I reached out for help. The standard response from everyone fell between ignoring me or telling me I need to "do it myself".
You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.
This part makes the entire post sound like a parody. Maybe Jeff Atwood has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor?
Yeah no, ask for help on Stack Overflow and you were were more likely to be met with castigation and snide remarks. It was such a breath of fresh air when ChatGPT let us not have to deal with that community anymore.
I dunno man. In it's heyday, SO was pretty fucking awesome. IMHO. Just a massive amount of good information concentrated. And some bad, but a damn sight better than random Google searches even back then.
ChatGPT also isn’t going to tell you when your idea is a bad one and will happily assist you in your (unknowing) efforts to brick your computer. So there’s that.
You are very much talking about late era StackOverflow there.
What marked it out originally (and was visible in some other less-travelled StackExchange sites rather later) was a culture of holding replies to a sort of account in the reply comments; people urging each other to make their replies better-sourced, less hollow, more responsive.
The goal of being non-duplicative alas ultimately is always going to lead to a culture that polices itself too hard. I am an LLM cynic but I think it’s possible that LLMs could actually help steer that process more gently, guiding submitters to likely answers but also helping them fine-tune a more specific, narrow, never-asked question.
On the GrapheneOS forum, I enjoy answering the questions in a post of user who just set up their phone.
AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.
Humans are social animals. It's true that not all of these interactions re positive, but so much of what drives us is not even related to acclaim or flattery, but merely interaction in a general sense. In a sense this is one of the true perils of LLM-style interaction (going back to Eliza, I guess) -- that we can not only potentially satisfy that drive mechanically, but do so in a way that's structurally produced by a commercial entity. Do you think that the models talking to you have your best interests at heart? They don't have any interest in you at all.
My personal rule as a recovering grammar school victim: don’t correct nits if you’re not going to add some cool trivia or at least provide some gentle, kind way to navigate the same confusion next time.
Less/fewer is probably a lost cause, and a little bit of why is this kind of useless correction. If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.
ETA: a fun comment below points me to a running joke I was unaware of; my apologies if this was an instance of it that I missed. I am not really a television person but this feels like a significant bit of cultural ignorance on my part.
It's profoundly annoying that it's correct, isn't it! Every time I wince at reading something that feels wrong I have to remind myself that it’s ultimately only wrong because of convention.
(I do occasionally slip, and correct its/it's, your/you're or they're/their/there in someone's comment, but only if that comment is aggressively or nastily calling someone else stupid.)
Oh! If there is some running joke here that I missed then I stand admonished
I actually don't even know if the person you replied to was making this joke, or if they were being sincere, I'm speculating... but...
Is there a clip?
It was kind of a running joke on the show. Couldn't find a clip that encapsulates the whole thing, but the first clip here shows Stannis reflexively making the correction at various times as if it were like a tic:
Thank you so much for this! Definitely seems likely I just missed out on the joke.
I would guess that this is sort of an embedded joke about the use of British regional language/accents as a world building framework? A brief google suggests it is not from the books.
I am of the age/schooling/class background where people make this reflexive correction entirely unironically. I know several older people who do this, and I remember the cultural campaigns over the “ten items or less” signs in supermarkets.
Capitalism is optimized to produce products and services people want to buy which drives people wanting to work more hours. Which then drives up the costs of things that aren’t replicated endlessly like land and goods that are intentionally left scarce such as admission to elite institutions.
You can work dramatically less and still live well, but the sirens call is very seductive. Food, clothes, transportation, housing, etc all offer real value at minimal cost and little pushing you in that direction.
The flaw with this argument is the assumption people who control the LLMs is the sole problem. Plenty of people use LLMs for personal gain at the cost of others.
At some point LLM users and proponents have to come to terms with the fact that this has all been a massive theft of labor, including donated labor and mutual aid in forums such as Stack Overflow.
Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.
There are many ways to steal labor, violating copyright is one such way, but not all copyright violations is labor theft, nor does labor theft require copyright to be violated.
The problem is that this source of free labor has dried up, precisely because of AI.
I've noticed that in "programming" forums, questions have devolved.
In the "before times", you'd get a mix of simple-medium-hard-extreme questions.
Google and StackOverflow made most of the medium and hard questions disappear.
