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.
pwagland 12 hours ago [-]
It's funny to see what a parallel you have to my story.
my reputation is 29,459, my last answer October 15, 2021, close enough to be considered the same IMO.
For me, the thing that drove me away, is that you'd spend time on writing good answers, to provider lore, etc, but it was increasingly difficult to find "good" questions to answer. There were increasingly many "homework" questions, and far fewer questions where people _had_ put the effort in.
And, an increasing animosity to the people answering the questions.
The community became toxic, and it wasn't the only the gatekeepers, everyone wanted something for free, and StackOverflow suffered from the "open source burn-out" problem.
Certainly I did.
bryanlarsen 10 hours ago [-]
Kudos to you, you're a more helpful person than I. I never looked for questions to help people, my interaction with SO was always "me first". If I had a problem before the AIpocalypse, I'd look on SO. If I couldn't find an answer I still had the problem and would have to figure it out the hard way. And once putting in the effort finding the answer it was little additional effort to provide it to others.
So I ended up with a large number of "revival" and "necromancer" badges for getting upvotes for answers on old previously unanswered questions. And many of my questions have my own answers posted a couple days later.
IOW, I provided a lot of value to SO. But I got even more value out of them, finding many more answers than I provided, especially since many of my answers were for very obscure questions. A real significant win-win.
I think this would have been a better model for SO -- encouraging more of this sort of drive by helpfulness rather than gamifying/socializing so much to encourage direct helping.
BorisMelnik 9 hours ago [-]
same - I only visited SO when I spent a lot of time looking for a solution / answer to something and I could not find it in documentaiton/man pages or on Google
KPGv2 9 hours ago [-]
I watched a few key tags around functional programming and JS, but someone would always answer first, so I eventually moved on because I wasn't needed. I for a time ended up just responding to random Tweets from African students posting about their programming achievements with tips for structuring code they posted better and stuff like that. It led to some fun conversations.
now I have kids, so they get my teaching attention instead. And I don't touch Twitter.
kkoncevicius 10 hours ago [-]
Similar here. I don't share your numbers, but I had ~10,000 on SO and ~5,000 on Cross-Validated.
I started it as a way to learn things. Mostly picked questions that were on the edge of my understanding, researched the problem for myself, and then tried to provide clear and detailed answers. So I got a lot out of it too.
My view for when SO started to decline is also similar to yours - being flooded with poor quality questions. And on average people asking questions became more arrogant, put little effort in, and demanded the whole place to change so they can paste their broken code and have someone fix it for an upvote.
So I think I naturally and slowly drifted away from using SO. However, publicly stated reasons for SO's downfall often proclaim there was something wrong with people who answered questions. That they were rude or were "gatekeeping". I always feel alienated reading those, since it's very different from how I experienced the site.
8 hours ago [-]
Syntaf 33 minutes ago [-]
Totally agree, my last answer was also in 2021; I remember trying to jump back in and just feeling like the quality of questions was so poor and all of the many "homework" questions felt dirty to answer because I'm clearly helping someone cheat.
I actually got hounded / insulted on a couple of my last answers for not providing timely responses to their comments on my answer and that was the last straw.
jkubicek 9 hours ago [-]
My reputation is 49,636 (I was a relative expert in iOS and git when both technologies were young, and answered a LOT of questions that are still getting upvoted to this day)
My last answer was December 28, 2015, and corresponds pretty closely with me getting a more interesting and engaging job. That, and the two areas I knew well were maturing and there were a lot fewer easy questions to answer.
jambalaya8 8 hours ago [-]
Mind if I ask if you stayed at that job, and if so for how long?
jkubicek 1 minutes ago [-]
I was there 5 years
sandeepkd 7 hours ago [-]
My working theory is that being able to understand a detail answer itself requires a certain level of understanding for that topic. In that absence of that it would throw off a big crowd which was hoping to find something simpler, something that aligns with their existing understanding easily.
RajT88 9 hours ago [-]
Never ending September?
alkonaut 13 hours ago [-]
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.
skydhash 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
I would generally classify those as “homework” questions.
Retric 11 hours ago [-]
That slowly changing landscape killed SO. Every year a higher percentage of answers were wrong because they got outdated, and removing duplicates made it worse.
I don’t think anyone in the org wanted to face the fact that the underlying assumptions in their model was flawed. The older an upvote the less reliable it becomes.
jambalaya8 8 hours ago [-]
This is part of the problem with AI, and probably the vast majority of sites online... even citations to textbooks (god knows how many papers have been superseded or are outdated, also).
I feel that people are not getting that is one of the larger issues with AI and pretty much everywhere people interact online.
Many of these places and projects were things we truly poured our energy into. But people change, just as operating systems and commandline executables do. At the same time, places like that, once they are gone, lose their weight... so any site that was really large or particularly represented a version of the zeitgeist of whatever subgroup, once it goes defunct, is kind of written out of any sort of AI historical lookup.
Also, there's so many answers on SO that a lot of people just use the Search function to find answers, if they choose to use SO instead of google or whatever. It is very useful for older and historical answers.
ezconnect 7 hours ago [-]
It is hard to describe the feeling of seeing things getting archived in real life. It will be very sad once SO is deleted from the web. When I needed a good description of a new computer stuff I usually go to Anandtech and now the whole site is now gone and all the knowledge on it. The future generation can't even dig it out of the ground like what archeologist are doing right now to piece some of our history. One day SO will be deleted from the web and all the knowledge it holds just like the old Usenet and Yahoo/Google groups with vast knowledge just deleted.
roncesvalles 8 hours ago [-]
It's a really intriguing phenomenon that on StackOverflow, the top-most voted answer was most often the wrong answer. My initial theory was that it's staleness. That is, it might have been the best answer when the question was asked, but if you're looking at a few years later the right answer changed. But it wasn't always that.
This has very interesting implications for everything in the world, btw. Correctness does not track majority consensus.
sublinear 7 hours ago [-]
100% this. The AI race is absolutely not about "intelligence" or some other naive scifi optimism.
It's global arbitrage of the "top answers". It's a new form of SEO because that's basically all LLMs are: a search engine in natural language.
This risk of staleness is also a huge risk for AI. It's actually worse than that since people are more willing than ever to stake so much on such an unstable technology.
hn_throwaway_99 7 hours ago [-]
> top-most voted answer was most often the wrong answer
I'm calling bullshit on that one. I don't doubt that some top-voted answers were wrong, but the vast majority of the time I used it, the top-voted answer was correct. This just feels like trying to paint with an extremely broad brush. I'm not denying that SO had problems, but there's no way I'm taking "the majority of top answers were wrong" without any evidence.
roncesvalles 2 hours ago [-]
I think "wrong answer" was the wrong phrasing. I meant it wasn't the best answer on the page.
chuckadams 7 hours ago [-]
Agreed. There was frequently a better answer that was ranked lower, but the top one was rarely actually wrong. SO had a litany of failings, but that wasn't one of them.
fatnoah 9 hours ago [-]
> 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".
Stuff like this is basically what drove me away as well. The top-rated answer was frequently not the answer. It was "an" answer to "a" question, but not the "the" answer to "the" question.
That, and I'd ask a variation of a question and it would get flagged as a duplicate of an already-answered question, except the original question and none of the scored answers contained the answer.
jitbit 4 hours ago [-]
69k rep here. I treated stackoverflow as my “facebook”. I even have moderator permissions.
I still left eventually and LLM has nothing to do with it. It’s the “closing as duplicate”, it’s the “provide text explanation not just code”, it’s the “deleted as off topic”.
I can’t tell you how many times I was finding useful info in DELETED answers (I see them as moderator). And the existing “vote for undelete/reopen” procedure does not work.
SO did not die because of LLLMs. It died because it was driven to the ground then sold private equity and about to be sold again (mark my words)
niekmaas 12 hours ago [-]
"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.
bcvvvy 12 hours ago [-]
As someone in the "some of you older programmers may have used Z80 assembly" territory, I find that hilarious.
ourmandave 11 hours ago [-]
Oh no you don't! You're starting a "back in my day..." thread, that's like saying "Beetlejuice!" three times.
Z80 Assembly! Fortran! ENIAC cables!
And the ghost of Alan Turing shows up.
bcvvvy 11 hours ago [-]
Hey I assembled that code on paper on my home made computer and I was in Alan Turing's office the other day!
(not even joking)
hangrybear666 9 hours ago [-]
Much respect indeed and I admire that effort!
All I do now is have the LLM generate SVG images of its implementation planfiles for me to review a pretty image because it's become too advanced for me to parse the markdown in appropriate time.
bcvvvy 7 hours ago [-]
At least you haven’t spent two weeks in AI strategy meetings with people who have used AI to come up with a strategy for AI to implement because if we don’t, our single competitor will win the AI arms race.
Our products are both mature, entirely finished, fully deterministic and the last attempt at this using the same approach just burned all the money that was spent instead of generating any new revenue.
neutrinobro 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vardump 10 hours ago [-]
Heresy! 6502/6510 was the only true CPU back then!
(In other words, my daddy bought me a C64 in the eighties. ;-))
jacquesm 6 hours ago [-]
The 6809 was by far the better CPU, but it was more pricey and the 6502 had some absolutely amazing software written for it (Notably: BBC Basic, Elite).
bcvvvy 5 hours ago [-]
Definitely the better CPU. You could write position independent code on it for a start.
jacquesm 5 hours ago [-]
That, the MUL instruction, hardware support for multi-tasking. Atomics.
chrisweekly 9 hours ago [-]
Get off my lawn!
I was playing Larn on my dad's VT100 long before the C64 was released.
drjasonharrison 8 hours ago [-]
You couldn't play anything on a VT100 except "please mainframe run this program"
That's like saying you played games on your dad's Philips G8.
chrisweekly 4 hours ago [-]
Your dismissive assertion is rude and inaccurate.
Larn was a text-based RPG that was in fact easily run as a networked game over a modem to a server at GenRad where my dad worked. Details escape me (it was over 40 years ago, I was like 12 years old) but these basics are factual.
bcvvvy 7 hours ago [-]
Honestly I bought a 6502 (BBC Micro) after I got tired of the Z80.
zugi 7 hours ago [-]
Like many I was a taker, almost never asking or answering questions, but simply finding answers that helped me.
Even so, at some point I made sure to answer a few questions, to get enough reputation to upvote and occasionally comment. I wanted at least to be able to reward / thank those who had posted answers that I found helpful. Even for 5 or 10 year-old answers, if an answer helped me I'd upvote it.
Now we're all "taking" via AI. We don't know who posted a helpful answer 10 years ago that the AI learned from in order to help us. That saddens me.
But in a way that's just the way of the world. We know to credit Pythagorus and Fourier and a few others whose names are attached to their methods. But for the most part we're all constantly standing on the shoulders of anonymous giants whose names are long lost.
Groxx 7 hours ago [-]
I mostly blame the near-complete abandonment of the product. It was quite clear even early on that it did not work very well for time-sensitive knowledge, and that having any of that cluttered the search results badly, but nothing at all was ever done to address that, despite nearly all of Stack Overflow fitting in that category.
IMO the uselessness of the answers just became more and more apparent, so fewer people contributed, so they rotted further. Good riddance, I say - it had a brief couple years where it was excellent because all information was new enough to be useful, and then it started dying like all stagnant things do.
Stack Exchanges that do not have such a bias for time-sensitive information are still going relatively well AFAICT, e.g. math exchange. The model works fine for some things, just not general tech assistance.
mixmastamyk 6 hours ago [-]
The Trending (recent votes count more) feature was implemented years ago. Not perfect, but helps a lot.
Groxx 6 hours ago [-]
All I've ever seen that do is move "the top answer doesn't work" (usually with no reference to which top answer) to the top. I fully believe it can help, but uh. Nowhere near enough.
mixmastamyk 5 hours ago [-]
Not my experience. If there is a new answer it usually brings it to the top or near it.
wouldbecouldbe 11 hours ago [-]
To be honest the accepted answer is just more to the point and helpful. I get your reasoning and its a nicer story, and the credit part.
santadays 10 hours ago [-]
I had the same thought when I read the top answer. But then I read the parent's answer, and it was quite pleasantly written. Ie it unfolded the thought process of why, which is what the question was about.
I also had the thought, I think I independently invented the same convention, but I am getting old and I probably at least somewhere read some code that was written that way and it made sense. Or maybe I read an article about it and started using it.
The thing about StackOverflow was it hit at a moment in time when everyone was excited about this stuff. I remember listening to Joel Spolski's and Jeff Atwood's podcast about building the site, Jeff thought it would take 3 months, Joel thought they needed a real timeline.
There was so much pent up demand for it, that it just immediately took off. But it also seemed to replace the various personal blogs where people would write about some problem they had and how they fixed it.
I don't really have a feeling about Stackoverflows demise one way or the other. I think I initially contributed one maybe two answers, got a couple nitpicks on the precise nature of the answer and kindof lost interest. Which is interesting because I remember Joel and Jeff explicitly wanting to solve for the issue that happened when someone asked a question and were immediately told they were taking the wrong approach, instead of just answering their question. I guess the burden shifted from the questioner to the answerer.
jmull 7 hours ago [-]
To me the voting is pretty much on target.
They are both good answers, depending on what you're looking for. The first is clear, concise, and correct -- pretty much exactly what you want to read and write code with the $ prefix.
The other one is more interesting in a behind-the-scenes way, and goes through the thinking process behind it.
I can see why the first answer gets the most votes -- that's usually all people want. The other gets votes for the people looking for a somewhat deeper answer and are willing to spend more time reading to get it.
It shouldn't necessarily be about winning the voting... different perspectives are useful.
santadays 6 hours ago [-]
I agree. I am just reminiscing on what came before StackOverflow. How it changed things, what it's intents were and what it actually became. We had alot of people doing their own thing, on their own blogs, creating a community of sorts. But there was a downside that it was incomplete, everyone presented their information in whatever format they wanted, etc, etc. StackOverflow definite did it's job in making this all more efficient in getting the question you were asking answered. But that seems to have come at a cost, it was a kind of harsh environment to participate in.
But now we have llms and we are even farther from any sort of community. And llms for all their faults are very pleasant to work with, and completely obviate the need to interact with anyone. And all those posts on stackoverflow and all those blog posts that everyone wrote free of charge all got slurped up, so when I ask it to port a big mess of jquery to react, somewhere in the matrix multiplications going on at scale in a data center somewhere is benefiting from some compressed knowledge that $ at the beginning of a variable means its likely a reference to an object that is a jquery wrapped set. And the connection to stratoscope thinking this up gets lost in a sea of diffuse indirection.
firesteelrain 11 hours ago [-]
I had the same thought it’s a great example of why StackOverflow does work in this case.
0points 12 hours ago [-]
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.
InsidiousWombat 7 hours ago [-]
I asked question, had it re-written by someone with more permission to ask something entirely different and then someone closed it as duplicate.
Had similar thing happen to my colleague too, in both cases they were pretty deep technical questions
Stopped using that ego bubble blower page shortly after
mattlondon 5 hours ago [-]
Same reason no one uses Wikipedia anymore - it's become a theifdom to the editors who have staked a claim on "their" territory and woe betide anyone who wants to contribute without paying prior deference to the emperor - you contributions will be deleted/removed/rolled-back instantly (often automated) for the flimsiest of reasons (if any reason is given at all).
Or my favourite entire IP ranges or whole ISPs blocked because eighteen years ago someone used a sock puppet account from their and there is no recourse because the High Doge has decreed it from their throne in Moderator Palazzo - you can appeal but the lord chief's decision is FINAL, and they're all too busy infighting and empire building to care about such trivia as users anyway
gww 6 hours ago [-]
I’m in a similar boat. I really enjoyed SO for a long time. I’m have around 44k reputation and haven’t answered a question since late 2020. I mostly stopped by the end of 2018, when I finished graduate school. Part of it was having less time as a postdoc and academic, and part of it was that the questions started to feel either repetitive or too specific and outside my areas of expertise.
mywacaday 10 hours ago [-]
A few weeks ago I was cleaning out some old boxes and found an envelope with SO and coding horror stickers, my Irish address was hand written and had Jeffs home address as a return address. SO was an amazing resource and I will be forever grateful that it existed.
wood_spirit 8 hours ago [-]
I got some merch from the gamedev site because I was a top 100 or 1000 user or whatever. I remember only the surprise and mistrust when someone reached out for my real life address and deciding to dare answer and actually getting quite a big box of small stuff! But I remember at the time my points were exactly 1337.
rileytg 6 hours ago [-]
And this is how i find out the history of this… This convention had massive impact on my career! Thank you! I was able to write maintainable complex front end code using this. The system is now 22 years old, my first move was prototype to jquery, my second big move was using $ convention. RIP jquery…
le-mark 11 hours ago [-]
> What is this "Stack Overflow" you speak of?
