Is StackOverflow Dying?

I have a fair number of points on SO from asking and answering some common (and esoteric) questions. But I stopped, as a lot of folks don't mark answers as correct, so good answers don't get highlighted. Why give good advice if it's not marked as such?

I got an email a few months ago that one of my answers had been edited. It turns out that someone who—as best as I can tell—hasn't ever actually answered a question had reworded my answer, removed a ton of context, and in effect, made my answer incorrect.

I immediately changed it back. The person who edited my answer was doing this to farm points. With no understanding of the problem or my solution, they were racking up points simply by "cleaning up" answers.

I'm not going to say that this is killing SO. But it does seem like there are some perverse incentives that make it easy for folks to accrue points without actually being competent. And as long as SO points are considered a sign of competence, people will keep doing it.

I saw this happening in sort of slow-mo, but didn't know who to tell or what to do, so here you go.

Around 2017-18 I was pretty involved in the bootcamp/learning programming community, and I noticed my fellow teachers recommending students to "do not ask question on StackOverflow, if you have an issue it' better to ask in Github to the library author, people are more polite and you get better answers".

As an Open Source dev myself, this left a slightly bad taste, but couldn't exactly disagree since SO culture IS brutal (specially in the tight timeframe). I did explain when I could that the best is actually to learn to ask the right question, and that often this is part of the debug experience for yourself, but I was but a little pebble against the stream. This had probably gone for a while, and it was then also when we saw a lot of talk about burnout in open source devs. At some point it seemed there was someone burning out every other week!

Everyone can put 2 and 2 together to see what was happening; low-quality questions were not being asked in StackOverflow anymore and now they were dumped to random OSS devs who didn't sign for it and were forced to move from a collaborative environment that was Github back then to a more customer-facing environment it became.

The "interesting" part is what happened as a consequence. Today if you do Open Source, become semi-famous and want to continue, it's pretty clear that you have to have a thick skin and do a combination of: just shut down ALL issues/support in popular repos[1], or get used to tell people NO quick and easily, or take regular breaks, or I guess be part of a big company being paid to deal with issues as part of your job.

Personally the only websites I see displacing SO on Google results are sites that reuse SO content and game Google to get ad revenue.

I stopped participating because I found that I usually was insulted somehow or my answer was not credited.

If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.

If you give a correct answer but don't include a significant amount of explanation, it will be marked down.

Often times I see perfectly valid questions and people refuse to answer them but will only respond with a comment.

I just wanted to try to help some people. I don't have time to write Wiki articles or deal with assholes who have nothing better to do than to do than try to find fault with a question or answer.

Also, a lot of the time the answer is to use some library or module and you can get attacked for even acknowledging that modules exist.

A lot of answers are now out of date. Some dangerously so. And its not just 'fast moving' languages. Bash, nginx, docker, gcp, bluetooth. Much of the landscape of these tools has changed since say 2015, but that is where most of the 'core' answers are from.

Many have notes that they are out of date in sub-comments. But its hard to be noticed against a 700 upvote selected top answer.

StackOverflow originated during a time when finding accurate and up-to-date documentation on the internet was a challenge. Today, however, there is a wealth of easily accessible, hands-on documentation that often includes links to support resources such as Discord.

In my opinion, this has led to two types of questions being asked on StackOverflow: very basic ones that the asker could have easily found in the documentation, and very advanced ones. Unfortunately, the number of basic questions far outweighs the number of advanced ones. As a result, the platform is losing popularity as users become increasingly less willing to answer questions that could have been easily researched.

I never really used stackoverflow. The rare times I do use it, i.e. google leads me to it, a large portion of the posts really annoy the hell out of me. I don't care if someone tries to solve the "wrong" problem, or however stupid "highly valued" users on that platform try to frame it. I don't care about similar questions, redundancy, frameworks, wrong usages of languages and quirks. I don't want to search around finding those other similar posts where the poster apparently has the more correct question (?). I don't want to learn a general method that solves the underlying problem so much more elegantly than the apparently implied "hack" that would be needed to solve the posters question as is. No, I'm very happy with the hack and I want it, because I want to know the answer to my problem, not indulge in your elitism. From that point of view, stackoverflow is very often just beyond useless.

