Stackoverflow Outage

[_mocha]

I'm a top 5% contributor to SO with around 300-400 answers (haven't actively answered a question in a while). One of the highlights of my career was seeing people benefit from those answers, post commentary, and update my answers. In the last year, there's actually been 0 engagement on all of my questions. One of the rare/sad aspects of how ChatGPT has impacted our community.

[BrenBarn]

I agree it's sad. There were a lot of positive aspects to the SO community.

[fooqux]

I have a love/hate relationship with the site, and I'm likewise conflicted by its eventual demise.

On one hand, it's an incredible place full of smart people and has some of the best rabbit holes to fall into. On the other hand, portions of the site (programming among them) has the worst culture imaginable and has likely turned as many people off from learning as it has helped.

[sien]

This is an ill formed question.

Stackoverflow may be up or down.

Please return later when you are able to determine exactly where your problem is and have read all the documentation on Unix, C and the internet.

[joelthelion]

Closed as a duplicate of "cloudflare outage"

[_ea1k]

I thought about making a joke like this, but I was afraid that it'd be closed as a dupe.

[busymom0]

Would have been funny if this post was marked duplicate of another post from years ago.

[lordnacho]

SO has had an effective outage for years now. Put up a question, get smacked with "it's a duplicate" of an old, no-longer-relevant question, mods don't correct it because the culture is gatekeeping, now you have a dead Q&A site.

With the additional problem that someone invented a way to take your question pages and tailor them to the exact needs of a particular user.

[gregjw]

Considering how many times a day I used to use StackOverflow, it's wild how long it has been since I last thought about it/visited. LLM's really scraped and dumped, sad.

[nikanj]

In theory this is a problem because LLMs don’t get any updates and are just a snapshot of old questions on SO, but in practice SO also gets no new questions because every question is closed (incorrectly)

[BrenBarn]

I find it somewhat sad to see so many people bag on StackOverflow as if it were a total failure. It's true that there were some negatives, but the brusque attitude and rapid question closures were often in response to a genuine flood of junky, repetitive questions. In its time it was unparalleled and even today there's still useful content on there. I also think its rep system is something a lot of sites could learn from in terms of how to gradually increase user privileges.

[jakubriedl]

I thought they're just shutting down because it wasn't worth running the servers anymore.

[hokumguru]

Last I heard they self hosted. Far as I understand it’s incredibly cheap for them to host. Especially since they’ve been completely cannibalized.

[kevin_thibedeau]

They're strangely committed to serving up pointless jquery from a Google domain. I'm sure there's a revenue stream behind that.

[ziggure]

Didn't notice, as Claude is still up.

[nikanj]

The crew that runs SO must be aware of the tone in this thread, right?

There always seems to be a strong consensus whenever SO is mentioned on HN, and it’s always very negative. Why don’t they change the moderation rules, if the supposed target audience is constantly frustrated with them?

[Nextgrid]

You hear about the people who complain but not the hundreds of thousands who search for something, get a StackOverflow result, read it and leave happily.

[joelthelion]

They don't care. They have a dogmatic belief that they're right.

[Philpax]

SO has been in decline for many years now; there's not much they could do to stop it now. Even if they could, it's hard to say whether that would be a net good for SO; part of what drove people to it in the first place was its steadfast dedication to maintaining a curated knowledge base, even with the impact that would have on long-term community health.

[renewiltord]

It’s no longer relevant. It doesn’t really matter what they do. The site is going to die. It was an artifact of a different time.

[ecshafer]

They should have kicked out every mod years ago.

Recently on reddit /r/art the mods collectively quit because people were making fun of them for gatekeeping someone. Everyone made fun of them more. Stack overflow are reddit mods gone extreme, they believe their job is to stop all activity on their boards apparently.

[arnaudsm]

Now that SO is almost dead, how will the AI labs train their LLMs on all the programming edge cases it used to document?

Will synthetic data and documentation RAG really be enough? Or will we be stuck at 2022 debugging knowledge forever?

[siva7]

what's their business model now?

[1-2-3-5-8]

Status updates for stackoverflow are like: hey look at me, I'm still here.

[John7878781]

Stack Overflow is no longer relevant. Today, you can just ask Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT instead, and you don’t have to deal with the usual condescension.

[Etheryte]

I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist? This was always Stackoverflow's bread and butter, and people who only use it as noob search tend to miss that fact. SO can be a tough crowd, yes, but mostly it's people who didn't read the rules before posting who get burnt. That aside, it still has a very high concentration of experts that you'll struggle to find anywhere else.

[werdnapk]

My niche questions are never answered correctly by AI. I'm led down false rabbit holes. Stack overflow still provides much better answers for me overall.

[ndespres]

Growing grains is no longer relevant. You can just walk into any supermarket and purchase packaged cereals, breads, and cakes, and you don’t have to deal with operating a tractor, cultivating soil, or sowing seeds.

[kace91]

How much of that LLM output is the result of adding SO’s content to the pot?

And if usage declines, what will be feed future LLMs with?

[add-sub-mul-div]

"Ah, the joys of mortgaging your future."