Oh let me remind you, it was the expertsexchange that was actually useful!
red_admiral 5 hours ago [-]
And the one not blocked by stupid url filters.
wood_spirit 8 hours ago [-]
Would hate to hear about people having inexpert ones!
rkagerer 5 hours ago [-]
It's funny, all those dollar signs in jQuery code initially turned me off to it - it felt unexpected (since I wasn't used to seeing the symbol in variable and function names) and distracting.
Hearing this story is helpful.
Antipode 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair the other replies had a 9 year head start
thorin 10 hours ago [-]
What I found was that there was a lot of repetition in the questions that were asked and so once the knowledge base was built up, less new stuff was being added.
There was a lot of blocking and downvoting of questions which was both a good and bad thing.
If you had an expertise on a certain topic, the questions were often very simple and repetitious (e.g. I knew a decent amount at relational databases), but also you'd get people asking for whole system designs which got a bit ridiculous.
It wasn't great for asking about little known products or libraries etc and I often found no one responded to questions on certain js libraries or BI tools. Which was quite annoying, maybe because it appealed more to certain types of developers.
I guess you served your time and most people don't want to be answering questions every day for ever! There was a guy called Tom Kyte from Oracle who ran a question site for over 20 years - it must have taken a lot of his time, but if you're out there Tom it was very much appreciated!
LorenPechtel 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah. It reached the point that basically everything was either homework or outside my knowledge.
And they're too aggressive about duplicates. My question shared almost nothing with the duplicate I was pointed to--yes, the answer was correct, but that's not a lack of research on my part as I never would have recognized the question as relevant.
weatherlite 12 hours ago [-]
> 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
assimpleaspossi 9 hours ago [-]
I had moderator privileges and I used them mainly to just get people to follow the rules. But the higher ups didn't want you to do that due to the "be nice" policy. "But...but...it's a direct violation!" I'd say. Then I'd be declared a bad guy and put into moderator jail for a while.
That happened often enough that I just gave up. I rarely felt the need to ask questions cause I was pretty good at what I did so I quit altogether. For fun, I signed in and noticed about a 2000 uptick in my standing and three "best answer" awards.
mrboatshoepants 9 hours ago [-]
I upvoted. Your answer is at 91 now.
viraptor 10 hours ago [-]
So it was a Hungarian $ - got to know :)
PeterStuer 9 hours ago [-]
The attrocious moderation was just an accelerator. SO was doomed the second it gained enough traction to become a resume padder and consultancy funnel.
shahedshah 12 hours ago [-]
I'm starting to feel old. I remember fondly using jQuery. Oh, and MoTools.
aembleton 12 hours ago [-]
MooTools. Also, I fondly remember YUI Library that Yahoo created.
ezconnect 7 hours ago [-]
YUI library was amazing and all the Yahoo coding stuff, it is sad they were all just discarded because it was not financially viable.
julianlam 10 hours ago [-]
I bet on MooTools and lost. sigh
Now its legacy is that its prototype pollution is the reason we can't have `contains` and call `includes` instead.
da_chicken 12 hours ago [-]
I've got a similar story and similar rep, although I only have about a dozen answers posted after 2021. I haven't ever told anyone how much I answered questions there, either. I wasn't there for the points, I was there for the puzzles. I think I've gotten like another 3k rep since I stopped going there. It looks like I finally lost my "Top 2%" status, or else they got rid of that for everyone.
For me, I think I left for a few reasons. All of them are some flavor of "the design is user-hostile".
The first reason is the "traps" they put in the moderation review queue process. These always felt like shit, even if you were right. And for some reason they frequently picked questions where you could reasonably pick multiple reasons to close a question... and they'd yell at you for getting it wrong! Really, this needlessly punitive experience is the heart of why SO was so awful, because everything is like that across the whole site. Some of the network sites aren't like that, but it's rare. And there were just so many Meta questions where the upvoted response was "this would be hard to do right, so instead we're going to do it the way we all know is wrong but it's easy."
The second reason is just how awful the onboarding is. The site constantly had problems with people either not posting code or posting screenshots of code. I don't know why they didn't make a beginner form, similar to what you often see on GitHub issue trackers for large projects (i.e., always include this, always include this, include this if it's relevant, etc. and it's in the textarea box when you start a question). Instead they assume that you know how to ask a question, give you a completely blank form, and then aggressively policy anything where you didn't do it right. I think the one thing to come out of that site is that people do not inherently know how to ask questions. [Which, if anybody has been responsible for responding to IT tickets, oh, boy, do they not know how to ask questions or report problems. "I'm getting errors running my report in the Finance application. I need this report soon! Help!" No mention of which report. No mention of what the report parameters were. No mention of which error message. They don't know what the error message means so, obviously, it must not be useful to anybody.]
The third reason is the site finger-pointing. "This doesn't belong here so I'm locking and closing your question," is possibly the most ridiculous thing ever. Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.
But, I think the final nail in the coffin is just how aggressively awful rpg.stackexchange.com is, which seeks objective, hyperliteral answers to game questions that are, by design, subjective and intentionally meant to be played with interpretation and nuance. The result is a handful of highly active users will nit pick any answer or question they don't like. Really, I think it's the GameFAQs Forum clique problem, to a significant extent. Some people really have nothing better to do except quash the utility of a site they have a small amount of control over, and it largely ruins the whole experience for the majority of other people. And, unlike a subreddit, you can't just go make your own version on the same topic. It doesn't work like that.
chuckadams 8 hours ago [-]
I like what Discourse does: it checks for similarity in your subject line (and can extend it to the body) and shows you a list of similar posts next to it. Whereas SO's unspoken motto that it lived and very much died by was always "gotcha": for askers, answerers, and moderators alike. Those meta-moderation traps were real, and it quickly got to where I just didn't bother doing it anymore. Selecting moderators by whether they agreed with the existing moderators was just another ingredient in the poisonous cocktail that SO mixed up itself and gulped down every day.
da_chicken 7 hours ago [-]
Exactly. The site's success was, in part, due to gamification. However, for some reason, the game they picked to mimic was Minesweeper.
LorenPechtel 6 hours ago [-]
SO shows "like" questions--but doesn't do a very good job of it.
znpy 10 hours ago [-]
> Was it the culture, as others here pointed out?
Rather than culture, for me it was the moderation body.
There were a bunch of people that were policing the dumbest minutie, and being assholish about that.
I occasionally would get my answers rewritten to have a completely different tone. My tone was not polemical or controversial in any way. It was just my tone. It was me. And somebody was not okay with that. They would edit MY TEXT and potentially put words in my mouth.
That's absolutely unacceptable.
Ten years on and i'm still salty about that, and i cheerish stackoverflow's death every time it gets brought up.
StackOverflow: Rest in piss, you won't be missed.
jodrellblank 7 hours ago [-]
> "They would edit MY TEXT"
It isn't your text. All content is submitted under a Creative Commons license[1][2] which lets StackOverflow 'adapt remix transform' as long as they give credit (username) and indicate if changes were made (edit history). StackOverflow is particularly sucsceptible to this "I imagine the site is something else and I'm making myself mad and blaming them". I don't know why because it's never been a discussion forum which changed, or a personal blog, it's always been a Wikipedia style public edit site. It's like people assume all websites with a textbox and a submit button are required to be the same website and behave the same way.
The first podcast[3] with Spolsky and Atwood from April 2008 has them talking about the site they are designing, and they mention editing other people's answers:
"""Spolsky: Our longer term goal, if we’re successful, is that you're trying to figure out how to do something in Python like how to merge two arrays in Python and you go to Google and you type "merge two arrays python" and submit that, and our goal is to be the number one hit that comes up with a really good edited answer to that question that some individual has contributed and maybe other individuals have edited."""
No. That's ridiculous. Whatever the rules say, there's never a situation where it's morally OK to change someone else's words and leave them attributed to them. Imagine I had edit rights here on HN, and I could change your message to:
> I think goats are sexy.
> - jodrellblank
Even if the site allowed it, or even encouraged it in certain small circles, you would not be OK with this. Or if you would, surely you could appreciate that other people absolutely would not be.
Sometimes people edited my SO answers in ways that were factually incorrect. A colleague or would-be employer might see that wrong answer attributed to me and suspect that I'm incompetent. That is not acceptable. Again, it doesn't matter if the license permits it. Morals and ethics do not.
This is different from, say, forking my software project and releasing an altered version. People would prominently see that you're publishing the changed version under your own name. That's fine. You having the ability to go in and change my own published code, without my permission, so that people see my name on your work, is morally and ethically wrong (and a major security risk). No rule or guideline on SO can override that principle.
lofaszvanitt 10 hours ago [-]
It might have happened because there are currents on the net and platforms where the only purpose is to pull out as much data from you and other humans as possible and give back NOTHING. Be wary what you post and about what.
They exploit the basic human needs and build whole exploiting platforms on it and then kick you out from the nest like a cuckoo does with other bird chicks. The abnormal modding and other shenanigans also killed my interest quite quickly, but in hindsight I have to say, good riddance. People are naive and gullible, and give out decades of experience on a whim, because they think that everyone is as good and benevolent as them. While in reality there are a lot of truly evil and selfish people out there and at the end of the day using their knowledge against the good ones.
And now here we are in the AI madness, where a similar exploitation is happening just at a much bigger scale, using the benevolent and naive ones information against them.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
and back when SO started, that either hadn't happened yet or nobody was aware of it. Posting on the internet was a positive experience.
lofaszvanitt 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, good ol innocent times.
JMKH42 8 hours ago [-]
I remember when I was young and first started working with jquery, I saw all the $ and had no idea what it meant or how it worked, and for a while was just cargo-cult programming making small edits. Eventually I said "time to learn how this actually works" and laughed when I realized it was just a function name convention. "OH! not so complicated!"
chasd00 7 hours ago [-]
i remember being a little disturbed realizing that javascript allowed a function to be named "$". I remember thinking what else is lurking in javascript? hahah, i've learned a lot since then.
VoodooJuJu 9 hours ago [-]
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jesterson 13 hours ago [-]
Now your intelligence was shamelessly stolen and other people making billions of it.
schleck8 13 hours ago [-]
Stack Overflow is CC licensed
> Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0.
jraph 12 hours ago [-]
CC BY-SA requires attribution. And is actually quite like GPL, in that it requires derivatives to be under CC BY-SA too!
Yizahi 10 hours ago [-]
And not only CC BY-SA 2.5 requires attribution which wasn't provided by any of the AI corpos stealing that data, it also requires that derivative product MUST be licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 too. So literally all AI models are in violation.
abc123abc123 13 hours ago [-]
True for OP and true for Linus Torvalds. Is the solution to stop with open source, and never to publish anything? ;)
bialpio 11 hours ago [-]
If it turns out that you have no control over what happens with your IP because someone will ignore the license and then make you pay for accessing stolen content then yes, that is certainly one of the solutions. It is also the reason why I recently decided against publishing my personal projects.
shimman 6 hours ago [-]
No, the solution is to force tech companies to pay a VAT that can then be used for public benefit software projects.
yussbro 12 hours ago [-]
Yes
tourmalinetaco 13 hours ago [-]
They were publicly posting to a search-indexed website with the intent of helping people. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that they understood that SO owned the messages and were already profiting off of them.
antonymoose 11 hours ago [-]
I believe the GP is referring to the LLM firms that have hoovered up all works they can find, legally or not.
Of course stepping past the licensing question - I would have never contributed to SO as I did had I known what was to come.
With SO itself I could at least see the value in having a central store of knowledge for these topics and so, hey, I don’t mind that they got to be the ones to make it happen and profit.
jodrellblank 7 hours ago [-]
No they don't understand that SO owned the messages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50287815 - someone telling StackOverflow to "rest in piss" because another user dared edit "MY TEXT" which is "unacceptable".
rpdillon 3 hours ago [-]
Power and responsibility go together. The power to edit needs to be attached to the responsibility of having your name next to those edits. That person's point isn't about ownership at all, it's about attribution.
GeorgeWBasic 4 hours ago [-]
That person is right to be angry with StackOverflow for that, and another comment explains that StackOverflow was editing their words but still claiming that they them. That can cause reputational damage. StackOverflow should have been sued over that.
saithir 5 hours ago [-]
Presenting CC-BY-SA as "SO owns anything" is an even more terrible lack of understanding.
jodrellblank 4 hours ago [-]
Your comment is low quality; it's an insult, it explains nothing, and the nitpick changes nothing about the point.
darlachaps 10 hours ago [-]
LMAO.
So absolutely zero self-awareness from you that not only did you add confidently incorrect “corrections” to the accepted answer, but your “lore” is verbose and uninteresting.
“I noticed $email looked like $('#email')” isn’t exactly an exciting bit of history, even if you spend multiple paragraphs trying to pump yourself up.
kstrauser 21 hours ago [-]
OK, let's get this out of the way:
1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.
2. AI clearly finished the job.
I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.
SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It dropped off a cliff when, 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow. Even then, it looks like 4 months of ChatGPT speed-ran about a year's worth of traffic decline, and then the slope went back to approximately the pre-AI angle.
I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.
SO was a governance disaster. It was the infighting it was the strike, it was bad auto moderation tools.
And the Stack Exchange strike wasn't really about AI. AI was just the final trigger after years of management undermining the community that made the platform valuable.
Stack Exchange was built on an implicit social contract people contributed their expertise and thousands of hours of unpaid work because they believed they were building a collectively governed knowledge resource. The company owned the platform, but the community created its value.
After time, management became increasingly centralized and disconnected from contributors. Also the policing of questions based on geeky criteria and not what users wanted. The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone, qmd at least thats why i quit. Quality control gradually became useless gatekeeping.
So there were really more than one problems, corporate management treating contributors as free labor, and established contributors treating their moderation as authority over everyone else, there were bad tools closing questions.
The platform had become extremely hard to use for posting questions, finding amswers, moderator work. For me it was useless. Incidentally the closing of “opinion” questions was the worst decision since it was the only thing that could make it distinct from AI produced answers.
> The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone, qmd at least thats why i quit.
This. Way before LLMs.
matsemann 10 hours ago [-]
> Also the policing of questions based on geeky criteria and not what users wanted.
This is wrong. People don't get that SO is moderated almost entirely by users. Users are those that down vote. Users are those who vote to close a question, and when a question reaches consensus it's closed. Users are those watching the review queue. Mods mainly did bigger stuff with additional tools.
So users wanted it how it was. And for good reason. If you actually participated on the site, like watching new questions arriving in a constant stream, it was obvious that most of it was low quality. People here will bemoan they got a question closed or no help, but that's to me mostly entitlement. The rules are clear, it was to create a Q&A site, not solve your specific question for free. To me that's not hostile.
rpdillon 9 hours ago [-]
> This is wrong.
This is exactly what drove me away. It's basically Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy. SO got so overrun with people that were dedicated to Maintaining Order that the site itself stopped being useful. I feel like at least half the time I would go visit, the question that brought me there had been marked as a duplicate or closed. Pointing out that the fire hose is mostly low quality doesn't change this.
All those people fighting to keep SO pristine now preside over a kingdom of nothing.
matsemann 8 hours ago [-]
Why did it matter if the question you visited was closed as a duplicate? Still you would find your answer by following it. People wrongly think a duplicate was something wrong. They probably could've made it clearer.
Sohcahtoa82 6 hours ago [-]
Because as literally dozens of people have already pointed out, it often wasn't actually a duplicate.
"How do I do X in Python?"
"This has already been answered in <other question>. Closing as duplicate."
And then you look up that other question and it's "How do I do X in PHP?"
Ask how to prevent XSS, and someone will flag it as a duplicate of a question asking how to prevent SQL Injection. Ask how to encode something in Base64, someone will flag it as a duplicate of a question about how to encrypt something with AES.
And the worst part, is that these moron moderators pat themselves on the back for keeping SO clean.
rerdavies 7 hours ago [-]
It was trivially easy to close dup a question that looked like it was a dup from the title, but much harder to actually read the contents of the questions, and realize that they were not. And you got points even if you were completely wrong. SO would have been much better if there were no close dups at all.
And even if the questions were actually duplicates, far too often the answers would be so out of date that it would be better if the question (and the answers) were allowed to start again from scratch.
And I agree: the "opinion" close was toxic as well.
A tragic gamification failure, that contributed significantly to my drift away from SO.
shagie 7 hours ago [-]
> And you got points even if you were completely wrong.
One of the oft repeated ideas is that you got points for closing questions.
