go to Costa and etc...


Even buying a bag to make at home...you're at ~$10 or more


If only google could provide that sort of quality control.


Yep, this is what I see, I was looking around to see if anyone had a similar problem with D3 I was having, but all the sites were just republishing Stack ticked answers.


Stack Overflow had the best intentions by making their data available for download.

The only outcome is see from that attitude is it fueled hundreds of spammy SO clones with names like “nerdsolution” and “geekanswer”.

We’d be better iff with SO keeping the data private.


Wait, hasn't it always been a (public) website ?


I'm guessing they released their data in a different format for download? Otherwise you'd have to scrape it which is not as easy as having it in a database.


I stopped participating because I found that I usually was insulted somehow or my answer was not credited.

If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.

If you give a correct answer but don't include a significant amount of explanation, it will be marked down.

Often times I see perfectly valid questions and people refuse to answer them but will only respond with a comment.

I just wanted to try to help some people. I don't have time to write Wiki articles or deal with assholes who have nothing better to do than to do than try to find fault with a question or answer.

Also, a lot of the time the answer is to use some library or module and you can get attacked for even acknowledging that modules exist.


As someone who has sometimes left a comment instead of an answer, it's because I too am scared that if I try to answer with an actual answer it'll just get downvoted / moderated away, so rather than "risk" a lot of karma in leaving an actual answer, I'll answer in the comments because it's less likely to recieve negative attention.

It's sadly working around the negativity and toxicity of the site and the people who tend to vote / moderate there.


You get 10 reputation for each upvote but only lose 2 for each downvote your answer gets. And if it gets "moderated away", you don't lose any reputation.


The correct answer is ALWAYS in a comment to the (often marked) wrong answer with the most upvotes.


> If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.

This has been my experience with learn language subreddits as well. I will give a one or two-sentence answer. Someone else will expound on that in the replies. If the reply was written in a snarky way, I get downvoted. That's just an invitation to not participate imo.


I quit because my questions just weren’t getting any answers anymore. As much as they love to complain about people asking questions that could be solved with a google search, they’ve failed me pretty hard when google has already failed me as well.

There are other SE sites I still like though. I tend to have an interesting time on the retrocomputing SE site, for example.


>If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.

Same on HN. I assume programmers get hyper pedantic because they spend their time telling a computer exactly what to do... Although I was pedantic anyway, so maybe cause and effect are the reverse.


A lot of answers are now out of date. Some dangerously so. And its not just 'fast moving' languages. Bash, nginx, docker, gcp, bluetooth. Much of the landscape of these tools has changed since say 2015, but that is where most of the 'core' answers are from.

Many have notes that they are out of date in sub-comments. But its hard to be noticed against a 700 upvote selected top answer.


Perhaps SO should include version numbers so that you could search for solutions to problems with specific versions or the latest as the case may be.

Out of date answers are useful when you need to fix something based on old / un-updated OS and/or software. Not every installation uses the latest versions of everything.


Having a switch that shows answers to specific versions would be a huge help. Even if those were general guesses, or if it was up to the answerer to self-report.


They've introduced "Trending (recent votes count more)" sort option recently, but it's not the default (yet?)


This isn’t a good fix, because it requires people to give enough of a shit (fight against the feeling of decay) to look through the existing answers or write new ones that won’t get many votes because the question is already answered, and I say this as someone who has am answer just like this, python added a feature in the years after the original question was answered and my answer is by far the most ergonomic and simple answer, but I have zero expectations that it will eventually be vindicated… this one question alone serves as my guidepost, SO has been in decline for years, and it’s accelerating, and they have finally noticed and are trying to fix it, but it won’t work…


StackOverflow originated during a time when finding accurate and up-to-date documentation on the internet was a challenge. Today, however, there is a wealth of easily accessible, hands-on documentation that often includes links to support resources such as Discord.

In my opinion, this has led to two types of questions being asked on StackOverflow: very basic ones that the asker could have easily found in the documentation, and very advanced ones. Unfortunately, the number of basic questions far outweighs the number of advanced ones. As a result, the platform is losing popularity as users become increasingly less willing to answer questions that could have been easily researched.


Discord and slack and other chat platforms are horrible knowledge repositories. They're not indexed by search engines, there's really no archiving ability, searching them for anything sucks, there's no linking and horrible for long form content and lacking useful formatting.


True, though it aims to cater the use case for „I need support now“ and not for „I want to archive this question and its solution“.


Stack Overflow was never intended as "I need support now". A significant amount of friction comes from people using it as such, misunderstanding what the site's purpose is. This is understandable, because it's not easy to explain and the on-boarding experience doesn't help with it either.


There are a bunch of people in this comment section asking for StackOverflow to be things that are clearly non-goals for the platform. SO certainly has it's problems but users coming and posting without understanding what the platform is supposed to be for is a significant contributor frustration among users new and tenured.


I think it is. They advertise with „ask questions, get answers“, which is precisely what users are doing when they are in need of immediate support.


The advanced ones don't get an answer or are too open ended for the website, which is incidentally why I stopped asking questions, they never got an answer or got closed.

Got better results on reddit


Reddit is probably even worse though with its auto-closing of comments after a short time, and tolerance for reposts. (Both of which make for netiquette violations !)

P.S.: this is also an issue with hn, though at least dang et al. work tirelessly to identify reposts. It still makes it awkward when the best discussion that you would like to contribute to is locked, or worse, has now bits spread in consecutive discussions...


