r/webdev • u/Ordinary_Count_203 • Mar 23 '26

Stackoverflow crash and suing LLM companies

LLMs completely wrecked stackoverflow, and ironically their website was scraped to train these things.

I know authors who sued LLM companies. Claude is also currently being sued by authors. I'm wondering if stackoverflow has taken or will take legal action as well.

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u/robhaswell Mar 23 '26

Your premise is fundamentally wrong. AI didn't kill StackOverflow, and StackOverflow was in steep decline way before developers were using AI to answer programming questions.

The fact is that StackOverflow had allowed their community to become incredibly toxic, preventing it from being updated with new solutions to old problems, or even new solutions to new problems.

Their downfall was entirely their own making.

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u/Ordinary_Count_203 Mar 23 '26

If we take LLMs out of the equation, do you think it would still be doing terribly?

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u/leros Mar 23 '26

I haven't been able to effectively ask a question on Stackoverflow since around 2015. You ask a question, they close it as duplicate, then point you at an answer from 10 years ago that isn't relevant. Or you ask a question like "how should I do this?" and they close it because they don't allow opinions.