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.
That graph tells a story.
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.
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.
I don’t know if it’s just my age/experience or some kind of innate “horse sense” But I tend to do alright with detecting shit responses, whether they be human trolls or an LLM that is lying through its virtual teeth. I don’t see that as bad news, I see it as understanding the limitations of the system. Perhaps with a reasonable prompt an LLM can be more honest about when it’s hallucinating?
I don’t know if it’s just my age/experience or some kind of innate “horse sense” But I tend to do alright with detecting shit responses, whether they be human trolls or an LLM that is lying through its virtual teeth
I’m not sure how you would do that if you are asking about something you don’t have expertise in yet, as it takes the exact same authoritative tone no matter whether the information is real.
Perhaps with a reasonable prompt an LLM can be more honest about when it’s hallucinating?
So far, research suggests this is not possible (unsurprisingly, given the nature of LLMs). Introspective outputs, such as certainty or justifications for decisions, do not map closely to the LLM’s actual internal state.
I’m not sure how you would do that if you are asking about something you don’t have expertise in yet, as it takes the exact same authoritative tone no matter whether the information is real.
I agree – That’s why I’m chalking it up to some kind of healthy sense of skepticism when it comes to trusting authoritative-sounding answers by themselves. e.g. “ok that sounds plausible, let’s see if we can find supporting information on this answer elsewhere or, maybe ask the same question a different way to see if the new answer(s) seem to line up.”
So far, research suggests this is not possible (unsurprisingly, given the nature of LLMs). Introspective outputs, such as certainty or justifications for decisions, do not map closely to the LLM’s actual internal state.
Interesting – I still see them largely as black boxes so reading about how people smarter than me describe the processes is fascinating.
let’s see if we can find supporting information on this answer elsewhere or, maybe ask the same question a different way to see if the new answer(s) seem to line up
Yeah, that’s probably the best way to go about it, but still requires some foundational knowledge on your part. For example, in a recent study I worked on we found that programming students struggle hard when the LLM output is wrong and they don’t know enough to understand why. They then tend to trust the LLM anyways and end up prompting variations of the same thing over and over again to no avail. Other studies similarly found that while good students can work faster with AI, many others are actually worse off due to being misled.
I still see them largely as black boxes
The crazy part is that they are, even for the researchers that came up with them. Sure we can understand how the data flows from input to output, but realistically not a single person in the world could look at all of the weights in an LLM and tell you what it has learned. Basically everything we know about their capabilities on tasks is based on just trying it out and seeing how well it works. Hell, even “prompt engineers” are making a lot of their decisions based on vibes only.
Which is eventually going to cause AI model collapse, since AI no longer has any source of truth to train on. This is such an interesting technology being used in such a stupid and irresponsible way.
Exactly my point. So what you see now is Ai is generating Ai content used for training. Also known as synthetic data… I know right?
Damnnnnn, truth bombs!
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)
I used Kiwix to grab a copy of Wikipedia.
Completely forgot about kiwix; I have that on my ipad and laptop, along with Dash which is like a modern day
HELPPC.COMif anyone remembers that thing…I didn’t know about Dash, but it sounds pretty great. Appears to be Mac only, though, and requires a subscription for the latest version.
Also found someone that appears to have converted HelpPC to HTML. Can’t speak to the legitimacy of it, though.
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.
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.
I’ve always been afraid of opening questions on stack overflow. To the point that I’d rather just figure it out myself.
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.
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.
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
How about this one then
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.
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.)
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.
so the ai kills off all its food sources and then what
Either Butlerian Jihad or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
time for a jihad
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.
MSDN subscription
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…
Wow amazing stuff
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.
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
“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.
RIP permanence and discoverability
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
Yeah, this is a problem with every single platform that becomes successful.
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
