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.
Not common I’m sure, but I once had an answer I posted completely rewritten for grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. I felt so valued. /s
As a mod, this is all I ever did on the platform. Thanks for the appreciation!
haha I ran into this too, someone changed the title of my question on one of their non-programming boards - I was so pissed, I never went back to that particular board (it was especially annoying because it was a quite personal question)
I used to post had the same thing. Then people would insult me for not knowing like “why you think I’m asking?”
According to a Stack Overflow survey from 2025, 84 percent of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76 percent a year earlier. This rapid adoption partly explains the decline in forum activity.
As someone who participated in the survey, I’d recommend everyone take anything regarding SO’s recent surveys with a truckfull of salt. The recent surveys have been unbelievably biased with tons of leading questions that force you to answer in specific ways. They’re basically completely worthless in terms of statistics.
Yeah because either you get a “how dumb are you?” Or none
Locking this comment. Duplicate of https://lemmy.world/comment/21433687
Honestly just funny to see. It makes perfect sense, based on how they made the site hostile to users.
Reported for duplicate.
Even before AI I stopped asking any questions or even answering for that matter on that website within like the first few months of using it. Just not worth the hassle of dealing with the mods and the neck beard ass users and I didn’t want my account to get suspended over some BS in case I really needed to ask an actual question in the future, now I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to any stack website and it does not show up in the Google search results anymore, they dug their own grave
I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn’t copy/pasting code.
And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.
But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don’t have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren’t really upset at “having” to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.
I call it “comic book guy” syndrome. The desperate need to feel superior.
That last part is so true, some people are just miserable and want to spread that misery to others to make themselves feel better
Hear hear, it was the hostile atmosphere that pushed me away from Stack Exchange years before LLMs were a thing. That very clear impression that the site does not exist to help specific people, but a vague public audience, and the treatment of every question and answer is subjugated to that. Since then I just ask/answer questions on platforms like Lemmy, Reddit, Discord, or the Discourse forums ran by various organisations, it’s a much more pleasant experience.
The stupidest part is that their aggressive hostility against new questions means that the content is becoming dated. The answers to many, many questions will change as the tech evolves.
And since AI’s ability to answer tech questions depends heavily on a similar question being in the training dataset, all the AIs are going to increasingly give outdated answers.
They really have shot themselves in the foot for at best some short term gain.
This was my issue. The two times I posted real, actual questions that I needed help with, and tried to provide as much detail as possible while saying I didn’t understand the subject,
I got clowned on, immediately downvoted negative, and got no actual help whatsoever. Now I just hope someone else had a similar issue.
Oh no, poor AI won’t know where to feed anymore. Anyway…
go ai, go broke
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.
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…
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But can anyone train on them? What happens to the original dataset?
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I do wonder then, as new languages and tools are developed, how quickly will AI models be able to parrot information on their use, if sources like stackoverflow cease to exist.
I think this is a classic of privatization of commons, so that nobody can compete with them later without free public datasets…
But what will the mods close for arbitrary reasons before there are any responses?
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
“Search before asking!” - Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow lost its job to ai
To AI using Stack Overflow data.