I never had a problem with a post closed on reddit and was able to ask very open ended questions, so independently of the rules, it was possible for me to get the help i needed, which wasn't possible on stackoverflow


This isn't so much about the first person asking the question-

(if they were really the first and not just failing to find previous occurrences of the same question being asked - because of the popularity of Reddit and how it works, the netiquette rule of searching first and avoiding duplicates seem to be forgotten in other spaces)

-but about those coming later with similar questions.


I never really used stackoverflow. The rare times I do use it, i.e. google leads me to it, a large portion of the posts really annoy the hell out of me. I don't care if someone tries to solve the "wrong" problem, or however stupid "highly valued" users on that platform try to frame it. I don't care about similar questions, redundancy, frameworks, wrong usages of languages and quirks. I don't want to search around finding those other similar posts where the poster apparently has the more correct question (?). I don't want to learn a general method that solves the underlying problem so much more elegantly than the apparently implied "hack" that would be needed to solve the posters question as is. No, I'm very happy with the hack and I want it, because I want to know the answer to my problem, not indulge in your elitism. From that point of view, stackoverflow is very often just beyond useless.


The only thing that introduces a similar level of rage in me is when something ends up on Microsoft's forum, the "marked correct" answer is always some variation of "did you turn it back off and on" that never has any replies or relevance.


Maybe I'm making it up, but I swear I've read somewhere that the answers are shit on purpose so you to go to their paid support.

Sounds Microsoftian enough to be plausible.


I think a major problem that stackoverflow has is that for recent questions, the average vote is a down vote.

It could be argued that the vast majority of questions are deserving of downvotes, but that itself is a problem and a turn-off and the definition of what qualifies as a good or bad question could be adjusted so that the majority aren't downvoted.

"Punishing" people for asking questions that would when the site was new be showered in upvotes feels like kicking out the ladder from under those of us who climbed it.


For physics, I noted that physics.stackexchange.com, which worked fine 10 years ago, was only filled with noise now and no answers. Then I realized people who usually answered stuff there moved to Discord servers and other sites. Maybe something similar happened to SO? It's like the gamification model that fuels the desire to post answers on those sites got old and boring..


I'm not sure it's the gamification itself so much as the details by which it's implemented.

I still rarely use stackoverflow to ask questions, but I've given up on answering them. I don't mind giving answers elsewhere, but stackoverflow specifically discourages that, somehow.

A few effects that are clearly harmful (IMHO):

- Stackoverflow's game mechanics strongly discourage duplicate questions. But this is pretty dispiriting when it happens to you - both as questioner, and as answerer. Additionally, duplication is often not exact; there can be significant difference that are sufficient to really change the appropriate solution. Stackoverflow is really bad at finding those.

- Even where questions are in essence duplicate, that is clearly not always obvious to the novices asking the questions. It's just not very helpful to close their questions in a rather toxic fashion and effectively berate them for not already seeing the parallels they were looking for in the first place.

- Stackoverflow discourages discussion. However, discussion is useful in finding the best solution or even merely discovering the context and limits of that solution.

- When discussion happens despite the SO UI, gamification rewards almost exclusively the primary asker and answerer; to the extent discussion is permitted, it's not encouraged to be constructive or healthy therefore.

- Stackoverflow's attention algorithm highlights new questions and highlights first answers to those questions. However, this encourages answers that are essentially "First post!!1!", and then maybe editing those into something better. It discourages well thought out responses. This isn't intrinsic in gamification; it's simply due to the way they've tuned the knobs.

- There's an intrinsic tension in how they've tuned their gamification: on the one hand, they encourage knee-jerk responses because speed is of the essence, and on the other, they discourage questions that benefit from quick-n-dirty answers. That tension doesn't lead to a healthy middle ground, it just leads to frustration and a bad experience.

Fora like this one and reddit also use gamification - we all see and respond to votes - but they do so differently. Stackoverflow could try to learn from that. And stackoverflow could make the gamification more collaborative, and less zero-sum. Whether they'll do so... I guess at this point I kind of doubt it.


Yes.

The community died many years ago. The company itself died a few years ago selling out. The value of StackOverflow is dying as we speak.

The original value was in the community. Sadly the system of moderation was not self correcting enough to change with time. No amount of democracy can solve the toxicity without new people in those positions of power. When people quote the community as being "toxic", you usually look to a number of rotten apples.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/22/the-loop-2-understandi...

Like what's famous at DARPA, there are short tenures to positions of power. StackOverflow could've adopted a similar model for their product and moderation teams(including community ones) to bring in regular positive change. The technical talent was already top-tier and created one hell of a marvel of infrastructure excellence.

https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/what-darpa-does


I think the experts basically got bored and left.

I've asked a couple of questions I'd hope would be fairly simple (like how to run a program in cgroups v2), set a big bounty on them, and never got a single useful answer.


I recently asked a question about Java and Maven development differences in VS Code between Windows and Mac OS and got only one answer from someone who didn't actually read the question. So, yeah, it sure seems that way.


Might it be time to introduce financial bounties?


Like Yahoo answers? It's probably tough to get the incentives balanced. Without a really good design you'll get lots of people without deep knowledge answering many questions and playing the numbers game.


I've noticed this trend for years, basically :

- for reference I land on official documentation

- for issues I usually land on GitHub issues and source code

- for random stuff I still hit SO - like some SQL problem, CSS, algorithm implementation

- for design stuff I land on blog posts

Personally I see stack overflow value reduce with good reference documentation and GitHub issues/open source dev discussions.

The fact that SO is purely QA and closes opinionated/discussion topics makes it less valuable. It made sense in the past when you couldn't communicate with devs so easily or when reference documentation wasn't that good. Especially for closed source stuff.


