alt Hacker NewsWhat is this "Stack Overflow" you speak of?
Oh yes. Now I remember. I used to visit the site every day.
I love helping my fellow developers and answering their questions whenever I can.
My reputation there is 29,020, and I've contributed 645 quality answers.
I used to brag about this.
Now I had to think a bit to remember SO still exists.
My last answer was on May 28, 2021, over five years ago.
Obviously it wasn't LLMs that drove me away. And I'm not sure what it was.
Was it the culture, as others here pointed out? Or did I just get busy with other things?
---
Update: Now I think I remember what muted my enthusiasm.
Some of you older programmers may have used jQuery.
There is a common convention to use $ as the first character of a variable name that is a jQuery object:
var $foo = $('#foo');
Someone asked about this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/205853/why-would-a-javas...
The top-rated answer, with 1542 votes, is a good summary.
The second answer, with 278 votes, is as irrelevant as an answer can be.
I'm in third place with 71 votes. I gave the story behind the naming convention, because I like people to know the "how and why".
It gets better! This question was marked as a duplicate of another one. That other question has a wild variety of answers, but none that does what I tried to do: explain the reason and background for the convention.
Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.
Replies
"Some of you older programmers may have used jQuery." Oh dear, I'm getting old as the jQuery era was my prime of programming before other activities in life took over. Apparently, as someone in their early fourties I am now in the older category.
On topic: thanks for this great summary of the issue. I too miss the prime stackoverflow days. Although the availability of LLMs has allowed me to learn new things and generate some code again, the passion and love for programming that was on (the early) stackoverflow, I do miss. Also the times of just buying a book to learn about a new tool or language (jQuery in Action teached me a lot) feels different from just asking Claude Code to fix or explain something.
Very much agree.
The query in this thread further confirms it, by november 2022 (ChatGPT reveal), usage had already dropped to ~109120 questions/month as compared to peak usage in March 2014 at 207169 questions/month.
The trend continued since but their decline is surely not caused by LLM:s.
> Was it the culture, as others here pointed out? Or did I just get busy with other things?
Culture or no culture LLMs killed SO for good, there's simply no need for it anymore
I'm starting to feel old. I remember fondly using jQuery. Oh, and MoTools.
Now your intelligence was shamelessly stolen and other people making billions of it.
Same. For me it was basically that as a body of knowledge, it kind of stabilized. I didn't work in a rapidly developing field like the newest JS frameworks, so for what I knew, most stuff simply became answered.
Whenever I took the time to make a long answer on a question, I saw some mod close the question as a duplicate of an existing one - even though the question could have some minute detail that was different, or perhaps there was some recent change in the landscape that meant an answer in 2020 would be different from one in 2013. But no: aggressive marking as duplicate even though clearly as a _community_ it would be much better to have a more recent discussion, perhaps more alternative answers and just allowing the near-duplicates.