The Fall of Stack Overflow

BenLloydPearson@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 647 points –

Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow

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I think this has as much to do with Google being shit at finding stuff lately as it does llms like chatGPT

You can even see the decline in posts and votes before GPT became mainstream. This definitely look more like search engine failing to get rid of those cheap copycats.

Agreed. For me, making it so that the search engine ignores -string was one of the biggest set backs.

the search engine ignores -string

WHAT? Why would they do that? WTF no wonder....

Hyphen (-) means you don't want to see this word, while words surrounded by quotes (") means you want these phrases exactly.

Most symbols are also ignored, which is great for an average user but terrible for programmers.

Yeh, suddenly you need to know what the language calls the operator within the context you want to use it.
At which point, you probably don't need to Google the symbol!

I'm still pissed over removing +words. Like, G+ is gone, guys, so revert that mess.

It was a really dumb move but you can can still get the same effect by putting a word in quotation marks.

UI-wise, though, it's toxic, and therefore slower and more stressing. It's something that can be fixed, and ergo essentially a bug. ;-)

Wait, what? On Google??

On Google and on Duck Duck Go too. On DDG you can't get rid of the over-optimized websites anymore even if you use -"website name". Luckily -site:address still works.

That's crazy. Google/DDG bloat from SEO websites had already driven me out a while ago, so I hadn't noticed. I've been using Kagi for a few months now, and I find I can trust my search results again. Being able to permanently downgrade or even block a given website is an awesome feature, I would recommend it just for that.

Wait WHAT? I was just asking on discord the other day if there existed a search engine that allowed you to blacklist websites as a user setting. I need to curate out all AI written garbage from my results.

Hmm, not really used to the idea of paying for search, but I understand.

Is it good at filtering AI generated sites and sites that are clearly copy pasted. Or do you kind of have to identify that yourself and manually block?

I think it's worth testing it with the free 100 searches. All you need is an email address (no credit card unless you're actually subscribing). I've only been using it a few days but I don't think it filters out AI generated sites. But you can set a ranking by site (block, lower, normal, raise, pin) so you can make stack overflow be priorised and block quora.

They have a ranking board of top sites in each category so you can go through it and set the rank of a bunch of sites upfront.

There's no specific AI detection at the moment, as far as I can tell. But it has "listicle" detection. If you ask "best lawn mower", all these "the 5 best lawn mowers of 2023" websites with affiliated Amazon links get pooled into a compact Listicle section, that you can just scroll past and ignore.

Don't forget that Duck Duck Go is even worse at it now. It will literally change your results if you go back after clicking a link.

Why is that?

I think they're trying to implement a sort of "smart prediction" thing, where it assumes that if you go back the link you clicked wasn't relevant. And so it tries to remove closely related results. Which works the opposite if you get two results from the same page and you click the wrong one. Which makes looking up technical or programming related issues a nightmare.

I used to spend a lot of time on Google and stack, now I ask phind more often than not, which violates information for me.

IDK what shitoverflow gets out of being so fucking toxic. I asked one dumb question and I'm basically banned from posting on the website.

It feels like they're trying to be a sort of "wikipedia" of every programming problem and solution. The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.

The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.

I don't think they see that as a problem, that's the goal

It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution.

It looks to me that they could effectively address that by improving their search combined with question grooming, and not shutting down posters.

I mean, what's a naive poster asking dumb questions other than a new user wanting to contribute? Is this the people they want to insult away?

You were able to post on there at all? Don't they have extremely high barriers to entry for even question comments?

Not only post, but I have content that still feeds me residual cool-points even now.

I got a nastygram because I was editing the questions to follow a proper style and form (AP) and some people got upset that my comments were more "run on sentence" and " 'emails' and 'helps' both sound wrong as nouns for the same reason" instead of something like "there-there, Timmy".

So I said "you can have free editing, or the next guy can be a people person instead." And they agreed.

So I'm read-only there now too. :-D

I vaguely recall the first time I ever asked something on SO, around 2013, the first reply was "this has already been asked before". No link to said previous question. Taught me to lurk and search more before asking anything there.

I sometimes also suffer a case of "explaining until I figure the question myself", where the more details I punch into my question, the more likely I am to find the answer myself.

It feels like they're trying to be a sort of "wikipedia" of every programming problem and solution.