Now with LLMs, all the higher difficulty levels except "beyond extreme" have vanished, leaving only the stupidly difficult questions that nobody can answer -- and hence doesn't contribute to collective knowledge, including the AI's knowledge.
Conversely, there is a new level of "below simple" questions by people that I dare say are too stupid to even attempt to become software developers. The type of questions that can could always have been answered with just Google, and are "beneath" both AIs and humans. These are worthless questions along the lines of "my computer not work, plz halp!?" followed by "I can't reboot it!" as if that makes any sense.
Again, that contributes nothing of value to the zeitgeist.
Worse, because the effort required to spin up a blog is trivial now thanks to AI and people are getting desperate for work, I'm seeing a mountain of "slop coding blogs" that are either 100% low-cost-AI output full of errors, or organic human-origin slop... full of errors. No longer are blogs written by the "best of the best" to disseminate their hard earned knowledge, they're now an alternative to a resume and produced in bulk by the most junior developers hoping to land a job through "exposure".
This also massively dilutes the last remaining source of good public information to draw. Google searches are useless now because finds nothing but endless SEO garbage.
What's going to happen in 5 or 10 years from now, when all of the pre-AI knowledge[1] is stale and out of date, making it irrelevant, but there's no new knowledge being publicly produced to train on?
Will programming languages, tools, and frameworks ossify because new languages are "post-AI" and hence untrainable due to a lack of StackOverflow questions and answers?
Will AI labs build their own private "AI members only" version of StackOverflow, building up their internal knowledgebases for training, sharing this with nobody else?
Will humans be paid to solve problems for the sole purpose of generating AI training materials? Is this the future of knowledge work!?
The thing about this is, by the time ChatGpt came out, SO was dead and the site itself was essentially making its money on people's earlier answers. Not saying LLMs are great but they aren't the first to coast on appropriated labor.
Stack overflow was one of the best ways to learn and mature as an engineer “back in the day”. The
meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.
It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.
It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.
Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.
My experience was different. I'd post on StackOverflow as an absolute last resort when I couldn't solve my problem any other way. The knowledge there was great, the kindness was sorely lacking. That's what ultimately did it in if you ask me. It got a (deserved in my opinion) reputation for unkindness way before LLMs came on the scene.
I think that’s why Reddit and discord haven’t been harmed nearly as much. They have a reputation for being a lot kinder than stack overflow for basic questions. Meanwhile stack overflow was dead pretty much immediately after people got an alternative.
I think StackOverflow was actually dead before ChatGPT appeared. But ChatGPT was the final nail in the coffin, for the reason you mention.
And there was a time when I enjoyed answering question on StackOverflow but that time ended long before the end of the site. It started out kind of competitive but ended insanely competitive to the point that answering questions was a waste of time.
You touched on what made it great, along with other forums where devs helped each other: It was a pleasure to read and try to answer other people's questions. NOT for the points! Because you found out so much about the problems other people were trying to solve, parallel to your own. The good questions forced you think what would I do in that situation and become a better coder yourself.
I may have asked 20 questions on Stack Overflow in 20 years. But I probably answered several thousand. Whatever I was deeply interested in at the moment, there was no better way to learn more than to try to answer those tough questions. It was like a hobby, during a few minutes of downtime, to just cruise around looking for database optimization problems... the way some people might pick up a Sudoku puzzle. It would keep me in the zone.
A lot of the mods sucked, and they had to deal with deluges of spam from kids asking for answers to CS exam questions... but hunting for the really juicy questions that couldn't be answered with a search was part of the fun.
I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.
I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.
If you aren't using the incredible technology we have around us right now to accelerate your learning then it is us that should be mourning your loss of imagination.
I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.
I agree with the rest of your comment, and I sympathize with what you're saying here, but really this only applies when measuring engineers against a yardstick that frankly is rapidly in the process of no longer existing.
As an industry rather than an art form, software is measured by its output.
The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.
Au contraire, the reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and it was immediately closed as a duplicate of something unrelated but with a superficially-similar name from 5 years prior, and then you were threatened with a ban.
StackOverflow was easily one of the most toxic communities on the internet and I don't miss it.
What a post. On Stack Overflow without karma you couldn't even comment on wrong answers, fix them or anything. I would spend time on there looking for questions I could answer in hope I could get enough karma, but I didn't.
