I remember the switch from random discussion forum that preceded it to stack overflow, the problem with random forums were that the answer was hidden somewhere down or on page 3. Stack overflow was significant improvement in this regard (to a point that I only searched programming question with site:stackoverflow.com to filter out other methods), the question was curated and updated. Now we have new thing that is even better so there is no going back. The progression was roughly:
1. Random website
2. Random thematic blog, seo'd
3. Random forum
4. Curated question portal like SO
5. Thematic subreddit when it became impossible to ask on SO
Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it).
At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.
At some point they got ultra aggressive about "duplicate" questions.
Technology changes at a fast pace .. so new questions would get asked, and then closed by moderators and pointed to similar questions that might be 5 or 6 years old and no longer relevant.. essentially ending the discussion on many topics and actively preventing progress in certain areas.
I love how SO lets itself being bullied by 25-30 high-rep users - the very same users who have chased away all the other users from the website.
While AI definitely took away a lot of people from SO, most people are relieved that they don't have to interact with that literally garbage community when they have an IT/CS question. They didn't leave because of the website design, but I also believe that the new design wouldn't have chased many away either.
These users' rule hasn't really worked out so far, as demonstrated by the current state of SO. Maybe it is time to ignore that very small, but very vocal group? Though probably that should have happened years ago, maybe it's just time to cut their losses.
You are complaining about counterfactuals. Nobody is bullying anyone; the people active on meta aren't "chasing away" users (almost no users actually come to meta in the first place, the big names don't do a lot of personal interaction and when they do they don't leave comments unless they can be exceedingly polite about it); all that's happening is that with LLMs people finally have the thing they wanted all along[0] so they no longer have to keep coming to SO demanding it to be that thing when it was very explicitly designed the entire time not to be that thing, specifically so that experts wouldn't have to waste their time when they try to make the world better on a volunteer basis[1].
But most importantly: the site does not even remotely in any imaginable way empower those users. It actively hinders them, the staff have berated them over the years over alleged "unfriendliness"[2] and they constantly dump their ideas on the meta site, then ignore all feedback and push their ideas through anyway.
The main site is noticeably slower now. As far as I can tell, this is because they've taken code paths that the beta uses (especially whatever it is they use to load the code boxes and put a little JS widget at the top of them) and applied them back to the main site that worked perfectly well before.
[0] Basically: a magic robot that can listen to them and try to suggest an answer one on one, without caring about whether literally anyone else on the planet could benefit from that exchange, because the robot can tirelessly do that for the next person.
[1] I.e., so that humans could say something once and actually have it be relevant to many people.
[2] I.e.: the company makes money from views and a lot of people don't want to view a site where they have to actually meet any kind of standard whatsoever to participate; so it's the fault of people who have an actual vision for the site being useful.
As someone who had a fast high engagement for some time and then have dropped away, asking very few questions in that time, I disagree. I have seen far to many marked as duplicate for things that aren’t, nagging about rules and unsuitable questions instead of helpfulness and general allowing of some users to despise beginners without any consequences.
I one time had an actual answer for a question that nobody else had answered in 5 years... but because I didn't have enough ridiculous "reputation" I couldn't post it, so everyone else couldn't actually be helped. That's when I was done with SO.
I never had a desire to post questions there. Comments or answers only if it were something I felt a personal stake in (community that we were trying to bring up) or the rare case where I would come across something uncommon that was unanswered that I had recently ran into and figured out. It's not the users there who kept me away, I just that I like quiet (high signal to noise) developer spaces. ;)
I imagine a huge number of people were just browsing for quick answers and then bailed as I did.
The stackoverflow was better than what was before it (*sexchange site). Time will tell how it compares to the AI slop of the dead internet (current generation of LLMs based on human-generated data are great. Let’s see what happens when most of the data is created by bots).
Here is a hard question - how could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta? I mean obviously the new CEO and leadership has been total trash and has squandered their goodwill and user loyalty, but if I was CEO instead I don't know how I would save the ship.
Doubling down on how it was done in the 'good old days' probably wouldn't work because you would slowly bleed user to AI. Selling data to AI companies might work for a bit, but I would guess that the sales value of SO's data has quickly diminishing returns. So what is their path forward?
