Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”
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.
Nothing passive about them it was just regular aggressive. Made my programming coursework so much worse. Indian guys on YouTube however, now those guys were helpful!
Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant?
“That’s a stupid question, marked as solved.”
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.
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?
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.
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 also, it’s outdated since four years.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
ChatGPT won’t humiliate you for asking a question that someone else has already asked.
I don’t know, being told what a good question that was and what a good boy I am everytime I ask a stupid question feels pretty humiliating.
(Still better than SO)
That’s a pretty recent development, isn’t it? I remember ChatGPT being a lot more matter of factly earlier on.
Yep, old ChatGPT was much more blunt and factual.
Don’t really like the recent trend of every LLM talking to me like I’m in kindergarten.
For me, strict rules are what make this website useful. No threads named “help me” is why I like reading it.
For newcomers there is https://stackoverflow.com/staging-ground
Even for non newcomers, having threads marked as duplicates for problems introduced by version changes that aren’t considered in the original question/answers is a major issue.
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.
I had a decently awarded account on SO because I joined it in 2012. I asked and answered questions. For the first few years it was fucking awesome as a professional developer. Then it’s popularity on google search results ended up making it too well known and the comment quality dropped substantially. Then the fucking powerusers popped up and started flagging almost everye one my questions as duplicates while pointing to unrelated questions. The last I really used SO was around 2017. I got too fed up to participate in the platform because when I spent the time to make a well formed question, it would just got shut down and my time wasted.
Never again will I help provide content to a VC-backed service just so that they can rugpull us and cash-out.
What exactly do you accuse Stack Overflow for? As far as I know this service has always been free to use and data is easily downloadable.
“Free to use” on a VC-backed service just means you’re the product. I am accusing them of the same thing I’m accusing each VC-backed service: That they exploit our efforts to cash out and then sell the service for someone who will enshittify it for profit.
Also, what do you mean “easily downloadable”? Can anyone download the entire corpus of SO in a way that they could set up their own SO with the same content to bootstrap them?
Also, what do you mean “easily downloadable”? Can anyone download the entire corpus of SO in a way that they could set up their own SO with the same content to bootstrap them?
have you seen: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
That they exploit our efforts to cash out and then sell the service for someone who will enshittify it for profit.
Can you give an example of this enshittification for profit?
Can you give an example of this enshittification for profit?
So I agree, I thought you are talking about some profit enshittification on Stack Overflow
I’m not following SO practices, but I it will come for it as well. It’s inevitable. Those who paid billions for it will require a ROI
Not necessarily directly, many people may have abandoned learning programming because of LLMs, rather than Stack Overflow specifically.
I don’t think such trend would be so big. And anyone who has used any LLM for programming learns very quickly that those are very far from replacing anyone
People who know programming already, yes. People who are getting into it / want to get into it, see it as an amazing shortcut.
I had two working students already, who thought and communicated that they don’t really need to learn programming, because they can do it with ChatGPT / Q. It was quite infuriating.
students
When I was a student I despised the idea of typeless
varin C#. Then a few years later at my day job I fully embraced C++auto. I understand the frustration but unfortunately being wrong is part of learning
For real. You can tell how good a programmer someone is, by how good they think an LLM is at programming.
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.
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.