Deleted my account after a while and never looked back. Also toxic community in general.
So glad now I can just spar with AI to troubleshoot stuff.
The Stack Overflow generation pulled up the ladder a decade ago, and now that they have already "made it" they can spend all day writing romanticized takes about how great their little club really was.
Meanwhile, the rest of us still have work to do and can't spend all day arguing with strangers on the internet. Not all even speak English at all.
I really don’t know where all these rose tinted glasses are coming from about early web communities.
As a teen trying to learn to code with no help at home and no money, going onto a technical forum you had to steel yourself to being ostracized for not already being an expert.
I mean people on hacker news in 2026 don’t appreciate how terribly toxic and not friendly at all this site itself was in 2012 when I joined.
I mean hacker news itself has had the reputation of being full of the most toxic technical people in the responses, and you know the dropbox response is exactly the precise reason this place has the reputation it does
Perhaps the LLMs are a reminder that we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire
Quick, remove this from HN before the investors see it!
Seriously though, there's so many posts "about AI" that amount to "is AI going to ruin humanity?" and I find it so tiresome. It's just a tool, people. Tools don't stop people from being people. If anything the problem is it makes people more peopley. The telephone didn't end in-person socialization, and neither did books, television, VHS, video games, the internet, etc. These are technologies that, despite allowing you to distance yourself from people and get information without talking to a person, actually brought people together more. Six million years of evolution doesn't go away because you made a robot. There will still be communities. People are still gonna people.
What we should be doing is not focusing so much on the technology, and focus more on how we are constantly being manipulated by the rich, corporations, and government, so that our socialization is to their benefit and our detriment. If your problem is connecting to people, and someone's answer is "I have a business idea", run away from that person.
> we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire.
The assumption here is that, people as a crowd, have some discretion, will, thouhht, intention, agentic control and act to change something.
Mostly they don't. Especially on the matters that don't affect their survival drastically.Things might be going down-hill, but if is a slide with mild ramp, no one even notices it. They might even enjoy the ride and going-down is normalized.
Just like Romans might have done when the Rome declined over a prolonged period. No one noticed it.
People are just subjects without own descretion on all matters that are not survival related. They go with crowd. Theat's precisely why we have billionaires owning people's communities.
SO people were one of the most stuck idiots I have ever seen. I found the opposite thing, for easy questions they'd upvote and answer very soon but for harder questions they'd downvote it because they didn't know the solution.
I'm very happy SO is done and dusted with.
Thing is Quora which was supposed to be a forum of people with real credentials also went down the drain because it succumbed to low quality questions and answers. I guess we need a LinkedIn like place where people with real credentials and experience can contribute to deep discussions. Discord won't cut it since it's not index-able.
We need to be able to flash credentials online whilst keeping our identities private. It would be useful to know some things about each other whilst still keeping as much privacy as possible.
Yes, there were genuinely helpful people there. I strove to be helpful as well. But my most common experience there was:
- People asking why you're doing that (without answering the question).
- People telling you that you shouldn't do that (without answering the question or providing an alternative).
- People closing your question as off-topic or duplicate without actually reading and understanding what you wrote.
- People editing your question and changing the meaning (leading others to innocently conclude off-topic or duplicate). Or removing actually important details.
- People giving just plain wrong answers that get upvoted, with comments from more senior people begging them to change or remove it.
Or in the words of Brick Top: "If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."
And yes, every so often a golden answer by an amazing person.
Now I can just ask a few LLMs, comparing and contrasting their answers. Even better: I can interrogate them on their answer.
Stack Overflow had a community of sorts, but it wasn't anywhere near like a physical community.
This was probably a bit later. And those LLMs are trained on SO presumably...
In the earlier days SO was more of a community. I guess the life-cycle of the Internet. I answered a few question back in the day. Asked a few. All in all positive experience. I still look fondly at some of my better accepted answers...
Community activists have been saying his for millennia but it’s not possible. Like literally every “prophet” as said almost exactly this since pahotep (https://kemendo.com/WOPFirstPrint.pdf)
I’ve personally started a half dozen different communities over the last 20 years. some last longer than others but almost none last beyond the moment leaders stop putting effort into them, which is the fate of every community.
As a serial community organizer I can tell you definitively that there are no long lasting communities drums eventually turn into an obvious scam on someone or finding increasingly unhinged people willing to stick to a mythology.
