- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
The number of questions on Stack Overflow fell by 78 percent in December 2025 compared to a year earlier. Developers are switching en masse to AI tools in their IDEs, making the popular developer forum increasingly irrelevant.
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Answering the easy dumb questions is now done by AI pretty good. I would say even better because the AI does not care about flagging your question for duplicate or mocking you for not being precise.
StackOverflow needs to refocus on those questions not answered by AI easily. They need to adjust their business to fewer questions that need thorough investigation and specialist solutions. That is a hard thing to do with only volunteers to answer these questions, so maybe they need to switch to a paid model which pays the correctly flagged answer a cut of the fee…
Beyond AI tools in IDEs, the reputation of the site’s attitude towards new question posters definitely doesn’t help. Neither does the site’s pivot towards AI that alienated a bunch of the power users. The reputation issue isn’t new though, and I’m not sure of when the AI pivot started.
I’m also not sure if it’s a great metric. Personally, anything complicated enough for me to want outside help with is usually so far into the specifics of my work environment that it’s not safe to ask about online. It’d either be too revealing or devolve into the classic “I refuse to answer your question because I refuse to believe your starting scenario and limitations”. Otherwise it tends to be stuff I can sort out by piecing together stuff from blogs, documentation, and tangentially related stackOverflow answers. Not always easy, but easy enough that I’d rather work through it myself instead of asking the internet for help.
the reputation of the site’s attitude towards new question posters
Waaah I copy pasted my homework question and the expert that donates his time for free was mean to me
Yeah, ok. Now explain these:
- Closed as duplicate. Question is barely related to the supposed duplicate.
- Ask question about library X. Get answers for library Y, with demeaning remarks about having used library X instead of library Y.
- Newcomers have a solution. Can’t post it or even comment because minimum reputation requirements.
- Accepted answer is wrong. The useful advice is in another answer or its comments.
While I’m sure you can find examples of those, the reality is that mods are right the vast majority of the time. The truth people don’t want to acknowledge is that the strict moderation keeping up the quality of the answers is the reason stack overflow was so popular.
Was so popular. Past tense.
It was popular before the current ridiculous moderationlevels. Now people just go there for the older content, since all of the newer stuff gets closed as ‘duplicate’ despite not being a duplicate.
That’s a ridiculous assertion. The moderation and complaints were the same a decade ago.
Meanwhile, Discourse forum software continues to grow in popularity an doesn’t have the reputation for toxic communities.
Jeff Atwood co-founded both StackOverflow and Discourse.
You can see the similarities. I really like the trust levels both systems use instead of the classic system of fixed user tiers.
Question… what were all those AI tools in IDEs trained on?..
…
Well, they used to be trained on Stack Overflow.
In the future they’ll be trained on all your code, as per the end user licence agreement you clicked through.
