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Stackoverflow Outage

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I'm a top 5% contributor to SO with around 300-400 answers (haven't actively answered a question in a while). One of the highlights of my career was seeing people benefit from those answers, post commentary, and update my answers. In the last year, there's actually been 0 engagement on all of my questions. One of the rare/sad aspects of how ChatGPT has impacted our community.

I have a love/hate relationship with the site, and I'm likewise conflicted by its eventual demise.

On one hand, it's an incredible place full of smart people and has some of the best rabbit holes to fall into. On the other hand, portions of the site (programming among them) has the worst culture imaginable and has likely turned as many people off from learning as it has helped.

Not only does GPT lack the pretty nasty culture of SO, it’s so much faster to work with.

I anticipate SO will go into decline and get worse as a result. I wonder how much GPT will suffer without it as a source.

In a way, they’re kind of a match made in heaven: domain experts who share experience and knowledge not found in the user docs alone, cleaned of the antisocial nastiness usually filtered by tech writers and PR peeps.

That's a very good point.

The AI chatbots could, with user approval, arguably create a new database of asked questions that they could research and add to.

I agree it's sad. There were a lot of positive aspects to the SO community.

This is an ill formed question.

Stackoverflow may be up or down.

Please return later when you are able to determine exactly where your problem is and have read all the documentation on Unix, C and the internet.

Would have been funny if this post was marked duplicate of another post from years ago.

Closed as a duplicate of "cloudflare outage"

I thought about making a joke like this, but I was afraid that it'd be closed as a dupe.

SO has had an effective outage for years now. Put up a question, get smacked with "it's a duplicate" of an old, no-longer-relevant question, mods don't correct it because the culture is gatekeeping, now you have a dead Q&A site.

With the additional problem that someone invented a way to take your question pages and tailor them to the exact needs of a particular user.

Considering how many times a day I used to use StackOverflow, it's wild how long it has been since I last thought about it/visited. LLM's really scraped and dumped, sad.

In theory this is a problem because LLMs don’t get any updates and are just a snapshot of old questions on SO, but in practice SO also gets no new questions because every question is closed (incorrectly)

I find it somewhat sad to see so many people bag on StackOverflow as if it were a total failure. It's true that there were some negatives, but the brusque attitude and rapid question closures were often in response to a genuine flood of junky, repetitive questions. In its time it was unparalleled and even today there's still useful content on there. I also think its rep system is something a lot of sites could learn from in terms of how to gradually increase user privileges.

I thought they're just shutting down because it wasn't worth running the servers anymore.

Last I heard they self hosted. Far as I understand it’s incredibly cheap for them to host. Especially since they’ve been completely cannibalized.

GCP and Cloudflare are mentioned on their status page.

They have since been bought by private equity and brought on architecture astronauts who moved it to a cloud provider.

They're strangely committed to serving up pointless jquery from a Google domain. I'm sure there's a revenue stream behind that.

Didn't notice, as Claude is still up.

The crew that runs SO must be aware of the tone in this thread, right?

There always seems to be a strong consensus whenever SO is mentioned on HN, and it’s always very negative. Why don’t they change the moderation rules, if the supposed target audience is constantly frustrated with them?

They don't care. They have a dogmatic belief that they're right.

You hear about the people who complain but not the hundreds of thousands who search for something, get a StackOverflow result, read it and leave happily.

SO has been in decline for many years now; there's not much they could do to stop it now. Even if they could, it's hard to say whether that would be a net good for SO; part of what drove people to it in the first place was its steadfast dedication to maintaining a curated knowledge base, even with the impact that would have on long-term community health.

There's plenty they could do. Nobody knows what it is, but it exists. And maintaining a curated knowledge base never had very much to do with what brought people to the site, but they still don't seem to get that.

Could be conflicts of interest involved too. For a while it seemed someone was getting paid at least a little to close every Israel question on politics.se.

It’s no longer relevant. It doesn’t really matter what they do. The site is going to die. It was an artifact of a different time.

They should have kicked out every mod years ago.

Recently on reddit /r/art the mods collectively quit because people were making fun of them for gatekeeping someone. Everyone made fun of them more. Stack overflow are reddit mods gone extreme, they believe their job is to stop all activity on their boards apparently.

Now that SO is almost dead, how will the AI labs train their LLMs on all the programming edge cases it used to document?

Will synthetic data and documentation RAG really be enough? Or will we be stuck at 2022 debugging knowledge forever?

what's their business model now?

Status updates for stackoverflow are like: hey look at me, I'm still here.