I would love for not this to be true but I’ve yet to find an example otherwise
Pick a group: shriners, elks, masons, religious groups, cults, wellness groups, drug user communities, veterans, long distance runners, gardeners etc…
It literally doesn’t matter, none of them last unless there’s some kind of expectation that either you’re going to get some financial or opportunity to improve your social standing or access to resources unavailable to “those people out there.”
It’s a shame really, but that’s the limits of human society it seems.
I don’t fully agree or disagree. Perhaps the honest truth is that nobody really knows how to proceed. That is why I truly appreciate a constructive, open public discussion like this, where people voice their opinions within the bounds of civility. Take that away, and are we any different from animals in the wild?
As a side note, Stack Overflow did embody this better than any other popular online platform. X has become the opposite cesspool with floating gold nuggets here and there. I digress..
An LLM would have done exactly what I wanted back then. But would it have given me what I needed? At the time, I needed to know somebody cared enough to help me.
Were StackOverflow, Google, and LLMs not all created by people who cared enough to help you?
There are much better places on the internet to find personal connection than StackOverflow ever was.
They may have cared about helping "people", but not the individual D. (from the OP) who posted a single question and needed a bit of human connection in the process.
Assuming OP is a people, they're included, but I get your point.
And it's great they did find personal connection on Stack Overflow, but it was infamous for its hostility to noobs. It's sad to say, but Stack Overflow very possibly discouraged more people than it encouraged in this way.
I'd guess that both IRC and Discord have a much better track record of personal connection and helping people, and they're still thriving.
I agree about the value of community. I also think that coding with AI assistance is very useful and possibly going to become the dominant form of software development.
These principles can coexist, but there are forces working against it. The problem is when people post antagonistic comments in response to good faith attempts to make something useful because they used, or were imagined to have used AI.
We have mass produced AI garbage that is filling the domain that Spam used to occupy. We also have people sincerely wanting to make things and being dismissed as making slop. These behaviours should not be met with equivalent responses, and they should not be. AI is removing the barriers for some to develop, of course their first attempts are not going to be very good. Hurling abuse at them is neither a good way to help them improve, nor is it a thing that a good human being does.
Instead of dismissing something that another person has worked on as slop, consider if the person is likely to accept constructive feedback about what it is that their thing is lacking. Maybe if that occurs their next thing might be less sloppy.
the sense of community on the internet from 1995 to 2010 was incredible. industry devs running into tricky situations and just asking for help on irc, newsgroups like comp.lang.*, then forums, places like expert-sexchange and gamedev.net - the people that helped were like heroes and mentors and the urge to pay it forward was real and strong. stackoverflow was cool when it first launched - then something happened to it, like someone unleashed a hundred thousand pent up devs from an underground cave where they had been torturing them with mind games where they're forced to sabotage each other and stuff like collaboration and encouragement was punished - all rushed in at once like a lethal injection and the sense of community was soon dead
I suspect that a lot of the stuff everyone recognizes as AI-isms/writing tics - is actually just the way genX'ers sounded when they were explaining things to strangers on the internet
This part makes the entire post sound like a parody. Maybe Jeff Atwood has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor?
Yeah no, ask for help on Stack Overflow and you were were more likely to be met with castigation and snide remarks. It was such a breath of fresh air when ChatGPT let us not have to deal with that community anymore.
Plus Stack Overflow was gamified. "Nothing to gain" except 12 different artifacts showing how awesome you are.
I dunno man. In it's heyday, SO was pretty fucking awesome. IMHO. Just a massive amount of good information concentrated. And some bad, but a damn sight better than random Google searches even back then.
ChatGPT also isn’t going to tell you when your idea is a bad one and will happily assist you in your (unknowing) efforts to brick your computer. So there’s that.
You are very much talking about late era StackOverflow there.
What marked it out originally (and was visible in some other less-travelled StackExchange sites rather later) was a culture of holding replies to a sort of account in the reply comments; people urging each other to make their replies better-sourced, less hollow, more responsive.
The goal of being non-duplicative alas ultimately is always going to lead to a culture that polices itself too hard. I am an LLM cynic but I think it’s possible that LLMs could actually help steer that process more gently, guiding submitters to likely answers but also helping them fine-tune a more specific, narrow, never-asked question.
