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

I've never even dared to make an account there to ask questions because they've always been toxic as fuck. And lately they've been going about pivoting to AI, after they sorta monopolized the "business" of answering questions on several subjects... They can go eat my ass with that shit and attitude.

Manually using a site like that to ask others for information will be irrelevant very shortly. I give it another year or two.

Duplicated question.

-Link to another completely unrelated question that was left unanswered.

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

I stopped asking questions there because I usually spend about twenty to thirty minutes writing them to make sure they're clear and not duplicates. I take time to explain why they aren't duplicates of similar questions. The I get downvoted and I get my question closed. Then the site tells me to do things and I do them but no one else knows what I'm talking about and I get mocked for not knowing how the site works. That community is toxic as fuck. Genuinely, users spend more effort and energy looking for reasons to not answer something than they do trying to make questions answerable. Heaven forbid anyone give a reason for any of this. Just gotta get their daily stats to rank up.

Seriously, the one thing SO could've had going for it in the wake of AI is the human aspect, but they haven't fixed their community problems in years.

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.
- "An answer to the linked question answers your question, so we've marked your question as a duplicate. Even though your question is different.💜 Also, a bunch of people downvoted your question too did not spotting that an answer on an unrelated question answers your question. And we give you notifications of it. And they're big, scary red numbers! But don't worry, this helps the site!"
  
  And then none of the answers there answer what you're asking. 🙄 Which like, if they did, the whole process might have been worth it.
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.
- My favorite ever SO experience was this time I found a dude who had had my exact problem four years earlier. The thread was the only google result for the error message I was getting that wasn't just random pasted log files, etc.
  
  Two people who had no idea how to fix it gave him some useless suggestions, then crickets.
  
  9 months later, he had come back and posted
  
  I solved my problem!
  
  dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=5M
  
  I wish I'd saved the link.
- So many things about the site sound great on paper. Like Meta? Amazing! But they never listen. I remember when they took Interpersonal.SE off of the Hot Network Questions list over a damn tweet somebody made. Apparently random tweets get more attention than posts in their dedicated community discussion location.
  
  And I still am angry about them dragging Monica through the mud.

I’ve blocked SO from my search results. Either the answers or useless and wrong, or they point to another thread, where the answer has also been useless and wrong. Not to mention how passive aggressive the people there are, all because they want to farm imaginary points

A few years ago I had a software problem, and in the course of trying to solve it I found someone with almost the identical problem on SO, although no-one had posted a solution. Later on, I managed to piece some facts together and come up with a solution that worked for me. Trying to make life easier for others having the same problem, I posted my solution to that SO question, along with a brief explanation of what I thought the underlying problem was, and how my solution addressed it.

I got several upvotes, and one or two comments from people saying it worked for them too, which was nice. There was also a post from someone it didn't work for, and they outlined why they thought that might be, which was constructive.

Unfortunately there was also some salty grump who weighed in just to tell me that my solution wasn't "correct". Not that it didn't work mind you, just that it wasn't good enough for them. As far as I bothered to look into their vague comments, my solution may have fixed the issue more as a side-effect than directly, but it did fix the issue. Meanwhile this person offered no alternative instructions of their own.

As time goes on, I seem to run across this sort of -- not just unhelpful but "anti-helpful" -- attitude more and more often on SO.

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.

They can go fuck themselves. I don't even post and it's aggravating how many questions I see go unanswered because they declare it a duplicate or something else to make it invalid. I see it more commonly now when I have more complex issues. Thanks but that post you linked to being the "original" is not the solution. They don't even gain anything from doing this. Don't you WANT more traffic by having more questions posted and answered?!

I asked a very good, thoughtful question yesterday and within 5 minutes got a downvote with no comment or explanation or feedback as to why. Ive got around 3k rep, not while im not a poweruser or whatever i aint new to it.

Glad other people engaged with it productively, but yea was a real "this is what people have been talking about"

I've given up asking. I've been on the site since 2008, the last time i asked something and actually got an answer was 2017.

I assume this is a mix of AI stuff being a more common Oracle for this stuff and StackOverflow clinging to old answers and questions as being forever relevant.

Every single time I open the perfect question the only answer is “we already covered this, use the search”
They're only relevant until they're not.

Maybe that IS forever, but only so far.

I asked 1 high-quality question in 2024, and it was closed almost immediately, and I haven't engaged with the site since.

If someone with 20,000+ karma has their nicely-formatted questions closed so quickly, what must the newbies and rank-in-file encounter? This is probably a big reason why it's declining.

It's a high quality question, yes.

The close as already answered elsewhere is valid though. It's not saying that the question is wrong; at least a decade ago StackOverflow explicitly allowed and encouraged asking the same question in different ways so they and their answers can be found.

It's about operator precedence. And the referenced question asks the same thing, about ?? and a comparison operator.

The head note says:

This question already has an answer here:

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

The header also mentions [previously] opinion based, so I looked into the question edit history. It most certainly was not a "high quality" question at the beginning - at the very least to the degree it looks like now.

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.
- Do you think that applies to this question?
  
  Null coalesce operator vs comparison operator precedence? Both questions are about that. I don't see one having a different answer to the other. In that case, duplication would only lead to spread out partially outdated information, instead of one place being updated.

I'm new to programming and still in training. Is there a replacement competitor site for stack overflow that people use?

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.
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

Can this be explained by the fact that the Internet already has satisfactory answers to more and more questions, so there is less need to actively ask new ones?

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.
- Bleh, maybe I'm an old man, but when I'm searching stackoverflow, I find the context of stack overflow answers really helpful.
  
  I.E. the top result may include caveats itself or have comments indicating why an answer might be problematic. And sometimes the best answer isn't even the top answer. I've not used AI code assistance very much, but these all seem like things that the model is likely to take for granted.
  
  But I also never contribute to stackoverflow, and agree I'd much rather engage with with an AI than do THAT.
There has been a large exit the last few months too
- Can you please tell me why? I read about it and made a lot of noise but I forgot what it was about.
  
  If i recall A lot of power user even threaten to delete their post as strike?

Find myself wondering if the quality of the remaining questions is higher. There definitely has airways been some of the gate keeping that people complain about, but a lot of it has also legitimately been people upset that they get redirected upon asking low quality or duplicate questions.

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.
- See this is what I'm talking about. You're saying you've heard stories. I bet some of them are legitimate criticism, but I'm also positive many of them are from people that couldn't put on the bare minimum of effort when asking for help from strangers on the internet.