You gain reputation when:
question is voted up: +10
answer is voted up: +10
article is voted up: +10
answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)
suggested edit is accepted: +2 (up to +1000 total per user)
bounty awarded to your answer: + full bounty amount
one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: + half of the bounty amount (see more details about how bounties work)
site association bonus: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)
You do not get any points for closing a question.
kstrauser 5 hours ago [-]
That's not quite right. Deletionists campaigned to be elected as moderators based on the number of questions they closed. For example: https://stackoverflow.com/election/14
They did not directly increase the integer counter of their reputation score. They did use it to explain why they should be granted increased human reputation as a moderator.
ryathal 5 hours ago [-]
When they added review queues there were badges tied to closing questions. The queues made a lot of existing problems a lot more public and prominent.
shagie 5 hours ago [-]
Badges had no impact on rep or any moderation or curation abilities on the site. Review queues could be completed with "leave open" or "reopen" rather than closing or leaving closed if one was after getting a badge.
shawn_w 2 hours ago [-]
A gold tag badge lets you do some things like closing a question with a single vote.
matsemann 4 hours ago [-]
Most of the badges was for reviewing, a "this question looks fine to me" gave the same progress as "close the question".
jodrellblank 6 hours ago [-]
> "SO would have been much better if there were no close dups at all."
Do you spend much time on Quora? Or AskReddit? Do you like that they are endlessly 'the same' questions over and over and over?
OroPla 4 hours ago [-]
How would you even notice without being chronically online? I visit these places and see users complaining about questions repeating, but never notice myself, since I don't read that kinda stuff every day.
matsemann 4 hours ago [-]
Because the people providing the value here, those answering, saw them day after day. That the freeloaders didn't holds no weight.
chuckadams 7 hours ago [-]
"We're not answering your question because it has words another question has, you're wrong for saying it doesn't answer your question, and you're wrong for thinking we were wrong."
That's a bit clearer. Bit long to engrave on a tombstone though, but SO will remain unburied because after all, most coffins are pretty similar.
Bratmon 6 hours ago [-]
The percentage of questions closed as duplicates that actually
1. Were actually duplicates of existing questions
2. That had a correct, up to date answer
was definitely less than 1%
braiamp 5 hours ago [-]
That's a lie, you know why? Because I've actually counted it, it's less than 20% wrong. And it's mostly because a rule of thumb got grossly misapplied: if you want to know if two questions are duplicate, look at the answers; if they are mostly the same then they likely to be duplicate.
It got grossly misapplied because it became "look at any answer, if one of the answers it the same, then they are duplicate". Note how likeness became overlap and likelyhood became certainty. Two questions where restart might solve the problem became duplicates under that absurd policy. Your example on the other hand I didn't find. I didn't find anyone claiming that two questions are duplicate of one another in different programming languages unless the language is not relevant.
Bratmon 5 hours ago [-]
> Your example on the other hand I didn't find. I didn't find anyone claiming that two questions are duplicate of one another in different programming languages unless the language is not relevant.
Did... Did you just mentally mark my comment as a duplicate question and copy/paste an unrelated answer?
braiamp 4 hours ago [-]
No, I'm classifying your assertion as false and offered reasons why it's false
inetknght 7 hours ago [-]
> People wrongly think a duplicate was something wrong.
No. A duplicate is fine.
What was wrong was when "duplicate" questions were closed in favor of other more-upvoted questions with less-correct answers, or questions that were marked duplicate which were in fact not duplicate.
rerdavies 7 hours ago [-]
Combined with the problem that more correct questions, that were likely to produce more correct answers were closed for further comments when they were incorrectly close-dup-ed. So often you would find the correct answer in the brief window between when the question was asked, and when a member of the self-appointed moderator class had incorrectly close-dup-ed the question. So frustrating!
jodrellblank 6 hours ago [-]
> "a member of the self-appointed moderator class"
It isn't self-appointed, everyone is a 'moderator'. And 'everyone' could vote to re-open closed questions.
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
This generally doesn't work out on public forums unless there is some larger upset in groups of people.
That is, typically the largest consolidated voting group is going to be your moderators. 5 or 6 people with one particular problem don't represent enough voting pressure to re-open any topic.
ezconnect 7 hours ago [-]
The problem of SO is the duplicate question is years apart. The answer is now different because software version changes along with the APIs. Cancer killed SO, the aggressive policing and killing of noobs who want to contribute.
johannes1234321 5 hours ago [-]
> So users wanted it how it was.
A group of active users wanted it that way. Some other group of users didn't necessarily understand the power mechanisms, others would would have liked to be active users were driven away.
It's however tough to know what a quiet diverse majority would have liked.
matsemann 4 hours ago [-]
What matters is however the active users answering questions.
johannes1234321 22 minutes ago [-]
Well, if they drive away interesting questions or interesting answers that matters, too.
The problem is that measuring the unknown is tough.
rerdavies 8 hours ago [-]
I think you also need to distinguish between actual users and members of the gamified moderator class: an entire class of SO users whose primary involvement was gratuitously closing questions so that they could get more points, or picking up cheap points by re-formatting the one or two variables you missed in your answer. Often with no real evidence that they had anything but very modest technical skills. Those people. If you don't want to call them moderators, so be it. But I'm not sure what you would call them if not "moderator", whether they had some magical shield that nobody paid attention to or not.
Easy to spot. Just spend some time browsing through the activity of super users with astronomical point scores. It's pretty obvious that they were doing what they were doing to get points, rather than to make the site better or easier to use, many of whom had quite unimpressive technical skills.
The obvious toxic effects of gamification was a substantial contributor to my personal drift away from SO. But what really killed my interest: the toxic effects of close-dup, which produced rapidly accelerating content rot. It is true that, at some point, they started applying penalties to old answers; but that seemed to have no real effect on the toxic effects of "close-dup".
e.g. Questions raised against Android 14 being close-dup-ed against questions that were originally raised against Android 4.0, where the top thee answers, each of which had 1400 upvotes, was that "you can't do that", even though you absolutely could on Android 14.
That and the fact that I had discovered (as I think many others had) that you actually got much better answers if you appended "reddit" to the start of you google search queries, and skipped over the SO answers altogether.
My final point score on SO: somewhere around 8,000 I think. So not a casual user. I'm pretty sure that about 3,000 of those points were given for an answer that applied to Android 4.0, that stopped being accurate in Android 9.0, and I (shamefully) never got around to updating for modern Android tools.
matsemann 4 hours ago [-]
You have multiple comments here in my thread where you wrongly describe how SO works. It's quite meaningless to discuss with you when you lie about points being awarded for stuff it was not etc.
benibela 4 hours ago [-]
but now the same moderators are on reddit
g8oz 9 hours ago [-]
There are real differences and experiences between heavy users and occasional users, voters and moderators, question posters and contributors. Unless you're careful it's very easy to develop a culture of gatekeeping that is off putting to a broader community. SO wasn't able to successfully steer between the sometimes competing interests of these groups.
Vaushite 9 hours ago [-]
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ghaff 12 hours ago [-]
You've described many things over the past few years. COVID is also one of them. Stuff that was just basically holding on anyway based on history and momentum just couldn't handle an additional body blow. (And, in a number of cases, didn't really care to.)
JensenTorp 7 hours ago [-]
The toxicity (we know best) was there from the start when they refused to let you create a local account and forced OpenID.
rerdavies 7 hours ago [-]
My personal hate-on for SO: forcing all answers, INCLUDING the code to be licensed under an awkward CC license. Yes, you were "allowed" to dual-license the code in your answer under a more permissive license that doesn't require attribution.
I tried adding an explicit dual license to the code in my answers; but moderators would any answer that tried to do that.
Not so much that I care about the copyright of my code; but more a question of whether I would find a lawsuit from SO on my doorstep because I had neglected to credit SO for three lines of code that somebody ELSE had contributed to SO. A very real problem, given that SO management after the takeover had shown itself to be not really trustable.
7 hours ago [-]
LtWorf 12 hours ago [-]
For me the main problem was that the level was so incredibly low.
Already when I was writing my master thesis I could get very little out of it.
All of my questions were too specific and went unanswered.
My most voted answer explains how to install header files on debian.
justauserid 18 hours ago [-]
I had stopped going to it quite some time ago.
1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.
3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
This was before LLMs or COVID.
10111001 16 hours ago [-]
> 1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
> ...
> 3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there. And whenever I did I had to be super-defensive from the get go. It was either people trying their hardest to close it, or "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question).
I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions, but in retrospect they took the wrong approach. They should have let people ask and answer questions freely, even dups. Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
somenameforme 14 hours ago [-]
Yip, LLMs were the executioners but SO had already long since put itself on death row for exactly what you're mentioning. I think sites like FlipCode were in many ways the spiritual predecessor of SO, and the questions were more of a part of the community rather than the definition of it. People need to feel free to communicate for something like SO to be successful, and they'd turned themselves into an absurdly user-hostile site where it seemed like people were competing against each other to see who could find a reason to close questions, rather than looking for a reason to answer them.
The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.
It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.
vintermann 14 hours ago [-]
A big part of the picture was that they'd gamified the heck out of it. Community moderation can work, somewhat, but I've never seen gamified moderation work. Gamification is the big killer of collaborative communities.
ChrisMarshallNY 13 hours ago [-]
I think you got it in one.
The one thing that always struck me, was that most (not some) of the high-score individuals had 1-digit question counts (with that digit frequently being "0"). It was clear that asking questions was a "demerit." These were folks judging questions, that had no idea how to ask a question, themselves.
Also, I found that many were not ones that worked on shipping software. It seemed that their vocation was SO. That's very much like the kid that spends all his time, playing Counterstrike, and giving advice to soldiers in theater.
I'm really big on apprenticeships. We become masters, by moving through being juniors. It gives us an extremely solid base, and elicits acknowledgment from others.
Journeymen can often be demanding and irascible, but they command respect, by demonstrating that they have been in your shoes, and that's really important. You suffer the slings and arrows, because you know that there's a clear path to where they are at.
I have friends that are former US Marines, and they all have Boot Camp stories. These stories all feature downright abusive Drill Sergeants. But they also all profess immense respect for these dudes, because they came from years of experience, and they often showed boots how to do something, by demonstrating it, themselves, at a high degree of skill.
> "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves."
-Brendan Behan
rerdavies 7 hours ago [-]
> We become masters, by moving through being juniors.
Yes this! I found it painful to watch abuse being heaped upon obviously junior programmers. Points should have beem award for mentoring those on the path, not gratuitously rejecting their questions.
tsss 12 hours ago [-]
Community moderation at that scale just doesn't work, period. It always attracts the worst office chair nazis who enjoy lording their petty power over other users.
phatskat 14 hours ago [-]
As someone who spent a lot of time answering and moderating (not full-on moderating, but editing, voting, reviewing first questions, etc) in the WordPress SE, it was jarring sometimes to see the attitudes that the real mods brought in.
However, when you spend an hour looking at low-quality answers, questions that have he's been asked like ten times already, etc, I get the sense that the people doing the moderating were trying their best - some of them, at least. No doubt there are mods there who just enjoy the miniature lower trip a la overzealous reddit mods, and I can't imagine the stress of trying to handle the amount of traffic some of the exchanges got.
greengreengrass 10 hours ago [-]
> "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question)
> I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions
I think both of these are true, but I'm not sure that many of the contributors (or even many of the moderators?) _really_ cared too much about building the "curated list of questions".
I'd posit that part of the problem was also its competitiveness – contributors wanted to earn rep, so they ignored constraints or answered the question they really wanted to answer. Some of the tags I used to frequent had a few contributors who seemed to do nothing but answer SO questions, so there were never any good questions left for a mere mortal with other commitments in their day.
I am generally unconvinced that reputation-based systems like SO's are actually useful. Contrast SO with a project mailing list or issue tracker – where I've had some of the best support – where there's nobody tracking rep or keeping a tally, and everyone is there to simply help and share their knowledge.
> Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
I did plenty of free moderation over time on the review queues. I have no idea today why I invested so much time in that, for it was a thankless task and ultimately didn't feel I could move the needle on the bigger problems.
alex7o 15 hours ago [-]
Almost feels like training an llm on that caused it to ignore certain constraints that make a problem hard and solve an easier version of you problem instead.
Also a lot of communities do their own QA on discord where they can modererate themselves.
kamaal 14 hours ago [-]
>>Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there.
Have seen this every where, even in case of people. If people are dreading to even approach you for something, its over for you. You can't get just the good things to pass through a filter. No such thing exists.
In many ways you need to be open for everything(apart from outright wrong things, like abuse) including stupid things, to get the good things.
bityard 10 hours ago [-]
On most forums, ending up with power-tripping asshat moderators is purely accidental.
In reading the site rules and meta discussions, SO always seemed to have been explicitly designed to invite, cater to, and directly nurture them.
mort96 13 hours ago [-]
My biggest issue with SO was that all the answers were outdated. In the beginning, if you found an answer on SO it'd be still relevant because SO was relatively new. But then as it got older, so did the answers to questions.
The ridiculously strict "no duplicates" policy guaranteed that the old, increasingly outdated answers would remain the only answers forever. In retrospect, I believe a site like SO wants to encourage some rate of duplicates, to ensure that answers remain fresh.
Just yesterday I looked something up on SO and the answer was 14 years old. Would've been a pretty relevant answer back when I first started using SO, but not now.
They really killed themselves through strict moderation. It's incredibly sad, it was a good resource while it lasted.
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
I think SO really needed a "vote to unaccept / mark outdated this answer" or proper supercession process.
rcxdude 11 hours ago [-]
I think the intended approach was basically to just edit the top answer to update it. One of SO's issues I think was that it couldn't really decide if it wanted to be a Q/A site or a wiki and so subverted the expectations of both.
ryathal 5 hours ago [-]
I think the problem is that the creators, and by extension the moderators were bought into the idea of a giant wiki of all programming knowledge. The vast majority of the users just wanted a Q&A site. This led to the infighting and lots of counter intuitive rules as the gamification part conflicted with the goals of being a wiki.
mort96 10 hours ago [-]
I think you're right that that was their expectation/intention. I think it failed because experts don't just randomly go through old questions and make modifications. What prompts knowledgeable people to share their knowledge is new questions asked by new people.
kstrauser 8 hours ago [-]
That approach was untenable because then it still attributed the answer to the original author, even when the content was updated. That could cause real-world issues. “Hey, why did you say that Python is untyped on SO? I thought you knew something about it.” “I never said any such thing.” “Here’s your answer where you say it!” “WTF.” And sure enough, there’s some dumb answer with crappy grammar and mistakes, still attributed to you.
That was a terrible, awful plan, and I always reverted edits to my answers that went beyond fixing typos or updating old links.
ourmandave 10 hours ago [-]
Some sort of version number would help. I use .NET and if the most current answer is on a question asked 15 years ago, I'll never see it.
lloda2 12 hours ago [-]
To me, the way the site was organized was absurd. It was difficult to answer questions.
The one time I tried, I couldn't answer directly because I had no reputation, and I couldn't comment either, but I could edit the question (!) which someone else had already done, answering the question in the question. It was an incomplete answer, so I added another edit with a complete answer. Then the mod who approved my edit also added a newline to it, so it was them and not me who was credited (unless you went to the 'history' page).
I gave up after that.
bulbar 17 hours ago [-]
> 1. It was hard to ask any question.
Totally. There were so many safeguards in place, for a newcomer it is quite hard to contribute.
They also never understood a core principle of such platforms. The noise is not noise but what carries such platforms. They even had it quantified, some of their most upvoted questions are off topic because they are opinion based. Bad and good questions (and answers) come hand in hand.
Well, they were the backbone of professional IT/SWE, so of course they did a lot of things right obviously.
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
> They also never understood a core principle of such platforms. The noise is not noise but what carries such platforms.
But it's also what wrecks such platforms.
SO didn't arise in a vacuum; it was explicitly a reaction to how shitty ExpertSexchange had gotten by then with an anything-goes moderation policy.
kortex 5 hours ago [-]
The solution was the one they arrived at way too late: have a "starter zone" for entry level stuff.
eithed 14 hours ago [-]
The most hilarious moment for me was when my question that was 5y old was closed as a duplicate of one that was couple of months old. I provided an answer on how to work around the issue; the new question didn't have an answer, but it had more points. From what I read the original issue was still there. At that point I was rarely visiting the website either way, but the absurdity of the situation was staggering.
matsemann 10 hours ago [-]
It's only absurd if you think the question being closed as a duplicate was calling you out for doing something wrong. This was how it intentionally worked: group everything, and provide a canonical answer. Duplicates were good, the idea being that more ways to ask the same question could lead more people to find the answer. The other question just happened to have more people find it (hence more points), but someone finding yours could then be redirected to the more popular variation of the question.
rpdillon 8 hours ago [-]
He just explained that that question didn't have an answer. Redirecting people to a question with no answer isn't helpful.
tacone 14 hours ago [-]
I think they tried too hard to structure things and keep everything clean, which becomes difficult or even outright deleterious when the numbers are large.