I found SO pretty helpful and approachable in the day. Not perfect, but that’s true of anything involving people.
On the GrapheneOS forum, I enjoy answering the questions in a post of user who just set up their phone.
AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.
Humans are social animals. It's true that not all of these interactions re positive, but so much of what drives us is not even related to acclaim or flattery, but merely interaction in a general sense. In a sense this is one of the true perils of LLM-style interaction (going back to Eliza, I guess) -- that we can not only potentially satisfy that drive mechanically, but do so in a way that's structurally produced by a commercial entity. Do you think that the models talking to you have your best interests at heart? They don't have any interest in you at all.
In this sense, running (and heavily tuning) a local LLM could be seen as a form of self-authorship.
Not that I find them all that useful, still.
We had better have even more time to help each other as a result of LLMs, or what are we even doing here?
I realize that everything seems to be about increasing the pace of life, but this is another "chance" for humanity to figure things out.
No increases in productivity ever led to less working hours, only organized action. We work more hours than miedeval serfs.
Fewer working hours.
My personal rule as a recovering grammar school victim: don’t correct nits if you’re not going to add some cool trivia or at least provide some gentle, kind way to navigate the same confusion next time.
Less/fewer is probably a lost cause, and a little bit of why is this kind of useless correction. If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.
ETA: a fun comment below points me to a running joke I was unaware of; my apologies if this was an instance of it that I missed. I am not really a television person but this feels like a significant bit of cultural ignorance on my part.
As a grammar and language Messerschmidt I hate how correct and elegant this is:
I will try to remember this and also execute it with kindness and trivia, like you suggest, in the future.
Thank you.
It's profoundly annoying that it's correct, isn't it! Every time I wince at reading something that feels wrong I have to remind myself that it’s ultimately only wrong because of convention.
(I do occasionally slip, and correct its/it's, your/you're or they're/their/there in someone's comment, but only if that comment is aggressively or nastily calling someone else stupid.)
When people correct less/fewer I always assume they are just making a Game of Thrones/Stannis Baratheon joke.
Which I will always support, even if the TV series drove off a cliff at the end.
Oh! If there is some running joke here that I missed then I stand admonished :-)
(Though it is a somewhat dangerous one to deploy without context)
Is there a clip? (I have neither the energy nor the streaming service to get into GoT)
I actually don't even know if the person you replied to was making this joke, or if they were being sincere, I'm speculating... but...
It was kind of a running joke on the show. Couldn't find a clip that encapsulates the whole thing, but the first clip here shows Stannis reflexively making the correction at various times as if it were like a tic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0zNWswcqMg
And then later in the series you see it rub off on the person he was with in the previous instances (in the 2nd scene in this clip):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXINZxodu9U
Thank you so much for this! Definitely seems likely I just missed out on the joke.
I would guess that this is sort of an embedded joke about the use of British regional language/accents as a world building framework? A brief google suggests it is not from the books.
I am of the age/schooling/class background where people make this reflexive correction entirely unironically. I know several older people who do this, and I remember the cultural campaigns over the “ten items or less” signs in supermarkets.
Serfs had fewer incentives to work more hours.
Capitalism is optimized to produce products and services people want to buy which drives people wanting to work more hours. Which then drives up the costs of things that aren’t replicated endlessly like land and goods that are intentionally left scarce such as admission to elite institutions.
You can work dramatically less and still live well, but the sirens call is very seductive. Food, clothes, transportation, housing, etc all offer real value at minimal cost and little pushing you in that direction.
This is not actually true, pretty much everyone today works much less than the vast majority of people in the medieval world.
The people who control the LLMs would rather be 0.1% richer than have any/every other person on the planet feel better in any way.
The flaw with this argument is the assumption people who control the LLMs is the sole problem. Plenty of people use LLMs for personal gain at the cost of others.
The faster they move, the faster they’re gone.
I hope when they arrive they send postcards.
Every scope of help commoditised. Help for late night drop. Uber ! Need for friendly food door dash !
At some point LLM users and proponents have to come to terms with the fact that this has all been a massive theft of labor, including donated labor and mutual aid in forums such as Stack Overflow.
Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622042
You can't steal something that's infinitely duplicatable. Also, AI training is fair use, not that I believe it should have to be.
