Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.
Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.
Oedipus answered: "Man: as an infant, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks on two legs and; in old age, he uses a walking stick".
Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.
It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...
So there's a clear difference in expected utility.
And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
Uh, no.
StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.
LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:
Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?
A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]
I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.
I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.
When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)
Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.
Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.
Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.
Same. And DBA.se. I was a top contributor of both for the first few years at least, even got sent some free swag a couple of times, not because I cared about the points and being in the first page of people ordered by them, but because I felt genuinely useful and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.
I never really did the social side though, I have problems with distance friendships including online communities (I just don't connect well with people that way) which is one reason that I'm hating tech work more and more these days (being on a remote team is not good for my mental health, while I'm not a huge people person it turns out I absolutely need some in my life, and really in my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).
I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.
Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.
I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.
That was that for that site.
1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and
2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
This does four things simultaneously:
1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model
2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)
3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.
4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?
Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:
* 1 trip to mars
* 10 trips to the Moon
* Converted water to wine
The worst system until you can finally help others.
Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.
A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.
https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...
It was also deleted, die already stack overflow
You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data
It's less efficient than being able to point to a canonical answer on a widely respected forum, yes. And it sucks immensely to have to rely on these horrible AI companies to replace the real human interactions that getting work done used to require, yes. But realistically, we are not looking at some kind of model collapse anytime soon due to lack of SO threads.
Losing Reddit and blogs and other forums is going to be a bigger problem. In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use? How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice? if the web becomes a ghost town and nobody is talking about anything anymore, there's no form thread it can uncover and say "that's the one everyone uses". Losing the library of technical Q&A is nothing close to the catastrophe of losing actual conversations between humans.
They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.
I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.
A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)
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[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay
[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!
So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.
Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.
I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.
That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.
It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.
It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.
I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
Huh. I had the opposite experience. The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
I stopped bothering, after a number of questions went answered only by me (after I found the solution on my own).
It did reduce the insults, but that seemed to be the only gain that I got, for carefully articulating my questions.
LLMs aren't perfect, but they don't imply that I'm being lazy, for not already having the answer, and they do give me an answer, instantly (and, like SO, the answer is not always the best one).
When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.
I suppose I was never their target market anyway.
Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.
What does happen is well-intended users get banned from subreddits, or their comments get deleted, or they get downvoted to the point of not being able to do anything.
amacalac•1h ago