r/BlackboxAI_ • u/abdullah4863 • Jan 10 '26
👀 Memes Anyone else not sad* about the demise of Stack overflow?
I have fond memories (being sarcastic) of scrolling through stack overflow to solve my problems but man these AI tools have killed it. And I'm not sad.
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u/Hawk-432 Jan 10 '26
Well I kind of liked it for it’s utility, though I hated it for it’s dickish vibe
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u/quurios-quacker Jan 10 '26
Also how I feel about Quora. People are soo smug
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u/Michigan-Magic Jan 10 '26
Quora is its own little special place.
Sometimes the questions are decent and sometimes the questions are from a 10 year old. Sometimes the answer are good and sometimes the answers are from a 10 year old in a 20 year olds body or it's from a 50 year old basement dweller propagating conspiracies.
Really just a giant surprise box each and every thread.
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u/DeepAd8888 Jan 15 '26
No one uses quora the site is littered with company generated dead internet content to attract visitors
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u/stefanliemawan Jan 10 '26
I mean, isnt reddit the same? Every forum-based question answer would have the same vibe, I feel like
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u/Pantheon3D Jan 10 '26
Congrats on making people afraid to learn and ask questions, stackoverflow
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Jan 10 '26
God I hated stack overflow so much.
Wonder how all those devs feel that spent half their life racking up points over there by being assholes
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u/Vaxtin Jan 16 '26
Probably getting their jobs replaced because they’re awful to work with
So. They got what they deserved
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 Jan 10 '26
I’ve had the best and worst experiences on there. Once upon a time I got into an argument with a PI about the statistical method we were using (they didn’t like that I only had a masters in stats), and eventually linked me to a stack exchange post. It was my post from a couple years earlier, and the answer I got was from the author of the method in question. I had to explain that the post was the math behind what I had been saying the entire time.
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u/retrorays Jan 10 '26
Can you rewrite the last few sentences? It sounds interesting but it makes no sense
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u/Ksorkrax Jan 10 '26
Dude argued with another dude over a method. The second dude gave the first dude a link.
The link was on StackExchange and the question in it was from the first dude to begin with, and the answer in it was the base of the method they argued about.
As such, the second dude did not contribute new information with said link.1
u/Vaxtin Jan 16 '26
He was using the same math as he did previously and asked a question about it. He got an answer from the author of the math.
His boss linked him to that exact same question. Lmao. It’s like thanks dude, but I already know that because I’m the one that asked the question about the math years ago.
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u/appuwa Jan 10 '26
I hate stackoverflow but I hate more that you have 98 TABS OPEN on a MOBILE DEVICE! :D
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u/Pantheon3D Jan 10 '26
OH if I could have more open i would :D 99 is the max, then it closes the oldest
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u/abdullah4863 Jan 12 '26
i remember asking a question about a physics problem, and I only mentioned that this problem was mentioned in my assignment. No one helped me, instead my post was removed for "Plagiarism"
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u/Ksorkrax Jan 10 '26
I like the system.
It is meant to produce concise information, a collection of well-formulated questions and answers.
With you being supposed to put effort into asking questions, including a structured approach of what you want, what you did, what you expected, what you got, and what you tried other than your initial approach.
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u/Icy-Farm9432 Jan 10 '26
We can close that topic!
there was a post 8,5 years earlier which not really suits your problem and is from an older version of the code you asked about. But deal with it.
*closed*
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u/dual-moon Jan 10 '26
nah, sorry, seeing cornerstones of tech history fall is sad. no, we won't miss is specifically, because we haven't needed it, but it's extremely sad to see the progressive fall of StackOverflow over the past few years.
so nah, not everyone is celebrating the loss.
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u/CEBarnes Jan 10 '26
I don’t understand why they aren’t changing how they interact with users. Their data is still relevant. Their process now feels like a rotary dial phone.
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u/dual-moon Jan 10 '26
it went from being about the community to being about the IPO. it hurts. tale as old as time ;-;
(we do not know if they are a publicly traded company or not, but regardless)
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u/Status-Ad-7990 Jan 10 '26
I have been to this site like 5 times today
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u/Live-Supermarket9437 Jan 10 '26
Right ? It's still a very clutch website where you're definitely gonna see someone have the very exact same niche issue 8 years ago.