That's a hard one. SO's hostile community to newbies, like any expert community, comes from the longstanding users having seen the basic questions 1000s of times and understandably not wanting to answer variations of them over and over, while for the newbies those questions genuinely are there and they don't have the routine knowledge yet of where to look or how to even look for solutions in the first place.
In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions. LLMs seem to be getting pretty good at those as well though, so I don't know where that leaves us.
SO for discussions of taste? I have these two options to build this, how should i approach this?
They tried to sell their own GPT wrapper for a while, didn't they? The use case I can see for that is:
User asks question - LLM answers it - user is unsure about the answer - it gets posted as a SO thread and the rest of the userbase can nitpick or correct the LLM response.
Edit: I also seem to remember they had a job portal in the sidebar for a while, what happened to that? Seems like a reasonable revenue stream that is also useful to users.
> In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions.
I think the deeper question is how SO would get paid for that.
Historically, SO has been funded by advertising. Users would google their question, land on SO, get an answer, and SO would get paid by advertisers. (The job portal was a variation on the advertising product.)
Even in your ideal world, newbies and experts would first ask their questions to an LLM. The LLM might search SO and find the answer there, but the user would get the answer without viewing an ad, so SO wouldn't get paid for that.
The same issue is facing Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't funded by commercial advertisers, but they are funded by donations, which are driven by ads. If LLMs just answer the questions based on Wikipedia data, the user won't see the Wikipedia ad asking them to donate; they may not even know that Wikipedia was the source of the information, so they may not even develop a fondness for Wikipedia that's necessary to get users excited to donate.
This is why you see people shouting about how LLMs are "killing the web." I think it's more correct to say that LLMs are killing free web resources. Without advertising, not even donation-funded resources can remain available for free.
Oh, I was thinking more of user enters question into SO -> LLM answer on SO -> user evaluates whether LLM answer was sufficient (or system itself judges whether answer is also interesting to other users?) -> question + answer combo made public, judged by other users.
There are of course several huge issues with this, but thats why I prefaced it with ideal world hahaha
the biggest of which is why most users would want their questios publicized if the ChatGPT answer not on the stackoverflow platform will be enough or even better
Or how existing users and question-answering volunteers feel about just being cleanup and training data after LLMs
Now that we have LLMs I don't need basic questions answered. I do still need hard questions answered by experts and AI has normalized paying money for QA.
I would definitely pay for a "human ChatGPT" service where the answers are written by experts who get paid per answer, e.g. grad students. Then they can resell this data to AI companies. Or maybe the economics are such that they can take enough money from AI companies to pay the experts and I don't need to pay anything at all.
This won't bring in as much money as advertising used to, but that business model is dead anyway. There's no future for a QA site at the low end.
Be chatbot first ig. I had envisioned a portal where you land on the front page and drop your question in the box. It would do some rag thing over the SO question database then try to answer your question. You could chat back and forth with it. If you figured out your problem then you would have the option to turn it into a question answer pair with help from the ai. If you didn't figure out your problem, then it would turn it into just a question, which would then show up for the experts of SO to answer. Something like that.
ideally, slowly grinding down duplicates into canonicals, keeping the ones whose answers are subject to change (with developments in languages and tools) up-to-date, removing cruft and making it more like a library (à la Rosetta Code) that's easy to find things in
and a change of form from (questions being asked primarily as a means to an end for one person) to (Q&A pairs being written as reference materials)
and requests for comment on which approach would be the most idiomatic or whether one has fallen into an XY trap or other things that rely on human 'taste' rather than LLMs' blithe march of obedience
I’m not aware of SO’s plans to remain profitable and relevant, but I do know they have an enterprise offering. I’ve seen ads on LinkedIn recently for MCP functionality tied to the enterprise SO offering that lets you use it as a knowledge base. I could see that potentially being a path to stay relevant.
The place I work at tried using an SO enterprise instance and it was quite ineffective. We didn't have the toxicity of the public instance, but generally having a Q&A forum double as a knowledge base is an oddball format that doesn't work out. Adding AI integration is not likely to compensate for that.
Allow AI to ask questions. Since the point of the site is to build a knowledge base you don't really need humans to be that involved. Humans running into problems and then asking question was just one way to do this in the pre AI era. Now with AI we can reevaluate if we really need humans as much as we did.