That is exactly what stackoverflow is supposed to be. It's not there to answer your question about "why is my IF statement not working", it's there to be a resource for all developers. How is a question about your specific problem gonna helps anyone ? If you haven't, take the time to read the "how to ask" section, it describes what kind of questions are acceptable and what kind are not.

There is, obviously, some proper questions that should not have been deleted, but most of them are not suited for the site, as they don't bring anything to the rest of the community.

If SO supposed to be wiki, then why there no clear way to update the answer with new information? Why only the person that asked the question can mark answer as correct? Clearly some person with more expirience should have possibility to mark answer as correct.

"You should be making a wiki page instead of a forum."

  • SO user on SO business model, thread closed Aug 2008

Depending on your reputation, you can edit the answer / comments of others. It's usually not recommended to change the context of the question or the answer but you could. Those update will be reviewed by other if needed. As for the correct answer, you can always upvote the answer you feel is the correct one, which is kind of a community way of selecting the correct answer.

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I bet this is directly related to ChatGPT

People prefer having something generating shitty code and not checking it, instead of asking or searching on internet for a substantially better solution

Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?

In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.

It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.

If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.

If I'm honest, stackoverflow was always a shortcut for searching documentation to me.

Simple stuff like how do I turn an InputStream to a String again? I can't remember it, but I know exactly what to look for, I'm just to lazy.

For that kind of stuff ChatGPT is almost perfect.

Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?

Not necessarily, but at least there's much more opportunity for other people to jump in and correct false info or expand upon something. It's by no means a flawless system, but it's better than only have one source of information

When we use forums there's also an opportunity to correct (or be corrected) on how we deal with problems.

I've seen a few times people asking how to do X while they're actually trying to do Y. ChatGPT would gladly direct them to the wrong path.

I didn't say that people should go on the internet and pick the first forum post either ; that would be like trusting whatever chatgpt is handing you :p

My point was more on the "people are lazy" side of things, but yeah you have to stay critical of both chatgpt and forum posts.

I agree, I just think that those lazy people will do what they do regardless of where they get their info.

To butcher a saying; blame the craftsman, not the tools.

I half expect that, if enough programmers use ChatGPT-written code verbatim, someday it's going to lead to Skynet. I mean, what's to stop ChatGPT from inserting bits of extra code to be used for its own distributed processing botnet?

Sadly there are so many people that take its output as gospel and don't realise it can be wrong. So is a tool that commonly gets abused by people that don't know how to use it.

ChatGPT is a great tool to get you started on stuff. I use it to better formulate my issues in technical terms.

I just started embedded Linux, so there are a lot of stuff that aren't intuitive. ChatGPT has been immensely useful to get around cross compiling for embedded linux, and understanding the quirks of the native libraries without having to go back and forth in a forum and not get an answer after a few days

If you know your stuff already, ChatGPT is not the right tool. If you don't know where to start, ChatGPT is the best tool ever made because you can clarify and ask for more detail in real time. This is like a personal tutor for free.

You mean shitty code which you can just check and ask them to change in almost real time, over posting your question on SO and waiting for months for an answer?

People who fail to understand the value of peer-reviewed code are just going to copy/paste bad, but popular, code practices.

There irony here is that Stackoverflow was considered a common source of copy/pasted code.

Chatgpt is still a tool and it's up to the user how to use it. If you google "bolognese recipe" you get one result; if you Google "traditional ragu from Bologna" you get another. Same for ChatGPT.

You can have it generate shitty code and then compare it against examples it finds online to iterate that code. Also, it was trained on the whole internet, including those good solutions, and can often reproduce them on its own. but you have to tell it, explicitly, to do all this to make better code, rather than just asking for the code.

At least ChatGPT will not flag the question as duplicate.

"I'm sorry, as an AI language model this question has been asked too many times and there is insufficient computer resources to handle your request. You've been temporarily silenced for 15 minutes."

You are delusional and will be left behind if that is your view point. The code is usually largely accurate only needing a few tweaks. Easily one of the most powerful scaffolding and learning tool I've used in 25 years. Our developers embracing it are more efficient then ever and passing static analysis, owasp scans, coding standards just fine if not better than cranky old devs who think they couldn't possibly be helped by a dumb machine.

