The signal to noise ratio on Stack Overflow has been low for a long time now, even before LLMs showed up. I was once a high-rep contributor there. Nowadays, I usually won’t even bother clicking web search results that lead there, let alone share my knowledge with them. (And with Cloudflare, which is now a man-in-the-middle between the site and its users.)
IMHO, the community could use a distributed Q&A network, with no instance able to interfere with anyone’s access to our accumulated knowledge.
In 2010 Stackoverflow was amazing. Tons of information, everything was up-to-date, great.
And then they close every new question on a similar topic as duplicate, ensuring that if you look up e.g. a Java question you can be sure it’s about Java 7. Because we all know I everyone in 2025 is using Java 7.
And of course, neither the questions nor the answers require version tagging and thus hardly any of them have anything like that.
And now they want to take this pool of outdated garbage and feed it into a garbage processing unit AI to make it somehow cooler.
The signal to noise ratio on Stack Overflow has been low for a long time now, even before LLMs showed up. I was once a high-rep contributor there. Nowadays, I usually won’t even bother clicking web search results that lead there, let alone share my knowledge with them. (And with Cloudflare, which is now a man-in-the-middle between the site and its users.)
IMHO, the community could use a distributed Q&A network, with no instance able to interfere with anyone’s access to our accumulated knowledge.
This.
In 2010 Stackoverflow was amazing. Tons of information, everything was up-to-date, great.
And then they close every new question on a similar topic as duplicate, ensuring that if you look up e.g. a Java question you can be sure it’s about Java 7. Because we all know I everyone in 2025 is using Java 7.
And of course, neither the questions nor the answers require version tagging and thus hardly any of them have anything like that.
And now they want to take this pool of outdated garbage and feed it into
a garbage processing unitAI to make it somehow cooler.Good luck with that.