They should have accepted a certain level of mess instead of being so strict. After all, even good popular answers become outdated sooner or later.
DuncanCoffee 13 hours ago [-]
> It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
I used to end the questions with "It's not a duplicate of AAA because BBB is different. It's also not a duplicate of CCC because DDD". It DID force you to check for already answered questions, but the automated hints while you typed was often good enough to spot duplicates.
In the end, imagine wasting half an hour to post a four-lines issue... No thanks.
lovich 13 hours ago [-]
I did the same and would still have a question closed as a dupe, with a link to the question I had already explained was different from my situation.
matsemann 10 hours ago [-]
Do you have a link?
lovich 1 hours ago [-]
No, I used my real name for stack overflowing and not willing to link it to this account
rerdavies 7 hours ago [-]
I've seen that too. Not that common, but it certainly happened more than it should. You get a point for close-dup-ing whether you're right or not.
cwnyth 5 hours ago [-]
You do not get points for closing questions, and you get negative points for downvoting. Where did that lie come from?
xtracto 17 hours ago [-]
I hated asking Qs in SO, it felt terribly snobby. However, I used it a lot to search for answers. The alternatives were crap.
First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.
The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.
Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].
lexandstuff 14 hours ago [-]
I remember Experts Exchange somehow managed to have every question one could ever ask, but no actual answers - even with a paid account.
I was glad when S.O. put an end to them.
pnut 12 hours ago [-]
good ol' expert sex change
zahlman 17 hours ago [-]
> The alternatives were crap. … Asking was still pretty terrible.
The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about. Asking was terrible because otherwise you get the other forms of crap. That's what everyone knew going in and it was a common observation that specifically motivated creating the site in the first place.
rerdavies 7 hours ago [-]
Ironically, in my experience, the alternatives were crap because the people giving the answers were point seekers. Microsoft Tech Support forums come to mind, particularly. No problem with the questions. But significant concerns about the skills of the people giving the answers. Not sure why that is, and why SO managed to get something right when it came to getting quality answers. For a while, anyway.
thephyber 12 hours ago [-]
I always found that the SO search was frustratingly bad and users NEED to use search to find the authoritative question for your needs.
And even if I find the right existing question, the accepted answer might not be the one I need. Sometimes the question asked accepts the wrong question. Sometimes the current right answer didn't exist at the time of the answer acceptance.
SO was a good first approximation of a good Q&A site. It didn't evolve with the times.
NetOpWibby 14 hours ago [-]
+1 to the outright hostility.
Good riddance.
locknitpicker 16 hours ago [-]
> It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe.
I feel this is the critical bit. People are quick to dismiss this problem as a moderation problem, but I don't agree. I believe it was a query problem, and the absolute lack of support for tying both questions and answers to specific software versions, or range of software versions. So you'd see answers from ages ago marked as the right answer to a question, even though it was using some deprecated version.
Questions on how to address the same issue when new versions were out where closed as duplicates because literally the question was asked before and answered as well. But the answer nowadays would not be applicable.
Then to sidestep this problem you see the phenomenon where ancient questions end up having multiple answers, with newer answers even out voting the accepted answer. And even those would be deprecated as well.
So SO was designed as a system where a single question can only possibly have a single accepted answer. Ever. And anyone asking similar questions would by design be routed to he question that was asked and answered. But the system was designed over the concept of static information and static notion of truth. Which the world definitely doesn't follow.
f6v 13 hours ago [-]
I agree that SO became very hostile at some point. But I also moderated a bit around 2014-2019 and the vast majority of questions in my field were very low effort. People would just dump their code with no context and ask why it doesn't work.
So, the place was a shit hole.
baud147258 13 hours ago [-]
As someone who spent some time participating in the filtering of SO's questions, considering the quality of some of the new question, I understand why the volunteer moderators pushed SO/SE for those question quality control tools and a push for users to use them. But sadly, unlike the upvote/downvote mechanism, the incentives to use them resulted in hasty decisions (close as dupe), which had an adverse effect on the site's reputation.
shevy-java 15 hours ago [-]
Well, 2) is often a honey pot trap since some projects have no
documentation, or only so little documentation that spending
time trying to figure out a project is a waste of time. There
is a reason why SO got important in the first place. Horrible
documentation was one reason.
mschuster91 15 hours ago [-]
> I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.
For the Javascript ecosystem in particular... it also massively helped that projects finally started to work on their documentation. The churn rate was insane and documentation or working examples took an afterthought for far too long, that is what drove so many people to SO in the first place.
neya 16 hours ago [-]
> 1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.
This was single-handedly the work of arrogant self-righteous moderators who would close random useful questions as not useful just to prove they were doing something. A lot of us long timers got annoyed at selective enforcement of rules and never looked back. It's sad because it was actually a fun place to hangout. Too much moderation always kills the vibe.
btilly 17 hours ago [-]
I contend that shitty moderation was why it flatlined.
I enjoyed answering algorithm questions. Unfortunately, every so often, people who weren't into algorithms would show up. And somehow summoned each other. To close good questions.
It was clear that they didn't understand the topic. They couldn't recognize what a good question, or a good answer, was. I wound up going away, coming back every few years, go until my next bad experience, and leave again.
Each time, the population answering those questions was smaller.
I believe that a lot of good people left like I did. Then just didn't come back.
rerdavies 7 hours ago [-]
You need to go deeper. The problem wasn't shitty moderation; it was shitty gamification.
One way that stackoverflow does stand out from the other stackexchange sites is that its half life appears far shorter. On a log scale plot it has a steeper descent than the other stackexchange sites. I'm not sure what to make of that. Another interesting thing is that the math stackexchange initially declines more slowly than the others for a year or two and then decays pretty similarly. You can also see examples in some of the other sites of their decay beginning before chatgpt releases (e.g. drupal). You can also see some sites decaying a decade earlier (e.g. expressionengine). I think those outliers are from their subject being too specific and going out of style.
I got the cross-site data from data.stackexchange.com with this vibe-coded query:
DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'
SELECT
site = [$site_name$],
month = DATEADD(MONTH, DATEDIFF(MONTH, 0, CreationDate), 0),
questions = COUNT(*)
FROM PostsWithDeleted
WHERE PostTypeId = 1
GROUP BY DATEADD(MONTH, DATEDIFF(MONTH, 0, CreationDate), 0)
';
EXEC dbo.sede_ineachdb
@SQLCommand = @sql,
@IncludeMainSites = 1,
@IncludeMetaSites = 0,
@IncludeMainMeta = 0;
rerdavies 7 hours ago [-]
So much for the long tail! The rate of decline after the advent of AIs is sobering. From 181,000 questions a month at the absolute peak, to less than a thousand a month now!
Rochus 12 hours ago [-]
That's interesting, thanks! The peak for most topics was around 2015-2020 apparently, and then came a "continuous" decline. If it really was a major event that caused the decline, wouldn't we expect to see a volatile plunge, like on the stock market?
famouswaffles 8 hours ago [-]
Today with Opus, Sol, etc there's basically no reason to visit the site, but when chatGPT launched it was powered by GPT 3.5, which would realistically only be able to answer a (minor) chunk of all possible StackOverflow questions.
Rochus 6 hours ago [-]
There are many potential explanations, including the policy changes in 2018. LLMs are definitely a concurrence to the service, but since the decline started years before they were really useful, other reasons might be relevant. I don't know to what degree. I just wondered why some of the forums had significant peaks after the GPT line.
LaurensBER 15 hours ago [-]
The issue was that Stack overflow never was enjoyable to use.
Asking questions was difficult and any difficulty questions I might ask would not get a response anyway.
Answering questions was a gamble, sometimes you would get rewarded, most of the time you would not.
jonwinstanley 14 hours ago [-]
Right when it first started it was so much better than what had been there before, and the way they assigned points was designed to encourage lots of people to chip in with answers.
Asking questions did become painful later on. But it was the default site to choose whenever you googled a programming issue for years after.
Nice. But about 10 years late. They should have seen for 2 years from 2014 to 2016 the damage done from their deletion policy.
tuveson 19 hours ago [-]
I like that you can see a Covid bump in there and then it immediately craters lol
kstrauser 19 hours ago [-]
Right? It's not a very subtle spike, is it? Even then, if you erased the bump, the graph is pretty close to a straight downward-sloped line from 2016 to late 2022.
It's kind of sad: I bet there was some excitement around the SO office. Is this it? Are we on the way back? Have people remembered that we're here and now they're returning? Alas, no, they weren't, and they weren't. That must've been rough.
dpark 19 hours ago [-]
“Has our strategy of being openly hostile to anyone asking questions finally resulted in the increase in questions we always dreamed of? Did our long term bet on alienating the community finally pay off?”
wildzzz 18 hours ago [-]
That's probably why the number of new questions asked dropped off. Once someone has asked "how to fizzbuzz in python", that's pretty much it. You'll get the textbook answer, the "why are you fizzbuzzing in the first place" answers, and then an answer a couple years later using the new python fizzbuzz built in library. You have a massive compendium of questions and answers and for most people, that's good enough. I don't think that stack overflow was necessarily less popular in visitors pre-LLMs but they certainly killed it off quick.
kstrauser 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zahlman 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the newcomers asked worse questions than average. There was a huge flood of people presenting like they thought they had a difficult question about how neural network simulations work, but actually had code full of multiple elementary errors (completely unrelated to the domain, just learning the programming language kinda stuff) and no apparent willingness to read error messages even to the extent of "it says TypeError, I guess that must mean something is wrong with a type".
jmyeet 19 hours ago [-]
This was all too common across tech. I know of many products at the time that, say, had their usage quadruple in Covid (from a very large baseline) and nobody in leadership seemed to ask the question "is this permanent or just an artifact of people being stuck at home?" Clearly the answer was "no".
drumhead 6 hours ago [-]
With SO the experience always felt like you were being chastised for everything you did. It was quite off putting. AI coming along and just giving you working solutions without any attitude was just a more pleasant way to work.
hollowonepl 14 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I found SO and Quora and similar sites with general or specific question/answer based communities weak long before AI.
AI replaced Google Search in many ways more directly on arrival than those.
SO to me was weak as it had outdated answers to outdated questions (yet related to search queries) that nobody maintained well.. and the community more focused on patronising to push their point of view than being essentially objective in many ways.
that was a total killer to me and I started preferring to come back to books, manuals and researching topics myself than short cuts like SO.. and that research is heavily optimised during AI/LLM era, yes, but that's just one of many nails to SO's coffin.
smsm42 16 hours ago [-]
In my experience, SO became useless many years before AI showed up on the horizon. I stopped actively participating about 2019 and about 2022 gave up on it completely.
saonnet 14 hours ago [-]
Often overlooked but Discord(and similar communities) are also a big reason why people no longer ask ques. on SO.
nitbard 14 hours ago [-]
No surprises here. However I recently tried to register global account on Stack Exchange network, just to get to some organic conversations and meet people... and I couldn't. Gateway errors, "try again in a few minutes", etc.
I did quick research and it seems that I'm not the only one.
Maybe I just run into one of the bad days.
Kurtz79 11 hours ago [-]
The graph makes it clear; the question I have though, between the start of SO decline and up to when AI became able to answer SO-like questions (or remove the need for them altogether), where did people go to find an answer?
kstrauser 4 hours ago [-]
Me personally? Reddit. For the languages and technologies I worked with, their subreddits were far friendlier to reasonable questions, even FAQs, even if they weren't pristinely composed. There was also a recency bias that I appreciated. If you brought up a subject that was asked last year, people would link back to the earlier conversation while continuing the current chat given new developments. An example might be:
> Q: What HTTP library should I use?
> A: Last year everyone liked Requests [link to chat], and that's still good, but if you're using async you might look at aiohttp which is newer and not quite as polished yet but has much better async support.
Those were the answers that would've kept SO relevant: here's what we all thought last time this came up, but here's how the situation has evolved since then.
Reddit came with its own problems, of course. The programming subreddits hadn't (yet?) been as weighed down with those issues when I weaned myself off going there.
1718627440 12 hours ago [-]
I don't get why there is actual complaining about that outcome, because that seemed what the actual intention was. SO made it clear, that they do not want to be a Q&A forum, but a collection of novel and interesting questions. Naturally, a lot of newly asked question were already asked in a similar fashion, which for SO philosophy meant that they could be merged. In addition, they gradually increased the "quality" level new questions need to be have, to be kept.
The declining number of questions is hence not a side-effect or a mistake, but just means that they reach their end-goal. It's actual a measure of success. (Now you can disagree, whether that philosophy was reasonable or sustainable in the first place, but given there choice, this is the logical conclusion and end goal.)
sharpshadow 11 hours ago [-]
Copilot in VS Code with OpenAI Codex came out in June 2021.
nomilk 15 hours ago [-]
A downward trend in the number of questions doesn't imply the site was in decline, since there's only so many questions you can ask about a given technology, so would-be question askers find the answer via search engine rather than having to create a new question on the site.
Tangental, but I tried plotting number of questions by month including deleted questions. It shows similar trends to questions by month (so nothing particularly interesting): https://imgur.com/a/NLLB3OK
Where else were people getting answers and help from between 2018 and AI getting good in the mean time? As I remember it there wasn't really an alternative.
Maybe it was more consolidation of tech and better docs over time.
geraneum 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe they visited the website and the existing questions were enough? These stats seems to be questions asked. Maybe that’s the reason.
jamesfinlayson 18 hours ago [-]
I was using StackOverflow pretty heavily in that time. I was doing PHP, Java and Groovy at the time, and PHP's documentation is pretty good. JavaDoc generated from source not so much...
kstrauser 8 hours ago [-]
I think a lot moved to subreddits. You could ask a decent question there and actually get answers, even if it didn’t meet SO’s purity requirements.
Macha 11 hours ago [-]
Github issues
joedwin 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cubefox 15 hours ago [-]
> SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017.
I'm fairly certain this early decline came from the fact that many common questions had already been answered, and therefore were available via Google, so hardly anybody asked them again. In the beginning there were just way more unanswered questions.
shevy-java 15 hours ago [-]
Yes that was my impression too. SO already died before the rise of AI.
foofoo4u 14 hours ago [-]
I stopped posting questions onto Stack Overflow after experiencing two user-hostile practices of theirs.
The first was how they would repeatedly mark my posts as dupes when in reality they weren't. Sure, my questions had large overlaps with existing questions. But mine had sufficient nuanced differences that my questions warranted being open.
The second is how they would repeatedly rewrite my posts. And extensively so! It no longer sounded like it was written by me. And any sense of warmth or humanity of my posts were entirely stripped away! So sterile and cold. I have to tell you, having a post that you spend time composing, only to have some moderators a-hole rewrite it is a very negative feeling. And to see a message posted publicly to the web with my username next to it, as though I'm the one that wrote it, is wrong.
Stack Overflow brought their death to themselves.
billynomates 9 hours ago [-]
The problem was that you would get points as an editor, so people would just rewrite everything even when it didn't it.
braiamp 5 hours ago [-]
This would only happen if you had less than 2k points or less than 500 accepted suggestions. Most edits that are suggested aren't total rewrites because the reviewers are against those, even when it does elevate them
I had forgotten about that. I also had some of my questions rewritten by other users. That felt so ridiculous. If there is something to add, add in a comment? Why is anyone even able to rewrite what others wrote? Who thought this was a good idea?
Bratmon 5 hours ago [-]
Comments are not for extended discussion. The important relevant information that was here has been moved to a confusing different page where it will never be seen again.
versteegen 10 hours ago [-]
And yet I often tried to edit questions or answers to fix broken formatting and was blocked because I changed too few characters! Only major edits allowed!
SwiftyBug 9 hours ago [-]
Jeff Atwood
goatking 4 hours ago [-]
I didn't know this was a thing until now. This is so stupid
cowlevel 22 hours ago [-]
You're underselling it. It's less than in their second month of existence - and that has been true every month for the past year. For the last few months it's also lower than their first month. Stack Overflow, effectively, no longer exists.
And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
Pet_Ant 21 hours ago [-]
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.
It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.
It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.
I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
Aurornis 20 hours ago [-]
> That’s why it succeeded.
The moderation style in the latter years was very different than at the beginning.
It was always heavily moderated, but after some point it felt like there were more layers of moderation and rules and cultural expectations added every year.
