TBH asking questions on SO (and most similar platforms) fucking sucks, no surprise that users jump at the first opportunity at getting answers another way.
Removed. Someone else already said this before. Also, please ensure you stick to the stlye guides next time, and be less ambiguous. SO could mean a plethora of things.
Spoiler
Last time this question was answered was for several years older software versions, and the old solutions don't work anymore. Whoops!
SO PTSD is real.
Git gud, n00b!
Yea it sucks, but quality is important so I get it.
According to a Stack Overflow survey from 2025, 84 percent of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76 percent a year earlier. This rapid adoption partly explains the decline in forum activity.
As someone who participated in the survey, I'd recommend everyone take anything regarding SO's recent surveys with a truckfull of salt. The recent surveys have been unbelievably biased with tons of leading questions that force you to answer in specific ways. They're basically completely worthless in terms of statistics.
Realistically though, asking an LLM what’s wrong with my code is a lot faster than scrolling through 50 posts and reading the ones that talk about something almost relevant.
It's even faster to ask your own armpit what's wrong with your code, but that alone doesn't mean you're getting a good answer from it
LLM's won't be helping but SE/SO have been fully enshitifying themselves for years.
It was amazing in yhe early days.
It was a vast improvement over expert sex change, which was the king before SO.
imho the experience is miserable, they went out of their way to strip all warmth from messages (they have a whole automated thing to get rid of all greetings and things considered superfluous) and there are many incentives to score points by answering which frankly I find sad, it doesn't look like a forum where people exchange, it looks like a permanent run to answer and grow your point total
Stackexchange sites aren't intended as forums, they're supposed to be "places to find answers to questions".
The more you get away from stack overflow itself the worse they get, though, because anything beyond "how can I fix this tech problem" doesn't necessarily have an answer at all, much less a single best one
I mean, people who don't want their questions or answers included in an LLM won't use SO. When people want to ask a question and not be shut down or berated, they'll probably end up on HN.
Reported for duplicate.
Honestly just funny to see. It makes perfect sense, based on how they made the site hostile to users.
Already before the LLMs for me it was the last chance before I would post over there. The desperation move. It was too toxic and I would always get pissed to get my question closed because too similar or too easy or whatever. Hey I wasted 15 minutes to type that, if the other question solved the problem I wouldn't post again...
In the beginning it wasn't like that...
I went to watch my stack overflow account and the first questions that I posted (and that gave me 2000 karma) would have been almost all of them rejected and removed
"Search before asking!" - Stack Overflow
But what will the mods close for arbitrary reasons before there are any responses?
This is not because AI is good at answering programming questions accurately, it’s because SO sucks. The graph shows its growth leveling off around 2014 and then starting the decline around 2016, which isn’t even temporally correlated with LLMs.
Sites like SO where experienced humans can give insightful answers to obscure programming questions are clearly still needed. Every time I ask AI a programming question about something obscure, it usually knows less than I do, and if I can’t find a post where another human had the same problem, I’m usually left to figure it out for myself.
It's worth to mention that the StackOverflow survey referenced does not include many countries with also great/genius developers, including Belarus, Russia, China, Iran...
There are related cases raised on Meta scopes: Developer Survey 2025 is, apparently, region blocked...
Apparently, while I've being employed in security as software engineer for at least 19 years now, I've never ever considered these trendy LLM/"AI" all serious, and still do not.
Sorry, I have literally no interest in all of it that makes you dependent on it, atrophies mind, degrades research and social skills, and negates self-confidencen with respect to other authors, their work, and attributions. Nor any of my colleagues in military and those I know better in person.
Constant research, general IDEs like JetBrains's, IDA Pro, Sublime Text, VS Code, etc. backed by forums, chats, and Communities, is absolutely enough for the accountable and fun work in our teams, who manage to keep in adequate deadlines.
Nor will use any LLM in my work, art, or research... I prefer people, communication, discoveries, effort, creativity, and human art...
I just disable it everywhere possible, and will do all my life. The close case to my environment was VS Code, and hopefully there's no reason to build it from source since they still leave built-in options to disable it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79534407/5113030 (How can I disable GitHub Copilot in VS Code?...)
Isn't it just inadequate to not think and develop your mind, and let alone pass control of your environment to a yet another model or "advanced T9" of unknown source of unknown iteration.
In pentesting, random black-box IO, medicine experimental unverified intel, log data approximation why not? But in environment control, education, art or programming, fine art... No, never ^^
Meanwhile... so freaking, incredibly many developers, artists are left without attribution, respect, gratitude...
So many people atrophy their skils for learning, contribution, researching, accumulation, self-organization...
So much human precious time is wasted...
So much gets devalued...
The time will show... and just a few actually accountable will recover only, probably...
This is so heartache... sorrowful...
Even before AI I stopped asking any questions or even answering for that matter on that website within like the first few months of using it. Just not worth the hassle of dealing with the mods and the neck beard ass users and I didn't want my account to get suspended over some BS in case I really needed to ask an actual question in the future, now I can't remember the last time I've been to any stack website and it does not show up in the Google search results anymore, they dug their own grave
I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn't copy/pasting code.
And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.
But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don't have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren't really upset at "having" to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.
Hear hear, it was the hostile atmosphere that pushed me away from Stack Exchange years before LLMs were a thing. That very clear impression that the site does not exist to help specific people, but a vague public audience, and the treatment of every question and answer is subjugated to that. Since then I just ask/answer questions on platforms like Lemmy, Reddit, Discord, or the Discourse forums ran by various organisations, it's a much more pleasant experience.
I post there every 6-12 months in the hope of receiving some help or intelligent feedback, but usually just have my question locked or removed. The platform is an utter joke and has been for years. AI was not entirely the reason for its downfall imo.
Serious question here. LLMs trained their data off SO. Developers now ask LLMs for solutions instead of SO. New technology comes out that LLMs don’t have indexed. Where will LLMs get their data to train on for new technologies? You can’t exactly feed it a manual and expect it to extrapolate or understand (for that matter “what manual).
Yes, that is the major problem with LLMs in general. There is no solution aside from "train on another different source (like Reddit)", but then we rinse & repeat.
Oh no, poor AI won't know where to feed anymore. Anyway...
go ai, go broke
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