My problem with it was that it looked truly disgusting and I don’t say that lightly. They had essentially cloned the Reddit “new” theme that has the all too common obnoxious overuse of white space over content.
I don't care about the visuals of Reddit, but copying the design of "this is a site for commenting, answers are just top-level comments with no distinction" seemed like they did not see the difference between Stack Overflow and a subreddit.
The beta site was a horrible redesign. It hid information that was previously visible, the layout was confusing, comments were harder to read, and it just made no sense.
The site is populated exclusively with die-hard fanatics with no real-world third space using that community to fulfill their personal social needs. They'll do that all the way to its complete and utter death due to uselessness. Change would be anathema to them so there is no path for the site but death.
There is no utility it fulfills except as a watering hole for those unfortunate souls who built their village there.
every *Overflow site other than the main one for asking coding questions has been very good to me. StackOverflow was a terrible experience. What LLMs got right was when asking seemingly stupid questions, or simple questions, or RTFM-answerable questions didn't get responses of "RTFM", or "Duplicate", or the like.
If for want of the Astronomy overflow and math overflow and others to remain I will not wish that StackOverflow go the route of Ask Jeeves (and wither away into irrelevance) but I'm hoping they take a look inside and see why they failed.
They destroyed this experience years ago because they couldn't monetize or own 3rd party networks, and when they shut them down and stole those with any traction, people who cared stopped participating, and the community left or more commonly just evaporated. The parenting one is a good example.
I remember the switch from random discussion forum that preceded it to stack overflow, the problem with random forums were that the answer was hidden somewhere down or on page 3. Stack overflow was significant improvement in this regard (to a point that I only searched programming question with site:stackoverflow.com to filter out other methods), the question was curated and updated. Now we have new thing that is even better so there is no going back. The progression was roughly:
1. Random website
2. Random thematic blog, seo'd
3. Random forum
4. Curated question portal like SO
5. Thematic subreddit when it became impossible to ask on SO
6. LLM
> when it became impossible to ask on SO
Can you explain what you mean by that?
Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it).
At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.
At some point they got ultra aggressive about "duplicate" questions.
Technology changes at a fast pace .. so new questions would get asked, and then closed by moderators and pointed to similar questions that might be 5 or 6 years old and no longer relevant.. essentially ending the discussion on many topics and actively preventing progress in certain areas.
I love how SO lets itself being bullied by 25-30 high-rep users - the very same users who have chased away all the other users from the website.
While AI definitely took away a lot of people from SO, most people are relieved that they don't have to interact with that literally garbage community when they have an IT/CS question. They didn't leave because of the website design, but I also believe that the new design wouldn't have chased many away either.
These users' rule hasn't really worked out so far, as demonstrated by the current state of SO. Maybe it is time to ignore that very small, but very vocal group? Though probably that should have happened years ago, maybe it's just time to cut their losses.
You are complaining about counterfactuals. Nobody is bullying anyone; the people active on meta aren't "chasing away" users (almost no users actually come to meta in the first place, the big names don't do a lot of personal interaction and when they do they don't leave comments unless they can be exceedingly polite about it); all that's happening is that with LLMs people finally have the thing they wanted all along[0] so they no longer have to keep coming to SO demanding it to be that thing when it was very explicitly designed the entire time not to be that thing, specifically so that experts wouldn't have to waste their time when they try to make the world better on a volunteer basis[1].
But most importantly: the site does not even remotely in any imaginable way empower those users. It actively hinders them, the staff have berated them over the years over alleged "unfriendliness"[2] and they constantly dump their ideas on the meta site, then ignore all feedback and push their ideas through anyway.
The main site is noticeably slower now. As far as I can tell, this is because they've taken code paths that the beta uses (especially whatever it is they use to load the code boxes and put a little JS widget at the top of them) and applied them back to the main site that worked perfectly well before.
[0] Basically: a magic robot that can listen to them and try to suggest an answer one on one, without caring about whether literally anyone else on the planet could benefit from that exchange, because the robot can tirelessly do that for the next person.
[1] I.e., so that humans could say something once and actually have it be relevant to many people.
