Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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Well duh. All possible questions have already been asked. There’s no need to ask any more. The world never changes and old answers never go out of date, so that’s it. StackOverflow is now the sum total of human knowledge for computer science and programming and will be so for ever more.

I stopped asking in like 2020 for the most part. Everything I asked was getting.akred as a duplicate even though it wasn’t because someone believed an ANSWER on a different question answered my question (they didn’t).

Plus StackOverflow Meta has been a fucking joke for years. They removed a site from HNQ because of a tweet. Why are they listening more to random Twitter users than folks on Meta?

And the whole Monica fiasco still has me upset.

But seriously. Every time I asked a question on StackOverflow I’d spend like 30 minutes wording it correctly and looking for duplicates. I’d find things that were sort of duplicates and explain preemptively why they aren’t. And every fucking time some doofus marks it as a duplicate. I just can’t take it. Like it literally makes me so angry even thinking about it. They had a problem with their humans LONG before AI came around. If they’d fixed that problem they could’ve really positioned themselves nicely when AI happened as a boutique place for humans answering humans. But no, their culture cultivates assholes who believe they’re following rules to the letter.

Pretty clearly a SO problem and not a more general problem. Whenever I ask AI a programming question, it usually knows less than I do, so answer sites like SO are clearly needed.

For example, I just asked ChatGPT and Copilot about how to do something with the Unreal Python API, and they both generated total bullshit code that wasn’t even based on the actual API. I gave Copilot a link to the API docs I was looking at, and then it generated more plausible, but still wrong code. I ended up spending a couple hours experimenting and figuring it out myself. AI definitely does not replace SO.

What a shame. Used to be such a great place. And to be fair some of the wider StackExchange communities still are (the PowerShell crowd stick out in my memory as being a friendly bunch).

But people need a place to be able to answer their dumb questions and have someone be kind to them. SO’s insistence on being the primary repository of useful knowledge and having that principle take priority over user experience is what killed it. I tried suggesting they implemented a 2-tier question/answer system, where “quality” questions got promoted to the repository and the rest didn’t get indexed, but it got marked as a duplicate of something it wasn’t a duplicate of, so that was the end of that.

What StackOverflow also fails to understand is that as technology moves on, the “right” answer changes. So an answer that got 20 billion upvotes in 2003 could well be completely useless by now (heck, you don’t even have to go back that far).

Let’s all just wait for the new versions of languages, frameworks and operating systems. LLMs won’t have been trained on those and won’t have answers, people not asking each other online will generate no answers to train on.

Let’s read and train on docs, right? Yeah, right.

I had no clue it was this bad

Obviously all the possible questions have already been asked, and anything new would be a duplicate.

100% SO fault. I’d rather change professions than try to ask anything there.

I’m just hoping for some alternative, because there need to exist a place to exchange that kind of knowledge.