It’s not that developers are switching to AI tools it’s that stack overflow is awful and has been for a long time. The AI tools are simply providing a better alternative, which really demonstrates how awful stack overflow is because the AI tools are not that good.
Ironic, they’re being closed as duplicate.
Undoubtedly. But you agree that the crowdsourced knowledge base of existing answers is useful, no? That is what the islop searches and reproduces. It is more convenient than waiting for a rude answer. But I don’t think islop will give you a good answer if someone has not been bothered answer it before in SO.
islop is a convenience, but you should fear the day you lose the original and the only way to get that info is some opaque islop oracle
Most answers on SO are either from a doc page, are common patterns found in multiple books, or is mostly opinion-based. Most code AIs are significantly better at the first two without even being trained on SO (which I wouldn’t want anyway - SO really does suck nowadays)
Would you say the same about Wikipedia?
TBH asking questions on SO (and most similar platforms) fucking sucks, no surprise that users jump at the first opportunity at getting answers another way.
Removed. Someone else already said this before. Also, please ensure you stick to the stlye guides next time, and be less ambiguous. SO could mean a plethora of things.
Spoiler
Last time this question was answered was for several years older software versions, and the old solutions don’t work anymore. Whoops!
SO PTSD is real.
You have been banned for off topic low effort conversation.
Shivers…
I remember when I signed up for SO and was immediately put off by the fact you couldn’t post a conversation asking for help until you had helped others out AND gotten enough positive points.
I still did it, but damn their moderation system is ass.
Ah yes the famous: you need to add more details, may e a picture but you need to have above 100 reputation before you can add a picture or edit your question
Git gud, n00b!
In a video covering the toxicity of Stackoverflow, it was found ot at least some of the admins are also extremely toxic on other sites, in that same exact manner.
I was in the middle of making a reply like this but yours is better. Closed as duplicate.
I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.
The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.
Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.
Damn, lol
Yea it sucks, but quality is important so I get it.
I do understand being rigorous about questions, and technical forums were even worse a lot of the time, but SO’s methods led to the site becoming severely outdated. They really should have introduced a mechanism to mark old content as outdated. It should have been obvious like 10 years ago that solutions often stop working come next major version of the programming language, framework or operating system.
Honestly just funny to see. It makes perfect sense, based on how they made the site hostile to users.
According to a Stack Overflow survey from 2025, 84 percent of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76 percent a year earlier. This rapid adoption partly explains the decline in forum activity.
As someone who participated in the survey, I’d recommend everyone take anything regarding SO’s recent surveys with a truckfull of salt. The recent surveys have been unbelievably biased with tons of leading questions that force you to answer in specific ways. They’re basically completely worthless in terms of statistics.
LLM’s won’t be helping but SE/SO have been fully enshitifying themselves for years.
It was amazing in the early days.
Yeah because either you get a “how dumb are you?” Or none
Locking this comment. Duplicate of https://lemmy.world/comment/21433687
The complete non-sequitur link really makes it. chef’s kiss
Even before AI I stopped asking any questions or even answering for that matter on that website within like the first few months of using it. Just not worth the hassle of dealing with the mods and the neck beard ass users and I didn’t want my account to get suspended over some BS in case I really needed to ask an actual question in the future, now I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to any stack website and it does not show up in the Google search results anymore, they dug their own grave
The humans of StackOverflow have been pricks for so long. If they fixed that problem years ago they would have been in a great position with the advent of AI. They could’ve marketed themselves as a site for humans. But no, fuckfacepoweruser found an answer to a different question he believes answers your question so marked your question as a duplicate and fuckfacerubberstamper voted to close it in the queue without critically thinking about it.
I used to moderate and answer questions on SO, but stopped because at some point you see the 500th question about how to use some javascript function.
Of course I flagged them all as duplicate and linked them to an extensive answer about the specific function, explaining all aspects and edge cases, because I don’t think there need to be 500 similatlr answers (who’s going to maintain them?)
But yeah, sorry that I didn’t fix YOUR code sample, and you had to actually do your homework by yourself.
My questions weren’t homework problems with 500 duplicates. Maybe that type of shit being the most common in the vote to close queue is why fuckfacerubberstamper can’t be bothered to actually think about what they’re closing as dupes.
If the alternative is the cesspit that is Yahoo Answers and Quora, I’ll take the heavy-handed moderation of StackOverflow.
You don’t think there’s any middle ground between the two? None whatsoever?
Well, no. If there were a middle ground, we’d all be using it.
