this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 17 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (5 children)

Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.

ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site's coffin because it's now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn't "use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic."

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I've been contributing on SO for a decade and comments like this drive me nuts.

It was a free self moderating tool and people couldn't even ask question properly for people to do the work for them for free. The entitlement is astonishing and to have the gal to call SO toxic just shows how undeserving some people are of any assistance.

Yes use the search bar and yes lock the thread if people can't spend 5 minutes to form their question there is no saving of these fools. Period.

In fact my main reason for stopping to contribute was dramatic decrease of question quality not the AI. Just try to follow the new section for a day and tell me it's not a problem, I'll wait.

[–] anotherandrew@mbin.mixdown.ca 2 points 2 hours ago

I too contributed fairly significantly over a long period of time, particularly on electronics.stackexchange.com. I generally just ignore the weak/low quality questions or vote them down. I might respond and ask them to fix the question if I felt charitable, but I never understood the "question nazis".

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 8 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Well it might goes both ways. People are not afraid to ask stupid questions to AI. And at the same time, AI will not judge the user.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Eh, they will complain that "ai is stupid" when the actual issue is pepple's inability to even describe their problem. We already see this happen.

[–] anotherandrew@mbin.mixdown.ca 5 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

There are poor personality types everywhere, but I have found stackexchange/stackoverflow to be one of the better sources of user curated help. LLMs are a new and interesting avenue and I've had some good success with them too, but Stackoverflow was really, really good.

[–] Feyd@programming.dev 3 points 6 hours ago

Yes. Stack overflow is a place where you can get knowledge from experts for free. The people that complain about the moderation being toxic generally think they are entitled to expert's time without putting in any effort themselves and would drastically degrade the utility of the site if they got their way.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 7 hours ago

I fully agree. Ai is hallucinate answers & solutions. Maybe very simple questions or programming issues can be solved by AI. But more complex, or very language specific or use case specific questions not.

And the result could be catastrophic when relying on AI too much.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

They took on a very strict ruleset to avoid clutter and chaos.

[–] Feyd@programming.dev -4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Found the person that asks shitty questions

[–] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Feyd@programming.dev 2 points 6 hours ago

Alas, I'm just a person who only had positive experiences in stack overflow and know the type of entitled dumbasses who think they should be able to ask volunteers to do their homework for them