Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.

I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.

AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.

The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.

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mort96 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.

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MeetingsBrowser 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered

I don’t buy this.

Programming as an industry is famous for constantly evolving and changing.

	▲	f311a 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yet the most viewed questions are about how to undo git commit, how to sort an array, how to select stuff in jquery, how to group by in SQL and so on. General questions about programming languages, SQL and git don't change that much.

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pydry 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

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embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent [-]

- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only"

- Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library

- Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked

- Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs

- Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP

- Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong

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jeanlucas 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Usually #1 actually works, most cases, and missing discord, several healthy communities on Discord nowadays

	▲	alloyed 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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antonvs 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You’re using your mom for rubber duck debugging, then. An LLM can work for that as well, usually better because it knows a lot more than your mom.

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's fictional, I never actually got burned by a tech lead nor been put on PIP either, nor asked my mom to help me with programming :)

	▲	antonvs 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's not really relevant, the point is LLMs are actually pretty good for the scenario you described.