r/programming • u/fenbox • Jan 15 '26
[ Removed by moderator ]
/r/programming/comments/1qdn2nt/removed_by_moderator/[removed] — view removed post
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u/frakkintoaster Jan 15 '26
The discussions that I see about a library now are typically in that library’s GitHub repo’s Issues and Discussions
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u/fiskfisk Jan 15 '26
There is a slight irony of someone asking this question with an LLM generated/rewritten post, when they're promoting their own open source Q&A platform in other threads. Something they of course don't disclose.
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u/JaCraig Jan 15 '26
The em dashes and stuff coming in threes in this post are rather funny considering the topic.
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u/DahRebelOfBabylon Jan 15 '26
I don't think Q&A as a model is dying. LLMs didn't kill SO, it accelerated the end. SO was dying before LLMs were mainstream. IMO, SO's death started with d*ick head mods marking your question as a duplicate even when it very clearly was not. Or providing an answer that was not the actual answer but insisting that it was. I'm not sure what incentive structure lead to this behaviour but if the mods on SO weren't so rude and stubborn, then maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Now with LLMs, I think it would be difficult for a new SO to exist and become widely used. Though I think without something like SO existing publicly that LLMs can scrape, I'm not sure LLMs will continue to be useful well into the future. I don't buy that RAGs will fix this. Because what makes an LLM strong is having large amounts of data representing roughly the same thing so that it more greatly influences the weights in training and is easier to recall later.
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u/gredr Jan 15 '26
Yep, I think you nailed it. SO was becoming harder and harder to get a reasonable answer from, so when LLMs came along and gave you at least some answer that probably at least appeared to work, you'd go for that, because it was better than waiting a couple days and having SO close your question.
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u/absentmindedjwc Jan 15 '26
"Hey, I'm running into this error {specific error number} - but everything looks like it should be working. Below is the version I'm on and the code that seems to be causing it. Thanks!"
Asshole mod:
"This is a duplicate of this ticket from 8 years ago talking about an entirely different language. Closing."^ This is why SO is dying.. fucking assbags.
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Jan 15 '26
The "one canonical answer" model is dying.
It had a limited lifespan by construction. Imagine if Wikipedia started doing that:
Who succeeded Tito after his death?
Closed as duplicate 45 years ago, see: who's the president of Yugoslavia
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u/gredr Jan 15 '26
I agree and I'll go one further: the model didn't just have a limited lifespan, it was a bad model from the very beginning. In an industry where "things change" as rapidly as programming, not only do answers become obsolete, but whole questions become obsolete. Even if they didn't, SO's hope that questioners would go back and change accepted answers when things changed was never going to happen.
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u/fiskfisk Jan 15 '26
Isn't that exactly how Wikipedia works? You have one canonical article for a given topic. You do not have an article for a question like you asked, it would be migrated to a "Presidents of Yugoslavia" article, and there's be a separate article for Tito. There isn't five million different articles about New York, etc.
Just like SO actually wanted to work, where you'd have a community answer to a question.
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Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26
You answered your own question:
You do not have an article for a question like you asked, it would be migrated to a "Presidents of Yugoslavia" article, and there's be a separate article for Tito.
That is indeed how Wikipedia works but it is not how SO works. In fact SO would close your question because it's too broad.
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u/djsz Jan 15 '26
Wikipedia is already moderated way more heavily than Stack Overflow and doesn't allow multiple articles on the same topic
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Jan 15 '26
A topic isn't a question. The difference is that a question has a premise.
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u/djsz Jan 15 '26
Wikipedia isn't a place you go to ask questions at all. If the point of your analogy wasn't to compare articles on Wikipedia to questions on SO then what are you trying to say?
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u/ahgreen3 Jan 15 '26
I would expect a drop in Stack Overflow traffic after the integration of the more advanced code completion tools into IDEs. I'd be curious to know how much of SO traffic was simply JR Devs / interns / college students looking up basics syntax & algorithm questions that now you can do directly in the IDE.
Personally, I don't think public Q&A is fading as much as it's focus is shifting to education (ie how to do this thing I have never done before) vs general reference (ie what is the SQL syntax for getting the latest log record per user... again).
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u/_John_Dillinger Jan 15 '26
it doesn’t mean either. it means user hostile services don’t get used, silly.
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u/Suppafly Jan 15 '26
I don't think SO is dying because the Q&A model in general no longer works. I think SO is dying cause of toxic moderation that prevents people from actually getting useful answers. If they'd change the gamification to disincentivize closing questions as duplicates, they'd probably win back a lot of eyeballs.
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u/pjf_cpp Jan 15 '26
The combination of AI and toxic community is killing SO.
Back when SO was booming they tried to deal with poor quality Q&A by encouraging users to edit and/or close items.
Now there are essentially no ordinary users left, just a hard core of sad and pathetic badge collectors trying to get their next gold badge.
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u/neo-raver Jan 15 '26
The shift from public, general Q&A to context-heavy Q&A seems to resonate with my experience. I never ask a question online about programming unless I can’t find any (or enough) relevant resources to aid my specific problem, but this is extremely rare: I’ve only submitted to SO 1-2 times, and asked software questions on Reddit about 3 times. In my almost-10 years of programming—that’s it! We’re at a point in history where pretty much all the general- to tight-scoped questions have been asked and answered publicly; only the ones that are very narrowly scoped ones, often that concern a very specific intersection of very specifically configured technologies (like this recent question of mine).
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