Copyright violation ≠ theft of labor.
There are many ways to steal labor, violating copyright is one such way, but not all copyright violations is labor theft, nor does labor theft require copyright to be violated.
The problem is that this source of free labor has dried up, precisely because of AI.
I've noticed that in "programming" forums, questions have devolved.
In the "before times", you'd get a mix of simple-medium-hard-extreme questions.
Google and StackOverflow made most of the medium and hard questions disappear.
Now with LLMs, all the higher difficulty levels except "beyond extreme" have vanished, leaving only the stupidly difficult questions that nobody can answer -- and hence doesn't contribute to collective knowledge, including the AI's knowledge.
Conversely, there is a new level of "below simple" questions by people that I dare say are too stupid to even attempt to become software developers. The type of questions that can could always have been answered with just Google, and are "beneath" both AIs and humans. These are worthless questions along the lines of "my computer not work, plz halp!?" followed by "I can't reboot it!" as if that makes any sense.
Again, that contributes nothing of value to the zeitgeist.
Worse, because the effort required to spin up a blog is trivial now thanks to AI and people are getting desperate for work, I'm seeing a mountain of "slop coding blogs" that are either 100% low-cost-AI output full of errors, or organic human-origin slop... full of errors. No longer are blogs written by the "best of the best" to disseminate their hard earned knowledge, they're now an alternative to a resume and produced in bulk by the most junior developers hoping to land a job through "exposure".
This also massively dilutes the last remaining source of good public information to draw. Google searches are useless now because finds nothing but endless SEO garbage.
What's going to happen in 5 or 10 years from now, when all of the pre-AI knowledge[1] is stale and out of date, making it irrelevant, but there's no new knowledge being publicly produced to train on?
Will programming languages, tools, and frameworks ossify because new languages are "post-AI" and hence untrainable due to a lack of StackOverflow questions and answers?
Will AI labs build their own private "AI members only" version of StackOverflow, building up their internal knowledgebases for training, sharing this with nobody else?
Will humans be paid to solve problems for the sole purpose of generating AI training materials? Is this the future of knowledge work!?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
The thing about this is, by the time ChatGpt came out, SO was dead and the site itself was essentially making its money on people's earlier answers. Not saying LLMs are great but they aren't the first to coast on appropriated labor.
Stack overflow was one of the best ways to learn and mature as an engineer “back in the day”. The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.
It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.
It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.
Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.
My experience was different. I'd post on StackOverflow as an absolute last resort when I couldn't solve my problem any other way. The knowledge there was great, the kindness was sorely lacking. That's what ultimately did it in if you ask me. It got a (deserved in my opinion) reputation for unkindness way before LLMs came on the scene.
I think that’s why Reddit and discord haven’t been harmed nearly as much. They have a reputation for being a lot kinder than stack overflow for basic questions. Meanwhile stack overflow was dead pretty much immediately after people got an alternative.
I think StackOverflow was actually dead before ChatGPT appeared. But ChatGPT was the final nail in the coffin, for the reason you mention.
And there was a time when I enjoyed answering question on StackOverflow but that time ended long before the end of the site. It started out kind of competitive but ended insanely competitive to the point that answering questions was a waste of time.
You touched on what made it great, along with other forums where devs helped each other: It was a pleasure to read and try to answer other people's questions. NOT for the points! Because you found out so much about the problems other people were trying to solve, parallel to your own. The good questions forced you think what would I do in that situation and become a better coder yourself.
I may have asked 20 questions on Stack Overflow in 20 years. But I probably answered several thousand. Whatever I was deeply interested in at the moment, there was no better way to learn more than to try to answer those tough questions. It was like a hobby, during a few minutes of downtime, to just cruise around looking for database optimization problems... the way some people might pick up a Sudoku puzzle. It would keep me in the zone.
A lot of the mods sucked, and they had to deal with deluges of spam from kids asking for answers to CS exam questions... but hunting for the really juicy questions that couldn't be answered with a search was part of the fun.
I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.
If you aren't using the incredible technology we have around us right now to accelerate your learning then it is us that should be mourning your loss of imagination.
I agree with the rest of your comment, and I sympathize with what you're saying here, but really this only applies when measuring engineers against a yardstick that frankly is rapidly in the process of no longer existing.
As an industry rather than an art form, software is measured by its output.
