StackOverflow has lost 77% of new questions compared to 2022. Lowest # since May 2009.

Every single time I open the perfect question the only answer is “we already covered this, use the search”

This is how the Internet has always been imo. You're running into the same trolls we've been dealing with since we first got on the fucking Internet. Some people just cannot interact with others without being rude as fuck because they're jaded assholes. So what if you've seen the same thing 80 times? Move along if you don't care.

I feel for you. Being a computer nerd in general, I've had to deal with this antisocial behavior forever. You really wonder why they even bother to go to places like this if they hate other people so much. I think it's just because they want to lord over others because that's all they have.

I take time to explain why they aren’t duplicates of similar questions.

Ha yes I've found that if you explain why your question isn't a duplicate of another question and link to it, people are more likely to report it as a duplicate of that question. So stupid.

It’s such a good idea at the base level. Reputation allows additional privilege so that the people who know the most on a topic can contribute more than screaming idiots. But the lust for a higher rep score drives toxic behavior. Thus you get people in control that know how to game the system not the actual experts. I’ve had great experiences in that site, and I’ve had terrible ones. Most the great ones are because I joined in the very early days and we were really all trying to help each other. As the rep addicts took over, I bailed. By that point there were you tube tutorials to fill the gap. I’m nostalgic for what that site was. It’s very sad to see what it became.

i tried to find another post saying this to make a duplicate question joke, but apparently when you type 77% into Voyager it crashes the app lol
https://github.com/aeharding/voyager/issues/1801#issue-2780882871

It doesn't help that some of the duplicates aren't duplicates at all but some SO admin or mod hasn't read or understood the question properly and points the asker at something that's actually only vaguely related or irrelevant.

I'm pretty sure I've also heard of askers providing links to other questions that are similar to but not quite what they're interested in, explained why their question is different and yet it's one of those linked questions that ends up being identified as being identical to the asker's question.

There may also be at least one pair of questions that each point back at the other as being the original, and there's no useful information in either. (I don't know why this idea is in my head though, so maybe it was a joke I read somewhere.)

Either way, the admins and mods there do not like to be told they are wrong and will shut things down fast if it starts looking like they've made a mistake. Unfortunately for them, stories like this get out anyway.

Petty little overlords of the toxic waste dump of their own making.

I would imagine it’s more ChatGPT getting about as good as stackoverflow.

Couple that with the ability to ask a question without someone closing it as off topic, or a duplicate, or telling you you don’t actually need to do the thing you need to do, or bringing up the XY problem, or… well the list goes on.

ChatGPT might hallucinate sometimes but it’s nice about it and it fundamentally changes the barrier to entry to ask a question in the same way that stackoverflow once did.

Stackoverflow was a step change because it excelled at being a a great place to ask questions because they gamified people actually answering them.

ChatGPT is another step change because it makes it so you can get a similar quality answer instantly and without any of the social baggage. It also allows you to have follow-ups and get into a groove of question and answer. It’s not always right but I was pleasantly surprised using it to navigate unfamiliar libraries and apis and being able to drill down on something. Even when it got something wrong it got it right enough that I could course correct without having to argue back and forth with someone.

There has been a large exit the last few months too

Notably, it refers to answers, not the invalidity or duplication of a question.

I think it’s too much to close a question just because a different question happen to have the same answer. There might be a future answer that might apply to one, but not the other.

Depends on your problem. Newer languages seem to have much better docs than in the old days, so languages like Rust, Go and Typescript seem very underrepresented by Stackoverflow activity compared to public Github activity.

Im a software developer and im not sure of another forum site to use and when I was learning my trade Stackoverflow was a hostile place full of arrogant people.

This will probably be downvoted cause LLMs bad, but our small company of 7 including owners have embraced LLMs. So I use CoPilot in Vidual Studio Professional and ChatGPT.

Now it should be understood that if you ask questions about software development it is going to: 100% correct, mostly correct but you need to refine it, or it’s just plain wrong.

I don’t know how useful it will be in learning and I guess it depends on how good you are right now, but as an experienced dev I have found it invaluable.

My boss who is the lead engineer and the smartest person I’ve ever met believes using LLMs has done the work of one employee for us, in terms of time saving and having less experienced devs like me use CoPilot means I am taking less of him time every day for problems I can’t quite solve. We do have some tools that utilize LLMs, for instance I can create a C# Model and our tool will go and create the schemas and a graphql layer and some basic views as we use a lot of boilerplate which is boring to keep writing out and a waste of time. We should be solving new problems not already solved ones.

Finally if you ever need any help or just want to ask a dev some questions about code or the industry in general, then reach out.

Edit: It is interesting to see this being downvoted and upvoted about evenly. Wish people would voice why they downvote. Like what are they downvoting exactly.

Most questions on stackoverflow are trivial. I assume those people now use llvms, as those are good enough for this kind of problem

ChatGPT or Claude. Just be aware that sometimes they'll get things convincingly wrong. If you're new to programming and asking simple questions then it should be relatively uncommon though.

I usually just look into the docs, for most of the more basic things, search engine will find you the related function, and the docs usually have usage examples.

Also, learning to work with and read a documentation will be one of the best skills you can acquire as a programmer. I was so glad I was used to docs, because when I started to work with libraries that are under NDA (porting games on consoles, most prominently PS5), where the only resource you have are docs and internal forums without any kind of tutorials, being able to figure out what you need from docs is really nice skill to have.

I have tried using AI for non NDA programming questions, and usually I've ran into an issue that it simply just halucinates even on basic questions. For example, I was trying to figure out how to prevent Quest from sleeping, so we can run long-running automated tests, and all of the solutions were adb parameters that do not exist. Unless it's something super basic, AI will probably just send to you the wrong direction.