Summarizer

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.

Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow for. It does remove the human touch so it's quite a different dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system.

> Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. That might work until an LLM encounters a question it's programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the docs, I asked Google's Gemini (whatever's the current free version) to write a bare bones script for an SMTP conversation. It flatly refused. The explanation was along the lines "it could be used for spamming, so I can't do that, Dave." I understand the motivation, and can even sympathize a bit, but what are the options for someone who has a legitimate need for an answer? I know how to get one by other means; what's the end game when it's LLMs all the way down? I certainly don't wish to live in such a world.

I don't know how others use LLMs, but once I find the answer to something I'm stuck on I do not tell the LLM that it's fixed. This was a problem in forums as well but I think even fewer people are going to give that feedback to a chatbot

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?

Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything. I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.

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.

Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"

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... ?

>>what happens now? I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the response . The overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where everything collaboratively built falls apart. The machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and self-righteous.... /okay. there was always a needy component to Stack Overflow. "I have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this algorithm?" and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be honest, it was the giving of information which forced you to think, and research, and answer correctly , which made systems like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the fucking future. Things are gonna slide / in all directions / won't be nothin you can measure anymore. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WlbQRoz3o4

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.

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.

The other major benefit of SO being a public forum is that once a question was wrestled with and eventually answered, other engineers could stumble upon and benefit from it. With SO being replaced by LLMs, engineers are asking LLMs the same questions over and over, likely getting a wide range of different answers (some correct and others not) while also being an incredible waste of resources.

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

Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question. Hey, can you show me the log files? Sure here you go. Please help! Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!

What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO. There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things. LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think. An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0] The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community. [^0]: He comes, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

Heh, OK, dialogue wasn't the right word. I am a better informed person by the power of internet pedantry.

> Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style? If they answered correctly, yes. My point is that providing _actual knowledge_ is by itself so much more valuable compared to _simulated knowledge_, in particular when that simulated knowledge is hyper realistic and wrong.

"A Human commented at ##:##pm" "An AI Bot commented at..." "A suspected AI Bot commented at..." "An unconfirmed Human commented at..."

People answer on SO because it's fun. Why should they spend their time fixing AI answers? It's very tedious as the kind of mistakes LLMs make can be rather subtle and AI can generate a lot of text very fast. It's a sisyphean taks, I doubt enough people would do it.

Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? Do we want this? We’re talking about how communities can become toxic. How we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to be our intentions. I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be compensated to not let a community deteriorate.

Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have. What you seem to suggest is that because building a community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing. What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to resolve differences productively. I think that if you replace individual responsibility with transactionality you have neither community nor long term viability or scalability. Then again, we live in times when transactional thinking seems to dominate discourse.

It's because I was involved with a large volunteer-based project that was a literal 24/7/365 operation for several years (dozens of volunteers at any given time and tens of thousands of concurrent users) and can speak first hand as to the differences. I didn't say it's not worth doing but it will bring challenges that wouldn't exist with employees. Paying people adds a strong motivator to keep toxic behaviour at bay. Your experiences will heavily depend on the type of project you're running but regardless, you can't hold volunteers, especially online, to the same expectations or standards as employees. The amount of time and effort they can invest will wax and wane and there's nothing you can do about it. Anonymity and lack of repercussions will eventually lead to drama or power struggles when a volunteer steps out of line in a way that they wouldn't in paid employment. There is no fix that'll stop occasional turbulence, it's just the way it is. Not all of your volunteers will be there for the greater good of your community. Again, that is absolutely not to say that it can't be worth the effort but if you go into it eyes open, you'll have a much better time and be able to do a better job at heading off problems. I've seen other people express similar opinions to yours and it wasn't until they experienced being in the driver's seat that they understood how difficult it is.

My argument is that it stops being a community when it becomes a business.

That's because there has been rapid improvement by LLMs. Their tendency to bullshit is still an issue, but if one maintains a healthy skepticism and uses a bit of logic it can be managed. The problematic uses are where they are used without any real supervision. Enabling human learning is a natural strength for LLMs and works fine since learning tends to be multifaceted and the information received tends to be put to a test as a part of the process.