I think a major problem that stackoverflow has is that for recent questions, the average vote is a down vote.

It could be argued that the vast majority of questions are deserving of downvotes, but that itself is a problem and a turn-off and the definition of what qualifies as a good or bad question could be adjusted so that the majority aren't downvoted.

"Punishing" people for asking questions that would when the site was new be showered in upvotes feels like kicking out the ladder from under those of us who climbed it.

For physics, I noted that physics.stackexchange.com, which worked fine 10 years ago, was only filled with noise now and no answers. Then I realized people who usually answered stuff there moved to Discord servers and other sites. Maybe something similar happened to SO? It's like the gamification model that fuels the desire to post answers on those sites got old and boring..

Yes.

The community died many years ago. The company itself died a few years ago selling out. The value of StackOverflow is dying as we speak.

The original value was in the community. Sadly the system of moderation was not self correcting enough to change with time. No amount of democracy can solve the toxicity without new people in those positions of power. When people quote the community as being "toxic", you usually look to a number of rotten apples.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/22/the-loop-2-understandi...

Like what's famous at DARPA, there are short tenures to positions of power. StackOverflow could've adopted a similar model for their product and moderation teams(including community ones) to bring in regular positive change. The technical talent was already top-tier and created one hell of a marvel of infrastructure excellence.

https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/what-darpa-does

I think the experts basically got bored and left.

I've asked a couple of questions I'd hope would be fairly simple (like how to run a program in cgroups v2), set a big bounty on them, and never got a single useful answer.

I've noticed this trend for years, basically :

- for reference I land on official documentation

- for issues I usually land on GitHub issues and source code

- for random stuff I still hit SO - like some SQL problem, CSS, algorithm implementation

- for design stuff I land on blog posts

Personally I see stack overflow value reduce with good reference documentation and GitHub issues/open source dev discussions.

The fact that SO is purely QA and closes opinionated/discussion topics makes it less valuable. It made sense in the past when you couldn't communicate with devs so easily or when reference documentation wasn't that good. Especially for closed source stuff.

Aside: earned reputation seems to last forever.

I got to top 10% about ten years ago, mostly through basic questions and answers that you could easily do when StackOverflow started. I haven’t touched my account in years, and I am now in top 8% with about 5000 reputation, because old questions and answers keep getting upvotes.

I would think few people have much incentive to try and gain StackOverflow reputation, so what keeps StackOverflow going?

IMHO, SO is tech-stack centric, which worked perfectly in old days. Questions are grouped by Java, Web, .NET, shell/system admin, etc. We got most of answers to general questions for each tech stack in SO. But nowadays, with the rise of open source projects, the knowledge of each project stays with the GitHub issues. This is naturally shaped by the domain knowledge of each project. I would say SO may not see any rapid growth anymore, Github will.

I think it will be around for a while - the volume of content is still valuable.

But like many others, I've stopped contributing to it. The last time I tried to answer a question, it was marked down. My answer was correct, concise, to SO standards etc, but because the question was poorly worded and formatted, I was seen to be 'encouraging' it.

I appreciate the need for high quality questions. But burying correct answers is completely ridiculous.

Discussion might be slowly dying off because most questions have already been answered. Maybe StackOverflow reached a state where it is mostly done and implicitly transitioning into a Wikipedia-style programming encyclopedia. This should show up in the logs, maybe somebody here has enough reputation on SO to have access to them.

If that is the case then new questions are mostly on new frameworks and new languages which are often niche tags and don't have as much engagement as the popular tags once had.

Almost all questions newbies could ask are ripe for getting closed as duplicate and complicated questions are rarely getting answers since they require too much context to fit into SO's format.

I think it's because all of the low hanging fruits have been picked up already.

People used to make 30,000 reputation out of a single answer on an extremely basic topic like "how do I create a variable in X".

Now all the questions are either duplicates getting closed or hard questions on very specific topic, that, even if you can answer, will get you 10 reputation, and maybe 50 over the years.

On the other hand, the spam of stupid, badly formatted or undersearched questions is intense.

