My favourite closed question is how to do Case-insensitive string comparison in C++ - closed as opinion based!
ChatGPT helped, but this is why you died StackOverflow.
A lot of people seem to be celebrating this, but I personally think this is a net negative for programming. Are people actually replacing SO with talking to LLMs? If not, where are they going?
I’ve seen an uptick in people using places like discord to get help. But that’s not easily searchable and not in the same format that it is in stackoverflow. SO was meant to organize these answers to make asking questions easier. Now it seems like we’re walking away from that, and I can’t quite understand why. Is it really because SO is “toxic”?
Good. StackOverflow is toxic, while I was in school I would ask questions that were “obvious” I guess. I’d get told that I’m dumb (didn’t get those words but it was implied) when trying to ask for clarification. Then I got banned from posting anymore questions due to downvotes. Like imo how can you learn if people shun you for asking questions?
Reddits programming community was more welcoming and kinder than the stuck up folk on SO.
It’s mainly a different model, but I totally sympathize that it’s the opposite of welcoming or encouraging.
SO recognizes that many, many questions are really just rephrasings of the same underlying question, and the aim is to find and provide the best answer to those. It explicitly does not want to repeatedly answer the same question, and given how few people find out how it works before simply asking, they have to be pretty ruthless about it. The result is that usually the most active and fleshed out questions and answers are very informative. So there’s a big upside in trade for those downsides. Answers are meant to be durable, ~singular, and authoritative.
Reddit is basically halfway between that, and Discord. Discord is the polar opposite, questions and answers are naturally ephemeral, duplication happens constantly, and quality of responses is all over the map.
I greatly prefer the StackOverflow model, and - to be very clear - I have never once asked (to say nothing of answering) a question of my own there, lmao.
It’s because all the questions have already been answered. How many times can you answer how to reverse an array in javascript?
I gave up on it when they decided to sell my answers/questions for AI training. First I wanted to delete my account, but my data would stay. So I started editing my answers to say “fuck ai” (in a nutshell). I got suspended for a couple months to think about what I did. So I dag deep into my consciousness and came up with a better plan. I went through my answers (and questions) and poisoned them little by little every day with errors. After that I haven’t visited that crap network anymore. Before all this I was there all the time, had lots of karma (or whatever it was called there). Couldn’t care less after the AI crap. I honestly hope, that I helped make the AI, that was and probably still is trained on data that the users didn’t consent to be sold, little bit more shitty.
I guess the main issue here is that we let some group “own” all of the questions and answers, giving them the opportunity to sell it whenever they wanted to cash out.
Maybe a better solution is some kind of decentralized version of StackOverflow that prevents one person from owning everything. Something like Lemmy and Mastodon, but for questions and answers specifically.
Unfortunately, that poisons not only the AI.
Yes, but if all this coding ai fails more and more in delivering good results, people may use it less.
Yeah the AI without consent thing killed it for me, too. Shame we couldn’t totally tank the whole site with poisoned answers.
While I find the site so helpful, humans that help AI like the team at StackOverflow did deserve to be on the losing end.
I am absolutely not above cutting off my nose to spite my face.
I went through my answers (and questions) and poisoned them little by little every day with errors
You are an evil genius (also, a very determined one - I wouldn’t have had the patience).
To the surprise of absolutely no one. Tends to happen when you cultivate one of the most tixic online spaces on the net. I’ve never asked a question on SO, but just the verbiage used to accost people just trying to learn is just insane. Mods don’t really care about post content as long as its not perceived as “hostile,” so you can be generally as passive aggressive and shitty as you want. It’s just…weird.
You can find especially viperis content when you find a question which has been answered, but someone is just like “Well, this isn’t the way that I do it!” etc, and then go on a tirade about how the question was asked poorly and the answer doesn’t completely answer the question.
Shit is just wild.
I use SO daily and never seen anything like you describe there. All I see is that incorrect answers are down voted. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t pay attention to the “verbiage”. I look at the code sample and move on. In the end, it’s not a forum. I’m not there to read opinions.
I find the concept of downvoting very toxic and discouraging. It can potentially prevent people to express different views, something a discussion and our personal development is thriving on. It can be well seen on Reddit and even on Lemmy, where people with different views get sometimes heavily downvoted. It is something I consider to be close to “cancel culture” - a majority decides not to like your opinion, so it tries to silence you by voting you “out”. I would really love to see that Lemmy removes this feature and just allows to upvote - so you can upvote a comment or not, but you cannot downvote a comment.
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You can disable download in a lemmy instance. My instance doesn’t have downvotes.
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What opinions do you see expressed on SO? Maybe we’re searching for different things there but all I see are answers that are either correct or not. If someone misunderstood the questions and the answers is not correct it gets downvoted. But I don’t know, maybe others use SO for things like “what’s your favorite distro?” or “Is AWS better then Azure?”.
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In my opinion, you’re doing a great job by not enabling downvotes. Every user can see how many votes their comment has, which should be enough for them to gauge how well their comment is received. 👍
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I haven’t been on Stack Overflow for a long time (around 15 years ago). Back then, I was mostly focused on statistics and programming in R. It’s true that rude responses were rare, especially in the sense that the OP should have known the answer beforehand or could have researched it themselves before asking. But yes, I never saw personal attacks.
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I think it’ll make a comeback eventually. LLMs will get progressively less useful as a replacement as its’ training data stales. Without refreshed data it’s going to be just as irrelevant as the years go on. Where will it get data about new programming languages or solutions to problems in new software? LLM knowledge will be stuck in 2025 unless new training material is given to it.
lmao. Ignorance is bliss is it.