[2] I.e.: the company makes money from views and a lot of people don't want to view a site where they have to actually meet any kind of standard whatsoever to participate; so it's the fault of people who have an actual vision for the site being useful.
As someone who had a fast high engagement for some time and then have dropped away, asking very few questions in that time, I disagree. I have seen far to many marked as duplicate for things that aren’t, nagging about rules and unsuitable questions instead of helpfulness and general allowing of some users to despise beginners without any consequences.
I one time had an actual answer for a question that nobody else had answered in 5 years... but because I didn't have enough ridiculous "reputation" I couldn't post it, so everyone else couldn't actually be helped. That's when I was done with SO.
I never had a desire to post questions there. Comments or answers only if it were something I felt a personal stake in (community that we were trying to bring up) or the rare case where I would come across something uncommon that was unanswered that I had recently ran into and figured out. It's not the users there who kept me away, I just that I like quiet (high signal to noise) developer spaces. ;)
I imagine a huge number of people were just browsing for quick answers and then bailed as I did.
I am not a high-rep user and I am still very much relieved that they got rid of the horrible redesigned website.
Nah it was definitely AI that obliterated SO.
Every vote-up/vote-down community is retarded, including this one.
Hell, every community is retarded if you think about it.
The group never invents - and all that Steinbeckian stuff
The downfall was long before ChatGPT (personally, I’d burnt out answering the same questions again and again) https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
The stackoverflow was better than what was before it (*sexchange site). Time will tell how it compares to the AI slop of the dead internet (current generation of LLMs based on human-generated data are great. Let’s see what happens when most of the data is created by bots).
Here is a hard question - how could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta? I mean obviously the new CEO and leadership has been total trash and has squandered their goodwill and user loyalty, but if I was CEO instead I don't know how I would save the ship.
Doubling down on how it was done in the 'good old days' probably wouldn't work because you would slowly bleed user to AI. Selling data to AI companies might work for a bit, but I would guess that the sales value of SO's data has quickly diminishing returns. So what is their path forward?
That's a hard one. SO's hostile community to newbies, like any expert community, comes from the longstanding users having seen the basic questions 1000s of times and understandably not wanting to answer variations of them over and over, while for the newbies those questions genuinely are there and they don't have the routine knowledge yet of where to look or how to even look for solutions in the first place.
In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions. LLMs seem to be getting pretty good at those as well though, so I don't know where that leaves us.
SO for discussions of taste? I have these two options to build this, how should i approach this? They tried to sell their own GPT wrapper for a while, didn't they? The use case I can see for that is: User asks question - LLM answers it - user is unsure about the answer - it gets posted as a SO thread and the rest of the userbase can nitpick or correct the LLM response.
Edit: I also seem to remember they had a job portal in the sidebar for a while, what happened to that? Seems like a reasonable revenue stream that is also useful to users.
> In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions.
I think the deeper question is how SO would get paid for that.
Historically, SO has been funded by advertising. Users would google their question, land on SO, get an answer, and SO would get paid by advertisers. (The job portal was a variation on the advertising product.)
Even in your ideal world, newbies and experts would first ask their questions to an LLM. The LLM might search SO and find the answer there, but the user would get the answer without viewing an ad, so SO wouldn't get paid for that.
The same issue is facing Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't funded by commercial advertisers, but they are funded by donations, which are driven by ads. If LLMs just answer the questions based on Wikipedia data, the user won't see the Wikipedia ad asking them to donate; they may not even know that Wikipedia was the source of the information, so they may not even develop a fondness for Wikipedia that's necessary to get users excited to donate.
This is why you see people shouting about how LLMs are "killing the web." I think it's more correct to say that LLMs are killing free web resources. Without advertising, not even donation-funded resources can remain available for free.
Oh, I was thinking more of user enters question into SO -> LLM answer on SO -> user evaluates whether LLM answer was sufficient (or system itself judges whether answer is also interesting to other users?) -> question + answer combo made public, judged by other users.
There are of course several huge issues with this, but thats why I prefaced it with ideal world hahaha
the biggest of which is why most users would want their questios publicized if the ChatGPT answer not on the stackoverflow platform will be enough or even better
Or how existing users and question-answering volunteers feel about just being cleanup and training data after LLMs
They should focus on high-quality expert answers.
