This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance
Yeah, exactly. A lot of groups have a Discord :( or other forums where people ask questions. I know I've had to ask questions on Svelte's Discord :( for example. And I think even once on some YouTube influencer's Slack...
Sucks cuz both of those places are silos and my questions and answers are forever lost.
Projects that use Discord for support piss me right off. What a stupid way to keep answering the same question over and over again.
I used it once in high school, got called a retard for asking a beginner question, then avoided it like the plague for 20 years.
Hey look everyone it's that retard from stack overflow!
Aw shit, not again.
People seem to be happy because of SO becoming irrelevant. I really don't get it, I used this website for many years now and for me it is the second (after Wikipedia) most valuable source of knowledge. The UI is clean, no intrusive adds, best answer is the most visible. Threads are well organised and on topic. No spam, no dark patterns, no wasting your time. Discoverability is great, you can easily browse and learn knew things. It is also SEO friendly. Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?
best answer is the most visible
no wasting your time
These two points aren't always true in my experience. On more than a few occasions, I have encountered posts that look similar to the problems that I am facing, but because of a slight nuance (on the surface), the answers suggested won't help.
Usually, my search would hit a deadend here. At this point, I guess the best course of action is to create a new post. Unfortunately, these new posts would then get closed as a duplicate of the similar post - even though the problem in that particular context still hasn't been solved
Not terribly surprising, Google would often direct me to StackOverflow threads as I was googling for an answer to a question. And as often as not, either the question was closed; or, instead of anyone providing an answer, the commenters would spiral off into questioning everything about the original question asker's life choices. While I do get the whole XY Problem, this sort of thing seemed to be over-used on SO.
Granted, I don't know if AI answers are any better. Sure, they can answer a lot of the simple questions, but I've not seen them be useful on hard, more obscure questions. Probably because those questions don't have ready answers on SO.
I've lost count the number of times where I try to find something in SO, and it's just someone posting the exact same example code as the answer. Or someone suggesting you just google it. Then I ask ChatGPT... and I get an answer.
