so the ai kills off all its food sources and then what
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Technology
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Either Butlerian Jihad or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
Ha. I remember I used my points to create a bounty for something I kind of saw as broken with Windows but that eventually expired or something and after that, never looked back. Whole thing doesn't make sense. Why make a bounty possible if it can just expire. Nobody answered the question... and I couldn't accrue points to do it again in a reasonable manner so go figure...
Wow amazing stuff
they're gonna rebrand to ai first or turn it into an experts-exchange aren't they?
It does feel like they're going that way. But that's okay. Everyone needs an Expert Sex Change every now and then.
Maybe, just maybe, most of the big questions have been asked and answered already.
These days when I look something up it's been answered like 8 years ago, and the answer is still valid. And they aggressively mark questions as dupes, so people aren't opening too many repeat questions.
The annoying thing about the dupe policy is sometimes the answer does change and the accepted answer to the existing question is from 5 years ago.
Yup. Infuriating. I can't remember how many times I saw a thread of someone asking my version of a question that was then closed as duplicate linking to an older one that wasn't the right version and therefore the fix was irrelevant or at least not best practice anymore.
I've always been afraid of opening questions on stack overflow. To the point that I'd rather just figure it out myself.
Yep, I've never needed to ask a question on Stack Overflow as everything I've searched for has been answered already... or I've looked elsewhere for the answer as I'm not allowed to upvote, downvote or ask questions on it anyway due to lack of karma (or whatever they call it). No wonder it's in decline if nobody new is allowed to contribute, and every new question is closed as a duplicate.
The barrier to entry is silly.
The barrier to entry is why it's a good place for answers and not Reddit-quality responses.
The article also goes into it, but I think the invent of AI and asking somewhat specific questions may also explain the decline. If you can get a result that can get you 90% of the way there with an AI that used stack overflow as a resource, theres no reason to actually ask on stack overflow. Its faster to go on the AI result or go on google/bing/etc...etc... that has the answer right there on the page.
And the redesign....its pretty bad in my opinion.
I was once downvoted answering a question on a library....that I created on stack overflow. Still makes me laugh.
The graph suggests it started declining well before AI became mainstream. I'm sure it accelerates it, but it had already long peaked.
Yep I agree. Its a combo of many different things.
I cant tell you the last time I was on SO for a question. its been that long.
I mean there's always gonna be new libraries or frameworks or whatever that will have their own questions to be asked. I think the problem is at a certain point you've reached the maximum audience you can appeal to. Which I feel StackOverflow very much has but of course corporations have to keep making greater and greater profits so once you maximize audience you have to find other methods for profit. Which is what leads to rebrand stuff like this.
I believe so. Whenever I have a problem, I look for an answer in the following order: search engine > reading a forum post > documentation > writing a forum post. I usually don't work on bleeding-edge software, so somebody probably has already asked my question and received an answer too. If it hasn't explicitly been asked yet, it might have already been answered in the documentation. Furthermore, as you said, Stack Overflow would much sooner delete your post for being a duplicate of a 21-year-old post than provide an answer to your question. There are other (and sometimes newer) tools out there that can provide the same answer without putting up so much resistance to you simply attempting to use them. If they want their traffic back, they could start there, instead of "rebranding".
(and sometimes newer)
My God man, say it louder for the folks in the back. A 21 year old answer, heck even an 8 year old answer like OP said, might not STILL be the best answer in the current age. Technology evolves, new languages get invented, old languages gain some new features, and all of that happens at a rapid pace.
I get super dismayed using SO and seeing the top answer predates Rust. (Note I don't mean to say Rust is always the answer, but that Rust is already 13 years old. Things change.)
Grab a copy of the stackoverflow database and use it locally, or train your own local LLM on the datastore.
And if you can, donate to the Internet Archive -- those people do really important work in today's age of killing off old information and constant enshittification.
Came here to say something similar about a local archive.
You can also use the app Kiwix to make it a little easier to download/search (and grab several other doc archives like Python PEP and Wikipedia)
Completely forgot about kiwix; I have that on my ipad and laptop, along with Dash which is like a modern day HELPPC.COM if anyone remembers that thing...
I didn't know about Dash, but it sounds pretty great. Appears to be Mac only, though, and requires a subscription for the latest version.
Also found someone that appears to have converted HelpPC to HTML. Can't speak to the legitimacy of it, though.
Damnnnnn, truth bombs!
Bad news. Since AI can only answer what it knows. If you have a question that is legit but not yet part of stackoverflow, you get a bad AI response.
In that case you can ask it on the stackoverflow website. But due to the fact that everybody now only rely on AI stackoverflow is dead. Well there you go, you just killed the source of truth.
I don't know if it's just my age/experience or some kind of innate "horse sense" But I tend to do alright with detecting shit responses, whether they be human trolls or an LLM that is lying through its virtual teeth. I don't see that as bad news, I see it as understanding the limitations of the system. Perhaps with a reasonable prompt an LLM can be more honest about when it's hallucinating?
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."
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They took on a very strict ruleset to avoid clutter and chaos.
Found the person that asks shitty questions
Found the shitty moderator
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
"Which is bad news for developers"
Nah, we've been through lots of iterations of community for developers, irc, maillists, forums, stackoverflow, etc. Most of my complex questions go through specific discord communities now. I'm not trying to spend a year editing a single post because some swamp ass weanie on stackoverflow has his nose covered in rule dust.
Yes ai has changed the game a bit, but it is not removing community, it's mostly just cutting down on the question duplication
My most recent foray into a new technology was working with vulkan in rust on a mac, stackoverflow is useless compared to the vulkan discord.
Down side of discord is huge. It's not searchable to start with / its not index. Often it's not even public information.
It's like storing data on your personal hard drive/ssd. It's the worst way to share knowledge.
RIP permanence and discoverability
Stack Overflow, like Reddit, derives its value entirely from its users—it's just a host. Now that users (and their knowledge) are moving elsewhere, the platform’s importance is fading.
It’s odd when people worry about Stack Overflow’s decline. Online communities have always shifted: from BBSs and newsgroups to forums, chat, Yahoo Groups, Reddit, and Stack Overflow. Each had its time.
The next gathering spot for tech-savvy users might be the fediverse, but who knows at this point. AI isn’t solely to blame for the shift—people moved to Stack Overflow because it was better than what came before. Now, as it declines in quality thanks to general enshittification of services as companies try to monetise uaers, they’re moving on again.
Yep users move over time. Its the natural order of things. I disagree with the article that moving away from SO is "bad news for developers " as long as we have something better in the works. It looks like Discord is the thing everyone is jumping on, which kinda sucks.
Discord is corpo slop... ~~how is that any better?~~
which kinda sucks
That graph tells a story.