That's what happens when mods auto close everything as a duplicate without taking a moment to really understand the question.
Also when you ruin your site with AI garbage.
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That's what happens when mods auto close everything as a duplicate without taking a moment to really understand the question.
Also when you ruin your site with AI garbage.
So AI answers replaced questions. Growthfroth
how are humans going to progress if you eliminate all the resources for humans to share experience?
imagine 20 years in the future where you no longer have a resource like stack overflow to troubleshoot the latest technology.
where is AI going to steal its answers from?
this seems like a dumbfuck gambit based on hopes and dreams. even if an AI can achieve what they're hoping, it won't know everything. they're banking on AI having the experience and intelligence of billions of humans.
we're fucked.
That's it, all possible questions have been asked! /s
99% is a crazy number for a drop. I guess if you're big enough can can still survive and 1% is still significant. The trajectory is pretty clear and worrying [for them], though.
/edit:
Stack Overflow recorded 1,442 new questions in July 2026
That's… very few. 50 a day. Two per hour. For a platform [that was] as big as Stack Overflow.
Asked and answered, closing this.
First AI came for those who answer questions, next it'll come for those who ask questions! Crazy how quickly the whole process is being automated away.
Always hated SO. They acted like they fostered the developer culture of sharing that had happened for decades. But instead they helped bring in the bro culture that ruined development. Now we have interviews that are hazing sessions. Code reviews that turn into fights. It goes on. And SO culture was part of that.
Fuck them.
Can you elaborate on "bro culture"? I never felt like my interviews or code reviews were very fratty
Stack Overflow: You're absolutely wrong
ChatGPT: You're absolutely right
If i was right, I wouldn't be having the conversation. Therefore SO is closer to the truth.
Why would you ask a question to see it closed immediately and be insulted on top of it? No thanks
This was already answered in a reddit thread from 2019. This comment is redundant and should be removed.
On top of it, op lacks basic thinking skills and stinks of mackerel.
They need to go, before we taunt them a second time.
Are you one of the knights who say "Ni!" or a mod on stack overflow? Or ... FRENCH?
Exactly my experience.
Asking a question was agreeing to be abused. You have to followed the rules exactly to maybe get a useful answer.
Imagine being such a bad website, you're basically the only thing AI actually took down.
AI took down a fuck load of independent/small websites by bombarding them with millions of connections for scraping and by circumventing user traffic to them
SO was in decline before AI. AI just accelerated the process. The shit moderation is what took it down.
I only became a dev 5 years ago its incredibly restrictive. They dug their own grave with their moderation.
Absolutely
I've used it many times as a lurker, and I would have loved to add answers buy it was just not usable for that
Seems like unless you can come up with a novel question, you basically cant vote or comment. So I guess... just not interact?
AI didn't take it down. Stack overflow was on the way out way before.
Stack Overflow’s moderation was cooked long before LLMs came to harvest the corpse.
I've been on the site since 2008 i think. Used to use it loads. Posted questions and answers. The question i actually got an answer to was 2018. Since then it would just get nothing. Sometimes a mod might tweak it a bit in a pointless way but just no answers. Gave up in the end.
Not surprising. Not only is it easier to ask stuff from AI chat bots, the responses on SO can often be so condescending and outright mean that it further drives people to ask questions from the yesmanning LLMs.
LLMs are trained to be sycophants, quick to praise and agree, in order to keep the user satisfied. This allows poor practices and behaviors to persist, at least until the user joins a team and becomes aware of their issues. Stackoverflow actually calls people out and teaches how to do research, and write informed questions. I got called out for some of my first few questions, and almost never after that, because I learned to do proper research and write proper questions.
Oh absolutely, I'm not denying any of that. But Stack Overflow is also filled with incredibly snarky people, whose feedback is less than productive. That's why I understand many beginners preferring LLMs over SO. Calling out bad practices is a good thing, but it doesn't mean people should be straight up rude.
Fair point, I've seen the rudeness myself. There's way to be constructive in criticism, and that should be taught as well
The difference of a private chat with an Ai to a public question on Stack Overflow (or any forum for that matter) is, that on Stack Overflow multiple persons can read and comment. Answers often iterate and fact check if someone hallucinates, because so many eyes sees it. If the answers are helpful is something everyone has to decide themselves, but the principle of an open platform being very useful is undeniable.
Compare this to your private Ai chatbot. Only one person sees the answer and if something hallucinated is in there or the quality of the answer is not good, then you might not know. And those Ai bots are controlled by the few big corporations, maybe a little less if you use a custom offline bot, but they are probably not as good as the big models. That's why this is a bad trend. I think the open and user controlled Stack Overflow was a better approach, by principle.
I would ask a question, but last time they even said it sounded like homework. Fuck'em. But I still like it as a knowledge base.
Yea, it's better than some of the other "knowledge base" platforms on the internet (discord)
Yeah... I have 100k rep (almost exactly!) and I don't use it any more. It doesn't have the network effects, so even if there is a question that AI can't answer (which does still happen despite what some people seem to think), I don't go to Stackoverflow, I go somewhere else. A forum, GitHub repo discussions, even IRC once (OpenOCD still uses that for some weird reason - they were extremely helpful though).
It had a good run. RIP.
Those guys sold SO just in the right time in 2021.
I wanted to check my rep, but the website login is down, while the status page shows all operational. lol
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