So StackOverflow has basically become a platform where contributors have nothing better to do than moderation, for which there is no reputation reward.

I know someone will tell me it's not all about reputation, but I don't believe it one second.

Google Search is not to blame for SO's decline.

Toxic deletionists are part of the problem, yes. But they are the literal dregs at the bottom of the bottle when all the good experts have left or burnt out or converted to deletionists. There's no way to find great questions that would make their talents shine.

And here we come to the next point - the company behind SO stopped investing dev time in improving the core experience. Yeah, they were also overrun by vitriolic politically motivated folks, but this is only a lateral plot line. Rearranging CSS, coming up with brand-new bug-ridden editors, concocting impossible get-rich-quick subsites parasitizing on the main site's popularity against the opinions of old-timers - here are just a few examples of brainless PM activities over the years.

As a consequence, Stack Overflow is dead. As in, still twitching from a combination of ideological / greed-fueled Cordyceps firing up random neurons. But yes, mostly dead.

Wow, so much hate for SO on this thread. Stack overflow has been a core part of my life as a developer for many years. Not all questions are answered well but, to some extent, you have to be a connoisseur. The first answer may not be correct, or it may be out of date but chances are that some answer, maybe far downstream, will be invaluable and save hours of research. Ask questions. Answer questions. Don’t do it for the ranking do it because someone did it for you.

Google search results are declining, but most programming questions still benefit from a site:stackoverflow.com appended to the end, to remove the copycat spam.

It’s possible that new content is getting lower quality on SO, but for any area where a 10 or 15 year old answer is as relevant today as it was when it was written, it’s still a goldmine.

> It's clear Google Search algorithm is favoring other websites.

In what universe? I feel this is one of the strongest examples of selection bias at work that I've ever seen, to be honest.

Stackoverflow comes up for every single thing I search, lol.

However I agree new answers of quality are rarer. The site users are more concerned with identifying duplicates or even any overlap and closing things rather than providing useful information sometimes.

Reddit has constantly provided better results to my questions over the past year.

Also, most subreddits accepts posting detailed "Am I doing this wrong?" questions instead of only perfectly asked ones that have never been asked before. I find it a better balance than SO removing a question I spent 30 minutes formatting because someone asked a tangentially related question 5 years ago.

Which websites are being favoured by Google - I don't see that.

Yes SO is looking at altering its colours to improve accessibility https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/386102/accessibilit...

Yes I've switched to chatgpt for all my programming questions nowadays because of many reasons:

1. It understands the versions more clearly, it won't generate the code for Bootstrap 2 when my question is about Bootstrap 5

2. Asking follow up questions is easy. So the code didn't work. I tell it that and instantly it tells me what I need to do to fix it (leave missing config file, etc) or gives me an alternate.

3. Its answers instantaneously except when their site is down.

4. Its more customised as the answer is not a generic question posted an year ago.

5. It spans multiple domains of knowledge, so if lets say I get an error curl.so not found, it can tell me what I must run on the command line to fix that on my system too.

6. Its so much faster because there are no stupid questions. It's just like typing on google vs SO where you need to proof read and make sure its not a duplicate.

I think it is dying and my bet for the reason why would be the policy changes.

Take it as you might, but I think the main reason many people were answering questions in the first place is the feeling of competition and wanting to establish oneself as someone with knowledge. This included gaining high scores and for some reason correlated with being quite blunt in the comments. But SO changes a few years ago made it so that asking questions got the same amount of points as answering them. Also people were forced to play nice with the new-comers who didn't even bother reading the rules of the site. And with these changes the whole atmosphere changed from being "a database of questions and answers" to just a site where people ask for free help.

I have been using less SO over the years, as more and more libraries and even programming languages have their own Discord servers.

And there it’s easier and quicker to get a specialised reply, with less judgement or responses like “already answered in thread X”

It's not a great place to get help anymore. My career has progressed since I first started, so most of my questions require more open ended format which often gets flagged.

Ex, when I first started, I would ask things like how do I do string interpolation in shell scripting? Now I have more questions that require considerations from different angles such as why should I use redux over react contexts? how has it been for people with large teams?

