Technology

Make no mistake. LLMs aren’t killing stackoverflow. LLMs just arrived to finish it off. The stuff that was killing it are the regular posters there, and their passive aggressive bullshit

Ever ask a question on SO? I tell my students to search there but never, ever ask a question. The unmitigated hostility is not what new developers need or deserve. ChatGPT won't humiliate you for asking a question that someone else has already asked.

I'm not convinced that the number of questions asked is the correct metric. In the end the point is not to have a constant flow of questions, rather constant flow of answers found.

There is a point in proficiency in language/library/whatever after which it is faster to find the answer in the code/documentation/test example than to wait until another person on even higher level will come and answer your question.
Maybe we simply filled out what was needed to be asked in the beginner-bug found-intermediate space and, apart from questions stemming from new versions etc, SO does not need more questions?

Expectation for everything to constantly grow is unrealistic

So here’s what I don’t get. LLMs were trained on data from places like SO. SO starts losing users ,and thus content. Content that LLMs ingest to stay relevant.

So where will LLMs get their content after a certain point? Especially for new things that may come out or unique situations. It’s not like it’ll scrape the answer from a web page if people are just asking LLMs.

Never again will I help provide content to a VC-backed service just so that they can rugpull us and cash-out.

Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance

Yeah, exactly. A lot of groups have a Discord :( or other forums where people ask questions. I know I've had to ask questions on Svelte's Discord :( for example. And I think even once on some YouTube influencer's Slack...

Sucks cuz both of those places are silos and my questions and answers are forever lost.

Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance – perhaps driven by moderation policy changes or something else that started in 2014

💯

People seem to be happy because of SO becoming irrelevant. I really don't get it, I used this website for many years now and for me it is the second (after Wikipedia) most valuable source of knowledge. The UI is clean, no intrusive adds, best answer is the most visible. Threads are well organised and on topic. No spam, no dark patterns, no wasting your time. Discoverability is great, you can easily browse and learn knew things. It is also SEO friendly. Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?

I used it once in high school, got called a retard for asking a beginner question, then avoided it like the plague for 20 years.