Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.
ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site’s coffin because it’s now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn’t “use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic.”
Another big problem is that we’ve been collectively trying to shoehorn everybody into programming careers for the better part of two decades. In fact, “just learn to code” is often thrown around by people in response to the prospect of AI automating and taking over everybody’s jobs.
What they don’t understand is that coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math, which is a significant portion of the population if you look at statistics, grades, test scores, etc. Expecting a lowly paid call center worker who lost their job to AI to suddenly open up Visual Studio and write any code is a fools errand.
I bring this up because I think there’s a correllation between people asking low-quality questions and people being pushed into making a career move into tech.
There are poor personality types everywhere, but I have found stackexchange/stackoverflow to be one of the better sources of user curated help. LLMs are a new and interesting avenue and I’ve had some good success with them too, but Stackoverflow was really, really good.
Yes. Stack overflow is a place where you can get knowledge from experts for free. The people that complain about the moderation being toxic generally think they are entitled to expert’s time without putting in any effort themselves and would drastically degrade the utility of the site if they got their way.
Here’s the thing - Stack Overflow replaced existing non-corporate less shitty places on the Internet where we experts shared knowledge for free. Stack Overflow quickly got so bad that many experts stopped sharing, but only after disrupting existing sharing communities.
People who remember what came before have a right to be angry that SO embraced and extinguished the free (and advertising free) forums and IRC channels that came before it.
(I admit SO was better in many ways. But it also killed off something more resilient. I hope we can someday rebuild some of what we had, outside of the long corporate line-must-go-up shadow. I don’t know if we will or not.)
Alas, I’m just a person who only had positive experiences in stack overflow and know the type of entitled dumbasses who think they should be able to ask volunteers to do their homework for them
Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.
ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site’s coffin because it’s now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn’t “use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic.”
Well it might goes both ways. People are not afraid to ask stupid questions to AI. And at the same time, AI will not judge the user.
Eh, they will complain that “ai is stupid” when the actual issue is pepple’s inability to even describe their problem. We already see this happen.
Another big problem is that we’ve been collectively trying to shoehorn everybody into programming careers for the better part of two decades. In fact, “just learn to code” is often thrown around by people in response to the prospect of AI automating and taking over everybody’s jobs.
What they don’t understand is that coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math, which is a significant portion of the population if you look at statistics, grades, test scores, etc. Expecting a lowly paid call center worker who lost their job to AI to suddenly open up Visual Studio and write any code is a fools errand.
I bring this up because I think there’s a correllation between people asking low-quality questions and people being pushed into making a career move into tech.
There are poor personality types everywhere, but I have found stackexchange/stackoverflow to be one of the better sources of user curated help. LLMs are a new and interesting avenue and I’ve had some good success with them too, but Stackoverflow was really, really good.
Yes. Stack overflow is a place where you can get knowledge from experts for free. The people that complain about the moderation being toxic generally think they are entitled to expert’s time without putting in any effort themselves and would drastically degrade the utility of the site if they got their way.
Here’s the thing - Stack Overflow replaced existing non-corporate less shitty places on the Internet where we experts shared knowledge for free. Stack Overflow quickly got so bad that many experts stopped sharing, but only after disrupting existing sharing communities.
People who remember what came before have a right to be angry that SO embraced and extinguished the free (and advertising free) forums and IRC channels that came before it.
(I admit SO was better in many ways. But it also killed off something more resilient. I hope we can someday rebuild some of what we had, outside of the long corporate line-must-go-up shadow. I don’t know if we will or not.)
Found the person that asks shitty questions
Found the shitty moderator
Alas, I’m just a person who only had positive experiences in stack overflow and know the type of entitled dumbasses who think they should be able to ask volunteers to do their homework for them