Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant?
"That's a stupid question, marked as solved."
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
315 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
70365 readers
3834 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
marked as duplicate, see <other question from 2005, before LLMs were invented>
I had a decently awarded account on SO because I joined it in 2012. I asked and answered questions. For the first few years it was fucking awesome as a professional developer. Then it's popularity on google search results ended up making it too well known and the comment quality dropped substantially. Then the fucking powerusers popped up and started flagging almost everye one my questions as duplicates while pointing to unrelated questions. The last I really used SO was around 2017. I got too fed up to participate in the platform because when I spent the time to make a well formed question, it would just got shut down and my time wasted.
Had the same experience, almost exactly.
It's not dead until I stop getting 10 year old outdated answers in my searches!
My experience with SO is that I'll look up a question about how to do something using X method and all the answers are like "why are you using X?" or "here's how to do it using Y.". You rarely find people answering the questions and instead find people trying to spread gospel about a certain tech that you aren't using.
In my experience has been like "that's a bug and was solved on version 2.1, update" and I'm having the exact problem in version 2.2 so what now?
load more comments
(1 replies)
My experience with SO is somewhat the same, but sometimes (actually maybe most times) you're trying to use a hammer to screw in a screw.. If you read the suggestions and take them into account you can often find the actual question, and then the actual answer.
I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.
- Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
- See if this is an XY problem.
I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.
The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
This was the majority of my experience as well. As a newer programmer, I'm more than happy to always know a better option. But if the way I'm looking to solve my problem is wrong, don't just give me Y, explain to me why it may not work how I think it will. Tell me about X and some pitfalls or reasoning for it not going to work, then recommend Y. Because if others only see the Y answer to my question about X, they'll probably just keep searching for a solution to X not knowing it may not work like I didn't know.
I've been in your position and in the other person's position many times. It can be frustrating but we need to think about the big picture. It's possible you hadn't considered a certain approach, and it's probable that many other future readers will not have considered a certain approach. So even though you might have said that you want to do something specific, it's often helpful to some people to provide general information of another way to tackle the same issue.
And of course you know your own situation, so now there are these comments that appear off topic, and they kind of are, for you, and that's just how it is on forums.
The other situation that comes up a lot is that people are doing it wrong. They are misusing some piece of technology and while their kluge might kind of work right now, it's setting themselves up for bigger issues in the future. Of course no one appreciates it when you tell them they're doing it wrong.
People don't like when you don't answer their question because it doesn't give them an answer to their question. Just answer the question first and then hop on your high horse to tell them why it's not going to work.
That's strange. It's almost never my experience on stack overflow.
What you're describing happens mostly on reddit and lemmy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I think all that needs to be said is if you search how to install a new CA in a given runtimes cert store, odds are the first and accepted answer will almost without fail describe how to disable ssl.
A lot of times the accepted answer on a locked question will be extremely outdated and/or not even functional anymore.
Modern tech charges at a break neck pace and stack overflow can't keep up because the people who run the community created rules that artificially led to it not keeping up
load more comments
(3 replies)
I wonder how well LLMs would do without SO's data
Or Reddit, or Linux forums.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Sucks because I prefer stack overflow in searches because I get more of a human explanation and wisdom. With llm i have to figure out what it’s_trying to do_ , debug it, and god forbid you want various ways of doing the same thing. I hate LLMs for coding. I hate clients for trying to force me to use it when most of the time now they admit they’re hiring me because AI failed in the first place
Stack Overflow hasn't been useful for at least 10 years, if not longer.
The flagged "correct" answer is almost always wrong due to idiotic power-users and the vast horde of idiots who upvote obviously wrong answers because they're bootlickers. The real answer is usually buried in between the posts by gatekeepers, pedants, idiots with something to prove, wannabe admins, egotistical idiots, the highly opinionated technologically insecure, etc ad nauseam. Reddit is just as bad for tech questions, if not worse.
Since I started using LLMs (running on my own inference server) I haven't used anything else for tech questions that wasn't opinion-based. Much, much more useful, and it requires you to think seriously about the problem to come up with a good prompt -- which often gives you the answer before you even finish the prompt.
This is interesting because a huge amount of AI "knowledge" comes from stack exchange.
Now I'll go read the other comments and article to see if that's already been mentioned :)
Anyone remember experts-exchange?
I remember when it didn't have a dash. Until people started making fun of the old URL...
So easily avoided too
Ah yes, the place that never answered anything.
The sloppiest of slops before we got AI slop.
It was the pinterest of answering stuff
Or if they had an answer, they paywalled it, until Google got pissed at them for including the answer in their SEO but blocking it once the user clicked through. Then they maliciously complied with Google's demand to not censor by burying the answer under layers upon layers of ads and other "related" questions.
I was so glad to see SO eat their lunch.
load more comments
(1 replies)
It will endure as long as the LLM's on there know how to misinterpret the question and fire back snarky unhelpful answers about how clueless you are for asking in the first place.
Like it or hate it (personally I prefer the latter, posting there I felt like a middle schooler with a PUNCH ME sticker on my face) it was a great source of indexable data on programming.
I wonder how will this affect future search and llms, now that all similar questions are being asked in private llm threads.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Ai haters out there, doesn't this give a valid use case for LLM?
SO is a collaborative encyclopedia of technical discussion that tries to be relevant, be practical, and to not constantly repeat topics.
LLMs can't provide that structure, they just shit out answers.
Most people think SO is a help desk and don't appreciate the structure and just want it to shit out an answer.
Maybe SO isn't dying so much as a cancerous growth is being treated.
view more: next ›