TBH asking questions on SO (and most similar platforms) fucking sucks, no surprise that users jump at the first opportunity at getting answers another way.
I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.
The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.
Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.
Damn, lol
Yea it sucks, but quality is important so I get it.
I do understand being rigorous about questions, and technical forums were even worse a lot of the time, but SO’s methods led to the site becoming severely outdated. They really should have introduced a mechanism to mark old content as outdated. It should have been obvious like 10 years ago that solutions often stop working come next major version of the programming language, framework or operating system.
I post there every 6-12 months in the hope of receiving some help or intelligent feedback, but usually just have my question locked or removed. The platform is an utter joke and has been for years. AI was not entirely the reason for its downfall imo.
I used to post had the same thing. Then people would insult me for not knowing like “why you think I’m asking?”
This is not because AI is good at answering programming questions accurately, it’s because SO sucks. The graph shows its growth leveling off around 2014 and then starting the decline around 2016, which isn’t even temporally correlated with LLMs.
Sites like SO where experienced humans can give insightful answers to obscure programming questions are clearly still needed. Every time I ask AI a programming question about something obscure, it usually knows less than I do, and if I can’t find a post where another human had the same problem, I’m usually left to figure it out for myself.
2016 is probably when they removed freedom by introducing aggressive moderation to remove duplicates and ban people
Yeah because either you get a “how dumb are you?” Or none
Locking this comment. Duplicate of https://lemmy.world/comment/21433687
The complete non-sequitur link really makes it. chef’s kiss
imho the experience is miserable, they went out of their way to strip all warmth from messages (they have a whole automated thing to get rid of all greetings and things considered superfluous) and there are many incentives to score points by answering which frankly I find sad, it doesn’t look like a forum where people exchange, it looks like a permanent run to answer and grow your point total
Stackexchange sites aren’t intended as forums, they’re supposed to be “places to find answers to questions”.
The more you get away from stack overflow itself the worse they get, though, because anything beyond “how can I fix this tech problem” doesn’t necessarily have an answer at all, much less a single best one
Oh no, poor AI won’t know where to feed anymore. Anyway…
Reported for duplicate.
It’s not that developers are switching to AI tools it’s that stack overflow is awful and has been for a long time. The AI tools are simply providing a better alternative, which really demonstrates how awful stack overflow is because the AI tools are not that good.
Ironic, they’re being closed as duplicate.
Undoubtedly. But you agree that the crowdsourced knowledge base of existing answers is useful, no? That is what the islop searches and reproduces. It is more convenient than waiting for a rude answer. But I don’t think islop will give you a good answer if someone has not been bothered answer it before in SO.
islop is a convenience, but you should fear the day you lose the original and the only way to get that info is some opaque islop oracle
What are the odds the classic “expertsexchange” ends up out lasting stack exchange?
I’ve posted questions, but I don’t usually need to because someone else has posted it before. this is probably the reason that AI is so good at answering these types of questions.
the trouble now is that there’s less of a business incentive to have a platform like stack overflow where humans are sharing knowledge directly with one another, because the AI is just copying all the data and delivering it to the users somewhere else.
The hot concept around the late 2000’s and early 2010’s was crowdsourcing: leveraging the expertise of volunteers to build consensus. Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and similar sites came up in that time frame where people would freely lend their expertise on a platform because that platform had a pretty good rule set for encouraging that kind of collaboration and consensus building.
Monetizing that goodwill didn’t just ruin the look and feel of the sites: it permanently altered people’s willingness to participate in those communities. Some, of course, don’t mind contributing. But many do choose to sit things out when they see the whole arrangement as enriching an undeserving middleman.
Probably explains why quora started sending me multiple daily emails about shit i didn’t care about and removed unsubscribe buttons form the emails.
I don’t delete many accounts… but that was one of them
Works well for now. Wait until there’s something new that it hasn’t been trained on. It needs that Stack Exchange data to train on.
Yes, I think this will create a new problem. new things won’t be created very often, at least not from small house or independent developers, because there will be this barrier to adoption. corporate controlled AI will need to learn them somehow
What we’re all afraid is that cheap slop is going to make stack broke/close/bought/private and then it will be removed from the public domain…then jack up the price of islop when the alternative is gone…
Works well for now. Wait until there’s something new that it hasn’t been trained on. It needs that Stack Exchange data to train on.
Already before the LLMs for me it was the last chance before I would post over there. The desperation move. It was too toxic and I would always get pissed to get my question closed because too similar or too easy or whatever. Hey I wasted 15 minutes to type that, if the other question solved the problem I wouldn’t post again…
In the beginning it wasn’t like that…
I went to watch my stack overflow account and the first questions that I posted (and that gave me 2000 karma) would have been almost all of them rejected and removed
The Redditification of SO
Serious question here. LLMs trained their data off SO. Developers now ask LLMs for solutions instead of SO. New technology comes out that LLMs don’t have indexed. Where will LLMs get their data to train on for new technologies? You can’t exactly feed it a manual and expect it to extrapolate or understand (for that matter “what manual).
You can’t exactly feed it a manual and expect it to extrapolate or understand (for that matter “what manual).
You can do that to a degree (RLVR). They are also paying human experts. But that’s the situation now. Who knows how it will be in a couple more years. Maybe training AIs will be like writing a library, framework, …
From the questions people ask and from online accounts.
“Search before asking!” - Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow lost its job to ai