I prefer being delusional and a cranky old dev, rather than trusting AI by giving all of my workplace code and logic. Powerful? Maybe. Helping you ship products faster? I don't know ; no metrics have been published about that in controlled settings, and I still think people will get lazy and after some time even the ones that tweaked the code and analyzed it thoroughly will just stop caring.

Go ahead, jump in that bandwagon, and prove me wrong in 5 years. All I want is proof.

Also, I didn't know one could be a cranky old dev after a few years of experience only

I thought chatgpt is kinda shit now since the newest updates

I think it’s overblown tbh.

In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.

It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.

If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.

ChatGPT has been a great tool to help me teach coding. It lets my students with a few months experience write better code, as if they had a few extra months experience, but like you say it's very easy to get in trouble with it. We had it generate some code to interface a web app with some cloud triggers, and chatGPT suggested we put all the API keys / creds right there in the front end where anyone with "view source" could see them. It made for a really good lesson, actually, on the need to gain experience, understand what code does , and to validate with documentation.

trawling through irrelevant forum posts.

This makes it worth it from just a time savings perspective. Also, describing it as trawling is very accurate lol. It takes a lot of trawling to get the answer you need, and even then sometimes it isn't right because you're relying on a single individual's answer.

I agree that it isn't as good as it was. The last two updates have definitely decreased its effectiveness for multiple things, not just dev. It is still my starting point when looking for something. It is just not as good as it used to be.

Obviously, you can't take what it gives at face value, but you shouldn't do that from SO either. In general, I see faster results using GPT than I do with Google and SO. You can also extend the responses with any customization or changes specific to what you are trying to do, where you can't with SO.

I'm not saying SO is bad. Not by any stretch. I still use it a lot. It just isn't my starting point anymore.

ChatGPT isn’t that good at code generation lol.

Doesn't need to be good. Just good enough that people need SO less often. If GitHub Copilot gives a code suggestion, I don't need to look up some syntax or some method I forgot. I'm reminded, and can see that it's correct. No searching online required.

is that what people used stackoverflow for? I google cheatsheets for simple syntax reminders.

What I found stack overflow useful for was 'I have this random bug in this random browser / os combo - here's what hasn't worked, has anyone dealt with it?' - and then hopefully we can all share the misery of this bug until someone figures out the source.

Not sure where to go for that type of thing anymore.

Not exactly why people seek out SO, but it shows up in Google searches and people click. Now there are fewer google searches for that sort of thing.

It's a little more decent than you give credit for. I use it all the time for easy generic subroutines and functions. It struggles a bit with specific, complex requests but is generally pretty versatile as a miniature code assistant. It's good at catching human errors like loops starting or ending at the wrong specified integer, so I use it as a debugging tool.

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Most of the comments here seem to be arguing whether it's better to get help now from SO or ChatGPT, but this is a pretty short-sighted mindset.

What happens when the next new standard comes out that ChatGPT hasn't been trained on? If SO tanks and dies, where will you go?

I'm not saying use a lesser resource, I'm saying this is kinda tragic and I hope they can sustain themselves; AI is propped up by human input and can't train itself.

Does it really though? It seems to me that once you nail the general intelligence, you'll just need to provide the supplemental information (e.g. new documentations) for it to give an accurate response.

Bing already somewhat does this by connecting their bot to internet searches

We're not able to properly define general intelligence, let alone build something that qualifies as intelligent.

I can think of four aspects needed to emulate human response: basic knowledge on various topics, logical reasoning, contextual memory, and ability to communicate; and ChatGPT seems to possess all four to a certain degree.

Regardless of what you think is or isn't intelligent, for programming help you just need something to go through tons of text and present the information most likely to help you, maybe modify it a little to fit your context. That doesn't sound too far fetched considering what we have today and how much information are available on the internet

I can think of four aspects needed to emulate human response: basic knowledge on various topics, logical reasoning, contextual memory, and ability to communicate; and ChatGPT seems to possess all four to a certain degree.

LLM's cannot reason, nor can they communicate. They can give the illusion of doing so, and that's if they have enough data in the domain you're prompting them with. Try to go into topics that aren't as popular on the internet, the illusion breaks down pretty quickly. This isn't "we're not there yet", it's a fundamental limitation of the technology. LLM's are designed to mimick the style of a human response, they don't have any logical capabilities.