Other tech support forums are terrible in other ways. AI is a godsend. Typical response: I am RJ, an Independent Advisor and Microsoft Gold Certified Support Specialist Enthusiast. I know how your system is not functioning as desired! Rest assured, I am here to help you resolve this today. Please follow these steps in order. Do not skip any steps. Step 1: Reboot your computer Step 2: Reinstall windows Step 3: Contact Microsoft support Did this resolve your issue? [ Yes ] [ No ] If this helped, please mark this as the Answer and give me a 5-star rating so I can continue providing high-quality, scripted responses to other users! Standard Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft. I am an independent volunteer who enjoys copying and pasting from a manual written in 2014.

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?

When I grew up shakes fist at clouds I had a half dozen totally independent forums/sites to pull on for any interest or hobby no matter how obscure. I want it back!

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 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?

The entire purpose of answering questions as an "expert" on S.O. is/was to help educate people who were trying to learn how to solve problems mostly on their own. The goal isn't to solve the immediate problem, it's to teach people how to think about the problem so that they can solve it themselves the next time. The use of AI to solve problems for you completely undermines that ethos of doing it yourself with the minimum amount of targeted, careful questions possible .

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.

> Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life. Yup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both are still somewhat active. [0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax [1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf

I do use Claude a lot, but I still regularly ask questions on https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/ . It's often just too niche, LLMs hallucinate stuff like an entire non-existent benchmarking feature in Snakemake, or can't explain how I should get transcriptome aligners to give me correct quantifications for a transcript. I guess it's too niche. And as a lonely Bioinformatician it can be nice to get confirmation from other bioinformaticians. Looking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any LLM.

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.

SO has lost against LLMs because it has insistently positioned itself as a knowledge base rather than a community. The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it. They basically made a bet because they wanted to be the full anti-thesis of ad-ridden garbage-looking forums. Pure information, zero tolerance for humanity, sterile looking design. They achieved that goal, but in the end, they dug their own grave too. LLMs didn’t admonish us to write our questions better, or simply because we asked for an opinion. They didn’t flag, remove our post with no advance notice. They didn’t forbid to say hello or thanks, they welcomed it. They didn’t complain when we asked something that was asked many times. They didn’t prevent us from deleting our own content. Oh yeah, no wonder nobody bothers with SO anymore. It’s a good lesson for the future.

Why publish anything for free on the internet if it's going to be scanned into some corporation's machine for their free use? I know artists who have stopped putting anything online. I imagine some programmers are questioning whether or not to continue with open source work too.

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?

I was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but got stuck in one particular function. It was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I couldn't find anything on Google. Had no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time. (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I didn't understand the documentation) It was a fond memory of the site for me.

Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more. I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board. With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September). I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed.

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 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?

I think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to "get to the bottom" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism. All of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered. I remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/discussion board, which feels more appropriate for the current state of the industry.

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 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.

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.

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?

> Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days? I don't think such generic place exists. I just do my own research or abandon the topic. I think that in big companies you probably could use some internal chats or just ask some smart guy directly? I don't have that kind of connections and all online communities are full of people whose skill is below mine, so it makes little sense to ask something. I still do sometimes, but rarely receive competent answer. If you have some focused topic like a question about small program, of course you can just use github issues or email author directly. But if you have some open question, probably SO is the only generic platform out there. To put it differently, find some experts and ask which online place to the visit to help strangers. Most likely they just don't do it. So for me, personally, LLMs are the saviour. With enough forth and back I can research any topic that doesn't require very deep expertise. Sure, access to an actual expert willing to guide me would be better, but I just don't have that luxury.

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.

I not even hearing stack overflow survey for 2025 damn bro, its sad how "tradition" is gone now edit: I know they still doing it but usually there is "viral" post,yt video etc for developer talking about it in my feed now??? less people talk about it anymore