I find repo issues generally horrendous to browse/sear h. In particular 'stale issue' bots killing off well written issues with reproduction.


Sorry, tangential rant, but, God I hate stale issue bots. The issue is valid, it's reproduced, it's been discussed, nothing's changed, it hasn't stopped being a valid issue just because it hasn't had activity in 30 days, or 6 months, or a year.

Just means the maintainers haven't gotten around to fixing it/implementing it yet, nothing wrong with that - they don't owe anyone a timeline for fixing issues.

The only way to fight the stale bot is to constantly spam your issue with "bump" comments, which nobody's going to do (and if they do, surely the maintainers will just complain that you're spamming, and rightfully so).

So if the maintainers don't have time to deal with your issue within X months, it just won't get fixed. They won't even be aware that those issues are still there (because who goes through closed issues looking for stuff to do?).

And so I hit google for an issue I'm having with Project X, stumble upon a "closed" issue, scroll to the bottom, and see "closed by stale bot". WHY IS IT CLOSED WHEN IT IS STILL AN ISSUE.


Oh god. I recently landed on a Docker issue that exactly described my problem. Many reproductions, all questions answered and then maintainers stopped engaging. So the stale issue bot took over. Somebody untagged it, but a while later it redid it. That went on for months, after which somebody closed it manually.

The bot doesn't really change the outcome (if maintainers don't engage, they don't engage), but it a huge bunch of noise.


While I agree with this sentiment and share the frustration. Or some sense of lack of cohesion, but...

Remember the stale bot is an opt-in feature. It is the maintainer (s) who decided to configure it.


It's not great UX for sure - but the information contained there is usually the best - you can usually get historic context or maintainer views on some issue you've hit.


I think you might find answers of problems that are not converted in the docs, I mostly find stuff about JS, Ruby, css or SQL there, but for example for Rust I default to Github, docs.rs or Discord, it might have to do with the community of the tech you are using.


This is also true - I'm mostly in .NET world nowadays and the official reference is actually really good. For JS I default to MDN (SO is full of outdated junk). But when I was looking up RoR or Python stuff I was hitting SO more often.

So like I've said - as the reference docs improve SO loses value.


Aside: earned reputation seems to last forever.

I got to top 10% about ten years ago, mostly through basic questions and answers that you could easily do when StackOverflow started. I haven’t touched my account in years, and I am now in top 8% with about 5000 reputation, because old questions and answers keep getting upvotes.

I would think few people have much incentive to try and gain StackOverflow reputation, so what keeps StackOverflow going?


This isn't an aside, you identified the main point. You're entirely correct, all rep lasts forever, further, all the easiest "deposits" have long ago been mined. Early adopters like yourself answered basic, universal questions and earned thousands of points, some tens or hundred of thousands, for providing knowledge that was easy to find or that almost any programmer already knows.

2 things: earning points is exponentially more difficult today, you have to answer quite specific, detailed, niche questions -- and are rewarded with just one, or a a handful of points. Very unlikely you'll get hundreds of thousands.

> few people have much incentive to try and gain StackOverflow reputation

Totally correct. After 15 years, people have realized the points don't have any value. It was fun and cool for a while but at this point, who cares? Would you ever put your SO point balance on a resume? There's simply no benefit, and it's much harder to earn, so why waste your time?


StackOverflow is “open knowledge”, so I enjoyed adding to it as I helped many people in the world. I am not involved with open source. I was very careful to be correct and what I wrote was often unique knowledge, although it was often about browser quirks so what I wrote has mostly become outdated.

If I were employing a developer, and the developer linked their StackOverflow account, I would definitely judge the quality and quantity of questions and answers. “Farming” reputation to use as a reference requires a lot of skill and judgement.

There is only one person in the top 30 at place #15 that has been using SO less than a decade: https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow

I know one of the top ten, and I would employ them (although I would be surprised if they choose to work with me).

The question of activity can be answered because SO publishes data. For example, the StackOverflow user database can be queried using https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new for LastEditDate, as a proxy for user activity. Or grab the raw database and work out activity over time?

(edits)


What keeps it going is adverts to the low rep users who can't turn them off.

They tend to use google to search and then find the SO answer. Yes trhey tend to be beginners and ask the same questions as the beginners 10 years ago. Thus the rep from your old question keeps growing.


IMHO, SO is tech-stack centric, which worked perfectly in old days. Questions are grouped by Java, Web, .NET, shell/system admin, etc. We got most of answers to general questions for each tech stack in SO. But nowadays, with the rise of open source projects, the knowledge of each project stays with the GitHub issues. This is naturally shaped by the domain knowledge of each project. I would say SO may not see any rapid growth anymore, Github will.


I think it will be around for a while - the volume of content is still valuable.

But like many others, I've stopped contributing to it. The last time I tried to answer a question, it was marked down. My answer was correct, concise, to SO standards etc, but because the question was poorly worded and formatted, I was seen to be 'encouraging' it.

I appreciate the need for high quality questions. But burying correct answers is completely ridiculous.


Can you link to the question where that happened?


Discussion might be slowly dying off because most questions have already been answered. Maybe StackOverflow reached a state where it is mostly done and implicitly transitioning into a Wikipedia-style programming encyclopedia. This should show up in the logs, maybe somebody here has enough reputation on SO to have access to them.

If that is the case then new questions are mostly on new frameworks and new languages which are often niche tags and don't have as much engagement as the popular tags once had.

Almost all questions newbies could ask are ripe for getting closed as duplicate and complicated questions are rarely getting answers since they require too much context to fit into SO's format.


I think it's because all of the low hanging fruits have been picked up already.

