Stack Overflow abuse and the rage it generated in me is sort of nostalgic. Kind of sad in a way that I can't quite recall the rage anymore.

By the way, at least as far as what it is showing me，SO is an AI site now. Home page Ask a question goes straight to an LLM doing RAG against Stack Overflow.

Edit: actually they tricked me into asking AI. The text box to ask AI is right next to what is actually an Ask A Question button that skips the AI.

It's training data seems limited or out of date because it had no idea what Gemma 4 E2B was. It just said that wasn't in the SO data and could I explain wtf I was talking about please. I guess not Gemma 3 either. And no web search. So it's useless for me today.

Interestingly, the Stack Overflow AI answer is provided by OpenAI, and these may be the most useless responses I have seen any time recently.

Whaddyaknow. Got me a little twinge of the good ole' rage tingles after all!

StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.

Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.

I will miss their yearly developer survey. Otherwise I won’t miss them. What a frustrating experience it was.

When an ecological shoes company pivot to AI, I wonder why StackOverflow executives don't pilot for AI now.

The Irony here is what Hacker News did to this page. 503 Service Unavailable :D

people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird.

i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.

Looks like StackOverflow was already declining by the time ChatGPT came out

SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet.

I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too.

And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes.

Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help.

Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely.

There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high.

Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.

Didn't Stack Overflow have a similar impact on Experts Exchange?

Where will AI's get the training data to answer questions now?