This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
SO is a collaborative encyclopedia of technical discussion that tries to be relevant, be practical, and to not constantly repeat topics.
LLMs can't provide that structure, they just shit out answers.
Most people think SO is a help desk and don't appreciate the structure and just want it to shit out an answer.
Maybe SO isn't dying so much as a cancerous growth is being treated.
Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant?
"That's a stupid question, marked as solved."
marked as duplicate, see <other question from 2005, before LLMs were invented>
It's not dead until I stop getting 10 year old outdated answers in my searches!
I had a decently awarded account on SO because I joined it in 2012. I asked and answered questions. For the first few years it was fucking awesome as a professional developer. Then it's popularity on google search results ended up making it too well known and the comment quality dropped substantially. Then the fucking powerusers popped up and started flagging almost everye one my questions as duplicates while pointing to unrelated questions. The last I really used SO was around 2017. I got too fed up to participate in the platform because when I spent the time to make a well formed question, it would just got shut down and my time wasted.
Had the same experience, almost exactly.
I wonder how well LLMs would do without SO's data
Or Reddit, or Linux forums.
Stack Overflow hasn't been useful for at least 10 years, if not longer.
The flagged "correct" answer is almost always wrong due to idiotic power-users and the vast horde of idiots who upvote obviously wrong answers because they're bootlickers. The real answer is usually buried in between the posts by gatekeepers, pedants, idiots with something to prove, wannabe admins, egotistical idiots, the highly opinionated technologically insecure, etc ad nauseam. Reddit is just as bad for tech questions, if not worse.
Since I started using LLMs (running on my own inference server) I haven't used anything else for tech questions that wasn't opinion-based. Much, much more useful, and it requires you to think seriously about the problem to come up with a good prompt -- which often gives you the answer before you even finish the prompt.
It will endure as long as the LLM's on there know how to misinterpret the question and fire back snarky unhelpful answers about how clueless you are for asking in the first place.
This is interesting because a huge amount of AI "knowledge" comes from stack exchange.
Now I'll go read the other comments and article to see if that's already been mentioned :)
Sucks because I prefer stack overflow in searches because I get more of a human explanation and wisdom. With llm i have to figure out what it’s_trying to do_ , debug it, and god forbid you want various ways of doing the same thing. I hate LLMs for coding. I hate clients for trying to force me to use it when most of the time now they admit they’re hiring me because AI failed in the first place
Like it or hate it (personally I prefer the latter, posting there I felt like a middle schooler with a PUNCH ME sticker on my face) it was a great source of indexable data on programming.
I wonder how will this affect future search and llms, now that all similar questions are being asked in private llm threads.
I never once actually asked a question there. Partly because most of the time, the question I was asking had always been asked.
However, I have found the correct answer to 100s of questions there. Usually through google/ddg/kagi searches.
Anyone remember experts-exchange?
I remember when it didn't have a dash. Until people started making fun of the old URL...
So easily avoided too
Ah yes, the place that never answered anything.
The sloppiest of slops before we got AI slop.
It was the pinterest of answering stuff
Or if they had an answer, they paywalled it, until Google got pissed at them for including the answer in their SEO but blocking it once the user clicked through. Then they maliciously complied with Google's demand to not censor by burying the answer under layers upon layers of ads and other "related" questions.
I was so glad to see SO eat their lunch.
I used it in earnest! (to write shitty VB scripts and PHP websites)
My experience with SO is that I'll look up a question about how to do something using X method and all the answers are like "why are you using X?" or "here's how to do it using Y.". You rarely find people answering the questions and instead find people trying to spread gospel about a certain tech that you aren't using.
This was the majority of my experience as well. As a newer programmer, I'm more than happy to always know a better option. But if the way I'm looking to solve my problem is wrong, don't just give me Y, explain to me why it may not work how I think it will. Tell me about X and some pitfalls or reasoning for it not going to work, then recommend Y. Because if others only see the Y answer to my question about X, they'll probably just keep searching for a solution to X not knowing it may not work like I didn't know.
That's strange. It's almost never my experience on stack overflow.
What you're describing happens mostly on reddit and lemmy.
Thats been my experience as well.
On SO it seems much more likely that the answers answering a different question have a negative score.