Moderation went from being a background cleanup operation that quietly kept the site in line to being the primary thing I expected to see when following a StackOverflow link from Google. In the later years it felt like every other StackOverflow search result was going to be the question I had followed by a moderator shutting it down for some reason before anyone could answer.
The moderation wore me out and I wasn’t even posting questions, just trying to find answers!
Skunkleton 18 hours ago [-]
I asked a question about 15 years ago. Lots of responses/engagement and a good answer. I just got an email a month or so back telling me that question got closed as a dupe. I checked...it was not even close to a dupe. Exhausting.
zahlman 17 hours ago [-]
Please show me the link.
matsemann 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cowlevel 9 hours ago [-]
Anyone who's used SO has had a similar experience. It's like saying you posted a comment on Reddit and got banned from three unrelated subreddits. It's just what happens there.
braiamp 5 hours ago [-]
Therefore it should be easy to show evidence of that :)
Doesn't have to be yours, just anyone that you've seen.
Matl 9 hours ago [-]
I get that's how it feels but I've also seen more SO questions closed off that seemed perfectly reasonable/not duplicates except in the most vaguest sense than I can count.
19 hours ago [-]
joe_the_user 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it makes me curious about exactly what thinking was involved in the site going to heck like that. Part of it was questions and answers accumulating and so the question of duplicates thus apparently weighing on the moderators minds more. Part of it might have been an effort to prevent people gaming the system.
Actually, talking to ChatGpt, I found this article: “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.”
( https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...) and that actually shows what the SO admins didn't get (imo obviously).
They thought the problem was people not being nice. But that actual problem was that SO was "gamified" and it's gamified interface made it impossible to win unless someone was ultra-competitive (and I'd those types burned-out over time as well). People not being nice was real but it was side-effect of the situation (questions answered instantly so a would-be question answered had to be constantly racing).
It's easy to imagine how the admins didn't see the situation. Each up of intensity seemed to up the engagement and so seemed a good thing. The question of whether the process was sustainable didn't appear and when there were problems it was attributed to something else.
I think
cowlevel 7 hours ago [-]
Goodhart's law. You award dopamine for closing questions, so they will be closed.
Even though you didn't get a reputation score for that specific action as I remember, it still gave you the little "I'm helping" feeling.
The honeypots in the review queue trained you to err on the side of closing questions - you were punished for not closing a honeypot when other people had closed it, regardless of whether it actually deserved to be closed. Complaints about incorrect honeypots were frequent and the system was not improved.
braiamp 5 hours ago [-]
> You award dopamine for closing questions
There's zero reward for closing a question. I know that because I casted 2 thousands of those, no reward ever came my way.
> The honeypots in the review queue trained you to err on the side of closing questions
That's also false, there were as many for either side in the audit queue. There's a whole list of post about people complaining[1]. Most of the time, the answer is the same: if you are not sure, hit skip.
For most the negatives audits, SO famously used spam rather than bad posts (which also taught the wrong lesson)
Wow, I didn't know anything of the moderator-interface-and-training details and this definitely gives the situation more clarity also.
Question-closing was a big complaint through-out SO's history. My guess is that the top people were unconcerned because someone who complained about it was by the way the system defined people, a bad user (since they were lumped-in with those who really did ask already answered questions).
cowlevel 23 minutes ago [-]
That's not the moderator interface, it's the mid-level user interface. I think you needed a few thousand points to access review queues, which the system constantly nagged you to do if you have permission.
zahlman 17 hours ago [-]
> It was always heavily moderated
No, it absolutely very much was not. Even granting that you mean actions of the community (what we call "curation") rather than the small and extremely strained moderation team, way too much stuff historically got through, while people yelled at the OP in the comments and argued over downvotes instead of taking the action that actually matters: voting or flagging to close the question. Worse, people would post answers that acknowledge the problem with the question and asking OP in the answer text to fix things.
I know because I was part of that mess back then, because I didn't know better. That, in turn, was mostly because the entire set of ground expectations was poorly communicated, and the community wasn't given the tools to improve that communication (e.g. couldn't edit the help pages, had their feedback about the discoverability of site documentation ignored, etc.). But it was also because Atwood and Spolsky hadn't refined their intuition about why beginners' bad questions are bad. (Hint: it is not because most of their problems are easy to solve, or "beneath" experts.)
> when following a StackOverflow link from Google
Google got worse at search over the years, so you ended up seeing low-quality versions of the question more often. And the site got way too big (there is no reason why there should be more than three times as many publicly visible questions on Stack Overflow, as publicly visible articles on Wikipedia), such that search results could get diluted with irrelevant low-quality questions that happened to have a lot of keyword overlap with what you wanted. And misleading questions didn't get cleaned up, so you would search for X and find a question where the OP hadn't tried to analyze the situation at all and ended up asking about X when the problem was actually Y, and got the question closed as a duplicate of the main Y "canonical". (I know because I used to lose considerable amounts of hair trying to find the X canonical that I knew was there but stubbornly refused to turn up in searches.)
If "moderation" had actually "always" been "heavy" then you wouldn't have had this problem because this stuff would have gotten hidden from public view, one way or another.
> a moderator shutting it down
Again, these actions are overwhelmingly not taken by moderators, and phrasing things this way reflects a refusal to interact with the community on its own terms and understand its policies. Those who hold an outsider mindset are bound to end up feeling like outsiders.
cowlevel 7 hours ago [-]
"moderation" doesn't mean "what users with the moderator role do". On SO, most moderation comes from users without the moderator role, and from the site's programmers.
jrflowers 14 hours ago [-]
> actions of the community (what we call "curation")
You know that users are going to call anything that happens to their posts on any website “moderation” right, and after decades of that being the norm that’s what the word means
braiamp 5 hours ago [-]
And that's exactly why we get all deaf ears. People that don't even attempt to understand how the site works, instead approach it aggressively and pushing their own ideals, don't feel surprised when that other group LOUDLY ignore those.
ChrisMarshallNY 21 hours ago [-]
> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
Huh. I had the opposite experience. The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
I stopped bothering, after a number of questions went answered only by me (after I found the solution on my own).
It did reduce the insults, but that seemed to be the only gain that I got, for carefully articulating my questions.
LLMs aren't perfect, but they don't imply that I'm being lazy, for not already having the answer, and they do give me an answer, instantly (and, like SO, the answer is not always the best one).
schneems 21 hours ago [-]
I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.
I have engaged with some younger devs who don't even bother turning the thought into a question. They make statements and expect you to do the work of inferring the question. Which I feel like they got from chatbots since it's faster and LLMs don't care if you make them jump through hoops.
> The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
There is a sweet spot of providing just enough detail but not too much in asking a good question. And even the best only “bat 300”. I've posted answers to my own questions plenty of times when I got no response.
I hear you on the hostility. Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow. The first time I tried asking a question on IRC I got mocked so bad I logged out and never tried again. Most forums were like that.
I gravitated to Ruby back then because it was one of the only forums people would be patient and empathetic with me.
usedtobegood 19 hours ago [-]
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting
I have repeatedly had this experience in trying to craft
The perfect question for a consultant who was also a mathematics professor, in finding the essence of the question the answer becomes clear and I never even have to send the email
basilikum 13 hours ago [-]
It's called rubber duck debugging.
ChrisMarshallNY 21 hours ago [-]
I have heard great things about the Ruby community. I don't use the language, myself, so I wouldn't know from experience.
Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.
Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.
cowlevel 21 hours ago [-]
I suspect that prior to Eternal September you could connect an online identity to a real life one. You might not know the guy but you knew it was J.Smith at MIT and if he acted bad enough your admin could ask their admin which idiot gave him a computer terminal.
noosphr 18 hours ago [-]
You can easily read posts before 1994, what you're saying definitely did not happen.
cowlevel 22 minutes ago [-]
The world's first spammer was prosecuted.
Pet_Ant 11 hours ago [-]
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting
The “answer my own question” feature was meant for exactly that. Had quite a few like that, and sometimes I still got better answers than I found
zahlman 17 hours ago [-]
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.
Yes, that was part of the point. I hope you posted anyway (after checking for a duplicate, and assuming the underlying problem wasn't just a typo), and provided your own answer for it. That is an explicit part of how the site is supposed to work (but an incredibly poorly communicated one).
> Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow.
SO actually considerably improved on that axis over time. It's just that tons of people erroneously think that being expected to meet certain standards in asking a question (in particular, doing the necessary debugging work to locate and reproduce a problem, or the necessary contemplation to properly specify a task), is the same thing as yelling at people for not knowing answers to easy things. That goes both ways: people get upset when their question is closed, and people think they're helping by excluding easily answered questions because they're easily answered. In reality, the main problem is questions that are easy but complex, i.e. which really break down into multiple separate easy questions or require digging through a code dump to find a trivial error.
cowlevel 21 hours ago [-]
I found that Stack Overflow, like Reddit, rewired my perception of what "good" is and made me view bad things as good.
60000 rep btw
19 hours ago [-]
DANmode 19 hours ago [-]
Was it a better question for skimming and quickly replying,
or just a great form of your question if someone genuinely wanted to answer it, not pump their score, dopamine etc?
yallpendantools 19 hours ago [-]
I think the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application of the "hacker" mindset (more or less) to a lot of fields that do not benefit from the hacker mindset.
From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between "broadly applicable" and "too specific". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my homework by posting pictures of my WIP and citing Youtube videos I'm trying to follow but, apparently, this is already toeing the line. I honestly don't know what the mods expect of a good question there. Of course, there will be an appreciable degree of case-specificity in my questions because if the YT tutorials could already answer my problem, I would have no need to ask for help and advice!
Then we have sites like Literature SE which has been languishing in their sandbox since literally forever. Like most SE sites, the guidelines bid you to "avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussions" and "be specific" but I find that untenable in a Literature site. Notably, sister site SF&F is comparably thriving but there is a fair amount of open-ended speculation going on in there.
Lastly, IMO, it just suffers because at its core its problem is human and social, not technical. In an effort for better curation we ended up with Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Science. For some posters, finding the right SE site already introduces a huge wall to overcome for posting. This hampers a lot of the out group: students who might be seeking homework guidance or looking to supplement their own readings and lectures, amateurs who are just curious about something in the field. I've had a question in one of the Science SEs outside my field that was well-received by the community but one mod kept "tagging to delete" (I forgot the exact term) almost every year. This mod action has a prescriptive period and, boy, he kept at it. Honestly, I don't care in the end. I asked the question out of sheer curiosity and got a satisfactory answer. Yet I wonder how exactly they expect to foster a community this way.
> That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new.
And _then_ it became so much more hostile to users - and lost a lot of what made it so wonderful. It became very common that asking a new, good question would be marked as a duplicate because there was something it wasn't a duplicate of.
mm321 20 hours ago [-]
My experience with the late SO was, that the original question used to be ten years old and filled with responses that were no longer relevant to the current state.
What amazes me is that an LLM can actually make sense out of all this crappy training data and often produces meaningful answers. (maybe that's a sign that we already have AGI)
Gigachad 21 hours ago [-]
You'd also get people downvoting completely valid rule abiding questions, and the site heavily punished being downvoted. So you'd get hit with a stick repeatedly for trying to engage with the site, it's no wonder everyone left as soon as there was an alternative.
eYrKEC2 21 hours ago [-]
It certainly didn't start that way, having been there and followed them on their podcast -- pre-launch. It became more and more hostile. It was initially positive, even when questions didn't fit the mold. Then successive waves of pedantic moderators chased out the altruism. There never seemed to be a suitable mechanism to slap down the haters, then years pass, you need to ask a question, and find out that it is causing you anxiety to just post a question..
noosphr 18 hours ago [-]
At the start moderators worked with you, after 2014 they worked against you.
bluedino 9 hours ago [-]
> It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.
Agreed, being a n00b in the open source & hacker community I recall asking half assed question on forums and IRC and would get the infamous RTFM.
I detested it but quickly realized that I needed to put in work and learn and only when I understand can I ask valid questions to real problems…not just asking for someone to spoon feed me an answer.
I really appreciate that experience…
BrandoElFollito 1 hours ago [-]
> Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers
After hundreds of thousands of rep points (it's a long time I haven't been there,) - this is simply not true anymore.
It was the case at the very beginning, and then there was a flood of useless questions, and the psychotic users decided to downvote everyone. Some groups (such as Golang) became a real sect. Meta was for unhinged psychopaths.
I loved SO and spent a long time there. At some point it became a 4chan. Shame.
Plenty of the nework sites zre still great though.
ifixeditonmyown 18 hours ago [-]
> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
Really? Because I only ever asked three things, technically two I suppose, and the only significant interaction I got from there was a guy saying they thought the third question was a duplicate but they only didn't mark it that way because they saw it was me asking again.
This dude straight up admitted to be on the hunt for marking things as duplicate and only put brainpower into doing not-that because something felt off in is gut.
Then someone else did.
No, he didn't actually answer my question. No one did.
If StackOverflow is being considered hostile now it's big ... well, Google the three stages of enshittification I suppose.
rootsudo 18 hours ago [-]
Ah I miss the old days of expert sex change.com
To be fair not really but it’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time and all it took was to scroll down to the end of the page to get your answer.
Real 20 year ago internet there.
NichoPaolucci 22 hours ago [-]
Well, the community never made it a very welcoming place... But, I think a part of this is that it's just faster to throw a Q into ChatGPT. There's no waiting for a response, a major bonus is the non-hostility + willingness to respond to 'stupid' questions.
creata 19 hours ago [-]
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.
stopsayingsorry 19 hours ago [-]
Let's just be blunt. The main target audience were clueless idiots who just wanted to solve their current programming problem, e.g. compiler error etc. They didn't care about anything else, they just wanted to copy-paste text and for the problem to go away, preferably without even needing to turn their brain on.
Now we have a new guy in town, who offers "robotized copy-paste the solution to YOUR specific programming problem, no reading required! we can even control your computer for you, so you can do something you actually enjoy and stop wasting time on this complicated computery thingy for boring nerds", which serves the aforementioned audience much better.
zahlman 17 hours ago [-]
> The main target audience were…
"Target audience" connotes people that the site wanted to be there. That's just who showed up, because that's who will always show up basically anywhere that looks like it might be helpful to them, by default.
stopsayingsorry 16 hours ago [-]
You are correct about that. But the fundamental design of the site facilitated the value extracting vermin. Then the biggest value extracting vermin the internet has ever seen came along, used you as the training data and replaced you.
The biggest suckers were the people who were genuinely putting it effort there. So, in the end, did they make the world a better place? One would like to hope they did, but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.
tornikeo 18 hours ago [-]
are you perhaps a mod from SO? if not you should apply as one asap.
you sound exactly like the mfs that ruined that forum.
zahlman 17 hours ago [-]
As one of those "mfs", we were undeniably correct in this, as any sampling of new questions at any point in the site history would amply illustrate. People really do just want their question answered without heed to what the site expects of questions. Web sites featuring user-generated content are allowed to set their own rules about how that content works. When people go to a new site with their own expectations about how the posting process works, and refuse to be corrected on that point, they are the ones in the wrong. Just because a website offers a Q&A interface absolutely does not in any way, shape or form mean that you can ask anything on topic, phrased in any manner, without any effort on your part, with no motivation beyond benefiting from getting an answer, and expect straightforward answers that accommodate your personal circumstances, for free.
But also, we were not "mods". We were just members of the community who did absolutely nothing to gain power over you except to participate by asking and answering questions. The actual moderators of the site, with a diamond next to their names, were almost literally one-in-a-million users. But it only took 3,000 reputation to cast a close vote, and 15 to flag to close a question (prioritizing it for consideration by the first group).
Posts like yours are made, IMX, because people had a bad experience asking a question. If that describes you, feel free to provide a link to the question and I'll be happy to give a detailed explanation of why things went as they did and what the site wanted you to do better in asking it.
harvey9 16 hours ago [-]
As you said elsewhere here, the site is not good at communicating its expectations. To the outsider it looks like a huge pool of questions and answers to which you may as well add yours.
The one thing I really liked was how it tried to find existing questions and answers that were like yours during the question input phase, but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter
zahlman 50 minutes ago [-]
> the site is not good at communicating its expectations
The biggest blocker to this is that the site itself did not provide ways for the community to fix the front matter, and the site ownership ignored pleas to fix that front matter and to take more action to make people read it before participating.
There's also a huge problem that people equate popularity with success. It's the same phenomenon that leads people to declare the site "dead" (or not) based on the rate of new incoming questions. No; it's dead because the site management pushes ever more AI involvement that fights against the policy forbidding AIGC in questions and answers; and because they're destroying the core principles of participation in the site in the hope of making that question rate go up again (while ignoring the voices of those who would otherwise answer those questions).
