Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011
The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.
I suspect moderators was very careful of allowing such questions to multiply on the site.
The other value I found was in fringe questions, like how do you access the model object of the value of a django form field from the template environment. If there even is an answer, the answer will hopefully point me to some non-documented way to accomplish what I want, or give hints to what kind of ugly hack I need to create. Those question don't seem to have much moderations applied to them at all.
"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"
"This is an excellent question, and shows a real attention to detail! Let me walk you through it in detail, with a particular focus on Django version and the evolution of the semantics there.
[...]
Bottom line: it's exactly the same as in Django 1.3 back in August 2011. But by anchoring to a specific version, you make the question unambiguous and much more insightful.m"
It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.
> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.
> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.
Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.
As someone who frequently answered questions in the 'New' queue, the sheer amount of rule breaking, low effort, and obvious duplicates was astounding. I eventually quit answering questions because 99% of them were not worth interacting with. Just vote close and move on.
Ultimately, I think SO is dead because it got too popular and moderation became untenable.
Tried to go back to one of my closed questions to look up a link someone had dropped in the comments, only to find out some moderator had fucking deleted the question for literally no reason, despite the fact there was actual fucking content in there. It actually drove me over the edge and made me go all in on my own domain and my own website. If I ever post anything there again, it will always be framed as links to my own site where their deletionism will never reach. I simply refuse to be erased.
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).
They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming.
From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.
So why does that mean that duplicates are dangerous? Because of updates. When someone answered a question about how to do something in Python (but it was 2008 so it was written in Python2) SO had ways to get a more correct, up-to-date answer to that question written in 2015 (and then again in 2019) and get that upvoted, and moderators could reward that new answer by editing the original etc.
That is why duplicates were a major threat: if the same question is asked and answered thousands of times, no one is going to go do the work to update all of those answers all across the site. Those lurkers are now dependent on the whims of Google as to which of the many answers you get taken to, and whether it has the latest answer or some answer that stopped working years ago.
And that is why they were so hostile to duplicate questions.
To extend this, the eventual problem is that you eventually lose all of your new users, which means you lose the extremely valuable intermediate users (ones that know enough to ask complex questions, but not so much that they can figure out the answer).
They were so fixated on solving that that they failed to realize: training all their power users to grief anyone who didn't behave like a power user off the site was detrimental (to having a site with non-power users). Everyone came for a question and answer site, but when it transformed it into a "question and get downvoted and modded into oblivion" site, everyone left.
AI put the final nail in the coffin, but SO was dead before AI arrived ... from this self-inflicted wound.
Even inside SO each language and topic would have different standards. A C question would not be answered in the same way one about a JS framework would.
Stack Overflow was the "flagship" product of the Stack Exchange company, and if the company pivots to AI, I wonder what the future holds for the other Q&A sites on the SE network.
There are a few outliers
People asking questions mostly wanted help, but most moderators thought they were curating some kind of question-answer form encyclopaedia. Very different perspectives.
Jeff Atwood thought a lot about this when he subsequently created Discourse. Nudge people to treat their community members nice.
That is great to hear. I am glad that the original creators of StackOverflow got their liquidity event and are well off financially I suspect.
It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.
The irony is that StackOverflow kind of killed them all, and eventually also became a victim of the next wave.
E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.
Some of those discussions made people go figure out how to do it, and then post it as an answer. The knowledge didn't exist anywhere until they did.
Even if stuff isn't in the official documentation, eventually there are projects that use it.
And if the library in question is open-source, then the LLM's can just ingest and read that directly.
- Rl envs + synthetic data + human annotated
- Usage data from codex/claude code/cursor
Most of the model abilities in coding come from post-training, not pretraining
unfortunately all the incentives right now are for repos to be private
LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
Unfortunately the LLMs are concentrated into few providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) so there's a chance they each end up doing their own private (and closed) StackOverflows. By leveraging their private StackOverflows, their LLMs will be able to short-circuit complex reasoning, saving tokens, time, and money.