The point system also doesn't mean much. I have over 60k points from just asking basic programming questions from when I was in college.

Google doesn't seem to think it's being searched for less relative to previous times

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

SimilarWeb shows them as having a very high proportion of incoming traffic coming from search

https://www.similarweb.com/website/stackoverflow.com/#traffi...

I genuinely think code snippets as a "thing" is going to die. I just wrote a web scrapper while knowing absolutely nothing about the language or the syntax of the library by just asking GPT and feeding back the errors the interpreter was throwing back. FWIW, I was writing a scrapper to compile all PG essays into a txt file to train GPT. I still don't know the syntax of Beautiful soup or the nuances of Python. But I got a working snippet which I can use for training nanogpt based on Karpathy's videos.

A workflow like this:

RTM -> SO question (not found) -> IRC/Discord -> post question on SO.

As opposed to this:

LLM -> RTM -> SO (maybe post a question)

Simply has SO earlier in the pipeline. The later does not render it obsolete (yet?) from what I can tell.

If a simple annotation to how the LLM got the answer is deployed I think that is where SO will be visited only to ask questions rather than find an answer (still not obsolete).

P.S. this is speculative at best at this stage. SO can be rendered obsolete by some hidden side effect of LLMs/search engines

A lot of the problems people are having in this thread ive been having while trying to use reddit for anything useful.

Im trying to put together a small project using a raspberry pi and figured the subreddit would be a good place to start. I couldnt find good recent answers so I make a short post, what pi would best handle quality video streaming, best ways to go about it ect. Deleted because I was supposed to ask it in a specific thread. Ok sure whatever. So I ask that question in the proper QnA thread and only response I get plainly and unhelpfully says to look at an faq question which dosent answer my question at all. I feel like if your going to have and run a community because your passionate about something, and offer help about that thing, you could probably do better than leading me down the "your question is to generic/easy for me to bother" like an automated help line.

SO feels like that to me, you need to go in with a "worthy" question to get any kind of help and not just stomped down

I think it's always been a bad place to get answers.

If you do maintenance programming you always have little questions like "How do you find the length of a string in Python?" and all you need is "len(s)". On Stackoverflow there is a discussion even if there is nothing to discuss, fortunately it is very unlikely that alternative answers like "sum(1 for c in s)" will get near the top but sifting through a lot of wrong answers and garbage is worse in the long term than learning your way around the official documentation.

Generally speaking, projects documentation is far better now, I often just land there and usually I'm done. I had yo upgrade a spring 3 project, spring documentation was enough. Also, SO have been quite hostile for me, a newbie for the site who couldn't comment. The probability to have question marked as duplicate was also quite high, with all the downside you know. YMMV, of course.

StackOverflow has been immensely helpful for me. When stuck on a programming problem, I usually look for solutions on StackOverflow or read the framework/programming language's docs.

It's highly unlikely that StackOverflow will slowly die. It's a very MOATY service: strong band, and network effects.

Not sure if it's just StackOverflow or the whole of StackExchange. I used to be active in another StackExchange subject site and it was incredibly toxic (and I say this as someone who is generally open to letting people speak their mind in any fashion they see fit). I was advocating that we let low quality questions get answered and remain, while providing feedback on how to ask better questions, and eventually (hopefully) raising the quality overall for all users of the site regardless of their experience level. You might have thought I'd suggested child sacrifice with the toxic responses I received for suggesting this. Net result -- I left the site altogether never to return, and found that Reddit was much more open to my idea of nurturing "newbies" rather than squashing them.

It is dead to me, as dead as Yahoo anyway. I haven't got an answer since 2017. After posting a simple question that got 20 downvotes, I had it.

GPT gives better answers 2/3 of the time. It makes up some answers, but often it's more helpful and accurate than what you find on SO anyway.

Not sure about stack overflow, but search result quality feels to be in decline. Lately I deliberately try to rely on official documentation more (i.e. have it bookmarked and browse it for answers) instead of trying to look something up in search engine. Which honestly is a good idea anyway.

