so the ai kills off all its food sources and then what
Either Butlerian Jihad or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
time for a jihad
MSDN subscription
Make sure users trust it so much they can no longer discern hallucinations and lies from reality, then keep the AI training on content generated by itself.
They don’t allow me to create an account because email restriction, VPN/IP restriction…
If they don’t want content, that’s their choice
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Eh, some manage to go around. Steam doesn’t push this BS (but yea I guess they force you to pay an amount)
Proton mail also doesn’t really go out of their way to check you… and Reddit is somewhat okay from what I remember
Even if your in and have a history of good questions and responses it is still ridiculously hard to get a question accepted. Stackoverflow is dying due to its own choices and its driven many people away from it. They caused their own peak in 2014 and its amazing it took this long to decline.
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…
Sure is bullshit. I now and then could have answered a question i am an expert in. But i never had an account and wouldn’t have had the points to do it, because “popular question” and whatnot.
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.
SO did go overboard at times; I’ve seen quite a few instances where posts were locked for being “duplicates” of completely unrelated problems. Oftentimes they were accompanied with unnecessarily rude messages as well.
But yes, the unwillingness of some (most?) people to use the search function baffles me. They’d prefer to write a narrative essay in SO for their FizzBuzz assignment and argue with mods rather than type a few keywords to instantly get the solution.
I’m not a programmer (last time I seriously dabbled into coding was building a website for an A Level Computing project and I had to teach myself HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL because my sixth form was shit and was only teaching us Visual Basic 6 when the IDE/language had been obsolete for nearly a decade) and I have never personally posted on StackOverflow. In fact, the only StackExchange site I’ve ever been part of was EpicAdvice, a short-lived offshoot that was for World of Warcraft specific questions. But I do have a sibling with a computer science and software engineering background which is how I became aware of the site in the first place.
This isn’t my personal criticism of the site, it’s me echoing the sentiment of the many who have complained about the community across the web.
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.
Another big problem is that we’ve been collectively trying to shoehorn everybody into programming careers for the better part of two decades. In fact, “just learn to code” is often thrown around by people in response to the prospect of AI automating and taking over everybody’s jobs.
What they don’t understand is that coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math, which is a significant portion of the population if you look at statistics, grades, test scores, etc. Expecting a lowly paid call center worker who lost their job to AI to suddenly open up Visual Studio and write any code is a fools errand.
I bring this up because I think there’s a correllation between people asking low-quality questions and people being pushed into making a career move into tech.
coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math
I disagree tbh. I’m a software dev with 20+ years of experience and I think most coding is not very difficult relative to other jobs. The problem is that coding requires specific motivation because the information breadth is insane compared to other professions and that becomes incredibly overwhelming for many people are not stubborn in a specific sort of way.
I think you have a point here regarding corellation between low-quality questions and people “who don’t want to be here” - that’s probably true.
Though people generally really suck at describing their issues and that goes way beyond code. LLMs are making this even more apparent because a dude who can describe everything is having a great time and others just yell “LLMs suck and have no value” so the difference is crazy.
There’s something with our society where introspection and detail is not natural and very difficult to learn for some people.
Agreed. There are definitely many areas of software to do require/benefit from good math skills. But software is an incredibly diverse field. Kids, if you’re interested in programming/software, there are plenty of areas you can do just fine in with varying levels of math skills.
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In the earlier days of StackOverflow, the founders try to fight the toxicity. I don’t know whether they got overwhelmed or just gave up, but the trolls wound up taking over. Maybe good moderators aren’t willing to put up with both overwhelming toxicity AND no pay.
I still love what StackOverflow once was. I tried coming back and giving a chance a few times. My last question got “answered” by people who clearly had not taken time to read the question. After updating the question with, “Note: I’m am NOT talking about ‘X’, its subtle, please read the question fully.” I was told that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I eventually figured it out and didn’t bother posting the answer to the issue. Fly-by answers by people just looking to improve their stats made continuing to interact with SO frustrating and pointless.
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
One of the more important knowledge repositories right now… and it’s tied to a corporation. We should probably be supporting alternatives.
Anybody know of data backups? Do we have the whole thing on the internet archive?
Do we have the whole thing on the internet archive?
Maybe?
Another consideration is that it’s probably a part of many LLM training datasets by now. In fact, I’d say the combination of bad moderation and AI have made Stack Overflow less attractive lately.
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Every time I go to SO I have to deal with CloudFlare checks or captchas. I’m not genuinely not sure why, but it has kept me from clicking SO links from search engines first. Not even using a VPN. Kind of odd.
I’m sure they have all the heuristics in Cloudflare cranked up due to all programming model training aggressively digesting their content. Can’t blame them, honestly.
sure we can
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
but without the kinda
but do we have something better? I’m not sure…
Stack Exchange is a business owned by investment company Prosus, and the Stack Exchange products include private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams)
Private equity milking another product dry.
“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
fuck discord. this is the only thing I want to add to the other 2 responses
and mind me, matrix wouldn’t be that much better in that regard. better, but still bad, because it’s a bad format for this.
Stack overflow is still useful z it’s just that the vast majority of answers are like 15-20 years old as most questions were already answered by then
Wow amazing stuff
That graph tells a story.