Stack Overflow is no longer relevant. Today, you can just ask Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT instead, and you don’t have to deal with the usual condescension.

How much of that LLM output is the result of adding SO’s content to the pot?

And if usage declines, what will be feed future LLMs with?

SO is probably a very significant factor in the success of LLMs but it's decline will not affect LLM development. LLMs will simply be trained on the conversations people are having with them.

I either misunderstand or disagree with that idea:

People go to the llm to request help. How is that conversation going to be a good source to increase future knowledge?

No one is going to ChatGPT to explain to it how they solved a problem.

Unlikely to happen with conversations, yes, but very likely to happen implicitly as part of work with coding agents. Successful agent trajectories will be used to learn what works and what doesn't for a given API.

Chatgpt can identify when it's solution has helped you solve the problem and use those conversations to train on

Blog posts and GitHub discussions come to my mind. That's where I often find answers to my questions and where I contribute.

I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist? This was always Stackoverflow's bread and butter, and people who only use it as noob search tend to miss that fact. SO can be a tough crowd, yes, but mostly it's people who didn't read the rules before posting who get burnt. That aside, it still has a very high concentration of experts that you'll struggle to find anywhere else.

LLM clients like chatgpt can scrape the code of new tech on demand. They tend not to hallucinate when you provide fixed inputs like this.

>I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist?

Not Stackoverflow, because all my questions are either ignored or closed, even when extremely detailed and unique.

> even when extremely detailed and unique.

or so you claim.

Well my last attempt turned out to be a vendor issue. It was officially acknowledged by a vendor support rep. It had to do with their unique method of populating a whitelist with DNS entries, and weird response chain to blocks in that state.

I read through the backlog, ensured I had completely exhausted every other avenue (short of 3 more weeks of yelling at one of the involved vendors for information about how they were performing their whitelisting) and had available captures for network and application, full reproducibility steps and details of everything that had been interrogated. I even remember linking similar issues, and explaining how I ruled out their causes.

In fact I am still relatively confident that the way mobile browsers were responding to the bug, probably constitutes a bug in itself but honestly, cant be assed to pursue it.

When enough time has passed I will probably produce a blog about the issue, so it can be digested by the next iteration of the troubleshooting machine. But I really dont feel compelled to provide further data to the stackoverflow community directly considering their complete lack of response. Even closing it as a duplicate of an existing issue would have been helpful, but it wasn't a duplicate so it was just ignored.

While LLMs may have used Stack Overflow data to get their start, I think it's reasonable to assume that this source of training data will no longer continue to be useful.

Therefore, as both a data source and a QA website, Stack Overflow has lost its relevance.

The source code itself.

If an LLM can read the source of the library you’re trying to use - or examples of others using the library in GitHub, or official documentation - then there is less of a need for a fellow SOer to put the pieces together to debug issues and answer questions.

> the docs don't cut it

Yet. By the time stackoverlow shuts down, AIs will be powerful enough to take data from docs or just from the source code alone. I mean the new version of opus is pretty good at understanding my front end source code. I think that should be the goal of AIs (that they are so advanced they don’t need to read code examples from a third party website like stackoverflow)

This is a pretty narrow view. Most APIs out there are not source available, frontend libraries are the odd one out in that regard. Likewise for docs, it doesn't matter if the LLM can read the docs or not if the docs literally don't include the things you need to figure out. I suspect this is a generational divide, people who grew up with SO can't imagine what life was like before it, but right now we're on a straight course back to isolationist communities, if we aren't already there.

Really? That’s actually a very narrow view to think that AIs need to rely on code examples of some third party forum.

AIs will be good enough to understand the docs and source code alone, just like the human answering a stackoverflow question.

Most of my work these days are around the AWS SDKs and Terraform. I always just say “verify the APis on the internet”.

Now, AWS has a documentation MCP server that can integrate with ChatGPT.

https://github.com/awslabs/mcp/tree/main/src/aws-api-mcp-ser...

I haven’t used it.

Unfortunately the answer to that is the Discord server of whatever technology I'm working with. Communities are now separated each in their silo on Discord, far away from the public internet, where nothing can be indexed.

Growing grains is no longer relevant. You can just walk into any supermarket and purchase packaged cereals, breads, and cakes, and you don’t have to deal with operating a tractor, cultivating soil, or sowing seeds.

The equivalent of "growing grains" would be reading the documentation - SO is second-hand knowledge.

"Ah, the joys of mortgaging your future."

My niche questions are never answered correctly by AI. I'm led down false rabbit holes. Stack overflow still provides much better answers for me overall.

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