Stack Overflow's Radical New Plan To Fight AI-Induced Death Spiral (thenewstack.io)
- Reference: 0177856713
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/1921248/stack-overflows-radical-new-plan-to-fight-ai-induced-death-spiral
- Source link: https://thenewstack.io/stack-overflows-plan-to-survive-the-age-of-ai/
> Stack Overflow will test paying experts to answer questions. That's [2]one of many radical experiments they're now trying to stave off an AI-induced death spiral . Questions and answers to the site have plummeted [3]more than 90% since April of 2020. So here's what Stack Overflow will try next.
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> 1. They're [4]bringing back Chat , according to their CEO (to foster "even more connections between our community members" in "an increasingly AI-driven world").
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> 2. They're building a "new Stack Overflow" meant to feel like a personalized portal. "It [5]might collect videos , blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs... and fold them together into one personalized destination."
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> 3. They're proposing areas more open to discussion, described as " [6]more flexible Stack Exchanges ... where users can explore ideas or share opinions."
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> 4. They're also [7]licensing Stack Overflow content to AI companies for training their models.
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> 5. Again, they will test paying experts to answer questions.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~DevNull127
[2] https://thenewstack.io/stack-overflows-plan-to-survive-the-age-of-ai/
[3] https://devclass.com/2025/05/13/stack-overflow-seeks-rebrand-as-traffic-continues-to-plummet-which-is-bad-news-for-developers/
[4] https://devclass.com/2025/05/13/stack-overflow-seeks-rebrand-as-traffic-continues-to-plummet-which-is-bad-news-for-developers/
[5] https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/02/27/our-next-phase-q-and-a-was-just-the-beginning/
[6] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/407158/how-might-chat-evolve-help-us-identify-problems-and-opportunities
[7] https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/moveworks-stackoverflow-partnership-ai-agents-marketplace
not a bad idea, but way too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly relaxing some of the rules could have helped a lot, 7 or 8 years ago.
I still tool around superuser.com, but over the last 10 years its become a husk of its former self, with fewer and fewer multi-visit users every year, because everyone has a horrible first experience navigating the strict terms of service for the site and the remaining overzealous userbase.
Now, its probably far to late to do much about it.
Re: (Score:3)
> the remaining overzealous userbase.
That is a huge part of why I never likes using them. Thogh it is not only "the remaining" in my view, but the whole site always seemed full of "You are an idiot!" posters. Although one could get good answers there at times all too often there was a high level of passive agression in replies.
Re: (Score:1)
> the whole site always seemed full of "You are an idiot!" posters. Although one could get good answers there at times all too often there was a high level of passive agression in replies.
Exactly, and often not just passive, but straight out aggresive. Sometimes quite sarcastic and derogatory. from the know-it-alls who strut their stuff. This is a common thread I've seen of why people are put off the site.
Re: not a bad idea, but way too late... (Score:2)
I think some of their stacks, like ServerFault, suffered to cannibalism from StackOverflow. Everything even tangentially related to what a software developer may wish to do ended up there, instead of on one of the more dedicated sites.
Job Board (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the best things for my career was the SO job board. Got sooooo many good, high quality job interviews through it (my first 6-fig job, too). Unfortunately, they canned it after being acquired by PE. BRING IT BACK!
_AI_ needs new content to work (Score:2)
âoeAIâ models will be a race to the bottom. New content to feed them is the model to profit from, well should be.
Re: (Score:2)
Not so much for Stackoverflow. Take a model that is trained well enough to comprehend stuff and then augment it with the documentation of a software library and it will help you to use the library in your code. No need for new training, and the data comes from the official documentation or even the source code, more accurate than some of the half-baked answers on Stackoverflow.
Missing the point (Score:3)
Have they not realized that answers to questions on their site are often outdated and therefore useless? AI saves people a lot of time by at least attempting to come up with an answer that's not wrong because the information is stale. Granted, the answer may still be wrong because the language in question doesn't have the functionality that the AI thinks should be there (and it should).
Re: (Score:3)
> Have they not realized that answers to questions on their site are often outdated and therefore useless?
Realizing that is the easy part. The hard part is fixing the problem, especially if you don't have an active user base who is willing to update the answers.
And of course AIs will run into the same problem, unless there are well-informed human beings available to update their knowledge base.
Re: (Score:2)
The obvious source of new training data for AIs are the private interactive sessions with users, but here's the thing: 1) there are less of them than there is existing data on the Internet, which has already been used (you can't use the same data twice) and 2) would you be ok with an AI training on your codebase tips and tricks so that it can share those insights in future sessions with coders employed by competitors?
In the absence of substantial amounts of new training data, then the public AIs built wi
Re: (Score:2)
Was that the stunt they pulled about firing someone for using the wrong pronoun or some such nonsense?