Regardless of what you think is or isn’t intelligent, for programming help you just need something to go through tons of text and present the information most likely to help you, maybe modify it a little to fit your context. That doesn’t sound too far fetched considering what we have today and how much information are available on the internet.

You're the one who brought up general intelligence not me, but to respond to your point: The problem is that people had an incentive to contribute that text, and it wasn't necessarily monetary. Whether it was for internet points or just building a reputation, people got something in return for their time. With LLM's, that incentive is gone, because no matter what they contribute it's going to be fed to a model that won't attribute those contributions back to them.

Today LLM's are impressive because they use information that was contributed by millions of people. The more people rely on ChatGPT, the less information will be available to train it on, and the less impressive these models are going to be over time.

What if the documentation is lacking? Experienced users will still know how a library works because they've tried some things, but that information won't be available if they never talk about it online

how do people still have this much faith in the tools humans build after seeing the climate change caused by the industrial revolution.

I was working on a hobby project where I used a niche framework in a somewhat uncommon way. I was stuck on a concept that I think the documentation didn't explain well enough, at least for me, and I couldn't find any resource on it aside from the docs.

I asked Bing to write a piece of code that does what I wanted and explain each line. It was perfectly working and the explanation was also understandable. All it did was search for its official documentation. It really blew my mind.

It seems to me that once you nail the general intelligence

That's not happening anytime soon.

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We will go to the documentation.

Oh god, oh no.

Do you realize what that will mean? My coworkers will have to learn how to understand documentation standards that rely on anything but "self documenting code."

I am already "an expert (lol @ my salary)" because I read shit they don't bother looking up. We're truly doomed.

That's a pipe dream thinking all the documentation is complete and well detailed

I can't count the times where I read the documentation for the tutorial to get started and the steps described in the official documentation by the official maintainer fails early.

Documentation is 99% an afterthought (slight exaggeration here)

Hey, if people are going to go back to reading manuals like we're in the 1980's again is it such a bad thing? /s

It's insane how a single tool managed to completely destroy the value collectively created by people in over a decade.

That single tool is still propped up by that collective decade of knowledge. ChatGPT would be nothing without sites like stackoverflow

Yeah but will people still care about contributing that information if they're not going to be compensated for it in any way? Like people get something out of contributing to stack overflow, even if it's just recognition. This is gone with ChatGPT.

Isn't that the FOSS model since ever?

With the FOSS model you get credited at least, so you are getting something out of it even if it's not monetary. With ChatGPT you don't even get that. You're feeding an AI that's being monetized by someone else, what possible incentive could people have to contribute anymore?

Not everyone is motivated by money and recognition, are you aware of that? Since humans were humans, cooperation has been an integral part of society and still is today.

Some people will always try to monetize everything, but still, people continue to develop FOSS.

ChatGPT will be no different in that regard.

When a single entity reaps all of the rewards of that cooperation, people are much less motivated to do that.

Some people are politically motivated, there are tons of reasons, but it's a two way interaction in all of these cases.

Crazy idea, what about a "federated" search. Hook up the websites' internal search engines to an aggregator. Stop allowing random indexing spiders to scrape.

We go back to expertsexchange

very good point! I find myself using ChatGPT more for references and I am also afraid what will happen if there isn't enough "human generated content" to train on. I can picture an edge case a chunk of the internet is AI generated content (with even users at the wheel). The the next wave of AI will train on previous gen AI output

AI should be trained by itself though. I just wouldn't call LLMs "AI" as a term

Also, it shall be possible in the future to just feed it the documentation and have answers. Obviously we are still nowhere near yet

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SO is a shithole, just like Reddit. All the work is done by volunteers. When it was time to cash out with the platform, they also did several things to fuck with their community. I've contributed quite a bit to the trilogy sites, and served as a moderator. I regret every second of it. But at least a few people got rich in the process.

I don't get why programmers, especially ones actually working on open source projects, insist on using proprietary services. Stack Overflow is one, also GitHub.

It's unfortunate, but the reality is that many of the proprietary services are... free, convenient, and where the people are.

Most projects do not have a lot of funding, so it makes sense to use low cost platforms with the least amount of friction. I think most developers are aware of the risks and trade-offs, but make a pragmatic decision to use these proprietary services b/c the benefits for them outweigh the costs.