Au contraire, the reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and it was immediately closed as a duplicate of something unrelated but with a superficially-similar name from 5 years prior, and then you were threatened with a ban.
StackOverflow was easily one of the most toxic communities on the internet and I don't miss it.
What a post. On Stack Overflow without karma you couldn't even comment on wrong answers, fix them or anything. I would spend time on there looking for questions I could answer in hope I could get enough karma, but I didn't.
Deleted my account after a while and never looked back. Also toxic community in general.
So glad now I can just spar with AI to troubleshoot stuff.
The Stack Overflow generation pulled up the ladder a decade ago, and now that they have already "made it" they can spend all day writing romanticized takes about how great their little club really was.
Meanwhile, the rest of us still have work to do and can't spend all day arguing with strangers on the internet. Not all even speak English at all.
100% this
I really don’t know where all these rose tinted glasses are coming from about early web communities.
As a teen trying to learn to code with no help at home and no money, going onto a technical forum you had to steel yourself to being ostracized for not already being an expert.
I mean people on hacker news in 2026 don’t appreciate how terribly toxic and not friendly at all this site itself was in 2012 when I joined.
I mean hacker news itself has had the reputation of being full of the most toxic technical people in the responses, and you know the dropbox response is exactly the precise reason this place has the reputation it does
Yeah, I remember struggling to even post a question until I gave up. Calling it a community sounds like nostalgia.
Quick, remove this from HN before the investors see it!
Seriously though, there's so many posts "about AI" that amount to "is AI going to ruin humanity?" and I find it so tiresome. It's just a tool, people. Tools don't stop people from being people. If anything the problem is it makes people more peopley. The telephone didn't end in-person socialization, and neither did books, television, VHS, video games, the internet, etc. These are technologies that, despite allowing you to distance yourself from people and get information without talking to a person, actually brought people together more. Six million years of evolution doesn't go away because you made a robot. There will still be communities. People are still gonna people.
What we should be doing is not focusing so much on the technology, and focus more on how we are constantly being manipulated by the rich, corporations, and government, so that our socialization is to their benefit and our detriment. If your problem is connecting to people, and someone's answer is "I have a business idea", run away from that person.
This really hits me, as someone building tools that utilize LLMs to help people deepen their faith.
My app tries to help people read the Bible more.
I’m asking myself.. What constitutes better? And is it worth pursuing?
Is better always better?
If even half of the toxic communities go away to LLMs, maybe AI will be a net positive after all.
Reddit is 80% of the way there.
you mean that 80% is bot-generated?
The assumption here is that, people as a crowd, have some discretion, will, thouhht, intention, agentic control and act to change something.
Mostly they don't. Especially on the matters that don't affect their survival drastically.Things might be going down-hill, but if is a slide with mild ramp, no one even notices it. They might even enjoy the ride and going-down is normalized.
Just like Romans might have done when the Rome declined over a prolonged period. No one noticed it.
People are just subjects without own descretion on all matters that are not survival related. They go with crowd. Theat's precisely why we have billionaires owning people's communities.
SO people were one of the most stuck idiots I have ever seen. I found the opposite thing, for easy questions they'd upvote and answer very soon but for harder questions they'd downvote it because they didn't know the solution.
I'm very happy SO is done and dusted with.
Thing is Quora which was supposed to be a forum of people with real credentials also went down the drain because it succumbed to low quality questions and answers. I guess we need a LinkedIn like place where people with real credentials and experience can contribute to deep discussions. Discord won't cut it since it's not index-able.
We need to be able to flash credentials online whilst keeping our identities private. It would be useful to know some things about each other whilst still keeping as much privacy as possible.
Maybe I'm remembering a different Stack Overflow.
Yes, there were genuinely helpful people there. I strove to be helpful as well. But my most common experience there was:
- People asking why you're doing that (without answering the question).
- People telling you that you shouldn't do that (without answering the question or providing an alternative).
- People closing your question as off-topic or duplicate without actually reading and understanding what you wrote.
- People editing your question and changing the meaning (leading others to innocently conclude off-topic or duplicate). Or removing actually important details.
- People giving just plain wrong answers that get upvoted, with comments from more senior people begging them to change or remove it.
Or in the words of Brick Top: "If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."
And yes, every so often a golden answer by an amazing person.