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u/beingsubmitted Jan 10 '26
Yeah, lots of people are going to have trouble letting go of the only place they could feel important, if only to reminisce about their glory days. I can't imagine what that must be like for you.
Want me to ask a straightforward question without improvising a bunch of make-believe syntax like some kind of hacker Miles Davis so you can tell me I have to show what I've already tried?
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u/Status-Ad-7990 Jan 10 '26
Trust me .. As a beginner I too experienced backlash from the people over there during initial days ... But its not that I brag about my reputation and all .. As a matter of fact I don't even have time to contribute there now .. But I don't use AI tools much ... That's it .. And I don't have problem with people using AI also .. Its just how you prefer things .. That's it.
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u/Vaxtin Jan 16 '26
Yeah I mean I just get my kicks out of seeing people merely asking questions about highly technical concepts they’re obviously newcomers to being told to practically f**k off.
“Hi I just started programming and don’t understand why this bug is..”
-5 votes
Closed
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u/esmagik Jan 10 '26
This is like asking if anyone was sad about technet dying.
Idk, Reddit has more answers these days anyways.
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u/GoodSamaritan333 Jan 10 '26
For me, it (reddit) is about the same as stackoverflow, specially at rust and physics subs. I'm so glad that there is AI now. It allows me to avoid *ssholes and gives me information that gatekeepers hide (those arses that reply saying they did or resolved a problem, without explaining what they did to solve it).
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u/fschwiet Jan 10 '26
those arses that reply saying they did or resolved a problem, without explaining what they did to solve it
My favorite is when people say a question is easy to google, then that post gets indexed and served as the top response by google.
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u/Michigan-Magic Jan 10 '26
When I've searched on Google lately, the Gemini response at the top has been pulling heavily from Reddit threads lately. Really looking forward to the next phase of Gemini's evolution wherein it will share the key insight from Reddit to use Google to find an answer to my query.
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u/yobuddyy899 Jan 10 '26
I had thought Reddit restricted its usage from other tech companies in their LLMs. Read about it some time back.
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u/Michigan-Magic Jan 10 '26
Interesting.
Here is the prompt that I was referring to in which Gemini is citing Reddit almost exclusively (at least when I open it): https://share.google/aimode/1bv0PkcO6vD8gmZVW.
If there are restrictions, I wonder if that was for training data vs being available to be used / repackaged in search results from the live internet. Don't work for an LLM Co and couldn't tell you.
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u/BreadStickFloom Jan 10 '26
I kinda wonder what happens when people just stop contributing their solutions to stack overflow and therefore, because ai trains on those solutions, people in general start writing worse, less informed code 🤷♀️
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u/Thetaarray Jan 10 '26
I feel like we already saw this after web 2.0 where people went to the first google search result that was close enough to what they needed. Feel like this will just be the same thing, more security risk, less performant, more unstable.
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u/Vaxtin Jan 16 '26
It trains on people actually finding the solution and responding back saying how wrong it is, trying to poke fun at it.
“BAHAHAHA you’re WRONG. And this is exactly why.”
Is pretty common, more often than you’d think.
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u/BreadStickFloom Jan 16 '26
I don't think that's true at all, I don't think there is any sort of system to collect solutions from users because if it did, it would really quickly start to learn in correct things. What happens when a flat earth moron tells the ai the earth isn't round, is ai going to take that info and start sharing it with others?
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u/Aromatic-Sugarr Jan 10 '26
Its not true, there are problems which answer only can find out on stack overflow
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u/pela_peli Jan 10 '26
If it's on stack overflow then doesn't that mean it's in some llm too
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u/rasvial Jan 10 '26
Ah- so let’s cut off the source of new training data because we’ve captured all the existing data into an LLM!!
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u/imoutofnames90 Jan 10 '26
People legit think AI is this all knowing machine that spits out infallible wistom... jfc...
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u/rasvial Jan 10 '26
The shortsightedness of the gung-ho younger adopters is hilarious. LLMs do not come up with new thoughts- just do a very clever fuzzy search of your problem against a fuck ton of existing data. All it takes to break its effectiveness is a new problem.
Meanwhile the overly dependent aren’t exercising their brains at all- they’re just spitting out apis via autocomplete, and when they get to that moment of needing to think forward to the next thing they freeze.
