To be honest. (although I am guilty using chatgpt way too often) I have never not found a question + an answer to a similar problem on stackoverflow.
The realm is saturated. 90 % of the common questions are answered. Complex problems which are not yet asked and answered are probably too difficult to formulate on stackoverflow.
It should be kept at what it is. An enormous repository of knowledge.
This is a huge reason for the question decline! All the easy stuff has been answered, the knowledge is already there. But people are so used to infinite growth that anything contrary = death lol
People also blame ai, but if people are going to ai to ask the common already answered questions then… good! They’d just get hurt feelings when their question was closed as a dupe
Yeah, the article seems to assume AI is the cause without attempting to rule out other factors. Plus the graph shows a steady decline starting years before ChatGPT appeared.
People also blame ai, but if people are going to ai to ask the common already answered questions then… good!
exactly!
While I am indeed worried about the “wasted” energy (thats a whole other topic), thats pretty much why AI is good for.
Yet another reason why the Puzzling Stack Exchange is so interesting.
Puzzling Stack Exchange
this simply an aggregator?
Stack Overflow has a whole network of Q&A sites. There’s places to post and answer puzzles, code golf, ask physics or political questions, etc. Lots of useful stuff not many people know about
Fun fact: the math “sub-stackoverflow” is owned by the American mathematical society iirc (do correct if wrong) and they reserve the right to up and leave and set root elsewhere outside the network.
no people post their own puzzles there for others to solve
I disagree. I still easily find new questions to ask, for example this one which is a nice demonstration of why StackOverflow is dying. Or this one (which also received 4 downvotes).
Even so, I definitely go to ChatGPT first now. Now that we finally have an alternative to the toxic downvotes/closing, why would I go there unless I absolutely need to?
That is a good example. If you aren’t already aware you might be interested in ntfs-3g, the GPL-2.0 licensed ntfs driver - the function ntfs_upcase_table_build in libntfs-3g/unistr.c may be of some assistance
Oo thanks!
I’d wager that most new questions are in cutting-edge tech. Older tech will be saturated.
This is a really good point. I joined stackoverflow after graduating university a few years ago, and found it really hard to participate. You need karma to be able to vote on stuff or add comments, but the only unanswered questions are often basically unanswerable. I did find some success with adding answers that were better than previous ones, but it was limited, because at that point the site was already declining and there was no one left to upvote my contributions.
It’s because all the questions have already been answered. How many times can you answer how to reverse an array in javascript?
… … How do you reverse an array in Javascript?
array.reverse() should do the trick 😆
I haven’t used it a lot even before AI.
A lot of people seem to be celebrating this, but I personally think this is a net negative for programming. Are people actually replacing SO with talking to LLMs? If not, where are they going?
I’ve seen an uptick in people using places like discord to get help. But that’s not easily searchable and not in the same format that it is in stackoverflow. SO was meant to organize these answers to make asking questions easier. Now it seems like we’re walking away from that, and I can’t quite understand why. Is it really because SO is “toxic”?
Yes. Stack overflow was a cruel, selfish, horrible emperor and now the dynasty of technical knowledge is crumbling.
If everyone moves to LLMs then there will not be a central repository of knowledge. That is the fault of stack overflow. Their self-centered behavior directly caused this fracturing of knowledge.
If they had been decent human beings we would have had a library of information kept current with today’s trends and technologies. Instead we’re going to have to rely on paid AI models or fucking grok.
This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.
This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.
Who is the “they” in this? The volunteers who contributed to the site? StackOverflow isn’t like a company or anything. No one is paid to answer questions there. They’re all people who were working hard to make a collection of common questions with the best possible answers, and trying to uphold a certain standard for the content there.
Based on your comment, I think maybe we as a group just don’t deserve stackoverflow. If we really are all now turning to LLMs instead (which are not in any way “decentralized”) to get a bunch of statistical bullshit spit at us instead of, you know, the actual right answer, then maybe we deserve what will happen next.
it’s owned by Prosus, acquired for $1.8 billion in 2021.
Yes, but they’re not the ones producing all of the content. Again, that’s produced by volunteers.
Again, the attitude comes down from the top. Volunteers whose ethics (contempt and superiority) align with the executive staff are rewarded, and those that don’t are let go. I don’t know if you’re ignorant or being deliberately obtuse? Please think about what I wrote.
To the surprise of absolutely no one. Tends to happen when you cultivate one of the most tixic online spaces on the net. I’ve never asked a question on SO, but just the verbiage used to accost people just trying to learn is just insane. Mods don’t really care about post content as long as its not perceived as “hostile,” so you can be generally as passive aggressive and shitty as you want. It’s just…weird.
You can find especially viperis content when you find a question which has been answered, but someone is just like “Well, this isn’t the way that I do it!” etc, and then go on a tirade about how the question was asked poorly and the answer doesn’t completely answer the question.
Shit is just wild.