How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged? If by other LLMs, then we run into a problem of infinite descent. If by humans, then you'd need some way to motivate expert or semi-expert humans (so that their ratings are themselves correct) to participate in a massive project of evaluating the correctness of a constant stream of content from content-generators that never sleep.
By LLMs. I think it's possible for agents to infer whether the user was satisfied or not, at least with my usage pattern. For example if I end the discussion it's a good sign. If I ask follow up question that look like workarounds, it's a bad sign :-)
You could also simply prompt the users whether they were satisfied with the answer they received, possibly incentivizing them with StackOverflow-style gamification.
We're getting closer to Dead Internet Theory too where a lot of accounts, particularly on Twitter, are just LLMs. I imagine it's a huge problem on Reddit too. Just people farming karma or otherwise involved in influence campaigns or simply grifting to ad revenue.
So we're going to get to a point where the corpus we train LLMs on will itself just be filled with LLM slops. Self-reinforcing slop. Is that the future?
If you browse with showdead on you'll be seeing a lot more of what look like reasonable comments greyed out.
Did anyone (person or competing LLM) bother to verify that they're correct, though? Who knows! Let the next generation of models worry about that.
Unfortunately in recent years it became such a traumatizing experience to post a question there (even if you made a perfectly legit question you'd likely get downvoted and closed ... and god help you if you posted a question with an issue).
It completely changed from "I posted a question I can answer myself, and someone said so in the comments" to "I posted ANY question and everyone on the site teamed up to get rid of that question".
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
What I found to help a lot is to ask for e.g. 10 different solutions to a problem and then choosing one of them. Sometimes, this even leads to borderline creative solutions if there aren't 10 different ones.
In practice, models that do this won't be prioritized as much, because the economics of thinking tokens that stop by default at, say, one option plus a bit more planning (short of full alternatives) would be superior as long as billing is per-user instead of per-token. So we'll still need to play games with prompting!
I remember how Stack Overflow would close questions as duplicates just because somebody suggested the wrong answer that is also the right answer to the existing question. The best way to get a correct answer on Stack Overflow (and forums before that) was to post the wrong answer as part of your question.
It really could be bad though.
"Show me 6 very different solutions, and present arguments for/against each one as if a bunch of angry monkeys."
It’s fine, and what you would expect for certain prompts, except that the synthesized results often come back communicating more authority than they deserve.
On the other hand, Claude later nailed this project, where I as a human said before, no, too much extra work.
4 years later my company had bought a different company, who happened to be using a newer model of the same board. They asked me how we could use the 12c bus. “Well before you bought us, we emailed the vendor and sent back this C snippet”
It was my code, verbatim. I’ve always wondered how many times they passed that bit of code around.
You're right but that site has been sputtering culturally for some time. I put a lot of effort into editing questions and answers on ServerFault (part of SO) but I feel that time was wasted. I think they knew for a while they just wanted to sell it and just stopped caring. A number of editors were allowed to be jerks for too long and it went to their heads. I wish I could take back all that effort.
You can definitely study alone and achieve perfect grades, but studying with your peers is how you build relationships for future life and take your community forward as a whole.
needed to implement a language feature that was a bit complicated and im not familiar with it so just planned with claude to do it, and after each write/fix cycle it just wouldn't work right.... gave up, went back to SO copy pasted the (not perfect but enough to start from) answer and worked up from there...
at the same time my knowledge grew and im more confident to do this same capability myself whereas reiterating with claude it was just a slog and i didn't learn much...
i think i may be starting to sour on these "do it all for me" usage scenarios for ai... especially for unfamiliar areas...
Claude/Grok/Gemini/Chatgpt answers are often so… how to say it… misleading? I have to stop the conversation as it leads nowhere (and it is not a skill issue :)
I thought point was on Stack Overflow, there were community voting on 'best' answer.
If it is just me and the AI. Then the AI training data, is just whatever I approved the AI to do. Just my opinion.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/193252...
