Summarizer

Right? It's a perfect example of the problem. In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help. But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think of users as a problem and an interruption, even though they were the only reason we were getting paid. I've been refusing to contribute to SO for so long that I can't even remember the details. But I still recall the feeling I got from their dismissive jackassery. Having their content ripped off by LLMs is the final blow, but they have richly earned their fate.

> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain. Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?

Deadness is the symptom, not the cause. Users don't avoid SO because it's dead, but rather, SO is dead because users avoid it. It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. There's another thread on the front page about IPv6 where someone had a good analogy: IPv4 vs IPv6 is like Python 2 vs 3. The Python 2 diehards continued arguing furiously to an emptier and emptier room. They never felt they were proven wrong, and the intensity of the argument never diminished but the argument was with fewer and fewer people until they were just arguing with themselves as the world moved on without them. And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026, after the horse is long gone. Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. You might want to reflect on why you hold such fervent beliefs that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now? The referenced comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477920

What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute. > People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's. Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack. We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot"). As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt.

What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers. (As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)

Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape? No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?

I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer science, programming, geology, and biology.

The "human touch" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the "robot touch," thanks very much.

The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.

Where in the process of "ask question" -> "closed as duplicate" are you interacting with another human?

Most of SO didn't seem to consist of people talking to each other so much as talking past each other.

How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service. Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape. If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.

Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds. Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention.

That "Dead Internet" phrase keeps becoming more likely, and this graph shows that. Human-to-human interactions, LLMs using those interactions, less human-to-human interactions because of that, LLMs using... ?

I would say that going onto Stack Overflow to answer questions made me a better coder - yeah, even with the cacophony of bullshit and repeats. It's almost more offensive for that job to be taken by "AI" than the job of writing the stupid code I was trying to help people fix. [edit] because I kind of get what you're saying... I truly don't care what marginal benefits people are trying to get out of popularity in the high school locker room that is the Social Media internet. I still have a weird habit of giving everyone a full answer to their questions, and trying to teach people what I know when I can. Not for kudos or points, but because the best way to learn is by teaching .

Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means. Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative.

What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top. SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit like HN, you learn from watching the back and forth. I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience. Whatever people's gripes about the site, I learned a hell of a lot from it. I still find solutions there, and think a world without it would be worse.

> What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience. Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.

The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.

Surely the fundamental difference is one asks actual humans who know what's right vs statistical models that are right by accident.

> the more experienced you become, the less useful it is This is killer feature of LLMs - you will not became more experienced.

Oh yeah. My favorite feature of LLMs, is the only dumb question, is the one I don't ask. I guess someone could train an LLM to be spiteful and nasty, but that would only be for entertainment.

If you say the wrong thing to grok, it will go off on you. It's quite entertaining!

Yep, LLMs are perfect for the "quick buy annoying to answer 500 times" questions about writing a short script, or configuring something, or using the right combination of command line parameters. Quicker than searching the entirety of Google results and none of the attitude.

I’d guess it’s also because it’s not as easy to ask your random question to a coworker when they’re not sitting next to you in the office.

The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows: With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

This is a perfect example of an element of Q&A forums that is being lost. Another thing that I don't think we'll see as much of anymore is interaction from developers that have extensive internal knowledge on products. An example I can think of was when Eric Lippert, a developer on the C# compiler at the time, responded to a question about a "gotcha" in the language: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8899347/10470363 Developer interaction like that is going to be completely lost.

I used to look at all TensorFlow questions when I was on the TensorFlow team ( https://stackoverflow.com/tags/tensorflow/info ). Unclear where people go to interact with their users now....Reddit? But the tone on Reddit is kind of negative/complainy

I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing questions when I was just starting to learn programming. He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles. He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of programming exist the way they are. I'm still thankful. If this was repeated today, an LLM would have given a surface level answer, or worse yet would've done the thinking for me obliviating the question in the first place. I wrote a blog post about my experience at https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning

Had a similar experience. Asked a question about a new language feature in java 8 (parallell streams), and one of the language designers (Goetz) answered my question about the intention of how to use it. An LLM couldn't have done the same. Someone would have to ask the question and someone answer it for indexing by the LLM. If we all just ask questions in closed chats, lots of new questions will go unanswered as those with the knowledge have simply not been asked to write the answers down anywhere.

Oh, so it wasn't bad enough to spot bad human answers as an expert on Stack Overflow... now humans should spend their time spotting bad AI answers? How about a model where you ask a human and no AI input is allowed, to make sure that everyone has everyone else's full attention?

You're absolutely correct, but the scary thing is this: What happens when a whole generation grows up not knowing how to answer another person's question without consulting AI? [edit] It seems to me that this is a lot like the problem which bar trivia nights faced around the inception of the smartphone. Bar trivia nights did, sporadically and unevenly, learn how to evolve questions themselves which couldn't be quickly searched online. But it's still not a well-solved problem. When people ask "why do I need to remember history lessons - there is an encyclopedia", or "why do I need to learn long division - I have a calculator", I guess my response is: Why do we need you to suck oxygen? Why should I pay for your ignorance? I'm perfectly happy to be lazy in my own right, but at least I serve a purpose. My cat serves a purpose. If you vibe code and you talk to LLMs to answer your questions...I'm sorry, what purpose do you serve?

That seems like a horrible core idea. How is that different from data labeling or model evaluation? Human beings want to help out other human beings, spread knowledge and might want to get recognition for it. Manually correcting (3 different) automation efforts seems like incredible monotone, unrewarding labour for a race to the bottom. Nobody should spend their time correcting AI models without compensation.

This is a huge loss. In the past people asked questions of real people who gave answers rooted in real use. And all this was documented and available for future learning. There was also a beautiful human element to think that some other human cared about the problem. Now people ask questions of LLMs. They churn out answers from the void, sometimes correct but not rooted in real life use and thought. The answers are then lost to the world. The learning is not shared. LLMs have been feeding on all this human interaction and simultaneously destroying it.

Don't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses? It should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible.

Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge? A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources. However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb. LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO. Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?

This is concerning on two fronts. The questions are no longer open (SO is CC-BY-SA) and if Q&A content dies then this herds even more people towards LLM use. It's basically draining the commons.

Man after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard, but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I, as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM instead of being able to peruse great answers from different perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.

Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed. AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions). SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?

Local meet-ups I guess?

I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.

Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to . LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact. And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder. I'm not sad.

I still would like to get other humans' experiences and perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO doesn't go away entirely. With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that, but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".

I recently wrote a blog post similar to this situation: https://ertu.dev/posts/ai-is-killing-our-online-interaction/

There's no doubt that generally LLMs are better. In addition SO had its issues. That being said I can't help but worry about losing humans asking questions and humans answering questions. The sentimentality aside, if humans aren't posing questions and if humans aren't recommending answers, what are the models going to use?

For me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose. Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me. But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?

Another note to add here: The whole system was stupid, too! What do you mean, I can only give answers, but not comment? While there is much more to say about SO's demise, the "interaction" on the platform was definitely not one of its strengths, either.

Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again. AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with. When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer. This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.