[TomMasz]

I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.

[adamddev1]

I see people talking about the negative experiences, and I'm sure they are real, but I also had some very positive experiences.

I remember being amazed that some internet stranger took the time to understand my question and provide some great solution where I was stuck. It gave me a little encouragement and social connection as I plugged away on a project alone.

I miss that feel good human connection when an LLM can quickly get me an answer.

[SoftTalker]

But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out.

I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.

[luckydata]

meh, in my experience good quality LLMs are significantly more correct than Stack Overflow ever was and have access to your code and machine to help you diagnose issues.

[SoftTalker]

It's about 50:50 for me. Often times they completely fuck things up and then want to rewrite rather than correct the original issues. That leads to debugging their rewritten code and an afternoon down the drain.

[luckydata]

you must be very unlucky

[andriy_koval]

It is curation process, so when you search you are not overwhelmed by 100 identical answers.

Being stupid in this case is irrational self-(mis)-perception.

Probably they really meant to say you are lazy and shift work on mods.

[includenotfound]

Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.

Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.

Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.

[naet]

The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.

[inigyou]

Sometimes you'd get banned for asking an exact duplicate of a previous question of yours that was closed. They'd tell you to edit the closed question and it would be reopened.

But if you'd edited the closed question instead, it wouldn't be reopened.

[palata]

Sometimes? It happened more and more and when every second question was like this, I left. I wasn't going to fight against moderators forever.

That was before AI.

[lazyasciiart]

And your second attempt would get closed as a duplicate of your first attempt.

[encyclopedism]

LLM's are the primary cause of SO decline. Largely due to LLM's having scraped SO (and everything else available on the WWW). It's the reason there is a decline in traffic across the web i.e. Wikipedia. LLM's surface the required search query or info directly.

[scotty79]

I guess AI sycophancy does contribute to its success.

[rbobby]

I feel like I've seen this comment before...

[scrapcode]

Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.

The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.