> but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter
Questions only really had downvotes because they went into a public queue immediately and that was the mechanism to hide low quality content. It is not a problem to ask a duplicate and fail to recognize it; someone closing your question as a duplicate is helping you get a cached answer immediately, while also helping make that answer easier to find in the future. Anyone who downvoted a question merely because it was a duplicate was misunderstanding the system. On the other hand, getting through that filter, and even if you had a genuinely new question, doesn't mean you had a good question.
It should never have worked like that; this was counterproductive to the site's stated goals (but it was what the founders came up with, and doing it the right way would have killed engagement right out of the gate). What you really want is for the question to start out effectively closed, in a state where it can be workshopped, without the voting system. Anything that made it through that system would, in theory, never attract downvotes because the legitimate reasons to downvote it would have been addressed already. And by doing it that way, you limit exposure to the question to people who are interested in fixing questions, and let the people interested in answering questions have their own feed. (Of course, people can also wear multiple hats, but you get the idea.)
In fact, we had something like that for a little while, called the Staging Ground. It was, in my view, the only good idea the company had after the Prosus acquisition, in a sea of bad ones. It was not perfect, but it was a damn sight better than the traditional system.
rpdillon 8 hours ago [-]
> Posts like yours are made, IMX, because people had a bad experience asking a question. If that describes you, feel free to provide a link to the question and I'll be happy to give a detailed explanation of why things went as they did and what the site wanted you to do better in asking it.
This is what killed SO. People were going to the site to get problems solved, not to add to their list of problems.
cwnyth 5 hours ago [-]
They came to get free help and couldn't even bother to put a little effort into their questions. What do they expect?
rafidzaman 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rpdillon 8 hours ago [-]
You'll need to examine the timeline to understand that AI didn't exist when SO started declining. SO's decline is entirely self-inflicted.
unrented7977 10 hours ago [-]
They started losing traffic at catastrophic rates before ChatGPT was released. You can check this information yourself, we did not have AI when SO started falling off a cliff
giancarlostoro 20 hours ago [-]
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
That and [redacted] mods who delete your question “because its a duplicate” but its not, you just assume it is and lock it. Lots of this when .NET Core came out and it drove me up a wall. Wouldnt surprise me if a lot of “hallucination” type answers come from bad Stack Overflow data being interpreted as “fact” in earlier models.
zahlman 16 hours ago [-]
Your question was neither deleted nor locked. It was closed as a duplicate, which immediately provides a link to existing useful information and helps keep the site organized by putting the best answers in one place.
My extensive experience has been that the overwhelming majority of the time that people complain "this isn't a duplicate", it actually quite obviously is. (And there were even more irritating complaints on the meta site at times; all the way up to the level of "you shouldn't ever close duplicates at all because I think you shouldn't", demonstrating no interest in even trying to understand the reasons for doing so.) Of course, people do make mistakes; there was an entire process for fixing this, but most people could not be bothered to engage with it productively (or even civilly). But feel free to give examples of things that you feel were wrongly closed from your own experience.
kstrauser 16 hours ago [-]
It's astonishing how vastly different our experiences were. I trawled the new Python questions frequently, looking for fun, novel things to answer. It was dismaying how often they'd been wrongly marked as dupes, often because the original answer was ancient and obsolete. It would often be egregiously bad, like:
Q: How do Python's dict preserve insertion order?
A: [duplicate of "Why does a Python dict's keys have a different ordering each run?"]
It was clear that the mod/curator/whatever spent no time attempting to understand what was actually being asked, and linked it to something that was completely incorrect as an answer to the real question.
I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics. If you asked me "when did you last eat a fruit bat", I can tell you the month and year because that stood out. If you asked me "when did you last eat spaghetti", I'd have a hard time saying.
zahlman 1 hours ago [-]
> It's astonishing how vastly different our experiences were.
Yes, it is. Especially considering that I too was mainly "trawling the new Python questions" for similar reasons, and being dismayed at how many dupes there were and how hard it was to find an actually good version of that question to use as the duplicate target for something that was constantly asked.
> I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics.
Without specifics I really can't engage with that, sorry. I would encourage you to check out the [reopen-closed] tag on the meta site, in chronological order (or take a random sample) and see what kinds of things people think should be reopened and how off-base they are (and also see how it is explained that things are in fact duplicates).
As it happens, I have a single "saved" (site bookmarking feature) question on the meta site with that tag, saved because I wrote what I think is a useful reference answer to the general question of why duplicates get closed so quickly: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422581
> often because the original answer was ancient and obsolete
This does not make a question "not a duplicate". The fact that there are different ways to solve the problem now, doesn't make it not the same problem. It is, instead, a reason to write a new answer, but we still want all the high-quality answers in the same place.
From time to time, a new "canonical" gets chosen for FAQs, because the community recognizes that it's better quality. "Up-to-date" is one consideration in that equation. But a lot of the time, people argue that an old Q&A should be disregarded or replaced simply because it is old, and this is often just not true. For example, the question 'What does if __name__ == "__main__": do?' (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/419163) was posted in 2009; as it turns out, it still does the same thing in Python 3.15 and the reasons for using (or not using) it are the same as well.
kstrauser 39 minutes ago [-]
I’ll be frank: I no longer care enough about SO to bother with researching it. The results of all the rules lawyering and purity tests ruined the fun of it for me — and according to the graphs, everyone else, too. It just wasn’t enjoyable anymore. I like answering questions and teaching and explaining. I don’t like spending more than 0% of my time dicking around with gatekeepers.
No amount of “you’re holding it wrong” could convince me that the millions of people who wanted to use it the way it was broadly described were truly doing it wrong. The payoff for slavishly doing things the “right” moderator-approved way just wasn’t worth the effort.
giancarlostoro 7 hours ago [-]
Honestly, if the "duplicate" question is older than 5 or 10 years they should force the mod to prove its resolved the same way before marking it duplicate.
zahlman 59 minutes ago [-]
The large majority of duplicate closures are done by a consensus of three people, and the large majority of the rest are done by people who have a badge indicating expertise with the subject matter in addition to the close-vote privilege. It is not done by "the mod"; there have historically been about a couple dozen moderators for a couple dozen million user accounts.
Generally, the people doing this are familiar with the material. Fast closures are motivated by an unconscious "ugh, not THIS question again". And the kinds of things that get asked over and over usually don't change very much.
There's a particular type of question asker who likes to say "what's the way to do this in [current year]?" as if to imply that it should be something different from before. But it very often isn't. And indeed, developers complain when languages/libraries/ecosystems change too quickly, which makes language designers/library authors more conservative about those changes.
braiamp 5 hours ago [-]
Printing a string in python changed exactly twice. This is a 17 years old question about printing.
Sure, but that's not the case for every question. I've found questions spanning various languages, .NET is more damning because the mod didn't apparently know that .NET Framework and .NET Core are distinctively different, so the problem might "look" related, but its not .NET Framework and .NET Core were NOT compatible at all. .NET 5+ became a .NET Core rebrand, and .NET Framework is basically abandonware. You cannot import .NET Framework libraries into .NET (Core / 5+) projects, but the confusion comes from libraries that migrated to Core and beyond, so a problem looks "familiar" but its completely different runtimes and in some cases underlying third-party code.
pdw 15 hours ago [-]
In my experience, any questions about an obscure or rare problem was likely to be marked as a duplicate if it sounded even vaguely similar to a common problem. My impression was that some moderators just were unwilling to admit they didn't know the answer to a question.
giancarlostoro 8 hours ago [-]
> Your question was neither deleted nor locked. It was closed as a duplicate
Fair, I got my wording wrong, its been a while since I've landed on the site... Sadly, I used to love reading SO for fun and to learn random tidbits.
I've run into way too many "this is a duplicate of" and its referencing something from 2003 in 2025 where the runtime has changed, and a similar looking issue was confused for the actual issue, the resolution in the linked "duplicate" doesn't apply or work. In my opinion, if you're going to call something a duplicate, prove that the solution there works before you lock it down.
13 hours ago [-]
px1999 18 hours ago [-]
Not just their users. My org got pitched stackoverflow careers and their private knowledgebase around 2019. We were somewhat interested but found it too hard to work with them.
We weren't going to be a huge contract (~100k/yr) but the tone was very much "conform or fuck off". I think the sticking point was that we were offered 1x permanent careers ad in North America and 2 in Oceana, and we wanted 3 in Oceana instead.
I've had a similar experience the couple of times I've asked or attempted to respond to questions (about software I wrote lol) - grammar and framing seemed more important than technical information/a solution.
N=1 anecdata ofc, but I'm not surprised at their demise
le-mark 11 hours ago [-]
Spotting some stackoverflow mods in this subthread!
oblio 14 hours ago [-]
> then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
You must be new to IT. Software businesses rarely truly die off (unless they're really small one person operations). Even Expertsexchange is still around: https://go.experts-exchange.com/
zerr 13 hours ago [-]
Lycos as well.
p-e-w 22 hours ago [-]
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
Uh, no.
StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
Unai 21 hours ago [-]
People used to add "reddit" at the end of their search queries, and now I'm sure many of those people just ask a bot. But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.
So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.
Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.
zahlman 16 hours ago [-]
> But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.
I hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.
But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was specifically intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to avoid chatter because that gets in the way of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.
socalgal2 21 hours ago [-]
To me your description is mythical reddit. Actual Reddit is every bit as hostile as stack overflow and unlike stack overflow, old questions can not be updated with new answers when existing answers get out of date.
cwnyth 21 hours ago [-]
I think Reddit is even worse. You could get banned from SO for using pretty foul insults, but in some places of Reddit, it's business as usual.
mahboi 21 hours ago [-]
Reddit is full of rage and also people getting banned for no reason. But crashing out on StackOverflow, now that's when someone needs help.
cwnyth 18 hours ago [-]
I'm a mod on two SE sites. It definitely happens. And yes, (imo) they typically need help.
8n4vidtmkvmk 16 hours ago [-]
What kind of help? Mental help, or getting their server back online?
mahboi 15 hours ago [-]
I meant mental, but now that you mention it, probably both
19 hours ago [-]
21 hours ago [-]
21 hours ago [-]
cwnyth 21 hours ago [-]
But SO was never a place to just talk to others. It's not a general purpose discussion site. It could have been a friendly place, but users still would have left, because it's just far easier to get an immediate answer from AI, and those answers have only been getting better.
Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.
cowlevel 21 hours ago [-]
In the early years it very much was. You could ask just about anything that was programming related and had a question mark. In the middle times of SO a lot of those became "locked for historical preservation" and new ones weren't allowed.
zahlman 16 hours ago [-]
It wasn't supposed to be like that. Atwood and Spolsky had an insufficiently refined concept of what makes a good question, that was overly tied to "keeping the riff-raff out" and insufficiently based in having a searchable reference that covers a full spectrum of "difficulty levels" but still having every question clearly posed and properly scoped.
Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.
It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.
NoMoreNicksLeft 15 hours ago [-]
And yet it was best when it was before everyone really developed an "understanding of how questions for a Q&A site were supposed to look like". That's the time everyone in this thread is looking back at fondly.
zahlman 1 hours ago [-]
No, no it really wasn't. People were yelling about the flood of crap back then, too.
For reference, here is the verbatim (except for code formatting for HN) Markdown of the initial version of a question asked in 2010, my answer to which became my highest-ever scoring answer (and which ended up getting over 2 million views):
if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ]
and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2
and for the second
(2+3)/2
third
(3+4)/2
...... etc
how can do as that ?
like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?
also how can i sum a list of number ?
a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]
is it:
b = sum(a)
print b
in i get one number !?
it doesn't work with me
help me plz
MBCook 20 hours ago [-]
Because AI removed what little value it had.
AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.
People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.
If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.
AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.
scubadude 17 hours ago [-]
SO responses were peer-reviewed code snippets or fixes. If something had 800 upvotes and comments outlining pros and cons, that is useful information. The bot gives you whatever it wants to give you, it could be information from a scientific paper or late night TV infomercial.
rhdunn 12 hours ago [-]
I think it's a combination of both...
Before AI people would still try asking questions on SO despite the hostility because it was the only/main place to get answers. Over this time, SO popularity was deteriorating.
After AI people who had bad experiences with asking questions on SO would ask the AI instead. This is because the AI wouldn't mark your question as a duplicate, wouldn't question its validity [1], etc. It would just answer your question. You could even ask it follow-up questions if the answer wasn't quite what you were looking for. All of this in real time, not waiting to get an answer.
[1] Unless the question triggered the safety gates that the AI companies have in place.
dspillett 21 hours ago [-]
People like me⁰, who I admit will also soon be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, will still refer to it for some time.
--------
[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay
[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!
theteapot 21 hours ago [-]
Good luck. What are you thinking of moving on to?
dspillett 12 hours ago [-]
No idea. I'm doing the “running away, worrying about the to later” thing to an extent. I'm thoroughly burned out so the first thing I'll do is take a break to rest my head and sort a few personal things. The mortgage is paid, I have a small but useful chunk of savings, and no dependents apart from the cats, so I have the luxury of being able to seriously consider that.
I'm not qualified for anything else that isn't also remote, full of AI and getting more so, or both, so I may quite literally end up waiting tables, I have friends who can help me skip the queue there with an “he's a good bloke” recommendation. While I was in hospital recently (gallbladder trouble and liver infection) talking to one of the porters who was wheeling to & from the CT scanner, they apparently need more bodies ATM, I could certainly do that (other than the temporary issue I was in there for I'm fit & healthy) and might actually find some enjoyment in it. Both involve dealing with real people who are in the room with me. Anything I do once I leave here will be result in a massive pay cut, but if the change saves my sanity then that will have to be acceptable.
JsonDemWitOster 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah sincerely good luck. Thought of this a few times but so far I can still sincerely say I still love the game, grind, and hustle. Upper management and immediate TL has been pretty pushy when it comes to GenAI use tho; almost every 1:1 comes with the question of if and what I discovered about AI lately. I have no idea how to answer the question honestly and my stock phrases are starting to show signs of wear at least in my mind. Flat out saying no comes with a canned admonition about how it improves productivity.
I don't contest productivity benefits and there's a time and place for Claude in my workflow but I fear sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day. Half joking. But it makes 1:1s even more awkward now when I have to put on a show for the GenAI parade.
dspillett 9 hours ago [-]
> Yeah sincerely good luck.
Thanks. I might need it!
> sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day
We track who uses what AI and how much. For billing/expense tracking purposes, as we've gone from “use it as much as you can” to “use it as much as you need to but don't waste it”, but there will be a table somewhere with my name in the bottom section next to a bit fat 0.
> has been pretty pushy when it comes to GenAI use tho … Flat out saying no comes with …
You'll have to deal with that or get out, eventually, how soon depends on your management. AI is not going away, even when/if the costs rise when all that investment capital starts being clawed back. If it is any help in choosing an exit strategy: under UK employment law (if you are elsewhere you'll have to verify how things work in your jurisdiction) they can't force you to use AI or punish/sack you for not as it can be argued to be a material change of role (as it is described as revolutionary, or in less breathy terms “like becoming a manager”, etc.) not just a different tool. But if you refuse then the same argument can be used to make you redundant (“we need more AI people and fewer traditional devs, traditional devs are being declared redundant, would you like to switch roles instead?” would be perfectly legal). As much as the payout for my long years in the same place would be nice, personally I don't think I can sit it out long enough for that to happen.
It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.
raincole 22 hours ago [-]
It doesn't matter. Even if it were the most friendly community ever, as long as their core value were the same - answering programming questions that with clear answers - it would have been replaced by today's AI completely. It's irrelevant today how bad GPT3.5 once was.
avereveard 12 hours ago [-]
It does because the claims that AI killed it are wrong. Would have died from AI anyway probably yes but it doesn't make the AI scapegoat any more true. Why do you have such an interest in blaming AI that you argue from a false position just because it might have happened?
johnfn 22 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI, which it unquestionably was. GPT-3.5 was able to answer some small chunk of my programming questions (like 10-20% of them), which seems clearly reflected in the graph.
dspillett 21 hours ago [-]
> I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI
A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)
kstrauser 21 hours ago [-]
Traffic started dropping precipitously in summer ‘20. There were no widely known LLMs then, let alone ones used outside labs. ChatGPT went public in November 2022, well into the decline.