Re: (Score:3)
Monica Cellio was reportedly fired when she asked if it was OK if she used gender-neutral language that does not use pronouns at all, since that can help avoid misgendering situations. She also said that use of preferred pronouns was the right thing to do, and that knowingly misgendering someone is wrong. She said that she was told by other moderators that avoiding third-person singular pronouns was itself misgendering. It's not clear from what she wrote if she was fired for asking the question, or fired pr
What SO really needs to do to survive: EMBRACE AI (Score:1)
A reverse-StackOverflow for AI-assisted work — where users post:
**** The problem they started with (a well-framed question).
**** The final solution they arrived at, potentially after AI iteration.
**** Maybe a short summary of the key insight(s) or stumbling blocks overcome.
**** No need to document all the back-and-forth steps unless helpful.
This could serve as:
**** A curated knowledge base of AI-assisted solutions.
**** A way to share polished resolutions others can quickly learn
Re: (Score:2)
I stopped reading after the first bullet point.
Why do you write in half-formed bullet phrases? Don't you know how to write a full sentence anymore? It's difficult to know what the point is that you are trying to make when you do this. It's difficult to know even which "point" is the more important, and which is subordinate. It's difficult to know how to reply to the relevant ideas or decide if there are any.
Re: (Score:2)
> I stopped reading after the first bullet point.
> Why do you write in half-formed bullet phrases? Don't you know how to write a full sentence anymore?
Fantastic example of the canonical StackOverflow answer style, bravo :)
Barriers (Score:3, Informative)
What killed it for me was the hoops I had to jump through to post a question. I gave up on it long before the AI bots came around.
Re: Barriers (Score:2)
Yeah, me too. SO was a great site, but some of the mods are apparently a bit drunk on power. Having to jump through hoops to prove yourself worthy isn't a good way to promote content creation.
Every once in a while I almost 'crack' and start to mentally compose an answer to a question or whatever, but then I just close the tab and move on because it's just not worth it.
The sad thing is, there isn't a competitor (no, Reddit really isn't) that's any better - so walking away from SO is just "data loss".
Jumped the shark (Score:1, Interesting)
Posting anonymously. I have six digits worth of karma in my tag. I stopped posted and haven't logged in for, let's say, quite a while, after I turned rather sour on SO. After doing some soul searching, I drew the following conclusions:
SO's moderation-based model runs counter to the general principle of free and open exchange of ideas and opinions. Some years ago, when the death spiral started, SO's administration hastily concluded it's because of, basically, mean tweets, and instituted a ridiculous code of
Re: (Score:2)
I'm a bit confused here. If you love freedom of speech so much why can't SO, a private entity, have the freedom to decide what kind of speech happens on it?
And is it not impinging on their freedom of speech to insist you have a god given right to decide how it ought to be on their platform?
All you guys who are always crowing about your freedom of speech don't seem to realize that restricting other people's right to decide how to have conversational rules in their own private paces might actually be anti-fre
Re: Jumped the shark (Score:2)
All you need to know about GP is that they used a hard R as a pejorative. That is no doubt why they got the boot they're crying about now.
Re: (Score:1)
> I'm a bit confused here. If you love freedom of speech so much why can't SO, a private entity, have the freedom to decide what kind of speech happens on it?
Can you point out the specific part in my previous post that claims that they don't have the right to do that?
> And is it not impinging on their freedom of speech to insist you have a god given right to decide how it ought to be on their platform?
Of course. Now, after you finish patting yourself on the back for thinking that you're so smart and intellectual, all you need to do is to find which part of my previous post claimed that they didn't have some kind of a cockamamie right to do that. You must've overlooked all the shadenfreude, and my gloating at watching that pile of crap crash and burn. I want them to continue doing what they're doi
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not defending censorship, I'm defending free speach against folks who demand their speach trumps others.
my understanding was that your previous post had contradictory ideas. I don't think you ever said they don't have the right to do anything, but you implied that it was morally against free speach to moderate in the way they wanted to. In other words:
1. That SO's moderation was against the principles of free speech .
2. But the principles of free speach, as I understand them, say that part of that is th
New name? (Score:3)
Maybe it should also get a new name, maybe something like Expertsexchange.
I gave up on it long ago (Score:3)
when you couldn't even post an actual answer (instead having to resort to a 'comment') simply because you didn't have enough "reputation" - this meant many other useful answers were buried amongst useless comments, making the whole site useless (including its search functions and cross-subject snippets making Google searches just as useless.)
Re: (Score:1)
Huh? Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure that it's the comments that are restricted until you get enough rep from posting answers and having your answers upvoted. You can still comment on your own questions, until you can't comment on other posts until you get enough rep. If the SO retards also changed this, then the only way remaining way to get your initial karma is by asking and having your question upvoted. To me, that seems harder than posting good answers.