Now I can just ask a few LLMs, comparing and contrasting their answers. Even better: I can interrogate them on their answer.
Stack Overflow had a community of sorts, but it wasn't anywhere near like a physical community.
We may work online, but we exist in the flesh.
This was probably a bit later. And those LLMs are trained on SO presumably...
In the earlier days SO was more of a community. I guess the life-cycle of the Internet. I answered a few question back in the day. Asked a few. All in all positive experience. I still look fondly at some of my better accepted answers...
Community activists have been saying his for millennia but it’s not possible. Like literally every “prophet” as said almost exactly this since pahotep (https://kemendo.com/WOPFirstPrint.pdf)
I’ve personally started a half dozen different communities over the last 20 years. some last longer than others but almost none last beyond the moment leaders stop putting effort into them, which is the fate of every community.
As a serial community organizer I can tell you definitively that there are no long lasting communities drums eventually turn into an obvious scam on someone or finding increasingly unhinged people willing to stick to a mythology.
I would love for not this to be true but I’ve yet to find an example otherwise
Pick a group: shriners, elks, masons, religious groups, cults, wellness groups, drug user communities, veterans, long distance runners, gardeners etc…
It literally doesn’t matter, none of them last unless there’s some kind of expectation that either you’re going to get some financial or opportunity to improve your social standing or access to resources unavailable to “those people out there.”
It’s a shame really, but that’s the limits of human society it seems.
I don’t fully agree or disagree. Perhaps the honest truth is that nobody really knows how to proceed. That is why I truly appreciate a constructive, open public discussion like this, where people voice their opinions within the bounds of civility. Take that away, and are we any different from animals in the wild?
As a side note, Stack Overflow did embody this better than any other popular online platform. X has become the opposite cesspool with floating gold nuggets here and there. I digress..
Were StackOverflow, Google, and LLMs not all created by people who cared enough to help you?
There are much better places on the internet to find personal connection than StackOverflow ever was.
Not really?
They may have cared about helping "people", but not the individual D. (from the OP) who posted a single question and needed a bit of human connection in the process.
Assuming OP is a people, they're included, but I get your point.
And it's great they did find personal connection on Stack Overflow, but it was infamous for its hostility to noobs. It's sad to say, but Stack Overflow very possibly discouraged more people than it encouraged in this way.
I'd guess that both IRC and Discord have a much better track record of personal connection and helping people, and they're still thriving.
I agree about the value of community. I also think that coding with AI assistance is very useful and possibly going to become the dominant form of software development.
These principles can coexist, but there are forces working against it. The problem is when people post antagonistic comments in response to good faith attempts to make something useful because they used, or were imagined to have used AI.
We have mass produced AI garbage that is filling the domain that Spam used to occupy. We also have people sincerely wanting to make things and being dismissed as making slop. These behaviours should not be met with equivalent responses, and they should not be. AI is removing the barriers for some to develop, of course their first attempts are not going to be very good. Hurling abuse at them is neither a good way to help them improve, nor is it a thing that a good human being does.
Instead of dismissing something that another person has worked on as slop, consider if the person is likely to accept constructive feedback about what it is that their thing is lacking. Maybe if that occurs their next thing might be less sloppy.
the sense of community on the internet from 1995 to 2010 was incredible. industry devs running into tricky situations and just asking for help on irc, newsgroups like comp.lang.*, then forums, places like expert-sexchange and gamedev.net - the people that helped were like heroes and mentors and the urge to pay it forward was real and strong. stackoverflow was cool when it first launched - then something happened to it, like someone unleashed a hundred thousand pent up devs from an underground cave where they had been torturing them with mind games where they're forced to sabotage each other and stuff like collaboration and encouragement was punished - all rushed in at once like a lethal injection and the sense of community was soon dead
I suspect that a lot of the stuff everyone recognizes as AI-isms/writing tics - is actually just the way genX'ers sounded when they were explaining things to strangers on the internet
I became a good engineer by answering questions on StackOverflow, and I'm upset that this form of mentorship evaporating.
- I learned to communicate answers crisply to others
- I saw what made software hard to grok which helped me write better software
- I intentionally answered questions I did not know the answer to from the outset to push me to learn
I grew tremendously by helping others, and things look pretty bleak if we all become glued to token streams instead.