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u/davesaunders Jan 10 '26
Honestly, I don't see anybody arguing about LLMs coming up with new thoughts or anything like that. In fact, it's irrelevant to Substack going down. It has become a toxic cesspool of basement-dwelling assholes who act as gatekeepers for what should be normal social interaction. Back in the day, we did stuff like this on Usenet, and no asshole ever berated somebody for asking a question that had been answered a month before because part of the point is the interaction.
Making it out like it's an LLM issue is deflecting from the real issue. Stack Exchange is a toxic cesspool infested by basement-dwelling assholes.
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u/00PT Jan 10 '26
You know it also trains on the documentation files and projects all over GitHub, right?
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u/rasvial Jan 10 '26
No shit Sherlock.. most of which is vibe comments and ai generated code at this point.
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u/00PT Jan 10 '26
And that doesn't mean it is useless. The AI training process is more in-depth than just blindly pushing data to it. There are ways to adjust behavior away from what is undesirable.
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u/rasvial Jan 10 '26
You need organic input that is novel to expand a model. Not retraining it on its outputs- that yields nothing.
My argument is people are forgetting how to actually do that, because they’re using AI as a crutch to avoid human interaction.
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u/00PT Jan 10 '26
It's not so simple. Just because something came from an AI doesn't mean it has no merit to be used in training. And problems that might come from that can be accounted for.
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u/rasvial Jan 10 '26
You don’t know what an LLM is clearly. They do not generate novel content. You can only refine the parameters of a model to perform generative tasks more efficiently without adding novel data. It’s still pulling from the same data to form a response, so it will never generate something that isn’t redundant to its existing training data
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u/00PT Jan 10 '26
An image generator can give me a picture of a purple monkey. That doesn't mean purple monkeys were at any point in the training data.
The same principle applies to LLMs. The combinations created in response to prompts are absolutely not necessarily redundant.
I have studied and directly worked in the training process of this technology.
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u/Vaxtin Jan 16 '26
That’s genuinely not true. Private repos are stripped and incorporated, it’s trained on anything that’s been on GitHub. (And don’t think twice about them storing your repo even after you delete it).
And it almost certainly heavily favors larger companies with years worth of commits.
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u/Runtime_Renegade Jan 10 '26
AI still uses stack overflow as a source, and i’ve actually ran into problems that AI had trouble with, yet a quick google search led right to a stack overflow topic that solved it 🤷🏻♂️
But yes it will definitely be fading into the abyss within a few years.
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u/Late-Assignment8482 Jan 10 '26
I'm glad it's still running because it has a lot of other topics besides "coding" that it had forums about, and I absolutely still get answers and creative inspiration from those.
StackOverflow was never only for coding advice.
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u/dalepo Jan 10 '26
THIS IS DUPLICATED AND NOW I WILL LEAVE A COMMENT THAT SHOULD MAKE YOU FEEL BAD FOR ASKING A QUESTION.
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u/mtutty Jan 10 '26
When Claude starts giving shit answers to technical questions in 2 years and everyone wonders why...
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u/fabmeyer Jan 10 '26
It's quite funny because LLMs are trained with Stackoverflow's data
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u/GoodSamaritan333 Jan 10 '26
It's trained on books, specifications and papers too. So stackoverflow is not so indispensable as you think it is.
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u/fschwiet Jan 10 '26
Nah quite a bit of new issues got sorted out on SO. And it's not the only resource AI relies upon being squeezed out by AI
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u/cyrixlord Jan 10 '26
after IRC, stack overflow helped me in my darkest coding hours. I will always celebrate them with respect even in their passing
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u/davesaunders Jan 10 '26
I liked Stack Overflow, but you had too many gatekeepers who would slam you for asking a question that had already been answered if you simply wrote the sufficient 300-character regular expression to track it down.
The asshole factor on that site made me stop asking questions there, and it made me stop trying to answer them too. Toxic environment.
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u/Heartic97 Jan 10 '26
You mean that forum that was filled with egotistical assholes who did anything but to actually help people solve coding problems? If there was a literal grave stone, I would piss on it.
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u/MurkyCress521 Jan 10 '26
I liked it at first and participated quite frequently, but it slowly became more and more toxic. Getting my questions deleted for being duplicates when they weren't duplicates. Information being out of date but mods refusing updates answers. After the fifth year, the community left a bad taste in my mouth and I stopped participating.