Now that we have LLMs I don't need basic questions answered. I do still need hard questions answered by experts and AI has normalized paying money for QA.
I would definitely pay for a "human ChatGPT" service where the answers are written by experts who get paid per answer, e.g. grad students. Then they can resell this data to AI companies. Or maybe the economics are such that they can take enough money from AI companies to pay the experts and I don't need to pay anything at all.
This won't bring in as much money as advertising used to, but that business model is dead anyway. There's no future for a QA site at the low end.
Be chatbot first ig. I had envisioned a portal where you land on the front page and drop your question in the box. It would do some rag thing over the SO question database then try to answer your question. You could chat back and forth with it. If you figured out your problem then you would have the option to turn it into a question answer pair with help from the ai. If you didn't figure out your problem, then it would turn it into just a question, which would then show up for the experts of SO to answer. Something like that.
ideally, slowly grinding down duplicates into canonicals, keeping the ones whose answers are subject to change (with developments in languages and tools) up-to-date, removing cruft and making it more like a library (à la Rosetta Code) that's easy to find things in
and a change of form from (questions being asked primarily as a means to an end for one person) to (Q&A pairs being written as reference materials)
and requests for comment on which approach would be the most idiomatic or whether one has fallen into an XY trap or other things that rely on human 'taste' rather than LLMs' blithe march of obedience
> How could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta?
As a data source for LLMs, and by becoming the place someone goes where ChatGPT can't produce a sufficient answer.
I’m not aware of SO’s plans to remain profitable and relevant, but I do know they have an enterprise offering. I’ve seen ads on LinkedIn recently for MCP functionality tied to the enterprise SO offering that lets you use it as a knowledge base. I could see that potentially being a path to stay relevant.
The place I work at tried using an SO enterprise instance and it was quite ineffective. We didn't have the toxicity of the public instance, but generally having a Q&A forum double as a knowledge base is an oddball format that doesn't work out. Adding AI integration is not likely to compensate for that.
It will turn into a meme subreddit and/or die. What else is there?
Allow AI to ask questions. Since the point of the site is to build a knowledge base you don't really need humans to be that involved. Humans running into problems and then asking question was just one way to do this in the pre AI era. Now with AI we can reevaluate if we really need humans as much as we did.
The Beta Site is at https://beta.stackoverflow.com
To me, it looks like more like Digg from the old days.
It looks like a clone of present-day Reddit to me.
I wasn’t aware there was a beta. For those familiar, what were its issues?
My problem with it was that it looked truly disgusting and I don’t say that lightly. They had essentially cloned the Reddit “new” theme that has the all too common obnoxious overuse of white space over content.
That's the very first thing which came to my mind too. I thought "wow, they really did copy Reddit design which I hate".
I don't care about the visuals of Reddit, but copying the design of "this is a site for commenting, answers are just top-level comments with no distinction" seemed like they did not see the difference between Stack Overflow and a subreddit.
The beta site was a horrible redesign. It hid information that was previously visible, the layout was confusing, comments were harder to read, and it just made no sense.
Lol, what a massive trainwreck.
There's a big chance SO is used more by AIs than real humans, nowadays.
Out with the old, in with the new.
The site is populated exclusively with die-hard fanatics with no real-world third space using that community to fulfill their personal social needs. They'll do that all the way to its complete and utter death due to uselessness. Change would be anathema to them so there is no path for the site but death.
There is no utility it fulfills except as a watering hole for those unfortunate souls who built their village there.
every *Overflow site other than the main one for asking coding questions has been very good to me. StackOverflow was a terrible experience. What LLMs got right was when asking seemingly stupid questions, or simple questions, or RTFM-answerable questions didn't get responses of "RTFM", or "Duplicate", or the like.
If for want of the Astronomy overflow and math overflow and others to remain I will not wish that StackOverflow go the route of Ask Jeeves (and wither away into irrelevance) but I'm hoping they take a look inside and see why they failed.
They destroyed this experience years ago because they couldn't monetize or own 3rd party networks, and when they shut them down and stole those with any traction, people who cared stopped participating, and the community left or more commonly just evaporated. The parenting one is a good example.