If you decide to start a project but somehow decide to self-host a git repository, ticketing service, CICD pipelines, etc... You no longer work on said project and instead you're the system administrator of half a dozen services.

...or you register an account with the likes of GitHub/gitlab, and stay coding right away.

Because there are no free and quality alternatives.

I used to go to SO and really liked it. I haven't been in a long time though and didn't know about this. What are your thoughts about Quora? Seems similar to me.

I don't really have any Insights into Quora. I know StackExchange hardliner always joked about the site and felt like SE is better. I joined that because I thought it was fun to feel superior, but I don't even have an account on that site

This doesn't tell us much without also including the quality of the posts. Are we sure this isn't just idiots who ask stupid question that can be found on Google over and over not doing that now that they have chatgpt

Well, for starters, the fall started six months before ChatGPT launched. And there was a brief uptick in traffic after ChatGPT's launch.

For me the real problem with Stack Overflow, as someone who was one of the earliest users of the service, is when you ask a question now you don't actually get a good answer anymore. Often your question just gets deleted by moderators. And even when I've answered someone's perfectly good question, the question (and my answer) have been deleted by mods.

All I can say is thank god ChatGPT came when it did, because we needed something to replace Stack Overflow.

For me the real problem with Stack Overflow, as someone who was one of the earliest users of the service, is when you ask a question now you don’t actually get a good answer anymore. Often your question just gets deleted by moderators.

This. I recall that I posted some question over a framework and if it supported a feature, and the question was shut down because a moderator complained it lacked a minimum working example. Unreal.

Do we have a community on lemmy to ask questions like stackoverflow?

I think for specific platforms, like rust questions in the rust community.

It wouldn't be very good.

Most people want answers, not questions, and with Stack Overflow the answers are usually already there and easy to find. Plus they are maintained and kept up to date, so if something was correct six years ago but isn't anymore, that will usually be obvious before you try the solution.

Some kind of federated stack overflow alternative could be awesome, but Lemmy is not it and never will be.

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Ah. Feels similar to the relevance discussions on the German Wikipedia. Gatekeeping at its finest.

My favorite part of stackoverflow was asking a question because every result from Google at the time was either not helpful... Or lead to a SO page with the same question with no answer, but was marked as a previously answered question by a moderator... And was then told by them to use Google

Like bitch I did use Google, the first 2 pages of answers filtered only for SO results were all marked as previously answered and closed by moderators!

That was the last time I used SO. Never figured out the answer to my problem either. At least chatGPT might point me in the right direction to figuring out the problem

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I am not sure when this started, but google searches now sort by paid content first rather then relevant content first, so Stack Overflow started to drop down into page 2 or more.

Maybe I would post more if I didn't get ignored, or my questions immediately get marked to be closed without comment.

I've had an account for almost 10 years that I use at least every other day at work, and have seen plenty of questions I CAN answer but apparently don't have the "reputation" to.

Honestly a really dumb system imo.

Nobody OWES me an answer, but if I tend not to get one, I'm not going to keep bothering with SO.

Now, the anonymous cowards who mark a question to be closed without commenting are a different story.

Man, infuriating! I had a problem that was being asked on stackoverflow but with no solution. Later, I found the solution reading some obscure parts of the docs from certain vendor. I was gonna post it there so everyone that had the same problem could find it and solve it. But I don't have enough reputation :/

It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been below mediocre for as long as I can remember.

Lots of people eager to earn points by showing off what they think they know, relatively few who truly understand the nontrivial issues, and the former often drowning out the latter. The result is like Reddit for programmers.

The moderation system also seems to optimize for mediocrity, often closing questions as opinion-based if there's even a hint of nuance.

I used to spend time there every week answering questions on subjects that I understand well, but competing with broken incentives in an ocean of know-it-all personalities was tiring, so I almost never bother any more.

I would like to see something replace it. I don't know what form that should take. A collective knowledge base with a culture like that on Hacker News would be interesting, though I don't know if that's feasible without someone selecting and paying good moderators.

It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been mediocre for as long as I can remember.