Like Lemmy? The site we’re all using?
But no my point wasn’t about a specific site, it’s about the moderation approach. Do you really think there’s no middle ground in approach to moderation between Yahoo Answers and StackOverflow?
Like Lemmy? The site we’re all using?
Cute. Except Lemmy hasn’t helped me solve any programming problems. StackOverflow has.
And I think you missed my point, so I’ll restate it: If this theoretical middle-ground moderation were actually viable, it would have eaten StackOverflow’s lunch like a decade ago. People were SALTY about SO’s hostility even before the “summer of love” campaign in 2012.
It’s viable, StackExchange as a company is just shit. See: then never listening to meta, listening to random Twitter users more, and defaming their volunteer moderators.
Lemmy isn’t a Q&A application in the way that the others I mentioned are.
Like I said, I’m not talking about specific sites, I’m talking about moderation style.
Of course there’s a middle ground, that’s much closer in my ideal world to StackOverflow than it is to Yahoo Answers or Quora.
Nobody here is suggesting for you to use Yahoo Answers.
I’m just using it as an example of what a Q&A site with inadequate moderation looks like. If you can’t see that then I don’t think we’re going to see eye to eye no matter how long this discussion continues.
Okay? But why? StackOverflow’s moderation is inadequate as well.
If Stack Overflow is a 3/10 then Quora is a 1/10 and Yahoo Answers is -5/10.
I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn’t copy/pasting code.
And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.
But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don’t have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren’t really upset at “having” to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.
I call it “comic book guy” syndrome. The desperate need to feel superior.
That last part is so true, some people are just miserable and want to spread that misery to others to make themselves feel better
Hear hear, it was the hostile atmosphere that pushed me away from Stack Exchange years before LLMs were a thing. That very clear impression that the site does not exist to help specific people, but a vague public audience, and the treatment of every question and answer is subjugated to that. Since then I just ask/answer questions on platforms like Lemmy, Reddit, Discord, or the Discourse forums ran by various organisations, it’s a much more pleasant experience.
The stupidest part is that their aggressive hostility against new questions means that the content is becoming dated. The answers to many, many questions will change as the tech evolves.
And since AI’s ability to answer tech questions depends heavily on a similar question being in the training dataset, all the AIs are going to increasingly give outdated answers.
They really have shot themselves in the foot for at best some short term gain.
This was my issue. The two times I posted real, actual questions that I needed help with, and tried to provide as much detail as possible while saying I didn’t understand the subject,
I got clowned on, immediately downvoted negative, and got no actual help whatsoever. Now I just hope someone else had a similar issue.
I’ve posted questions, but I don’t usually need to because someone else has posted it before. this is probably the reason that AI is so good at answering these types of questions.
the trouble now is that there’s less of a business incentive to have a platform like stack overflow where humans are sharing knowledge directly with one another, because the AI is just copying all the data and delivering it to the users somewhere else.
The hot concept around the late 2000’s and early 2010’s was crowdsourcing: leveraging the expertise of volunteers to build consensus. Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and similar sites came up in that time frame where people would freely lend their expertise on a platform because that platform had a pretty good rule set for encouraging that kind of collaboration and consensus building.
Monetizing that goodwill didn’t just ruin the look and feel of the sites: it permanently altered people’s willingness to participate in those communities. Some, of course, don’t mind contributing. But many do choose to sit things out when they see the whole arrangement as enriching an undeserving middleman.
What we’re all afraid is that cheap slop is going to make stack broke/close/bought/private and then it will be removed from the public domain…then jack up the price of islop when the alternative is gone…
I do wonder then, as new languages and tools are developed, how quickly will AI models be able to parrot information on their use, if sources like stackoverflow cease to exist.
I think this is a classic of privatization of commons, so that nobody can compete with them later without free public datasets…
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But can anyone train on them? What happens to the original dataset?
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Already before the LLMs for me it was the last chance before I would post over there. The desperation move. It was too toxic and I would always get pissed to get my question closed because too similar or too easy or whatever. Hey I wasted 15 minutes to type that, if the other question solved the problem I wouldn’t post again…
In the beginning it wasn’t like that…
I went to watch my stack overflow account and the first questions that I posted (and that gave me 2000 karma) would have been almost all of them rejected and removed
The Redditification of SO
Oh no, poor AI won’t know where to feed anymore. Anyway…
But what will the mods close for arbitrary reasons before there are any responses?
go ai, go broke
Every question has been answered, pack it up boys.
Who is going to ask there to be harresed
