Ask HN: Is Stack Overflow Dead?

7 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by raphar

Item id: 46327389

7 Comments

marziply

6 hours ago

It's a tragedy but I think it's true that SO has lost a significant amount of value given AI's new presence. Having said that, it's not like it's dead - it's a community of real people rather than an amalgamation of knowledge in a single tool. What sets SO apart and will always set it apart is that human aspect. For future problems that AI has no knowledge of, there will always be a group of people better equipped to answer questions through real life experience and deductions that AI simply cannot apply. I suspect in the next few years, SO will evolve into a platform that focuses on that human aspect because ultimately that's the only avenue I can see that would work. It's unlikely SO will die any time soon, it's more likely that the platform will find ways of pivoting to keep business flowing. It's not like SO is struggling for questions right now anyway, it continues to be a massively popular platform. Predicting the future is somewhat of a pointless task but I think it's safe to say, for now, that SO is still alive, and will be that way for a while at least.

raphar

6 hours ago

Thanks, you just addressed just the points I was curious about the most.

- How will they survive?

- What happens with all those unsolved problems, those that AIs haven't found a source with the solution to scrape from?

leros

6 hours ago

I haven't used StackOverflow hardly at all since ChatGPT came out.

Unrelated to AI, I haven't really had a positive experience on StackOverflow in 7+ years. The way they aggressively close questions as duplicates despite the previous questions having incomplete or outdated answers was already making it a much less useful site.

chistev

5 hours ago

It will be used to answer the harder questions that AI models can't answer.

bediger4000

6 hours ago

If SO comes up in search results, I visit it. But I should also add that I usually skip reading "AI" results or summaries. There's usually nuance in SO questions and answers that "AI" leaves out.

al_borland

5 hours ago

I’ve had many situations where a sourced AI summary has references that don’t show up in the top search results. Clicking through to the source gives me the nuance and context of the full post that I wouldn’t have found without the AI summary. Even if you don’t trust the summary, rightfully so, it can still be good at surfacing good results.

(My experience here was with Kagi, I’m not sure how Google and others are with this)

journal

5 hours ago

If not, I bet everyone is waiting for it to die, and take hn with it.