People used to make 30,000 reputation out of a single answer on an extremely basic topic like "how do I create a variable in X".

Now all the questions are either duplicates getting closed or hard questions on very specific topic, that, even if you can answer, will get you 10 reputation, and maybe 50 over the years.

On the other hand, the spam of stupid, badly formatted or undersearched questions is intense.

So StackOverflow has basically become a platform where contributors have nothing better to do than moderation, for which there is no reputation reward.

I know someone will tell me it's not all about reputation, but I don't believe it one second.


Very true. Further, most long-time contributors to the site have realized the rep points actually have zero value. Would you hire someone because they had a high SO score? Would you put your rep balance on a resume?


Google Search is not to blame for SO's decline.

Toxic deletionists are part of the problem, yes. But they are the literal dregs at the bottom of the bottle when all the good experts have left or burnt out or converted to deletionists. There's no way to find great questions that would make their talents shine.

And here we come to the next point - the company behind SO stopped investing dev time in improving the core experience. Yeah, they were also overrun by vitriolic politically motivated folks, but this is only a lateral plot line. Rearranging CSS, coming up with brand-new bug-ridden editors, concocting impossible get-rich-quick subsites parasitizing on the main site's popularity against the opinions of old-timers - here are just a few examples of brainless PM activities over the years.

As a consequence, Stack Overflow is dead. As in, still twitching from a combination of ideological / greed-fueled Cordyceps firing up random neurons. But yes, mostly dead.


Wow, so much hate for SO on this thread. Stack overflow has been a core part of my life as a developer for many years. Not all questions are answered well but, to some extent, you have to be a connoisseur. The first answer may not be correct, or it may be out of date but chances are that some answer, maybe far downstream, will be invaluable and save hours of research. Ask questions. Answer questions. Don’t do it for the ranking do it because someone did it for you.


Google search results are declining, but most programming questions still benefit from a site:stackoverflow.com appended to the end, to remove the copycat spam.

It’s possible that new content is getting lower quality on SO, but for any area where a 10 or 15 year old answer is as relevant today as it was when it was written, it’s still a goldmine.


> It's clear Google Search algorithm is favoring other websites.

In what universe? I feel this is one of the strongest examples of selection bias at work that I've ever seen, to be honest.

Stackoverflow comes up for every single thing I search, lol.

However I agree new answers of quality are rarer. The site users are more concerned with identifying duplicates or even any overlap and closing things rather than providing useful information sometimes.


Reddit has constantly provided better results to my questions over the past year.

Also, most subreddits accepts posting detailed "Am I doing this wrong?" questions instead of only perfectly asked ones that have never been asked before. I find it a better balance than SO removing a question I spent 30 minutes formatting because someone asked a tangentially related question 5 years ago.


Which websites are being favoured by Google - I don't see that.

Yes SO is looking at altering its colours to improve accessibility https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/386102/accessibilit...


Yes I've switched to chatgpt for all my programming questions nowadays because of many reasons:

1. It understands the versions more clearly, it won't generate the code for Bootstrap 2 when my question is about Bootstrap 5

2. Asking follow up questions is easy. So the code didn't work. I tell it that and instantly it tells me what I need to do to fix it (leave missing config file, etc) or gives me an alternate.

3. Its answers instantaneously except when their site is down.

4. Its more customised as the answer is not a generic question posted an year ago.

5. It spans multiple domains of knowledge, so if lets say I get an error curl.so not found, it can tell me what I must run on the command line to fix that on my system too.

6. Its so much faster because there are no stupid questions. It's just like typing on google vs SO where you need to proof read and make sure its not a duplicate.


Chat gpt will never get smarter though (learn anything new), unless actual people use stack overflow to provide the training data.

The most important comment on SO is the one where the OP says "I did this and that, and can confirm it's working". There is no such data when you only use the chat bot. It's a major problem. Perhaps the solution is a more tailored "stack gpt", where the "conversations" are published along with the human responses.


ChatGPT is already “smarter”. I can ask ChatGPT for the answer to my very specific problem and it can answer it snd give me code.

For instance, I needed to write a simple script that gave me all of the roles containing a list of policies where you can specify multiple policies from the command line using “-p” multiple times.

If I look it up on Google, I get this response which is close enough

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66127551/list-of-all-rol...

And I still have to make slight modifications.

Of course I could write the entire thing myself just by looking at the boto 3 docs.

But instead I told ChatGPT

“ Write a Python script that returns a comma separated list of arns of all AWS roles that contain policies I specify with the “-p” parameter using argparse”

Then I told it, “that won’t work with more than 50 roles”. It then corrected the script and used a paginator.

Yes, I had to know enough to recognize the bug. But I count have written or modified a Python script that fast and I write boto3 based Python scripts all of the time.

I definitely could have told it that the first version wasn’t returning all of the results and it would have corrected itself like it did and added a paginator


They know this is a problem, so they’re hiring contractors to write code and label it to teach the AI.


I think the thumbs up and down button it shows on each response can be good for that. I think it can already classify similar questions so if it consistently gets a thumbs up or thumbs down it can become smarter too.


There is a chicken-egg problem with using ChatGPT for domain specific technical knowledge. ChatGPT is trained on data from sites like SO. If everyone starts using ChatGPT instead and technical communities die off, it seems like ChatGPT would quickly become ineffective.

You would still have documentation published by originators of the technology but a lot of programming is figuring out the quirks of things that aren't in the documentation or getting past bugs.


