Yes. Stack overflow was a cruel, selfish, horrible emperor and now the dynasty of technical knowledge is crumbling.
If everyone moves to LLMs then there will not be a central repository of knowledge. That is the fault of stack overflow. Their self-centered behavior directly caused this fracturing of knowledge.
If they had been decent human beings we would have had a library of information kept current with today’s trends and technologies. Instead we’re going to have to rely on paid AI models or fucking grok.
This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.
W h a t ? I couldn’t disagree with your comment more.
StackOverflow, and the slew of substacks, are/were almost entirely volunteer run. From the questions, to the answers, to the moderation.
Like yeah, there’s assholes everywhere, and yeah tech jockies are always snooty when they think they know better. I don’t think any of this is the fault of StackOverflow necessarily, it’s just a format that isn’t a forum. They were, and are, a QA site where they wanted answers from the people that knew. Not discussions. Not the same question asked a hundred times. Not quick homework answers.
StackOverflow is one of the defacto ways I still get programming answers and knowledge from. So much so that I haven’t needed to ask a question in a long time. It’s robotic, it’s uniform, it’s boring, but it’s is/was such a useful website.
IMO it’s downfall was not promoting more community and branching our beyond QA and into discussion based topics and chats. Not being able to see that people needed a space outside their QA model and not trying to harness that in their hay day cost them everything. Now AI has scrapped all their content.
I think a big problem was how new users had to unlock things like the ability to comment. Probably a lot of new users really should have added comments to previous questions to clarify things, but instead the site tells them to create a new question first to get reputation points. So they do, but what they want isn’t really a unique question, just clarification on a previous question.
Once you get enough reputation to be “in,” suddenly the whole site opens up and you can do everything you need to. But a new user has to get to that point, and that is daunting if they’re new to programming.
I also think that SO selling their data for training AI really rubbed a lot of old timers the wrong way too. If they had not given in to that, I wonder if the decline would have been nearly as sharp. There were users active there daily, finding questions to answer and evaluating others answers. Now there really aren’t.
This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.
Who is the “they” in this? The volunteers who contributed to the site? StackOverflow isn’t like a company or anything. No one is paid to answer questions there. They’re all people who were working hard to make a collection of common questions with the best possible answers, and trying to uphold a certain standard for the content there.
Based on your comment, I think maybe we as a group just don’t deserve stackoverflow. If we really are all now turning to LLMs instead (which are not in any way “decentralized”) to get a bunch of statistical bullshit spit at us instead of, you know, the actual right answer, then maybe we deserve what will happen next.
Yes. Stack overflow was a cruel, selfish, horrible emperor and now the dynasty of technical knowledge is crumbling.
If everyone moves to LLMs then there will not be a central repository of knowledge. That is the fault of stack overflow. Their self-centered behavior directly caused this fracturing of knowledge.
If they had been decent human beings we would have had a library of information kept current with today’s trends and technologies. Instead we’re going to have to rely on paid AI models or fucking grok.
This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.
W h a t ? I couldn’t disagree with your comment more.
StackOverflow, and the slew of substacks, are/were almost entirely volunteer run. From the questions, to the answers, to the moderation.
Like yeah, there’s assholes everywhere, and yeah tech jockies are always snooty when they think they know better. I don’t think any of this is the fault of StackOverflow necessarily, it’s just a format that isn’t a forum. They were, and are, a QA site where they wanted answers from the people that knew. Not discussions. Not the same question asked a hundred times. Not quick homework answers.
StackOverflow is one of the defacto ways I still get programming answers and knowledge from. So much so that I haven’t needed to ask a question in a long time. It’s robotic, it’s uniform, it’s boring, but it’s is/was such a useful website.
IMO it’s downfall was not promoting more community and branching our beyond QA and into discussion based topics and chats. Not being able to see that people needed a space outside their QA model and not trying to harness that in their hay day cost them everything. Now AI has scrapped all their content.
I think a big problem was how new users had to unlock things like the ability to comment. Probably a lot of new users really should have added comments to previous questions to clarify things, but instead the site tells them to create a new question first to get reputation points. So they do, but what they want isn’t really a unique question, just clarification on a previous question.
Once you get enough reputation to be “in,” suddenly the whole site opens up and you can do everything you need to. But a new user has to get to that point, and that is daunting if they’re new to programming.
I also think that SO selling their data for training AI really rubbed a lot of old timers the wrong way too. If they had not given in to that, I wonder if the decline would have been nearly as sharp. There were users active there daily, finding questions to answer and evaluating others answers. Now there really aren’t.
Who is the “they” in this? The volunteers who contributed to the site? StackOverflow isn’t like a company or anything. No one is paid to answer questions there. They’re all people who were working hard to make a collection of common questions with the best possible answers, and trying to uphold a certain standard for the content there.
Based on your comment, I think maybe we as a group just don’t deserve stackoverflow. If we really are all now turning to LLMs instead (which are not in any way “decentralized”) to get a bunch of statistical bullshit spit at us instead of, you know, the actual right answer, then maybe we deserve what will happen next.