This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Maybe, just maybe, most of the big questions have been asked and answered already.
These days when I look something up it's been answered like 8 years ago, and the answer is still valid. And they aggressively mark questions as dupes, so people aren't opening too many repeat questions.
The annoying thing about the dupe policy is sometimes the answer does change and the accepted answer to the existing question is from 5 years ago.
Yup. Infuriating. I can't remember how many times I saw a thread of someone asking my version of a question that was then closed as duplicate linking to an older one that wasn't the right version and therefore the fix was irrelevant or at least not best practice anymore.
It also doesn’t help when the answer is “yeah just disable this feature that is used for security. That fixes the issue” but that really isn’t the best solution
The article also goes into it, but I think the invent of AI and asking somewhat specific questions may also explain the decline. If you can get a result that can get you 90% of the way there with an AI that used stack overflow as a resource, theres no reason to actually ask on stack overflow. Its faster to go on the AI result or go on google/bing/etc...etc... that has the answer right there on the page.
And the redesign....its pretty bad in my opinion.
I was once downvoted answering a question on a library....that I created on stack overflow. Still makes me laugh.
The graph suggests it started declining well before AI became mainstream. I'm sure it accelerates it, but it had already long peaked.
Yep I agree. Its a combo of many different things.
I cant tell you the last time I was on SO for a question. its been that long.
Yep, I've never needed to ask a question on Stack Overflow as everything I've searched for has been answered already... or I've looked elsewhere for the answer as I'm not allowed to upvote, downvote or ask questions on it anyway due to lack of karma (or whatever they call it). No wonder it's in decline if nobody new is allowed to contribute, and every new question is closed as a duplicate.
The barrier to entry is silly.
The barrier to entry is why it's a good place for answers and not Reddit-quality responses.
Reddit can give quality tech responses though. The voting system on SO would be sufficient.
I've always been afraid of opening questions on stack overflow. To the point that I'd rather just figure it out myself.
I believe so. Whenever I have a problem, I look for an answer in the following order: search engine > reading a forum post > documentation > writing a forum post. I usually don't work on bleeding-edge software, so somebody probably has already asked my question and received an answer too. If it hasn't explicitly been asked yet, it might have already been answered in the documentation. Furthermore, as you said, Stack Overflow would much sooner delete your post for being a duplicate of a 21-year-old post than provide an answer to your question. There are other (and sometimes newer) tools out there that can provide the same answer without putting up so much resistance to you simply attempting to use them. If they want their traffic back, they could start there, instead of "rebranding".
(and sometimes newer)
My God man, say it louder for the folks in the back. A 21 year old answer, heck even an 8 year old answer like OP said, might not STILL be the best answer in the current age. Technology evolves, new languages get invented, old languages gain some new features, and all of that happens at a rapid pace.
I get super dismayed using SO and seeing the top answer predates Rust. (Note I don't mean to say Rust is always the answer, but that Rust is already 13 years old. Things change.)
Not in technology, it's a rapidly evolving field. Answers that might have been absolutely perfect five years ago can now be irrelevant archaic trivia.
I mean there's always gonna be new libraries or frameworks or whatever that will have their own questions to be asked. I think the problem is at a certain point you've reached the maximum audience you can appeal to. Which I feel StackOverflow very much has but of course corporations have to keep making greater and greater profits so once you maximize audience you have to find other methods for profit. Which is what leads to rebrand stuff like this.
Grab a copy of the stackoverflow database and use it locally, or train your own local LLM on the datastore.
And if you can, donate to the Internet Archive -- those people do really important work in today's age of killing off old information and constant enshittification.
Came here to say something similar about a local archive.
You can also use the app Kiwix to make it a little easier to download/search (and grab several other doc archives like Python PEP and Wikipedia)
Completely forgot about kiwix; I have that on my ipad and laptop, along with Dash which is like a modern day HELPPC.COM if anyone remembers that thing...
Damnnnnn, truth bombs!
Bad news. Since AI can only answer what it knows. If you have a question that is legit but not yet part of stackoverflow, you get a bad AI response.
In that case you can ask it on the stackoverflow website. But due to the fact that everybody now only rely on AI stackoverflow is dead. Well there you go, you just killed the source of truth.
so the ai kills off all its food sources and then what
MSDN subscription
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...
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
I too contributed fairly significantly over a long period of time, particularly on electronics.stackexchange.com. I generally just ignore the weak/low quality questions or vote them down. I might respond and ask them to fix the question if I felt charitable, but I never understood the "question nazis".
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.
There are poor personality types everywhere, but I have found stackexchange/stackoverflow to be one of the better sources of user curated help. LLMs are a new and interesting avenue and I've had some good success with them too, but Stackoverflow was really, really good.
I fully agree. Ai is hallucinate answers & solutions. Maybe very simple questions or programming issues can be solved by AI. But more complex, or very language specific or use case specific questions not.
And the result could be catastrophic when relying on AI too much.
Yes. Stack overflow is a place where you can get knowledge from experts for free. The people that complain about the moderation being toxic generally think they are entitled to expert's time without putting in any effort themselves and would drastically degrade the utility of the site if they got their way.
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.
The headline is a lie. Developers will be fine. One company will lose users. And rightly so.
they're gonna rebrand to ai first or turn it into an experts-exchange aren't they?
It does feel like they're going that way. But that's okay. Everyone needs an Expert Sex Change every now and then.
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
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
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.
That graph tells a story.