I genuinely find ChatGPT very useful for a lot of tedious tasks, but it's also very obvious that it's data cutoff point was in 2021. You can get it to write you an abstract generic Odata controller class in C# better than most searching on google, but it'll be with IActionResult and not ActionResult, sometimes it'll even be with Task<Iqueryable>, which is even older and it'll do this extremely confidently. Which is sort of fine, it'll work after all. It's also not fine, because there is a reason it's moved on to become ActionResult performance and ease of maintenance being some of the reasons.

Though to be fair, it's not like Stack Overflow, or even some of the less updated parts of the official documentation, will do any better than ChatGPT, but with ChatGPT you don't get a date on the knowledge and you don't get the comments from other people telling you that it's wrong or outdated. For me personally, there is also some thing about its confidence that makes me "trust" it more than the internet that I've spent 20+ years not trusting. I'm not sure if that's just me or even why that is exactly. I'm fully aware that the language model is basically just the internet, and still I believe it? I'm happy the first thing I asked it was on a subject I knew a lot about so that I could see straight away that its answer was very outdated. Because if it had been on a subject I didn't know much about, I'm not sure I would have even found out its cutoff point was in 2021. I only learned that fact because the answer it suggested was with a library that I knew was abandoned, to which I asked if it knew that, and it told me when it had stopped "learning".


I find it hard to believe that ChatGPT is useful beyond trivial things or giving you a lead that you can follow on Google. It's very frequently just plain wrong.


If you invest time in improving your skill at prompt engineering you’ll find it quite worthwhile.

And yes, often I do follow up google searches for some things - but it has already saved me days of research time compared to Google


i'm wrong about most things most of the time. i'm pretty sure i'm still useful.


Well even wrong answers have utility in a forum. When someone posts a wrong answer on Stack Overflow, Reddit or in real life(?), it baits a bunch of replies describing in detail just how wrong that answer is.

ChatGPT has the user interface of an oracle sitting alone in a cave in the mountains, but it isn't as accurate as an oracle is expected to be. That makes it useless to me.


I may be wrong but isn't chatGPT essentially trained on a web dataset that includes SO? I remember reading something about Common Crawl being used.


I would be interested in knowing why you are getting downvoted. Much of your experience rings true, except for me chatgpt tends to generate bogus code (though pointing me in the right direction).


7. It doesn't ask pretentiously why would you even want to do that and opine on this being an anti pattern.

I'm so sick of these people on SO.


I was literally about to comment this as well. Actually, that's the biggest plus for ChatGPT right now.


I think it is dying and my bet for the reason why would be the policy changes.

Take it as you might, but I think the main reason many people were answering questions in the first place is the feeling of competition and wanting to establish oneself as someone with knowledge. This included gaining high scores and for some reason correlated with being quite blunt in the comments. But SO changes a few years ago made it so that asking questions got the same amount of points as answering them. Also people were forced to play nice with the new-comers who didn't even bother reading the rules of the site. And with these changes the whole atmosphere changed from being "a database of questions and answers" to just a site where people ask for free help.


So in essense, SO was destined to die.

If they kept their original polices, it'd be even more toxic to newbies which destroys their reputation over time.

But because they made it more friendly to newbies, the assholes who generated the most values left. Now questions are left unanswered, more duplicate questions are allowed, and answer quality has declined.


I have been using less SO over the years, as more and more libraries and even programming languages have their own Discord servers.

And there it’s easier and quicker to get a specialised reply, with less judgement or responses like “already answered in thread X”


I don't like that approach because the contents are not searchable using public search engines.


https://www.linen.dev/ makes it possible (not my product)


But Discord is a chat. How it replaces QA website?


You ask a question. you get an answer.


It's not a great place to get help anymore. My career has progressed since I first started, so most of my questions require more open ended format which often gets flagged.

Ex, when I first started, I would ask things like how do I do string interpolation in shell scripting? Now I have more questions that require considerations from different angles such as why should I use redux over react contexts? how has it been for people with large teams?

The point system also doesn't mean much. I have over 60k points from just asking basic programming questions from when I was in college.


Google doesn't seem to think it's being searched for less relative to previous times

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

SimilarWeb shows them as having a very high proportion of incoming traffic coming from search

https://www.similarweb.com/website/stackoverflow.com/#traffi...


I wonder how many people actually add "stackoverflow" to their search queries. For me it's basically never, because it usually will be the first result anyway


I genuinely think code snippets as a "thing" is going to die. I just wrote a web scrapper while knowing absolutely nothing about the language or the syntax of the library by just asking GPT and feeding back the errors the interpreter was throwing back. FWIW, I was writing a scrapper to compile all PG essays into a txt file to train GPT. I still don't know the syntax of Beautiful soup or the nuances of Python. But I got a working snippet which I can use for training nanogpt based on Karpathy's videos.


A workflow like this:

RTM -> SO question (not found) -> IRC/Discord -> post question on SO.

As opposed to this:

LLM -> RTM -> SO (maybe post a question)

Simply has SO earlier in the pipeline. The later does not render it obsolete (yet?) from what I can tell.

If a simple annotation to how the LLM got the answer is deployed I think that is where SO will be visited only to ask questions rather than find an answer (still not obsolete).

P.S. this is speculative at best at this stage. SO can be rendered obsolete by some hidden side effect of LLMs/search engines


A lot of the problems people are having in this thread ive been having while trying to use reddit for anything useful.

Im trying to put together a small project using a raspberry pi and figured the subreddit would be a good place to start. I couldnt find good recent answers so I make a short post, what pi would best handle quality video streaming, best ways to go about it ect. Deleted because I was supposed to ask it in a specific thread. Ok sure whatever. So I ask that question in the proper QnA thread and only response I get plainly and unhelpfully says to look at an faq question which dosent answer my question at all. I feel like if your going to have and run a community because your passionate about something, and offer help about that thing, you could probably do better than leading me down the "your question is to generic/easy for me to bother" like an automated help line.

