AI Killed Stack Overflow (and why that sucks) | Hacker News Reader

AI Killed Stack Overflow (and why that sucks)

devcodehack.com

6 pointspar7 comments

StackOverflow killed itself.

I'm the first to admit, I got a lot of search results that pointed to answers I found valuable on SO. I answered questions the best I could and always tried to be helpful.

I have no actual SO "questions asked", 1000 "answered" and 15k in "rep". I tried my best. I would never have actually asked a question and open myself up to the abuse fire hose.

SO killed itself in my opinion with overzealous power users with 10s of thousands of rep points to burn and an axe to grind. I know it is a dead horse at this point, but the new user experience was terrible and still is unless you choose "advice" rather than a traditional question.

AI was just the euthanasia. I am sure there are lots of people, not just me with the opinion that AI has never been rude to me when I ask for help.

Agreed. I used it a bit around 2010 when I was doing a lot of C# for custom GUI stuff. I also had a lot of help on there for Linux/Unix questions and AWK programming. There were a decent amount of smart people on SO, one who stuck out was an EE who gave lots of solid advice on PCB design (Ollie Lanthorp I think) in the electronics forum. But over times it felt that it became hostile and questions closed as duplicate when they were asking about specific edge cases. Once I moved out of programming I stopped using it though I still find a nugget of info on it from time to time.

I think some of the early push back on asking better more relevant questions was right. But it morphed fairly quickly into gate keeping power user hell hole. I did learn early how to ask better questions. Often to the point I could get an answer without someone else feeding it to me. I appreciate that from StackOverflow. I wish I could just send some of my colleagues who ask bad questions or ask for help in a bad way through the StackOverflow ringer. The number of times my "peers" would respond with a flat "didn't work" with no additional details is driving me crazy. What didn't work? Did it fail differently than before? Were there any error messages? Did you check the logs? What else have you tried? I have to play 20 questions to even start being able help them and all of that work somehow falls on my shoulders.

Knowing how to ask for help is an important skill. Honestly, I admit what SO was demanding was the really the foundation of debugging and I am sure that many people are now better developers because SO having taught them how to approach a problem and how to ask for help.

That said, while the core objective may have been sound, that approach and delivery of the SO "way" was often socially wanting.

That is of course, just my observation.

Nah, I'm not unhappy that SO burned. Either the platform became a community-owned, not-for-profit, volunteer-driven project whose sole purpose was to be useful, or it was going to become yet another enshittified platform - which is exactly what happened. In that sense, it deserved to disappear. We're worse off without it, I agree, but we were heading in that direction anyway.

In 2 out of 3 cases, the responses I received to my questions were poor, wrong, snarky, or generally unhelpful.

I still believe a platform like that would be useful: something closer to MDN Web Docs, but with a Q&A mechanism. It should exist as public-interest technical infrastructure funded by govs, not as another asset to be squeezed until the community that made it useful has nothing left to give and everyone was worse off apart from the owners.

SO got awkward when the not-bad anti spam measures got cross wired with a mod mentality similar to wikipedia.

"Writing the question WAS the lesson" Indeed!

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