Yes, but they’re not the ones producing all of the content. Again, that’s produced by volunteers.

Yeah, that’s a fair point. After I posted my previous comment, I realized it probably wouldn’t work since the entire point of SO was to create canonical answers to canonical questions. But how do you decide what “instance” gets to have the canonical answer to a given question? Having a central authority host everything makes it a heck of a lot easier.

I think a big problem was how new users had to unlock things like the ability to comment. Probably a lot of new users really should have added comments to previous questions to clarify things, but instead the site tells them to create a new question first to get reremovedtion points. So they do, but what they want isn’t really a unique question, just clarification on a previous question.

Once you get enough reremovedtion to be “in,” suddenly the whole site opens up and you can do everything you need to. But a new user has to get to that point, and that is daunting if they’re new to programming.

I also think that SO selling their data for training AI really rubbed a lot of old timers the wrong way too. If they had not given in to that, I wonder if the decline would have been nearly as sharp. There were users active there daily, finding questions to answer and evaluating others answers. Now there really aren’t.

This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.

Who is the “they” in this? The volunteers who contributed to the site? StackOverflow isn’t like a company or anything. No one is paid to answer questions there. They’re all people who were working hard to make a collection of common questions with the best possible answers, and trying to uphold a certain standard for the content there.

Based on your comment, I think maybe we as a group just don’t deserve stackoverflow. If we really are all now turning to LLMs instead (which are not in any way “decentralized”) to get a bunch of statistical bullshit spit at us instead of, you know, the actual right answer, then maybe we deserve what will happen next.

This is a really good point. I joined stackoverflow after graduating university a few years ago, and found it really hard to participate. You need karma to be able to vote on stuff or add comments, but the only unanswered questions are often basically unanswerable. I did find some success with adding answers that were better than previous ones, but it was limited, because at that point the site was already declining and there was no one left to upvote my contributions.

I guess the main issue here is that we let some group “own” all of the questions and answers, giving them the opportunity to sell it whenever they wanted to cash out.

Maybe a better solution is some kind of decentralized version of StackOverflow that prevents one person from owning everything. Something like Lemmy and Mastodon, but for questions and answers specifically.

A lot of people seem to be celebrating this, but I personally think this is a net negative for programming. Are people actually replacing SO with talking to LLMs? If not, where are they going?

I’ve seen an uptick in people using places like discord to get help. But that’s not easily searchable and not in the same format that it is in stackoverflow. SO was meant to organize these answers to make asking questions easier. Now it seems like we’re walking away from that, and I can’t quite understand why. Is it really because SO is “toxic”?

It would be slower to read the value if you had to also do bitwise operations to get the value.

But you can also define your own bitfield types to store booleans packed together if you really need to. I would much rather that than have the compiler do it automatically for me.