SO feels like that to me, you need to go in with a "worthy" question to get any kind of help and not just stomped down


I think it's always been a bad place to get answers.

If you do maintenance programming you always have little questions like "How do you find the length of a string in Python?" and all you need is "len(s)". On Stackoverflow there is a discussion even if there is nothing to discuss, fortunately it is very unlikely that alternative answers like "sum(1 for c in s)" will get near the top but sifting through a lot of wrong answers and garbage is worse in the long term than learning your way around the official documentation.


Generally speaking, projects documentation is far better now, I often just land there and usually I'm done. I had yo upgrade a spring 3 project, spring documentation was enough. Also, SO have been quite hostile for me, a newbie for the site who couldn't comment. The probability to have question marked as duplicate was also quite high, with all the downside you know. YMMV, of course.


StackOverflow has been immensely helpful for me. When stuck on a programming problem, I usually look for solutions on StackOverflow or read the framework/programming language's docs.

It's highly unlikely that StackOverflow will slowly die. It's a very MOATY service: strong band, and network effects.


Not sure if it's just StackOverflow or the whole of StackExchange. I used to be active in another StackExchange subject site and it was incredibly toxic (and I say this as someone who is generally open to letting people speak their mind in any fashion they see fit). I was advocating that we let low quality questions get answered and remain, while providing feedback on how to ask better questions, and eventually (hopefully) raising the quality overall for all users of the site regardless of their experience level. You might have thought I'd suggested child sacrifice with the toxic responses I received for suggesting this. Net result -- I left the site altogether never to return, and found that Reddit was much more open to my idea of nurturing "newbies" rather than squashing them.


It is dead to me, as dead as Yahoo anyway. I haven't got an answer since 2017. After posting a simple question that got 20 downvotes, I had it.

GPT gives better answers 2/3 of the time. It makes up some answers, but often it's more helpful and accurate than what you find on SO anyway.


Not sure about stack overflow, but search result quality feels to be in decline. Lately I deliberately try to rely on official documentation more (i.e. have it bookmarked and browse it for answers) instead of trying to look something up in search engine. Which honestly is a good idea anyway.


I had an interesting conv. with my extended in laws about this last week. Basically everyone 20+ telling the mid teens that there was a golden age of google where it could answer questions "like telepathy".

It was interesting to hear a diverse (in occupation) non-tech group lamenting the search decline. I felt so validated!


Yeah I think the big reason there's not much discussion outside of tech is that people outside of tech were always less reliant on the Internet, but if you mention search engines to them, they'll often rant about how bad it's gotten.


Not yet. ChatGPT recommended me about 7 deprecated ways of doing something yesterday before eventually giving up as it hasn't been trained on a current version of a library. A person on the Stack Exchange for the tech (Solana) had an answer in about 90 minutes.


Honestly I go to Reddit before I go to SO if I want to write a question. Or I go straight to the projects GitHub if available. I’ve only posted on SO twice in my life because I can usually piece together what I need from old answers


It's because you're getting passed the point of having simple questions. Once you get to a certain point of understanding, there is less available online for shared problem solving. This just happens.


Subreddits are more welcoming and answers your questions more compared to SO.


I think a lot of has to do with dev tools/frameworks having standard, nice, readable, UX friendly documentation websites.

Gone are the days of custom documentation layouts and designs that are hit or miss.


I think they also do a great job of capturing communities and discussions which SO purposely devalues. I imagine a lot of problem solving happens in discord and github now.

It might also be that SO was good for arbitrary and shallow questions, but most problems with more modern frameworks that aren't covered by the docs get domain specific and complex quick.


Does Google amplify that which gets engagement?

When I go to SO, I frequently find the answer is not what I was looking for and I've probably missed some keyword to get where I'm going - so I'm back on Google within seconds.

Google doesn't need much smarts to see I'm bouncing off of SO and hardly ever sticking around - if this is a common pattern then it's not favouring other websites that provide a more sticky experience - implication being that answered my question as I didn't return to further refine it.


Googles starting to get into trouble I think.

It just doesn’t feel as useful as it did.

And for most programming questions I go to ChatGPT or GitHub search (which is utter garbage but I think a new version is coming).


Looks like chatgpt was trained on stackoverflow

https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/38660/was-chatgpt-tra...

I wonder what its contribution was to chatgpt’s ability to answer coding questions. And what happens if chatgpt (or similar) displaces it.

Also interesting is that SO has banned chatgpt from answering but I suspect that will be another shadow “AI vs humans” war.


Time since a post bemoaning something dying/falling in quality/ not being the way it was x years ago showed up on ask hn: 14 minutes


SO is for browsing for answers and RT is for asking questions. People on RT are a lot more friendly and sometimes equally skilled.


I'm sorry, can you clarify what site you mean by RT? Is it Reddit?


Sorry yeah I meant Reddit


I started using SO, HN, and Reddit about the same time. I was a total newb.

HN was the nicest to me so far, then Reddit, and SO ranks the last.


SO has been "dying" since a couple years after it started

There are a handful of decent[ish] tags

Most of it is total garbage


Die, it should. I'd much rather see a new version based on HN upvoting and similar rules.


I asked ChatGPT to give me a react component for _something I wanted to do_. The first version it gave me was bad but with some prompt tweaks I got exactly what I wanted.

I had searched the same thing on google and stackoverflow and found nothing.


