this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Programming
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A lot of people seem to be celebrating this, but I personally think this is a net negative for programming. Are people actually replacing SO with talking to LLMs? If not, where are they going?
I've seen an uptick in people using places like discord to get help. But that's not easily searchable and not in the same format that it is in stackoverflow. SO was meant to organize these answers to make asking questions easier. Now it seems like we're walking away from that, and I can't quite understand why. Is it really because SO is "toxic"?
Yes. Stack overflow was a cruel, selfish, horrible emperor and now the dynasty of technical knowledge is crumbling.
If everyone moves to LLMs then there will not be a central repository of knowledge. That is the fault of stack overflow. Their self-centered behavior directly caused this fracturing of knowledge.
If they had been decent human beings we would have had a library of information kept current with today's trends and technologies. Instead we're going to have to rely on paid AI models or fucking grok.
This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.
Who is the "they" in this? The volunteers who contributed to the site? StackOverflow isn't like a company or anything. No one is paid to answer questions there. They're all people who were working hard to make a collection of common questions with the best possible answers, and trying to uphold a certain standard for the content there.
Based on your comment, I think maybe we as a group just don't deserve stackoverflow. If we really are all now turning to LLMs instead (which are not in any way "decentralized") to get a bunch of statistical bullshit spit at us instead of, you know, the actual right answer, then maybe we deserve what will happen next.
it's owned by Prosus, acquired for $1.8 billion in 2021.
Yes, but they're not the ones producing all of the content. Again, that's produced by volunteers.
Again, the attitude comes down from the top. Volunteers whose ethics (contempt and superiority) align with the executive staff are rewarded, and those that don't are let go. I don't know if you're ignorant or being deliberately obtuse? Please think about what I wrote.