I use SO daily and never seen anything like you describe there. All I see is that incorrect answers are down voted. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t pay attention to the “verbiage”. I look at the code sample and move on. In the end, it’s not a forum. I’m not there to read opinions.
I find the concept of downvoting very toxic and discouraging. It can potentially prevent people to express different views, something a discussion and our personal development is thriving on. It can be well seen on Reddit and even on Lemmy, where people with different views get sometimes heavily downvoted. It is something I consider to be close to “cancel culture” - a majority decides not to like your opinion, so it tries to silence you by voting you “out”. I would really love to see that Lemmy removes this feature and just allows to upvote - so you can upvote a comment or not, but you cannot downvote a comment.
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You can disable download in a lemmy instance. My instance doesn’t have downvotes.
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What opinions do you see expressed on SO? Maybe we’re searching for different things there but all I see are answers that are either correct or not. If someone misunderstood the questions and the answers is not correct it gets downvoted. But I don’t know, maybe others use SO for things like “what’s your favorite distro?” or “Is AWS better then Azure?”.
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In my opinion, you’re doing a great job by not enabling downvotes. Every user can see how many votes their comment has, which should be enough for them to gauge how well their comment is received. 👍
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I haven’t been on Stack Overflow for a long time (around 15 years ago). Back then, I was mostly focused on statistics and programming in R. It’s true that rude responses were rare, especially in the sense that the OP should have known the answer beforehand or could have researched it themselves before asking. But yes, I never saw personal attacks.
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Am still on Reddit and was reminded just minutes ago of what you just said.
Here is 20 people downvoting me for giving a TL;DR which is somehow both good and bad simultaneously.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you wrote on Reddit, but from what I read, there was nothing even remotely offensive. You simply provided information. Downvoting you for that is just silly.
The downvotes you’re getting here on Lemmy for your comment are equally baseless (current status: 0). It just shows that some people have enough energy to downvote, but not enough to engage in a discussion. Maybe they should save that energy for something more constructive.
Some newspaper forums require identity verification (through paid subscriptions, social media accounts, etc.). These forums are generally much more civil - and we all know why.
Which Lemmy downvotes?
I got banned temporarily (but actually permanently) from TheGuardian for posting newspaper articles reporting on evidence that Assange’s Swedish alleged rape victims boasted about their sexual encounter on Twitter and SMS (which bus lawyer submitted as evidence). No commentary from me.
I got banned from r/worldnews without warning because I posted an article by Seymore Hirsch suggesting that the NordStream pipeline was sabotaged by USA themselves. The only commentary there was to add that he is a respectedjournalist who exposed the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam.
I had a comments deleted on Lemmy WorldNews because the Mod did not like my politics. At least I wasn’t banned.
Friends have set up a private forum and server which is a solution however it doesn’t have much activity. Those in our circle are too attracted to popular socials instead it seems.
I asked a question on there about Apache Poi. Then no one answered it so I found a solution and answered it myself. Must’ve stayed relevant because I fielded a few questions about it for years.
Then they took my account away, I think maybe because I didn’t confirm my identity after a big breach? Then I looked for my Q/A and it was attributed to someone else. I was hot about it for a minute and then realized I didn’t care and was finally free from being the expert in that one niche thing I’ve never done since.
looks like an opportunity for the fediverse
In my opinion SO has been replaced by forges discussions/issues. Whenever I have an issue with some library or piece of software, I will always check their repo to see if someone is going through the same thing or how they solved it.
When I tried to engage with SO it was a pain in the ass so I just stopped answering/asking.
My favourite closed question is how to do Case-insensitive string comparison in C++ - closed as opinion based!
ChatGPT helped, but this is why you died StackOverflow.
The question asks for “the best” way to do it (making it opinion based) and forbids a potential solution without explaining why (it’s clearly some kind of assignment, but that doesn’t matter here). And it has plenty of answers both using Boost and in pure C++, so I’m not sure why that wasn’t enough for you. Just because it’s closed doesn’t mean the answers already provided are bad.
By that measure basically every StackOverflow question asking how to do something is opinion based - the very nature of the site is questions asking for the best solutions. The “opinion based” rules is NOT meant to prevent questions like this. This is the kind of useless pedantry that killed StackOverflow.
I think it comes from a fundamental disconnect. You have something like:
- People ask questions like “which programming language is best” or “what’s the best game engine” or “should I use tabs or spaces”?
- Someone decided they didn’t want StackOverflow being used to debate these things, so they made a rule against opinion-based questions.
- People later come along and blindly apply the rule to ban anything that is worded as if it is an opinion, even if it’s a perfectly suitable question.
not sure why that wasn’t enough for you
I never said it wasn’t; just that it shouldn’t have been closed.
Just because it’s closed doesn’t mean the answers already provided are bad.
Again, I never said otherwise. The point is it shouldn’t have been closed.
Damn. Rest in peace.
I don’t mind so much. It started as a Wiki and then became a corporate AI training ground.
I think Microsoft bought it, and as with most things they buy, they run it into the ground.
