AI Killed Stack Overflow (and why that sucks)(devcodehack.com)
4 pointsby par4 hours ago3 comments
  • uberman4 hours ago
    StackOverflow killed itself.

    I'm the first to admit, I got a lot of search results that pointed to answers I found valuable on SO. I answered questions the best I could and always tried to be helpful.

    I have no actual SO "questions asked", 1000 "answered" and 15k in "rep". I tried my best. I would never have actually asked a question and open myself up to the abuse fire hose.

    SO killed itself in my opinion with overzealous power users with 10s of thousands of rep points to burn and an axe to grind. I know it is a dead horse at this point, but the new user experience was terrible and still is unless you choose "advice" rather than a traditional question.

    AI was just the euthanasia. I am sure there are lots of people, not just me with the opinion that AI has never been rude to me when I ask for help.

    • MisterTea3 hours ago
      Agreed. I used it a bit around 2010 when I was doing a lot of C# for custom GUI stuff. I also had a lot of help on there for Linux/Unix questions and AWK programming. There were a decent amount of smart people on SO, one who stuck out was an EE who gave lots of solid advice on PCB design (Ollie Lanthorp I think) in the electronics forum. But over times it felt that it became hostile and questions closed as duplicate when they were asking about specific edge cases. Once I moved out of programming I stopped using it though I still find a nugget of info on it from time to time.
  • robtherobber4 hours ago
    Nah, I'm not unhappy that SO burned. Either the platform became a community-owned, not-for-profit, volunteer-driven project whose sole purpose was to be useful, or it was going to become yet another enshittified platform - which is exactly what happened. In that sense, it deserved to disappear. We're worse off without it, I agree, but we were heading in that direction anyway.

    In 2 out of 3 cases, the responses I received to my questions were poor, wrong, snarky, or generally unhelpful.

    I still believe a platform like that would be useful: something closer to MDN Web Docs, but with a Q&A mechanism. It should exist as public-interest technical infrastructure funded by govs, not as another asset to be squeezed until the community that made it useful has nothing left to give and everyone was worse off apart from the owners.

  • olaird252 hours ago
    "Writing the question WAS the lesson" Indeed!