Who cares what the average is? You only need one good answer. And even a shitty answer can often steer you in the right direction by pointing out a facet of the problem you missed by being too deep in the weeds. Bad answers can easily be edited to transform them into good answers or once the asker figures it out they can even answer it themselves, maybe a week later. Also it's not just the person asking the question, but also every other person who stumbles across your question has a chance to be helped.

And on top of that, you could could add a bounty and you'd definitely get a good answer - as long as you have enough reputation to place a bounty, which was pretty trivial.. just go answer other questions while waiting for yours to be answered and your your rep would climb high - doing that got me to the top 1% on the site.

Bad questions can also be edited to become good questions (often that's as easy as marking it a duplicate, which then helps people who search with alternate phrases find what they're looking for).

These days your question is likely to just be deleted. Even if it's a good question... my rep is high enough that I see deleted stuff and it's full of things that should not have been deleted - the fall of Stack Overflow is a travesty in my opinion.

I really like using code.whatever.social as an alternative frontend to Stack Overflow. It has way less distractions and allows me to only look at the question and the answers and nothing else.

I really like this, never saw it before. Thanks!

No problem. You can use extensions like LibRedirect in order to make it automatically change SO to this one.

Annnnd bookmarked. Thanks, this is really cool!

Is there a fediverse alternative yet?

Also, if you are a technical person I urge you to start a blog where you document problems you solve. It's a great ressource for others and a resumé for you.

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jQuery is also dying. Coincidence?

i use jquery daily.. maybe now that it’s dying ill have a real reason to move to something a little more cutting edge. haha

If you don't mind me asking, why do you still use jquery and what do you use in jquery?

one of the products i work on is enterprise level so its been around more or less in its current iteration for a while. it used jquery as part of its primary stack during its inception and still does bc it would be a metric ton of work to convert everything.

I actually go there more often now that I try to avoid reddit in my search results. Sometimes valuable posts have been edited or deleted.

I used to mod on SO and a few SEs, but deleted my accounts a few years back. It's just a mix of low-quality submissions, over-bearing moderators/admins, and bad culture & etiquette. I still regularly use SO when looking up questions, but I haven't participated on there in a long while. I've mostly gone back to smaller forums and mailing lists.

what other forums do you use ?

Depends. I use vendor forums for vendor-specific Q&A (like the forums for ESP32, Mbed, FreeRTOS, etc). For other project questions, I open a Github issue with the "question" tag. Before, I used Reddit but it was rare that I'd get a "good" answer out of it.

Stack Overflow reached its maximum "duplicates". So new users arent engaged on asking anything because it is of course already a duplicate of xyz.

Tbf it's a normal problem to have, it wasn't meant to be a forum. But it looks like they haven't considered what to do with the moving parts of the community once they reached content saturation. 😄

It’s also a problem for advertisement revenue and therefore funding. If there is an active discouragement of any interaction because questions are simply closed as previously answered, then page views fall dramatically, and revenue with it. You only need to load a page once if the question and answer are already locked.

Same thing came to my mind. Is it so bad if the content grows at a slower rate and the traffic of adding new content drops to a new equilibrium.

Isn't it a good thing if your question is marked as a duplicate? That means you now have lots of answers readily available which already answered the question.

Often the question marked as a duplicate isn't a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn't spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.

Don't get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn't great these days and hasn't been for a while.

But then would you be like "Oh boy let me get slapped next time too"

I'd be like "Oh boy let me get redirected to lots of useful answers to my question next time too".

I don't understand why you would frame that as being "slapped". Does having your question marked as a duplicate hurt your feelings?

No but it feels redundant then to ask it anyways.

Not really. A question that’s simply closed as a duplicate isn’t going to get any answers, and the answers to the original question, while they may have once been reasonable enough to be accepted, might be outdated.

Languages move on and add features, and closing any question as a duplicate precludes new, modern features that provides a better way to answer the original question.

A lot of content on SO is dated to say the least, precisely because reputation harvesters with a dated knowledge of the language are overly keen on closing questions.

https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow

Oh wow, thanks. I didn't realize that making this an image post got rid of the link

Yeah, I don't know if it's a bug or a feature. I got a similar problem before with one of my posts. I think a workaround would be to post it as a link and paste the image in the Body.

I really hope it burns to the ground. One of the most toxic dev "forums" I've seen. I made a point of never clicking their site when looking for answers even if it took me longer.