Not yet. ChatGPT recommended me about 7 deprecated ways of doing something yesterday before eventually giving up as it hasn't been trained on a current version of a library. A person on the Stack Exchange for the tech (Solana) had an answer in about 90 minutes.

Honestly I go to Reddit before I go to SO if I want to write a question. Or I go straight to the projects GitHub if available. I’ve only posted on SO twice in my life because I can usually piece together what I need from old answers

It's because you're getting passed the point of having simple questions. Once you get to a certain point of understanding, there is less available online for shared problem solving. This just happens.

Subreddits are more welcoming and answers your questions more compared to SO.

I think a lot of has to do with dev tools/frameworks having standard, nice, readable, UX friendly documentation websites.

Gone are the days of custom documentation layouts and designs that are hit or miss.

Does Google amplify that which gets engagement?

When I go to SO, I frequently find the answer is not what I was looking for and I've probably missed some keyword to get where I'm going - so I'm back on Google within seconds.

Google doesn't need much smarts to see I'm bouncing off of SO and hardly ever sticking around - if this is a common pattern then it's not favouring other websites that provide a more sticky experience - implication being that answered my question as I didn't return to further refine it.

Googles starting to get into trouble I think.

It just doesn’t feel as useful as it did.

And for most programming questions I go to ChatGPT or GitHub search (which is utter garbage but I think a new version is coming).

Looks like chatgpt was trained on stackoverflow

https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/38660/was-chatgpt-tra...

I wonder what its contribution was to chatgpt’s ability to answer coding questions. And what happens if chatgpt (or similar) displaces it.

Also interesting is that SO has banned chatgpt from answering but I suspect that will be another shadow “AI vs humans” war.

Time since a post bemoaning something dying/falling in quality/ not being the way it was x years ago showed up on ask hn: 14 minutes

SO is for browsing for answers and RT is for asking questions. People on RT are a lot more friendly and sometimes equally skilled.

I started using SO, HN, and Reddit about the same time. I was a total newb.

HN was the nicest to me so far, then Reddit, and SO ranks the last.

SO has been "dying" since a couple years after it started

There are a handful of decent[ish] tags

Most of it is total garbage

Die, it should. I'd much rather see a new version based on HN upvoting and similar rules.

I asked ChatGPT to give me a react component for _something I wanted to do_. The first version it gave me was bad but with some prompt tweaks I got exactly what I wanted.

I had searched the same thing on google and stackoverflow and found nothing.

the answers are generally ok, but most of the questions are almost inevitably duplicates

GitHub issues has been a pretty good place to get answers too

Personally I haven't asked or answered on stackoverflow for a long time. Just one data point.

Imo the high ranking people today on SO are annoying as fuck and on a power trip. I haven’t asked question in a long time and I had a unique situation and asked the question. Within seconds some guy adds some snarky unhelpful and honestly toxic reply and I had to repost my question. I ran a quick survey and found others who have had similar experiences and I feel this is terrible for newbies and even people like me who know what we are doing and posting good questions. I mean I have many millions of people reached according to SO with my answers.

I can’t stand these people.

It would be nice if SO would go back to evolving Q&A and stop letting toxic losers become mods.

every passing year the platform gets more and more hostile to non-americans. I gave up trying to argue and deleted my account. No regrets, modern-day documentation is more than sufficient

I needed to go point farming to answer a question, upvote a question or just about anything. I like points as a qualifier, but heck, give me a way to earn my first points. I don't always have answers, but when I had, I couldn't post them. That made it clear to me that this platform has no future. Look at Twitter or Reddit, somehow they manage to push the boring stuff down and the quality content up. I don't see why SO should be that different.

That makes sense as the site is almost useless now. It's been entirely taken over by people who do nothing but farm karma.

The current situation... If you're a noob who's learning, then your question will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked as question is deemed low quality..

If you're a pro, then your question will be about something obscure which the mods don't understand, and also will require a more nuanced answer, so it will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked.

So it's aimed at mid-level devs to ask things with certain answers, the kind of answer which would most likely be found in documentation. So the people who require help/answers the most are kicked off, whereas people who need answers/help the least are encouraged.