Paul Graham argues Stack Overflow's hostile community culture, not just AI scraping, drove developers to AI alternatives

@Austen On the other hand, if anyone deserved to lose their users, it was them. They allowed a notoriously brutal culture to flourish there. Obviously people will prefer to ask questions of an AI that won't ridicule them for asking.

@Austen That's how the model companies looked on them.

@paulg Very true.

I mostly looked at them as a historical repository of questions already asked.

@Austen No one liked using them. The petty martinets who would close your question as violating some random rule or who would penalize you for not writing something in exactly the right way ruined it long before AI.

@paulg @Austen It was really the spiritual answer to “what if the Debian IRC channel was a company?”

@real_michal @paulg @Austen Give them break man..... Those dudes needed something to feel better about themselves 😂

@paulg @Austen literally got banned for asking "easy dumb questions i should have known" when i was first learning how to code

@David_N_Frank @paulg @Austen Share the prompt ;)

@Austen Could not be happier out of all cursed forums it was the most toxic for people giving you trash answers and marking your post duplicate and pointing you to past questions that held no solutions.

@Austen This is what platform shifts usually look like. Distribution advantage disappears fast once the interface layer changes.

@Austen It was a hellhole for newbies and I have zero sympathy for the company that failed to rein the mods in.

They could have built their own model as as soon as they saw what was happening. They did not do that since by then they were PE driven.

@Austen AI didn't kill SO the downvote mob did. we just got patient answers without the gatekeeping.

@Austen Plus for every helpful resonse you got three snarky unhelpful responses lmao

@paulg @Austen Imagine the countless new devs who quit in frustration bashing their heads against that platform. Terrible

@Austen the platform that taught the models how to code got replaced by the thing it trained, with no contract and no payment

@Austen I hear this all the time and don't get it, do people think there is all to programming was is SO, and ai is enough forever? Or do they really think ai can write new code for future problems? This will stagnate programming beyond dreams in future, no new code just rewritten code

@Austen They have licensing deals right? So they are probably doing ok. And the intimidation factor was terrible on that site, as others noted. Happy to never return.

@Austen Stack Overflow was going to die anyway. We built something really amazing, but it was decaying well before GPT came around. Mix that in with creative commons and there was never any alternative.

@paulg @Austen Where is the training data going to come from now that nobody is producing any more?

@Austen Long term, yes.

Just check their revenues over the last 2 years 😆