Re: (Score:2)
>> [...] this meant many other useful answers were buried amongst useless comments, making the whole site useless [...]
> Huh? Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure that it's the comments that are restricted until you get enough rep from posting answers and having your answers upvoted.
That sounds just as retarded, but resulting in the opposite: a bunch of 'answers' that are really meant to be comments, thereby polluting the whole site.
Re: (Score:2)
> That sounds just as retarded, but resulting in the opposite: a bunch of 'answers' that are really meant to be comments, thereby polluting the whole site.
That does sometimes happen, but the non-'answers' are downvoted or deleted quickly, so they don't pollute the site.
Re: (Score:2)
That and having to wait while it checks if you are robot and then continuously clicking on request to save cookies. Too much overhead.
Re: I gave up on it long ago (Score:2)
If you can't manage to build enough reputation on Stack Overflow, you probably weren't going to meaningfully contribute to the discussion.
Rearranging the deck chairs (Score:2)
on the Titanic.
Their ship has already sailed.
Justanswer.com (Score:2)
Justanswer.com has been doing this sort of thing for years with car repair and other similar topics. Quality of the help given varies widely. In fact I actively avoid justanswer.com links that come up in a search. I guess some avoid stackoverflow links already.
AI not to blame? (Score:2)
[1]InfoWorld claims bad moderation, and not AI is killing SO. [infoworld.com]
I do agree SO's moderation is both condescending and frustrating. Any semi-viable alternative will quickly be explored to get away from SO. Their near monopoly has made them arrogant and complacent.
Low ranking questions and answers should be kept, but merely partially hidden by default, similar to Slashdot (assuming mostly on-topic). Sometimes good clues are in obscure replies.
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3993482/ai-didnt-kill-stack-overflow.html
Re: (Score:1)
Ouch, with that reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment, that really does apply to what happened at SO, I just had not connected those two. Good link find.
Re: (Score:3)
Stack Overflow messed up by not having a "close with explanation" option. They are too focused on experts and data quality.
If you understand [1]How To Ask Questions [catb.org], Stack Overflow is fantastic. I've had nothing but good experiences.
If you're a newbie, you will ask a question that you are so lost on that you'll get closed as a dupe of a question that seems unrelated to yours. The expert will have seen three layers deep into your issue and found the real problem, correctly closing it as a dupe.
On one hand, Stac
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
PeanutsOverflow (Score:2)
If you think any actual experts will get a ywhere near StackOverflow, you are gravely mistaken. You'll end up with self-proclaimed experts who'll end up being first year uni students working for peanuts and providing no real expertise.
Great! (Score:2)
> 4. They're also licensing Stack Overflow content to AI companies for training their models.
So I guess now we'll start getting condescending answers to our prompts, thanks to SO's "data"?
Prompt: I need to know how to use curl to fetch a website's page.
Answer: Did you RTFM, idiot?
Re: (Score:2)
I honestly never have understood why someone takes time out of their schedule to belittle people on sites with non-answers to questions.
It's like they are compelled to answer without actually answering. It's some kind of psychological disease that has been exasperated by the Internet.
Re: (Score:2)
> I honestly never have understood why someone takes time out of their schedule to belittle people on sites with non-answers to questions.
Very often with these question-answer sites (or, really, any discussion forum - I remember running into this in my newsgroups days) people simply get annoyed at the question being merely asked (like, do they expect everyone else hanging around are as knowledgeable as they are??), and instead of answering the actual question and asking any follow-up questions for additional context that may have been left out of the original question (to perhaps offer an alternative answer later), simply lash out with "RTFM"
CEO in over his head (Score:2)
A few weeks SO staff posted a "we're rebranding" post on the site in the Q&A format. They've been throwing out all kinds of supposed strategic expansions lately, which look scattered and less than coherent.This particular post generated comments and the CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar started responding.
Observation: The CEO (unfiltered by editors, legal, or PR) can barely write a coherent English sentence. They're not making any sense at all with their current plans, as far as I can tell. Their goose is prob
Opinions (Score:2)
As I recall it was the caustic opinions on the questions asked that drove people away.
...and then licensing it back to AI companies... (Score:3)
So that the cycle of slop will continue, though I guess the AI companies will just steal it if they don't get what they want whenever they want it. May as well at least make a buck on it.
Re: (Score:2)
[1]AI slop is real [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVkCfn6kSqE
Re: (Score:2)
Jon Skeet and the other top Stack Overflow answerers are just thrilled that their contributions are lining someone else's pockets.
Legacy legacy products growing (Score:2)
When you look beyond AI based or AI connected products, much of mainstream technology is 10 or more years old.
They are no longer the cool new technology to learn, hence less new Stack Overflow questions.
May it's the mainframification of the web + cloud tech stack.