> Volunteer admins with nothing better to do get their dopamine by closing questions for StackOverflow points, regardless of whether the supposedly duped question from 8 years ago is actually still the best answer and covers the nuances of the question now being asked.

This rung so true to me, given that my answer from 4y ago was closed as a duplicate of an answer made 3m ago :D (no, the nuances were not considered and the questions were ultimately too different; this didn't influence moderation decision at all and I was very confused on how I've made a duplicate 4y ago of a question in, at that time, the future)

Stack Overflow should have been a strong connection for developers who started building software prior to 2022.

A niche place to find the solution for something getting in your way.

Instead, my own experience and every anecdote I've ever heard from those who tried participating mirrors this one.

Genuine questions and thought out responses closed in the harshest way possible.

If the policy on duplicates weren't so rigidly and coldly enforced it would be a place I've visit frequently to learn.

Instead I avoid it and do not feel bad that it's been superseded by LLMs. Which sucks because good human responses are far more preferable.

Ads, which are the sole reason for the attention-grabbing-at-all-costs society we find ourselves in, are, in my opinion, one of the greatest cancers to ever befall us.

However, ads are also the reason why many services on the Internet are free. So maybe they are not completely bad.

> Nobody asked for this.

The people who aren't willing to sign up for an account and pay a monthly/annual/per-article fee asked for this.

People have bills to pay after all.

Ads are also used as infection vectors by spyware now. See:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/int...

Note: Ctrl + F: malicious advertisements

as the purpose of the post was not to highlight that fact. But given that Google is an advertising company and they still mention it ...

TANSTAAFL. Ads are just another way that lunch isn't free. You're welcome to consume all the ad paid content you want and then bitch about it. But it's just like complaining that other things cost money. However we pay for other people's labor, it's a corellary of opposing slavery. The alternative is compelled unpaid labor, or not consuming things. So choose: slavery, poverty, or perform labor to compensate other people for theirs. Sometimes that means waking up at 4am to work in the salt mines, and sometimes it means watching stupid ads. Personally I like having the occasional choice.

> Ads should not exist at all.

> They are psychological, manipulative, influencing tools.

The second paragraph is in my opinion also an accurate description of a very huge amount of people. By your argumentation that ads should not exist at all: shouldn't these people also not exist at all?

> Nobody asked for this.

Well... the advertisers did.

There has to be some price tag associated with running Stack Overflow, but I wonder if it's within the range of something a collective could manage.

More and more I think we need volunteer projects running the things we depend on the most. Community driving email, forums, social networks and Q&A sites like Stack Overflow. A community driven Stack Overflow could still run a job board, or have the C# section be "Sponsored by Microsoft", or run a Jetbrains ad. If you only have to pay for hosting, then you need less ad revenue.

Absolutely, I much rather push docs into LLM when really needed, it works miles better than googling and/or SO, especially for smaller tasks

SO is actually a great resource to train your LLM on :)

"We've got an egg, why do we still need the chicken, eh?"

>> I mean, it's there any genuine case you can cover with SO that you cannot with your favorite LLM?

Perhaps better than current models at detecting and pushing back when it sounds like the individual asking the question is thinking of doing something silly/dubious/debatable.

The main benefit for me is of the upvotes and comments telling me which solutions/approaches are better than others and why. Present day LLMs on their own don't have that context, nor the critical thinking.

As I see it, the next step is a synthesis of the two, whereby StackOverflow (or a competitor) reverses their ban on GenAI [0] and explicitly accepts AI users. I'm thinking that for moderation purposes, these would have to be explicitly marked as AIs, and would have to be "sponsored" by a proven-human StackOverflow user of good standing. Other than that, the AI users would act exactly as human users, being able to add questions, answers and comments, as well as to upvote and downvote other entries, based on the existing (or modified) reputation system.

I imagine for example, that for any non-sensitive open source project that I'm using Claude Code for, I would give it explicit permissions to interact on SO: for any difficult issue it encounters, it would try to find an existing question that might be relevant, if so, try the answers there, and upvote/comment about those, or to create a new question, and either get good answers from others, or to self-answer it, if it later found its own solution.

[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/policy-gener...

When I do use them, I always get there using LLM queries via Kagi Assistant. And when I get there, I don't spend more than a minute looking for the info that was presented by the LLM summary. I don't spend time as a contributor to review posts anymore.