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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow is dead because its rules are nonsensical and many of its users are dicks.

It's going to be a real problem going forward, because if AI hadn't killed them something else would have, and now it's questionable whether that "something else" will ever emerge. The need for something like SO is never going to go away as long as new technologies, algorithms, languages and libraries continue to be created.

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Besides the issue of repetitive beginner questions, which today could be answered with an LLM, was a significant driver of low-quality content, requiring substantial intervention from StackOverflow.

However, your point stands: as new technologies develop, StackOverflow will be the main platform where relevant questions gain visibility through upvotes.

Obscure problems would get no visibility though — because of their obscurity.

If it were just a matter of upvotes and downvotes, that would be one thing, but voting to close a question for being a "duplicate," forcibly terminating an emerging discussion because somebody asked something vaguely similar 10 years ago for a completely different platform or language, is just nuts.

Or closing a general question because in the opinion of Someone Important, it runs afoul of some poorly-defined rule regarding product recommendations.

A StackOverflow that wasn't run like a stereotypical HOA would be very useful. The goal should be to complement AI rather than compete with it.

You’re right, but I suspect that it became this hostile to beginners because of the constant flood of repetitive questions. It’s possible that with LLMs doing this filtering, the community loosen up the hostility when new more and more new questions are stuff LLMs can’t answer.

A scary (if not particularly original) thought: If people become utterly reliant on LLMs and no longer embrace any new language etc for which there is insufficient LLM training, new languages etc will no longer continue to be created.

Possible, but I think unlikely. New languages already suffer this uphill battle because they don't yet have a community to do Q&A like entrenched languages; their support is the documentation, source code of implementations, and whatever dedicated userbase they have as a seed for future community. People are currently utterly reliant on community-based support like StackOverflow, and new languages continue to be born.

If languages stop being created, it will be because there won't be a need for them. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Think of programming languages as you currently think of CPU ISAs. We only need so many of those. And at this point, machine-instruction architecture has diverged so far from traditional ISAs that it no longer gets called that. Instead of x86 and ARM and RISC-V we talk about PTX and SASS and RDNA. Or rather, hardly anyone talks about them, because the interesting stuff happens at a higher level of abstraction.

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