3k per month is one question every 15 minutes.
The Ghost of Expert Sexchange gets its revenge.
There's more than one reason that forum is dead.
I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.
I think most of my questions ended up with this, when I had very good reasons for doing it the way I was doing it. I typically wasn't showing it because I had isolated the problem I was facing into the minimal amount of code to duplicate it, or I was stuck with the particular tech I was using and we had 12 years of code built on top of it and I couldn't switch.
Ironically i'm probably a better dev purely because after a few experiences on SO, I would rather waste days/weeks banging my head against problems and learning from them than to actually post on SO. It was a miserable experience generally. For context this was probably ~15 years ago now.
This isn't necessarily to say that SO made me a better developer. Rather i'm just saying that i value (correctly or not) those extremely hard fought lessons. Those lessons where it was considerable pain, effort, time, misery, etc. Are they efficient ways to learn? I doubt it. But in my many trips down that road i developed intuition that i'd probably not have otherwise.
So ironically i guess SO made me a better developer by avoiding using SO at all cost. Conversely, i imagine i'd lack this value that i speak of entirely if i was 20 years younger and starting fresh today. Not sure i'd be better off though.
edit: By "using SO" i should be saying posting on SO. I of course searched and used data found on SO as often as i could. So to that end i am grateful for SO existing.
Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
Fourteenth clear as imagined in their head XY problem of the day.
By far most of the "XY problems" I saw, on SO or elsewhere, were actually "XY problem problems" - i.e. a responder having so limited imagination and character (or, to be charitable, just running very low on energy and focus), that upon coming across a question they couldn't comprehend, they would assume the person asking the question must be confused instead.
If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.
I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.
That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison.
For better or for worse, people are cursed with ego, and we need to account for that when communicating with others. It is a failing of the platform (and a tragedy, because it is healthier to learn from a human) that it was unable to foster a positive environment.
Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...
There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect.
The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.
But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.
The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.
It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.
Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.
It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa...
https://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-audito...
I hope they stay with us. I don't much care for the company or what's left of the community.
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.
> Wikimedia-like foundation
There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"
And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.
Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.
There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.
When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.
I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.
While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.
Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.
Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.
This is just dead man kicking. This will be less and less valuable thing as all sort of info go out of date.
But if it this, and IT WILL go out of date, what will be new learning data for all of those models?
Previously with SO people just enjoyed helping other people. But if they will be helping primarily multibillion dollar "AI" companies, then why would they? If nobody will be doing that then how this knowledge will be shared? There is open source projects and docs but they are blocking stuff more and more and some point I wont be surprised if you will have to log in into Debian or Arch Linux system to be able to read those docs.
But then if those companies and OSS will be not adding to training data what will? Will it be that programmers will be just writing new code for llms, for the money till they will make themselves obsolete?
Or at some point those "AI" companies will use anything they can to get ahead of the competition, even if this is against contracts or the law?
The longer I think about the future the more grim it looks.
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.
Everyone has had the experience where the top response was right for 3 months, but is now impossible to fix, so you have to just somehow know that you need the 19th answer with only 6 upvotes (versus 387). That was a problem early on, and afaict has exclusively worsened over its whole lifetime. They seem to be proud of it as if it was a major feature, and have afaict never built anything at all to try to address it.
(Yes, editing answers is "a solution", but you can't do that as a newcomer who knows better. You've got to commit to the ecosystem for months... when it had just failed you. Of course most visitors don't do that!)
I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.
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.
For example, one of the classical requests from S.O. questions and GitHub issues is a "minimal reproducible example " of the question/problem.
So a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write that, run it, see the issue , go to the library/related-system code or documentation (for closed source) and derive a solution
That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?
You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.
Slashdot is firmly in this stage of its existence, and honestly it's kinda fun
Human facing web search. Most SaS.
I don't care about being sold, bad moderation or other aspects of its decline. AI gives me all answers I need.
we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models
One has to appreciate the irony on the use of the word "trust" there ...
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.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
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
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.
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!