I mean yeah, Google and especially StackOverflow aren't meant to give you fully ready components to use, they're there to give you answers to questions.


Maybe I wasn't clear. I didn't expect the full component from Google, Stackoverflow or ChatGPT. ChatCPT exceeded my expectations.

I (obviously) searched for questions related to the work I was trying to do on Google and Stackoverflow and could not find anything useful at all.


the answers are generally ok, but most of the questions are almost inevitably duplicates


GitHub issues has been a pretty good place to get answers too


Personally I haven't asked or answered on stackoverflow for a long time. Just one data point.


Imo the high ranking people today on SO are annoying as fuck and on a power trip. I haven’t asked question in a long time and I had a unique situation and asked the question. Within seconds some guy adds some snarky unhelpful and honestly toxic reply and I had to repost my question. I ran a quick survey and found others who have had similar experiences and I feel this is terrible for newbies and even people like me who know what we are doing and posting good questions. I mean I have many millions of people reached according to SO with my answers.

I can’t stand these people.

It would be nice if SO would go back to evolving Q&A and stop letting toxic losers become mods.


Human society 101: moderation is work, like any other. And if you are not paying your moderators to do the job (like on HN), you will quickly find that it once the initial wave of idealists fades out, it will attract people who get "paid" by having petty power over others. The kind of people we call "toxic assholes". Then your platform will die and the cycle will repeat.


So you're saying we should clone dang?


Dang is very well paid


How do you know that?


Seriously.. I just posted a rather nuanced question (can a CSS gradient extend into over-scroll like color can), and it just got instantly closed by someone who didn’t understand the question at all. Apparently I need “cred” to even request review on this using their meta channels. Really bad FTUE.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75240915/is-it-possible-...


I see two issues with your question, which I just edited:

* The images should be inlined so people can see it without having to click to another site. Stackoverflow also has its own image server so it doesn't have to rely on the other site (giphy) not deleting the image, and you add images just by clicking the "image" icon above the edit box.

* The title of the question didn't match the body, which is probably what got it closed. The original title was an obvious "yes" because you already had an example of it in the question.

Edit: Left closed I guess, not originally closed. I see in the history the question was much improved, but it still didn't get past the review queue.


To be fair, FTUE has a really bad First Time User Experience, I just had to Google it.


Stackoverflow is like online gaming . Just mute/ignore the morons and jerks, and get on with you life. I've received a ton of hate on SO, but I've also received so many answers to questions that would have taken me at least a day to figure out on my own. Some angry dweeb launches a tirade at me, and some kind soul gives me an answer. Ignore the dweeb, go to lunch, ship the feature.


Plus, all the highly rated, high SEO answers are ancient at this point. It's hard to find anything relevant to tech from this decade.


And any attempt to ask a question about modern tech gets closed as being a duplicate of some tangentially related question asked about perl 2.


One of the reasons ChatGPT is so refreshing is the lack of toxic replies.


One of the reasons it's useless is that if there's no way to do exactly what you're asking, ChatGPT will just invent a way. I've wasted a bunch of time trying to find docs for functions ChatGPT claims exist, only to conclude that it made them up.

ChatGPT is like a smart human inventing a hypothetical API which would solve your problem. A service like StackOverflow has people who are actually familiar with what actually exists in reality. The human will usually know enough to come up with some alternative approach or workaround where ChatGPT hallucinates an answer.


It’s like when you go looking for an answer in GitHub’s issues discussion, and while scanning down you see a code snippet with a perfectFunctionForThis()… only to realize a few moments (or longer) later the commenter is suggesting it would be nice if this function existed and if this pattern could work.


Sounds solvable though once LLMs like ChatGPT become "live" (e.g connected to the internet) they can perhaps verify their answers. They will probably have their own development environment at some point. So these things might still happen in the future but rarely.


That's because it's still an early version. Also, it's trained on data over 2 years old. OpenAI needs to figure out how to regularly refresh its training. Newer and better models for programming should also help.


The info being old is an excuse for not knowing about recent stuff. It's not an excuse for hallucinating answers to questions it doesn't know the answer to (or for which no answer exists).

I have seen nothing to suggest that future modes will fix the hallucination problem. I wouldn't be surprised if it's just an inherent, unfixable issue with the concept of neural network language models – they don't have a model of the world from which they produce logically coherent text, they simply have a giant statistical model for which words tend to occur in which order – so I don't see why we should expect a language model to not hallucinate. But I'm not an expert on the current state of the art, so if you have some links to papers which indicate that the language model hallucination problem is solvable, I'm open to admitting I may be wrong.


ChatGPT may not feel outright toxic but easily devolves into a buttheaded condescending nanny if you try to push some of it's "moral" boundaries. I tried to have it help me come up with ideas for a programming language that would be used to spite employers and or coworkers. Boy did I get a lesson about my negative attitude.


You can tell ChatGPT to reply in the style of someone else, or even take on another role, which makes its responses differ. It's interesting that it even has moral boundaries. This could be part of safe AI, which a lot of people have complained about long before ChatGPT launched.


> I haven’t asked question in a long time

By design I literally can't add comments/engage in conversation. I need 50 reputation on each individual StackOverflow sites.

https://stackexchange.com/sites


50 reputation is only 5 upvotes, and there's an association bonus that means you start with an extra 100 rep on every site once you establish yourself on one. Also, you can always comment on your own questions. The requirement only applies to commenting on others' questions.


It encourages "farming" in my opinion. I'm sure it's a net positive (maybe) and keeps spam down but... it's weird. They want you to contribute in a certain way before you can contribute in the way that you're most likely to encounter (randomly landing on a question from Google during the middle of a busy day, drop a quick note, try to move on, etc.)


