I stopped using it much even before the AI wave.

Ive honestly never intentionally visited it (as in, went to the root page and started following links) - it was just where google sent me when searching answers to specific technical questions.

It became as annoying as experts exchange the very thing it railed against!

What was annoying about it?

Often the answer to the question was simply wrong, as it answered a different question that nobody made. A lot of times you had to follow a maze of links to related questions, that may have an answer or may lead to a different one. The languages that it was most useful (due to bad ecosystem documentation) evolved in a rate way faster than SO could update their answers, so most of the answers on those were outdated...

There were more problems. And that's from the point of view of somebody coming from Google to find questions that already existed. Interacting there was another entire can of worms.

They SEOd their way into being a top search result by showing crawlers both questions and answers, but when you visited the answer would be paywalled

Stack Overflow’s moderation is overbearing and all, but that’s nowhere near at the same level as Expert Exchange’s baiting and switching

That despite their url's claim, they didn't actually have and sex change experts.

the gatekeeping, gaming the system, capricious moderation (e.g. flagged as duplicate), and general attitude led it to be quite an insufferable part of the internet. There was a meme about how the best way to get a response is to answer your own question in an obviously incorrect fashion, because people want to tell you why you're wrong rather than actively help.

Why do you think those people behave that way?

Unpaid labor finds a variety of impulses to satisfy

Memories of years ago on Stack Overflow, when it seemed like every single beginner python question was answered by one specific guy. And all his answers were streams of invective directed at the question's author. Whatever labor this guy was doing, he was clearly getting a lot of value in return by getting to yell at hapless beginners.

That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that's ever been allowed on Stack Overflow.

So? It is commonplace there. The comments are even worse.

I don't think it matters. Whether it was a fault of incentives or some intrinsic nature of people given the environment, it was rarely a pleasant experience. And this is one of the reasons it's fallen to LLM usage.

Nope. The main problem with expertsexchange was their SEO + paywall - they'd sneak into top Google hits by showing crawler full data, then present a paywall when actual human visits. (Have no idea why Google tolerated them btw...)

SO was never that bad, even with all their moderation policies, they had no paywalls.

I don't get these comments. I'm not here to shill for SO, but it is a damn good website, if only for the archive. Can't remember how to iterate over entries in JavaScript dictionary (object)? SO can tell you, usually much better than W3Schools can, which attracts so much scorn. (I love that site: So simple for the simple stuff!)

When you search programming-related questions, what sites do you normally read? For me, it is hard to avoid SO because it appears in so many top results from Google. And I swear that Google AI just regugitates most of SO these days for simple questions.

I think that's OP's point though, Ai can do it better now. No searching, no looking. Just drop your question into Ai with your exact data or function and 10 seconds later you have a working solution. Stackoverflow is great but Ai is just better for most people.

Instead of running a google query or searching in Stackoverflow you just need a chatGPT, Claude or your Ai of choice open in a browser. Copy and paste.

It's not a pejorative statement, I used to live in Stack Overflow.

But the killer feature of an LLM is that it can synthesize something based on my exact ask, and does a great job of creating a PoC to prove something, and it's cheap from time investment point of view.

And it doesn't downvote something as off-topic, or try to use my question as a teaching exercise and tell me I'm doing it wrong, even if I am ;)