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Comment by wtfHN26 | Hacker News Reader

Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.

I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.

AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.

The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.

> at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered

I don’t buy this.

Programming as an industry is famous for constantly evolving and changing.

Yet the most viewed questions are about how to undo git commit, how to sort an array, how to select stuff in jquery, how to group by in SQL and so on.

General questions about programming languages, SQL and git don't change that much.

Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.

Well, a combination of that and understanding human psychology. For any of these common issues, SO usually had an answer of what you were supposed to do, but it was usually very counterintuitive.

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only"

- Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library

- Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked

- Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs

- Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP

- Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong

Usually #1 actually works, most cases, and missing discord, several healthy communities on Discord nowadays

yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world

You’re using your mom for rubber duck debugging, then. An LLM can work for that as well, usually better because it knows a lot more than your mom.

It's fictional, I never actually got burned by a tech lead nor been put on PIP either, nor asked my mom to help me with programming :)

That's not really relevant, the point is LLMs are actually pretty good for the scenario you described.

So is IRC, the relevance being that none of what I wrote in my initial comment is actually serious or my actual beliefs.

SO allows questions that are specific to a library.

I like that out of all of them, that was the most false to you.

SO closes your question for being a duplicate of some other random question that has nothing to do with yours. That would be true.

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