> 50 reputation is only 5 upvotes

On answers you get 10 for upvotes, on questions you only get 5. Then you can also get 2 at a time by making edits to others' questions/answers to improve them (this only works up to some limit, you stop getting the bonus past that).


> On answers you get 10 for upvotes, on questions you only get 5.

That hasn't been true since 2019: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-que...

> Then you can also get 2 at a time by making edits to others' questions/answers to improve them (this only works up to some limit, you stop getting the bonus past that).

The limit is 1000 reputation earned from edits or 2000 reputation total, whichever comes first.


Once you have 200 reputation on at least one site you get a 100 point bonus when joining a new site.


TBH I got fed up so I used a few different accounts (they do have different purposes) to vote each up.


That's been my case too. I don't receive an answer to my question, just someone telling me I shouldn't do it that way. I then explain why I have to do it this way and of course crickets from them because they never had anything helpful to contribute in the first place.


This is a common problem on internet forums / communities generally.

Whenever a community gets large enough that people start to care about their status within that community you get people who just want to throw around their authority.

In Stackoverflow's case though the value of the site comes from how helpful the user base is. I think part of the reason a lot of devs are asking questions on places like Reddit and discord servers these days is because you're less likely to deal with some dickhead picking holes with how you formatted your question before some power user comes along and closes the thread completely before you have an answer.


I have asked several somewhat embarrassing questions in the Go and Bash categories in the last year. Got amazing results quickly with zero snark. I am super grateful for SO.


I especially love the ones who tell people they don't understand their own requirements. I tried SO a couple times but the responses I got back were "oh. you should just do it in python" (it's a 50 engineer project using C# and while dotnet isn't perfect, trying to convince management and other engineers to switch a large project to BOTO just to use one particular easy to use method isn't going to work.)

Then there are the mansplainers who very calmly explain they ignored half of my question because I clearly didn't know what I was doing.

But I still click on SO search results when searching for obscure AWS errors. It's not like the AWS docs explain them. I think there's still some decent content from 5-10 years ago, but it's slowly becoming less relevant as technology marches ahead.


>Then there are the mansplainers

Are you a woman? Do they know you're a woman?

Is mansplaining gender neutral at this point?

I ask because to me the act is quite sexist, but accusing someone of the same without basis seems quite sexist, and I don't see how gender would come up on SO.


I used to contribute to another community at stack exchange and 100% stopped a few years back because of this. A handfull of individuals completely ruined the website for me. I haven't asked or answerd a question in years with the exception of the home improvement community.


> I had to repost my question

This is against the rules. The fact that you did it anyway makes me believe that your original question probably broke other rules too, and that the "unhelpful" and "toxic" comments were probably telling you that.


You an SO mod? The "I'm just gonna presume your question broke some rules and you deserve shit for it" attitude suits you.


Is it not a reasonable assumption that someone who you know broke one rule probably broke others too?


Oh wow. I was going to write this whole thing about how just because someone posts a question twice doesn't mean that there's anything rule-breaking about the question itself; that the two seem almost entirely orthogonal. But I went searching for some rules, and I could not find the rule you're talking about. Hell, I wasn't even able to find anything which calls itself "rules" for how you're supposed to ask questions. Even the "What should I do if no one answers my question" help page [1] doesn't even advice against re-posting. All I can find is certain users claiming reposting is against the rules, but nothing official. (In fact, I'm having a hard time finding anything other than the CoC which describes itself as "rules" rather than guidelines intended to help the user write better questions or answers -- and even these don't advice against reposting.)

Maybe there is some deeply hidden rule against reposting. Or maybe you're just full of shit. But either way, reposting is clearly not a sign of reckless disregard for clearly laid out site rules, so the fact that a person has reposted their question does not indicate in any way that the person has a propensity for rule-breaking.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/no-one-answers


"Rule" is a bit strong, but it's true that you shouldn't do that. One of the courtesy assumptions stackoverflow works on is that you looked for an answer before posting your question, and the second post would have been closed as a duplicate of the first.


every passing year the platform gets more and more hostile to non-americans. I gave up trying to argue and deleted my account. No regrets, modern-day documentation is more than sufficient


In which way? I'm not American and have never had any issue (4,500 reputation, so quite a lot of usage)


What do you do when the software you use does not actually have "modern-day" documentation?


I'm an American and I've been the recipient of hate on SO too.


I needed to go point farming to answer a question, upvote a question or just about anything. I like points as a qualifier, but heck, give me a way to earn my first points. I don't always have answers, but when I had, I couldn't post them. That made it clear to me that this platform has no future. Look at Twitter or Reddit, somehow they manage to push the boring stuff down and the quality content up. I don't see why SO should be that different.


> I needed to go point farming to answer a question

No you didn't. You don't have to earn any reputation points before you can post answers.


That makes sense as the site is almost useless now. It's been entirely taken over by people who do nothing but farm karma.

The current situation... If you're a noob who's learning, then your question will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked as question is deemed low quality..

If you're a pro, then your question will be about something obscure which the mods don't understand, and also will require a more nuanced answer, so it will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked.

So it's aimed at mid-level devs to ask things with certain answers, the kind of answer which would most likely be found in documentation. So the people who require help/answers the most are kicked off, whereas people who need answers/help the least are encouraged.


Stack Overflow was never intended for "noob who's learning". It's not a free tutoring service.

If your question is hard or highly specific then you're indeed less likely to get a lot of responses, because, well, your question is hard or highly specific. People on Stack Overflow are not omniscient.




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