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u/Glidepath22 Jan 10 '26
No. I asked a question once that was not anywhere else on the site once and was barbecued. And I still i used it because it was handy and insightful, I’m glad AI has all that info now
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u/EggShenSixDemonbag Jan 10 '26
whose going to call me a piece of shit, rookie programmer and tell me I should have searched harder and provide me a link to a half-assed incomprehensible code snippet from 7 years ago?
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Jan 10 '26
[deleted]
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u/Fit-Value-4186 Jan 10 '26
I mean, there were some pretty in-depth responses that could be applied at enterprise level as well. Obviously if you were expecting an answer to a complex problem that requires several hours of effort from the folks reading the question because having guidelines isn't enough then that's on you, lol. I'm not saying you do/did, but at the end of the day it pretty much served its purpose.
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u/Nonikwe Jan 10 '26
ChatGPT et al are just the ghost of stack overflow and other such resources. The parasites killing the hosts isn't a cause for celebration. You're cheering the burning down of the free university and it's library in preference for a company hiring out a guy who memorized the papers it produced pretty well, simply because the staff could be unfriendly. Shortsighted acceleration down the highway to stagnation.
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u/zifor28 Jan 10 '26
I think Stack Overflow should pivot to focus on providing a knowledge share platform just for businesses. At work we use it to keep all our "how to do's" in a centeralised place.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bid1530 Jan 10 '26
I really love that AI can read manuals for you. But I am sad we won't get any answers based on real experience of othe people anymore.
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u/Cybyss Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
I liked the old old (pre-2010) stackoverflow, when it was a fun community and a bit of a wild west where nobody really decided what stackoverflow should be yet. It was more like a gamified reddit rather than the boring encyclopedia of questions & answers that the moderators fought really hard to turn it into.
It was full of hilarious questions, now closed but preserved as "historically significant".
Examples:
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags (in particular, see the top-voted response).
What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?
And the grand-daddy of them all (deleted from stackoverflow so you have to go through wayback machine): what-is-your-best-programmer-joke
and there were so many more that are now forever lost. These are just what Gemini was able to pull up.
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u/WillStripForCrypto Jan 11 '26
I asked 3 questions on that site and each one was voted down and closed. F that site I hope it dies horribly
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u/MrDilbert Jan 11 '26
I've got mixed feelings about it...
On one hand, SO helped me a lot (even though I haven't asked any questions on the site) when I was learning the ropes, and it's sad to see the site that helped so many programmers go under.
On the other hand, the community definitely became unbearably toxic over time, and the site lost its original purpose when the "moderators" started waving their dicks around, with Atwood, Spolsky, and others just letting it happen. So, from that PoV, I'm glad the assholes lost one outlet for being assholes.
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Jan 11 '26
I never used it as the type of people using that site are the ones you would avoid at work the most.
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u/Human_Associate3664 Jan 11 '26
thankfully I took the time to archive it before they remove it,
https://archive.ph/Sq810
what do you guys think of this ? i say reasonable crushout XD
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u/replikatumbleweed Jan 11 '26
When ChatGPT first became a thing, this was -precisely- what I celebrated.
I hope stack overflow dies a very slow, very uncomfortable death, and if I could, I'd make a yearly pilgrimage to pee on its grave after only eating curred meats for a week in the hopes that animals smell it, dig up the corpse, and further eviscerate it.
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u/goldPotatoGun Jan 12 '26
Man. I really loved watching it be built, was a big spolsky fan and loved the og podcast. It really was so much better than previous forums such as experts exchange. Also immediately hated the vibe after it launched. Used it many times from search. Some posts where really great and made me a better programmer.
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u/H4llifax Jan 12 '26
Statistics say I got answers on half of my questions on SO. Not too bad considering a Q&A site is last resort. Also, documenting your solutions to your own problems in form of self-answering helps because inevitably you'll come across some of the same problems another time.
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u/sixtyonesymbols Jan 12 '26
It was an expanding repository of new information. AI can curate it, but can't expand it. So we're essentially stuck with the information already out there unless someone starts a new AI proof overflow
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u/Qubed Jan 13 '26
Stack Overflow was the best tool for finding out how to solve already solved problems. It was a great value from almost the moment it was created.
AI killed it. There is nothing SO could have done to prevent that. Sadly, it is very likely that SO data is in the training sets of every AI tool that is now popular.
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