Damn man, how do you get any work done without it?

I would ask on reddit, IRC channels or read the documentation. I found that I rarely get an updated answer on stack overflow for my area of work.

It is quite toxic but come on, you can't say it isn't an essential tool nowadays. The nitpicky attitudes and downvote barrages kinda enforce good quality answers besides being toxic as hell sometimes

It also enforced that while I was learning I would avoid asking any question there.

That's usually for the better though, basic questions have been answered a million times in a million different ways, yet another post on the same question will just make the original answers harder to find.

People still could be nicer and not attack others personally for not knowing any better, but closing duplicates and redirecting new people to them is a net positive for the platform

Is this due to the chatgpt?

Its so exhausting having to train chat gpt to be condescending and to close all my threads as duplicates though

The perversity of SO rewarding people for ensuring that the answers on SO are becoming increasingly outdated absolutely befuddles me.

ChatGPT went public at the start of the last kink downward. It can not be the reason for the big drop untill 2023.

Probably chatgpt getting all the easy high volume questions, yeah.

All questions have obviously been answered.

Not arguing with the other possible reasons given, but it can be really hard to get started with SO as anything other than a reader. Gaining enough points to comment, answer, or even answer a comment feels really hard now that so many questions are already answered well.

A lot of my answers I get answered with ChatGPT. And I can always ask ChatGPT to tell me where I can look to verify the answer. I find myself on stack overflow for very specific or very technical topics.

It's funny how if everyone just went and "read the documentation" like they tend to obnoxiously tell you to do.. stackoverflow wouldn't exist. Personally I go and look for things I can answer if someone asks a question that I know will get obliterated but I can tell they just need some help. I'll try to answer it before it gets downgraded and they get banned

Have you ever wanted to do something from the uncharted area? Encountered bad documentation? This is what it's supposed to be for, not handholding.

Uncharted is quite subjective. I used SO most when I was starting out in SE. Looking back through the questions I posted, most of them were very much beginner questions that I would just know nowadays or know where to look for. That was what I used SO for. Beginners asking veterans for help. The least of them were due to bad documentation or exploring uncharted territory. As I grew more confident in the field, I stopped using SO more and more. The latest only for best practices on simple problems I don't want to reinvent. And exactly those cases GPT now solves faster and I'd be surprised if not even better than SO posts.

It doesn't look to be a decline at all (quite healthy on the contrary) until around the time ChatGPT was released.

Where exactly am I supposed to go for programming questions if SO goes under? I don't suppose there's a Fediverse equivalent?

I can see for myself that I go way less often since I use github copilot

I mostly end up with answers from a handful of top tier devs.. I'm kind of glad they prevent junk and noise so I get the answers I need, ymmv

I mean discourse exists now

How does it replace SO? Oh wait, it doesn't.

It uses the format the benefit of SO is the format

What?

Are you brain dead? It’s literally made by the exact same people.

In the past I tried to submit something to it, but didn't have enough reputation or whatever.

In general though, I'll try to use copilot first

Can you give an example how you use copilot? Why is it better than using chatgpt and how exactly do I use it?

chatGPT is more for asking questions.. IMHO, I haven't really seen it solve anything that Google won't anyway.

However, Copilot is basically a really advance autocomplete. So, if I write something like function LinkedList.Init() it will try and fill in the gaps. Whereas, in the past, I might have gone to stack overflow for basic algorithms

It used to be total rubbish, but these days its good for a lot of smaller things.

Depends on your use case though. But, I just haven't seen the need for ChatGPT at all for what I'm doing (but stuff which is more natural language like journalism, or product summaries, it might be more useful).

Also, on an unrelated note, Dall-E SUCKS at generating Logos (it can't even generate text)

I I have been programming with Matlab for 8 years and am switching to Python. I'm focusing on deep learning applications and have been using ChatGPT to answer general questions about Python as interactive documentation. Would you say Copilot would be better for this use case or only better when I am a bit more advanced with Python?

It's almost as if devs have found a new way to have their code written for them... 😅

This tracks with my own experience of relying more on ChatGPT for coding assistance rather than searching Google (which would then lead to me to StackOverflow). ChatGPT has just been a faster way to get to the answer I’m looking for. StackOverflow is still a fantastic resource, though.