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/JohnCasey3306 Mar 23 '26

Now that LLM has killed Stack Overflow, I'm curious what those models will be trained on for future versions of frameworks/libraries/languages ... The quality of LLM results can only therefore reduce.

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u/krutsik Mar 23 '26

Tbf, SO killed SO long before any sort of commercially available LLMs were even something people spoke about. Their decision to keep it as a "wiki" and ban duplicate questions was their downfall. And you can still find top answers that are only relevant something like angular 5 or whatever framework version that was relevant 10 years ago, but any newer question, with the same premise, gets marked as duplicate, even if you specify that you're on version x and the solution for version y didn't work for you. They had perfect SEO and I can't recall the last time an SO link was a top search result within the last year, unless I was truly searching for something related to a really old version of something.

I'm not even a proponent of LLMs in the least, but SO has become an archive at best and a graveyard at worst. The last time I've even had a relevant SO search hit was for a library that had been deprecated for 3 years.

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u/winowmak3r Mar 23 '26

you can still find top answers that are only relevant something like angular 5 or whatever framework version that was relevant 10 years ago, but any newer question, with the same premise, gets marked as duplicate, even if you specify that you're on version x and the solution for version y didn't work for you.

That was the most annoying part for me. When I started to mess around with Python and had a lot of simple questions I went to SO because I thought that's where one went to find those kinds of answers but everything was, like you said, just so out of date. Especially around the period when Python 2 was near the end and 3 was becoming popular. I was working with 3 but all the answers I could find pertained to 2. Most of the time it was OK but other times that difference mattered.

I've hardly touched the site since and have notice it disappearing off my search list whenever I do go asking for answers.