My experience with SO is that I'll look up a question about how to do something using X method and all the answers are like "why are you using X?" or "here's how to do it using Y.". You rarely find people answering the questions and instead find people trying to spread gospel about a certain tech that you aren't using.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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My experience with SO is somewhat the same, but sometimes (actually maybe most times) you're trying to use a hammer to screw in a screw.. If you read the suggestions and take them into account you can often find the actual question, and then the actual answer.
In my experience has been like "that's a bug and was solved on version 2.1, update" and I'm having the exact problem in version 2.2 so what now?
I've been in your position and in the other person's position many times. It can be frustrating but we need to think about the big picture. It's possible you hadn't considered a certain approach, and it's probable that many other future readers will not have considered a certain approach. So even though you might have said that you want to do something specific, it's often helpful to some people to provide general information of another way to tackle the same issue.
And of course you know your own situation, so now there are these comments that appear off topic, and they kind of are, for you, and that's just how it is on forums.
The other situation that comes up a lot is that people are doing it wrong. They are misusing some piece of technology and while their kluge might kind of work right now, it's setting themselves up for bigger issues in the future. Of course no one appreciates it when you tell them they're doing it wrong.
Not necessarily directly, many people may have abandoned learning programming because of LLMs, rather than Stack Overflow specifically.
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
Question closed as off-topic.
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 forget where I heard the quote, but:
Stack Overflow is a great place to find answers. Stack Overflow is a terrible place to ask questions.
Their moderation approach is a big part of why it's a great place to search for answers.
If LLMs just copied stack overflow they'd respond to every question with "Closed as duplicate. Question already answered."
and link a slightly similar question, which's answers can't be used in your case, because of the small difference. also, it's outdated since four years.
or 13 in case of python questions, and they are about python2
Problem being that someone else asked the question 10 years ago and the answer is now irrelevant due to version changes. People with high scores are just early adopters who answered all of the easy questions. Hostile users generally can't understand the question. The issue with llms answering your question is that they are going to be stuck in the current time period. In the future their answers will also be irrelevant due to version changes.
Earlier today I googled how to toggle full screen in dosbox-x and the AI-generated answer said to use alt+enter. Tried it and it didn't work, so I look in the documentation and it turns out that they changed it to F12+f a while ago (probably to avoid interfering with actual dos input).
This is definitely already a problem.
Every LLM is shit at dealing with version changes. They don't understand it as a concept, despite all their training data.
I mean that is already a problem, if you ask a question you have to be ready for the answer to be a mismatch of version conflicts.
But that is ok. ChatGPT is a tool that can either help you or hurt you. I like to think of it like a power hammer. If you are doing a roofing job, it can help you get things done faster compared to a manual hammer, but you still need to know how to build a roof to get started.
ChatGPT is great at helping you organize your thoughts or finding an answer to some error message buried in some log file, but you still need to know what questions to ask and you need to be ready for it to give you a stupid answer and how to get around that.
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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.
Projects that use Discord for support piss me right off. What a stupid way to keep answering the same question over and over again.
It's not like discord is any better than SO. It's a closed platform, often with no read access if you don't want to register, and it's not searchable in the slightest.
I would take SO any day over discord.
Can people access to discord from corporate networks? I'm fucked if the Google answer gave me reddit or github as the answers because they're blocked.
Yep. 200% agree. I still post questions on SO, but when I don't get any answers, then I have to go to Discord... :(
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
Honestly using the existing question stock to generate current-version answers using the current documentation as synthetic training data is probably the way to go.
As more and more libraries are open source on GitHub or gitlab or sourceforge or whateverthefuck, asking questions on the libraries themselves (as an issue) is often the right thing to do, too... Less centralised than SO but also the only people who care about how to do things in a lib are people using the lib, so.....
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.
You are assuming that people act in logical ways.
This is only a problem right now if you think about it.
The snake eats its tail and it all degenerates into slop. Happy coding!
The need for the service that SO provided won't go away. Eventually people will migrate to new places to discuss. LLM creators will either constantly scrape those as well, forcing them to implement more and more countermeasures and GenAI-poison, or the services themselves will enshittify and sell our content (i.e. the commons) to LLM-creators.
I worry that the replacement is more likely a move to platforms like Discord. I mean it's already happened in a lot of projects.
Discord is terrible for this.
I hate Discord with a passion. Trying to get everyone I know away from it.
If they move to Discord, nobody will ever be able to find the answers. They must use a website that is indexable by search engines or it will be pointless.
Yeah. But this already happens, unfortunately.
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Never again will I help provide content to a VC-backed service just so that they can rugpull us and cash-out.
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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.
Hey look everyone it's that retard from stack overflow!
Aw shit, not again.
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
💯
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I've lost count the number of times where I try to find something in SO, and it's just someone posting the exact same example code as the answer. Or someone suggesting you just google it. Then I ask ChatGPT... and I get an answer.
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?
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I stopped using it before chatgpt arrived. You can always find answers in the documentation or in github issues
Not terribly surprising, Google would often direct me to StackOverflow threads as I was googling for an answer to a question. And as often as not, either the question was closed; or, instead of anyone providing an answer, the commenters would spiral off into questioning everything about the original question asker's life choices. While I do get the whole XY Problem, this sort of thing seemed to be over-used on SO.
Granted, I don't know if AI answers are any better. Sure, they can answer a lot of the simple questions, but I've not seen them be useful on hard, more obscure questions. Probably because those questions don't have ready answers on SO.
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