While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.
autoexec 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder if AI didn't end up having an impact in other ways. Did they get more aggressive about captchas or bot detection around the time when LLMs came out annoying or keeping out legit users? I imagine they were saw a lot of bot traffic in the years before AI chatbots went public and that probably continues even now that it's a ghost town.
cwnyth 21 hours ago [-]
I think you're forgetting of a certain major event that happened in 2020. An event that initially caused a lot of free time around the world and kept people indoors...
kstrauser 21 hours ago [-]
You mean, the kind that made them more likely to sit around asking and answering questions because there wasn't anything else do to, and which caused an initial spike of traffic?
cwnyth 20 hours ago [-]
I think it's pretty clear that was the cause of the 2020 spike and fall. Once people started going back to work (summer 2020 for us), questions dropped back to pre-2020 levels.
kstrauser 20 hours ago [-]
Sure, but it rapidly fell before its pre-COVID levels and then kept dropping rapidly for the next year or so, and then AI really kicked in.
Jtarii 21 hours ago [-]
So you think there is a viable business around technical Q&A even with GPT 6 Astra or whatever existing?
LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.
Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.
kstrauser 21 hours ago [-]
If there is, I’m not creative enough to imagine it. I don’t contend that SO could survive AI. You’ll never hear me arguing that. However, that graph shows that it was already dying before AI became widely available. AI 100% certainly kicked it while it was down. It just cannot have been the cause of the downturn because the downturn was in full swing before AI could’ve had any effect at all.
4 hours ago [-]
bsder 21 hours ago [-]
Agreed.
StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".
Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.
After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.
THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.
kelnos 19 hours ago [-]
SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.
listenallyall 16 hours ago [-]
the obvious reasoning is that the vast majority of common questions were already asked, and then still many, many uncommon questions, until the only things that hadn't been asked were very, very niche. It's the same reason complaints about mods marking lots of questions as duplicates didn't really pick up momentum until the mid/late 2010's.
Bratmon 5 hours ago [-]
Push factors and pull factors work together far more effectively than either do on their own.
It's like how everyone hated dialup but still kept using it anyway until there was broadband.
reaperducer 19 hours ago [-]
Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.
grg0 20 hours ago [-]
It is not obsolete insofar as it is a good source of Q/A material, which is useful to both humans (directly or indirectly) and bots. The only part of it that is obsolete is the search/query part. If the AI companies had an ounce of decency, they would see no problem injecting money into the platform to continue seeding that Q/A material which they have directly profited from. But investing in a commons is not on the playbook for vulture capitalism.
joquarky 19 hours ago [-]
> It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
The same thing that happened to perl.
epihelix 18 hours ago [-]
Perl was my first love as a language, and I don't recall any hostility towards Perl users. On the contrary, the environment in the early 2000s was very supportive.
Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.
(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)
kstrauser 18 hours ago [-]
How so? I stopped hanging around in Perl-land around 2001 and it seemed friendly enough way back then. What happened to it?
autoexec 17 hours ago [-]
I remember seeing at least one person complain that perl forums were unfriendly, but in that case it turned out it was because he took it as an insult when after he posted code others would comment with re-writes using fewer lines/characters. He didn't understand that they were just playing and not critiquing or trying to tell him that his code should be have been written that way instead. If anything, the shortest possible way to do something should probably be avoided in perl code you plan on ever having to work on again, but it can still be fun to see how compact you can make it.
zahlman 16 hours ago [-]
Yep, that sounds about right. Similarly, people would complain about SO being unfriendly because of people politely asking them to isolate a problem and produce a proper minimal reproducible example, or seeking clarification for a how-to question about what should happen in an edge case, or questioning whether the OP has an XY problem, or marking an obviously duplicate question as a duplicate, or just generally explaining that there are standards on the site and that you can't just treat it as a help desk.
lossolo 22 hours ago [-]
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.
Espressosaurus 20 hours ago [-]
They were on their downswing but LLMs put a gun to their head and executed them. I don't use Stack Overflow anymore, just an LLM and cppreference.
Damn sad how quickly that habit changed for me.
Never asked a question, but got some good info from people who had asked questions and the people who replied.
nullbio 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it has nothing to do with 'hostile attitude'. There's just no reason to use StackOverflow when I can use a chatbot that gives me infinite StackOverflow answers for any conceivable problem I have, within seconds.
asanineassasin 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ransom1538 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
medellin 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
baobabKoodaa 19 hours ago [-]
So you're arguing that SO was really un-hostile at first but at some point it became hostile, causing the crash in usage? My recollection is that SO always was very hostile towards users, even during the time period when it was growing rapidly. So hostility alone is not a sufficient explanation.
Gigachad 21 hours ago [-]
Other question asking platforms like Reddit and Discord are still going well. Nothing has been hit as hard as Stack Overflow, because people hated having to use the site the whole time.
fhn 21 hours ago [-]
sort of like the hostility you're showing?
ahelwer 19 hours ago [-]
Punters with enough good boy points were rolling into very obscure and technical tags to close questions as duplicate (they weren't). When I saw how impossible it was for people to ask questions in a tag I was an expert in I knew the site was cooked. Imagine, like, giving physiotherapy forum power users moderator privileges on HN.
jl6 14 hours ago [-]
SO in the end was like walking into a bar, and the music stops, and all the regulars stare at you, and say “Yeah, what do YOU want, kid? Quit wasting our time. And by the way, you opened the door wrong.”
Most of the easy questions have been asked. I stopped using it because I was asking questions that weren’t trivial to answer, and I guess it is easier to earn internet points through mod actions than through writing answers.
antonymoose 11 hours ago [-]
Your experience matches most closely to mine. I started on SO early in their existence and got plenty of points answering easy PHP and jQuery type questions.
As my career progressed I took on deep problems with complex issues and complex answers. Not much sense in asking as no one ever managed to help me with them. I’d just end up answering my own question a week or a month later perhaps.
And of course the moderation and karma farming - I oh so ‘fondly’ remember the one user that would take your question and run some auto-formatter on it so that it would fit his personal style guide and then get a percentage of the points as your now “co-author.” What fun!
rurp 40 minutes ago [-]
Yeah once I progressed past junior level work the value of asking questions on SO fell off a cliff. At that point most of the problems I got really stuck on were more niche than how to do $standardThing with $CommonLibrary, and there just weren't many people answering oddball questions like that. Even with popular languages like Javascript and Python most of my questions would get zero useful answers, so I pretty quickly stopped writing them. I think it's true that SO really didn't do much to encourage folks who would write answers like that to stay active on the site.
It stayed useful as a reference tool for quite a while, for when I needed to look something up that was fairly common but that I wasn't personally familiar with. But as others have said, the way they handled dupes and supposed opinion-based answers was really poor and meant that the top answers got more and more out of date each year. By the time LLMs came around they were strictly better for those kinds of lookups. Strictly better for now at least, LLMs will themselves get enshittified in the coming years.
zombot 10 hours ago [-]
The old adage comes to mind that you don't get answers on the internet by asking questions but by posting the wrong answer.
EvanAnderson 22 hours ago [-]
I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.
I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.
When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)
Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.
Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.
Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.
dspillett 21 hours ago [-]
> I miss Server Fault
Same. And DBA.se. I was a top contributor of both for the first few years at least, even got sent some free swag a couple of times, not because I cared about the points and being in the first page of people ordered by them, but because I felt genuinely useful and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.
I never really did the social side though, I have problems with distance friendships including online communities (I just don't connect well with people that way) which is one reason that I'm hating tech work more and more these days (being on a remote team is not good for my mental health, while I'm not a huge people person it turns out I absolutely need some in my life, and really in my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).
8n4vidtmkvmk 16 hours ago [-]
I was/am big on Stack Overflow. I always found it amusing when my coworkers stumbled upon my questions or answers. Or i'd find one of my own years later and maybe even try upvoting it before realizing it was my own.
Can't say I formed any connections there though. Just a few negative interactions.
ewwhite 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, the memories! We're still around. I remember when you handed the torch off to me on the leaderboard.
The real life examples and synergies were a plus. I got so much work from that ServerFault presence.
EvanAnderson 8 hours ago [-]
Blast from the past here-- it's ewwhite! I hope life has been treating you well, sir. It's hard for me to believe it's been so long.
mahboi 20 hours ago [-]
I used to spend time on these sites answering questions. It was actually fun and educational.
kstrauser 19 hours ago [-]
I did too! The gamification was fun, but more than that it was just really enjoyable to help other people. I like teaching, and SO was like the crack cocaine version of that.
faangguyindia 22 hours ago [-]
Reddit is going the same way.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
gwerbin 22 hours ago [-]
I stopped using Reddit not because I got banned, but because it has been steadily converted from the world's most popular forum platform to a trash heap of engagement hacks and shady practices. Moreso than SO, which was already struggling with existential problems before AI, Reddit did itself in.
paraknight 18 hours ago [-]
I've been struggling to find something that scratches the Reddit itch, in the lineage of Slashdot, then Fark, then Digg. Any recommendations? I don't mean niche communities, there needs to be enough of a mainstream critical mass the makes it _the_ place to go. I don't think it's Lemmy, though maybe it could be.
RugnirViking 10 hours ago [-]
I really enjoy lemmy with summit client on my phone. Never been on it from my desktop though. Probably a good thing all things considered.
It's got pretty good coverage of most things related to my country and interests, but if you go too far afield/niche theres not many users on many topics
arccy 12 hours ago [-]
TikTok, but you'll have to suffer the video format
IshKebab 14 hours ago [-]
There isn't one unfortunately. Some nerd is ok on Lemmy but you'll never find stuff like knitting or local communities. Not with any people on them anyway.
ryandrake 21 hours ago [-]
I stopped when they killed old.reddit.com for non-logged-in users.
dawnerd 17 hours ago [-]
They're also blocking you from using even the new site on mobile.
nichos 19 hours ago [-]
The updated Firefox plugin still works.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
Yea, but I just don't feel like going to a site that doesn't want me as a visitor. F them.
anthk 9 hours ago [-]
There's a FFox plugin to enforce old.reddit.com's old CSS.
ergocoder 19 hours ago [-]
Reddit has the most advanced AI system.
I tried to post on r/showerthoughts several times over the past 10 years. And every time it deleted my post saying my thought wasn't original. I was wow how they would even know that, and this was pre-AI.
fishingisfun 19 hours ago [-]
there is an amazing opportunity on the internet for proper community that isnt slinging shooting to either extreme of the political spectrum. we need a decent discussion board like reddit without the horrible mods banning or automods deleteing something because it wasnt EXACTLY following 19 different rules in the sub baar.
heresie-dabord 17 hours ago [-]
> there is an amazing opportunity on the internet for proper community
But how will you design it to survive in this age of malicious actors and persona farms?
mike_hearn 15 hours ago [-]
Rely completely on LLM moderators. But it's problems largely stem from its reliance on volunteer human moderators, who often self-select for strange and problematic characteristics (e.g. they are attempting to advance a political agenda by manipulating what people can read on the site).
freecodeio 10 hours ago [-]
I have upgraded my reddit experience to no account and not browsing the comments.
cferry 14 hours ago [-]
This site is a prime example of the worst kind of enshittification that could happen around an IPO. I left when the first moves around that were looming (API restrictions and 3rd party app ban). This is one of the rare decisions of mine that I have yet to be critical about.
When I read old.reddit.com was disabled for non-logged-in users, to be sure I'd never hit this site again even by mistake, I put a rule in my router's DNS resolver to lie and pretend an NXDOMAIN.
ViscountPenguin 19 hours ago [-]
Reddit is an absolutely hostile platform now, the amount of dogpiling is insane. Say the wrong thing and apparently you're simultaneously a bot, and a valid target for harassment (why people are so invested in harassing people they think are bots, I have no clue?)
yolo1897 16 hours ago [-]
I thought that calling people bots was just a way to dehumanize what they perceive as an opponent, just like in wars, but they know that it's a person.
rhdunn 12 hours ago [-]
It's easier to call someone a bot or other names than to engage with them or to try and understand their point of view.
We're increasingly pushed into different groups and sides with little to no toleration of each other. It's been progressing more over the past 10-15 years in the UK, US, and possibly elsewhere.
tsss 6 hours ago [-]
I think they honestly believe that because they can't even fathom that anyone would legitimately have a different opinion on something than them. And if they do, they're literally Hitler anyway.
tdb7893 21 hours ago [-]
I went on Reddit recently to look something up and some of the niche subreddits were decent but I was shocked at the amount of just total garbage that's there now (including lots of weird misogyny) so it's not just the bans that are a problem. It feels like every social media platform is just miserable to use now. Except occasionally posting here my only social media is just Discord servers with my actual real life friends.
Gigachad 21 hours ago [-]
Everything moved to Discord now. Reddit started ignoring subreddit subscriptions which made the whole platform a homogeneous blob of slop. Discord has maintained separation between communities and has minimal discoverability features so users stick to the servers they participate which builds a sense of community.
jobigoud 4 hours ago [-]
> Reddit started ignoring subreddit subscriptions
Where are you seeing this? When? I go to "Home" and I only see my subscriptions.
I have a cosmetic filter to avoid clicking on the "Popular" link but I never see anything from the front page that's not part of my subreddits. I don't use the app.
cellsstudio 21 hours ago [-]
Honestly, agree. I find the niche subreddits are nice because they are still very human, in terms of both users and mods, but once they get a bit bigger it just gets destroyed by new users and bots.
Gigachad 21 hours ago [-]
Problem is there are no niche subreddits anymore, there are no walls between subreddits at all. Reddit runs on a modern algorithm where any individual post which scores well will be shown to the whole site regardless of users individual subscriptions.
wraptile 14 hours ago [-]
I gave up on contributing on reddit as everything is being removed by auto moderation as if bots can't spam /r/funny to farm some karma, and how am I supposed to get 1,000 upvotes if I post only in communities that have 1,000 active users? The entire thing is rigged to favor bots and propaganda over genuine human interactions.
Gareth321 14 hours ago [-]
This happened to me and I haven't bothered to create a new account. I was a 16+ year user. Banned over something innocuous. I tried appealing but it was clearly AI which denied the appeal - despite them claiming it was a human.
Something most people don't know is that Reddit now has a kind of AI partnership with moderators of the larger subreddits. If those mods ban a user from their sub, the AI can suspend or ban a user for "breaking the terms of service." Given the state of Reddit, and the kind of people who moderate the large subreddits, it's creating a fairly violent and polarised community.
namrog84 22 hours ago [-]
There was that 1 person who used to work(paid?/volunteer?) at Reddit that actively tried to cultivate high-quality AMA on Reddit. Ever since they've been gone. It hasn't felt the same.
Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.
Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.
I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.
Gigachad 21 hours ago [-]
I think the various reddit dramas over the years have taken their toll on the site even if they didn't completely kill it. You can see it in moderation these days, individual sub mods have called out the fact that no one pays them and they don't have the motivation to spend all day enforcing quality for free. No one has stepped up to replace them so most moderation on Reddit is site wide LLM powered moderation.
saimiam 21 hours ago [-]
Victoria (I think)!
Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.
itomato 20 hours ago [-]
I am so deeply banned from Reddit it feels retaliatory in some way.
Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.
fergie 15 hours ago [-]
Its not so much the moderation, its more the random nature of the links, and the anonymization of user contributions.
One thing is that there are lots of bots on the site, another is that the site now seems to be specifically designed for bots.
JensenTorp 7 hours ago [-]
Reddit is an online mental institution. That's hardly an interesting insight, it just makes me sad when I think how good it used to be, before the events of 2016 broke Redditors brains.
srvmshr 18 hours ago [-]
The Reddit banning algorithm is strange in its own way.
In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).
Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.
A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing
OroPla 13 hours ago [-]
> never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
The trick is to delete your browser cache (not just things related to reddit, everything), then wait a week to a month before creating the next account.
bawolff 19 hours ago [-]
In general, in online communities - i think there is no such thing as free moderators. If you aren't paying them in money then you pay them in power.
EvanAnderson 22 hours ago [-]
I refused to make a Reddit account. I knew my personality would lead me to wasting entirely too much time on the site if I could reply. (Like here... >sigh<)
When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.
I suppose I was never their target market anyway.
cwnyth 21 hours ago [-]
There's Old Reddit Redirect extension in Firefox, but honestly, you're not missing out on anything there anyway.
8note 17 hours ago [-]
doesnt work as of today
cwnyth 8 hours ago [-]
It worked fine earlier this week, but I guess that's that for Reddit. It had been a (not so) good run.
cellsstudio 21 hours ago [-]
I am totally addicted to reddit. Good instincts - stay off it hahaha
unethical_ban 22 hours ago [-]
My account of well over a year and 11k karma was banned by admins presumably for an admin-deleted comment where I said "Hi kids, buy our product!" as a Steve-Buschemi-meme reference, and was flagged as spam. To your point they also have their Comment Quality Score (CQS) which lowers you automatically if you use Proton email aliases, lowers you if you use VPN to access the site, among other things.
Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.
firesteelrain 20 hours ago [-]
I was banned from subreddits for belonging to r/conservative. Mods wanted me to disavow that subreddit to atone for the sin of belonging to that subreddit.
freecodeio 10 hours ago [-]
tbh it's quite a sin to belong to that subreddit, might as well as just inject bleach and it's the same level of stupidity
firesteelrain 10 hours ago [-]
It’s censorship
freecodeio 9 hours ago [-]
the sub that censors the rest of the reddit userbase gets censored by the rest of the reddit userbase, color me surprised
firesteelrain 9 hours ago [-]
It wants you to have a conservative viewpoint. But it doesn't ban you if you join like say r/AdviceAnimals which 2 years ago many subreddits were taken over when Trump was running for office again. r/AdviceAnimals and others were banning those that were members of r/conservative.
Reddit took action in March 5, 2026 to stop that practice.
There is a policy of ideological gatekeeping by certain Moderators.
freecodeio 9 hours ago [-]
> It wants you to have a conservative viewpoint.
no it bans you for not having a conservative viewpoint, that's completely different from wanting you
mike_bob 7 hours ago [-]
100%. I was on reddit 15+ years, mostly participating in a few niche subs, and got site-wide banned for making threatening comments after mods failed to keep political BS out. Ha! Far worse things have been said by talking heads on crappy cable TV news shows (you Faux). My appeal went into a black hole.
I tried making another account, and you are right, it got banned a few days later. Tried once again after learning how they do persistent bans and found they let me keep posting, but after 3 days my post views always stayed at 1... in others words they didn't "ban" me but my comments were clearly no longer visible to anyone else, and I haven't been back since. What a joke of a company.
ricardobeat 20 hours ago [-]
Surprised to hear this, I'm not alone!
My account was banned back around 2021. I had a separate account on mobile, which got subsequently banned for 'evading a ban'. Have been unable to create an account since then, even on entirely new machines, different OS, renewed IP. Whatever tracking techniques they use are downright scary.
The worst part is that all of this started because a mod in a right-leaning sub silenced my account, then decided to turn it into a permanent ban for no reason.
Nowadays, I'd still like to visit r/programming for a change, and share some of my work, but otherwise it's such a cesspool of AI-generated content and bots that the appeal has almost entirely faded.
lifeisloving 19 hours ago [-]
Ive experienced this as well, i confronted some reddit devs at a conference about their ability to track sock accounts and they kinda just smiled and acknowledged what I suspected vaguely.
luqtas 22 hours ago [-]
and hopefully soon we have decentralized protocols as the standard when we think about user spaces. amen
EvanAnderson 21 hours ago [-]
We had it. Reddit should have just been NNTP. You can't "monetize" NNTP though.
unethical_ban 22 hours ago [-]
I used to be a lot more enthusiastic about decentralized protocols. I don't know how to solve the AI problem though. I think the Internet as we knew it for assumed-human interaction is dead, and the surest way to believe you're interacting with humans now is through existing trusts, such as accounts older than AI and highly-moderated forums, and to charge for access.
bakugo 18 hours ago [-]
> Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
Meanwhile bots are running rampant and I can't scroll through the site for 10 minutes without seeing an obvious bot post or comment. Dead internet is real.
jmyeet 18 hours ago [-]
Reddit still has a place for very niche communities. To this day it can be the best place for a lot of things.
But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.
One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.
I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.
You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.
21 hours ago [-]
lifeisloving 19 hours ago [-]
Also subreddit mods can ban your entire account..wtf. I was banned for arguing in a poltical subreddit. So if a mod doesn't like your political beliefs they can ban you (and your devices apparently) from the site.
And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.
faangguyindia 15 hours ago [-]
subreddit specific mods can't ban you directly site wide, but they have tools through which they can report your second account for ban evasion, and if the automated system runs a check and finds you had an old banned account on the same sub, your new one is perma banned too.
vivzkestrel 19 hours ago [-]
all hidden accounts posting political propaganda day and night in the name of privacy was enough to turn me off
howunfortunate 18 hours ago [-]
It's kind of like the opposite of the Nazi bar problem.
You purge some Nazis, then run out of Nazis to purge, but you've got a good purge system going...
nullbio 20 hours ago [-]
Reddit is by far the most toxic place on the web, yet somehow manages to get the least amount of scrutiny from regulators. Makes you wonder why, doesn't it?
wood_spirit 9 hours ago [-]
I have 76K points and quite a bit more on a few sister sites like the gamedev one. Haven’t used it in a decade though.
For me, the crazy everything-is-a-dupe drove me away. Same as so many others mentioning here.
But a lot of other things were also wrong and they are worth listing too:
I stopped looking at the answers as they aged. So many of the top or accepted answers were quickly out of date (but you couldn’t ask again because or the dupe mods).
A lot of the accepted or top answers had always been wrong even when written. If you knew more about something you could spot this but it was pointless to engage and try and change it. Popularity is not about being correct.
There was no need for all the other sites. It would have been better with one inclusive site. So often a good question would be asked and mods would comment it should be asked on some niche site with no traction and so died the question.
The gamification point system favoured the early people like me. I probably got most of my points long after I had actually moved on because my top answers were still racking up votes. There was no hope for a more recent joiner (even joining 10 years ago) to ever catch up.
And the hardest most interesting questions got no answers. If you were truly stumped on a difficult algorithm then it really wasn’t the place to ask.
That’s some of what I remember being wrong with SO long before LLMs were mainstream.
I shudder to think that LLMs learn from SO answers. It would explain so much of the worst vibe coding though :)
ryandrake 21 hours ago [-]
StackOverflow is great if your question is "How would we have done X back in 2012?" Because you can't re-ask or re-answer questions that have had their correct answers change as technology changed. So the sites is stuck back in time when each question was first answered.
minitech 20 hours ago [-]
> or re-answer
Sure you can. (But it is a significant problem that they start at the bottom of the score-based answer sort and don’t get attention.)
ailearneditther 17 hours ago [-]
This is why you give the updated answer as a comment under the top answer, with a casual "shouldnt we do xyz in [anno domini NOW] instead". Then some established answerer takes what you just said, edits it into the top answer, and steals all credit. But hey, at least you got the answer to be updated, not in your words, and no trace of your input into it. But still updated, right?
I'm not pouring one out for SO's death. Because I already did years ago.
999900000999 22 hours ago [-]
Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use
fps-hero 21 hours ago [-]
There is something about the gamification of social interaction which breeds a hostile community. Power hungry users chasing internet points, or moderators needlessly raising their hammer.
I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.
cwillu 21 hours ago [-]
The “can't answer” thing is probably the reason I never contributed. I don't know the specific reasoning behind it, but it's such a self-defeating solution to whatever problem they thought they were solving.
minitech 20 hours ago [-]
I’m curious what both of these comments are referring to, since it’s not supposed to take any privileges to answer a question on Stack Overflow (you can even answer without making an account). Maybe some anti-spam block?
worthless-trash 21 hours ago [-]
My favorite point was when you're the single person to have worked on a problem, published an answer, published a paper had the answer accepted and some MUPPET edits your answer to mean something else entirely, and it has your 'name' now beside an incorrect answer.
kstrauser 19 hours ago [-]
That infuriated me and I revoked those edits constantly, until I gave up and left the site altogether. I'd rather you steal my answer and put your name on it than put your own words under my name. Fix some dumb typo I made on mobile or something, sure, fine. Edit my answer to change the meaning or phrasing whatsoever? Oh hell no. Go make your own answer, and don't lie and say that I was the one speaking your words.
lazyjones 14 hours ago [-]
The numbers suggest that said hostile community is actually very small, or that it never intended to contribute to the site in the first place. As opposed to Wikipedia for example, where the very hostile admins and moderators actually add a lot of content.
hatthew 22 hours ago [-]
SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.
sobellian 17 hours ago [-]
I remember when SO had codegolf on the main site. Maybe if they weren't such killjoys people would have still been interested in participating in some programming oriented community even though AI displaced the actual writing of computer languages.
braiamp 5 hours ago [-]
Codegolf still exists, it's just not part of stackoverflow.
IshKebab 14 hours ago [-]
The problem was it was a discussion forum. They just didn't like that.
p-e-w 22 hours ago [-]
> SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming.
They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.
hatthew 21 hours ago [-]
I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
They really didn't change their minds. The bulk of the prior meta Q&A that people on the meta sites ended up citing to justify policy, all came from around 2014 and a fair bit of it was older than that. Plus there are numerous on-the-record statements from Atwood and Spolsky from 2011 or earlier that are broadly speaking consistent with the modern understanding.
However, they didn't really understand what makes a question valuable, or why low-quality beginner questions are low quality, and thus what exactly to expect in order to get higher quality things that could be helpful to other beginners. And yes, they did initially make some gestures towards some threshold of question difficulty, but this was a misstep (and also hard to disentangle from question complexity, as well as whether a question is interesting and to whom). And yes there were experiments like the Documentation project (which I lamented the loss of). And yes the reputation system was a totally broken idea and implementation, inconsistent with stated goals.
It turns out that when you have a critical mass of users and the alternatives are frustrating enough, you can get away with a lot of those missteps.
As for enforcement, that's what happens when the overwhelming majority of it is assigned as the community's responsibility. Misconceptions about the site's purpose compound when some users get away with them and then gain reputation from a single old/popular Q&A. (I had some, too.)
Fundamentally the site failed to figure out how to impress those values upon people before they got too involved. I think this was out of a fear of scaring users away, but clearly this was counterproductive — surfacing the misconceptions and conflicts later on only made things worse. An ideal system would have started questions closed, so that having one closed on you wouldn't feel like a final judgement (despite it not being one); and it would have shielded you from downvotes until question opening (because the entire point of this would be to recognize that questions require work by default to meet the site standards). In other worse, what the half-baked Staging Ground was trying to accomplish (and mostly did, for the small minority of questions the system decided to send there at random).
EvanAnderson 22 hours ago [-]
I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.
bombcar 21 hours ago [-]
Those people are always drawn to these unpaid positions of power and they’re absolute death-knells for the community. Time and time again you see it.
zahlman 1 hours ago [-]
SO didn't ban you for asking a bad question, either. It just closed the question, and then if you kept doing it you might face restrictions on asking more, which, yes, ended with something far too harsh.
If the community could have tweaked that system, we absolutely would have. The site owners never gave us that access, and it got much worse after getting bought by Prosus.
But yes, on a Q&A site you absolutely should be prevented from asking certain questions. The fact that they're facially "on topic" does not save them, just like how there are guidelines to post on HN that go beyond "make sure it has something to do with technology". Because it is not the purpose of a site like SO to answer your question just because you asked it. The purpose is to have good Q&A that everyone can refer to in order to learn something. The root of the "hostility" is in the selfishness of those who won't consider the perspective of everyone else who's going to see the question later. Which, you know, is the exact problem with the traditional discussion forums that SO was created explicitly to provide an alternative to.
tintor 22 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.
gerdesj 22 hours ago [-]
Does it really? I'm not going to mess with biotech because I have no idea what I am on about there. I did ask about Samsung TVs:
> I'm not going to mess with biotech because I have no idea
Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276998 lack of knowledge doesn't prevent people from using random biotech keywords as measure against LLM's assisted reverse engineering.
yongjik 21 hours ago [-]
Well, maybe it does, but it seems that an average developer asks which IDE to use a thousand times more often than what malwares are installed in their Samsung TV.
So there's a clear difference in expected utility.
22 hours ago [-]
eluru 21 hours ago [-]
it does not
ProphetOfParado 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
heisenbit 8 hours ago [-]
But it charges you for both the question and answer.
damowangcy 18 hours ago [-]
In a dystopian fufure where a few or ONE AI company bested the rest, the company might banned you from using the AI for coding because the AI thinks you're incompetent or require you to pass a test to activate the coding function, because it's dangerous.
Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.
ergocoder 19 hours ago [-]
I always hate it when a person tries to "X Y problem" me.
I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.
People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
> People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.
No, they absolutely do not.
They propose that you might be having an XY problem because they have seen people commonly ask the same thing before and turn out to have that same XY problem, and they want to help you by making sure that you are asking a question where the answer will actually be useful to you. Or else they genuinely cannot understand why a person would want to solve X.
kstrauser 18 hours ago [-]
To be fair, there was a lot of X Y question asking there. "Would it be better to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to implement a clone of the Redis protocol? We're deploying an app that needs a 100% compatible Redis API. We own the Linux server it'll run on. Which should we use?" Uh, can you just use Redis? "Don't XY me!"
I'm not saying that's the problem you had, not at all. I do see why some of the answerers were quick to jump to it though.
gspr 15 hours ago [-]
Was it so hostile?
The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?
ranger_danger 21 hours ago [-]
Most online platforms I have used to ask questions or make comments (whether it's real-time chat, mailing lists, forums, etc.) were extremely hostile and always have been... I guess it's just human nature.
StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.
Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.
igonvalue 7 hours ago [-]
I just received an email notification from Stack Exchange today, "1 new item in your Stack Exchange inbox". I was intrigued, thinking someone had commented on one of my questions or answers. Did people still do that? Maybe an LLM-powered bot had interacted with my post; after all, they are probably the main users of the site.
Turns out, it was just a system message "You are now able to set your unique username for your profile." Someone who was responsible for growth marketing probably figured this would boost user engagement. The last gasps of a once vibrant platform.
AI didn't do it to SO. SO's new ownership did it to SO. It's a hostile place with or without AI.
motionlessveloc 19 hours ago [-]
The same decline is visible on all Stack Exchange sites, regardless of moderation policy.
OroPla 11 hours ago [-]
Do you have some graphs for that?
Search engines no longer surfacing useful results didn't help the web in general. Outside of a handful of sites everyone knows the Internet seems to have become a ghost town over the past decade.
moffkalast 6 hours ago [-]
All Stack Exchange sites had the same user hostility problem, though SO was by far the worst at it.
mahboi 21 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately they changed ownership very close to when ChatGPT got released, so I can't point to timing, but there's just no way this is not because of AI.
IshKebab 14 hours ago [-]
SO's extreme hostility definitely drove people to the first viable alternative (AI) as quickly as possible, so it might have survived longer if it hadn't been so hostile.
But to be honest I expect that would have just delayed its death. AI is so good now I think I'd use it even if Stackoverflow was really friendly.
grumbel 13 hours ago [-]
I am curious why questions about AI itself haven't had a bigger impact in slowing this all down a little. AI is a whole new field for programming and there should be plenty of interesting questions surrounding AI that are worth discussing on SO.
My attempts at discussing AI related questions with AI itself have been pretty frustrating, especially in the early years, since they are either just uninformed about what's currently going on in the AI space or recite random blog posts of questionable value, often they couldn't even tell what they themselves are capable of.
inY2K 16 hours ago [-]
My biggest turnoff was dealing with the gatekeepers who will treat you like you were asking stupid questions to a topic you obviously didn't know. I am glad AI is here and killed that; there is not stupid questions for AI. The walls for learning have been breached.
someguyornotidk 13 hours ago [-]
As someone with many gold awards and notable questions, I stopped participating in stack overflow when they decided to withhold our open data from us. Our deal was that I spend time and effort asking quality questions and providing quality answers for free in return for open (free speech, not free beer) access to the entire qa dataset.
The new owners either did not understand this arrangement or did not value it enough. I now have my kwix backups and my open weight LLM. This should be more than enough to hold me over until a stack exchange substitute pops up.
Razengan 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
aeturnum 4 hours ago [-]
As someone who only ever asked or answered a couple of questions, Stack Overflow has been on the way out for close to a decade by now. The website never (from my inattentive perspective) did anything about the key problems of a question site:
- If something was marked as a dupe by mods, that was it. There was no way to suggest that a dupe was marked in error on your question or others.
- The site had no standard mechanisms for separating questions in time or by version. So many answers for "python 3" that answered for, like, 3.8 or whatever. Same for operating system and basically any other contextual category.
- Following answers was incredibly inelegant. Would you like to know if the chosen answer switches? What about if there is a new answer for the next version of the software? Trick question we don't track software versions!
- The community had an extremely high learning curve, I think in part because the site had so few affordances. It was very easy to be rude on accident and it left a bad taste in ones mouth.
- The site decided to entirely ignore meta organization. Do you want a category of questions that are kinda silly? What about separating highly complex questions or debugging particular errors from general questions about how to use the tools? Nope, we're not going to do any of that.
I am shocked it lasted as long as it did.
armchairhacker 22 hours ago [-]
SO has been useless for years now, but the other Stack Exchanges can be interesting, they deserve more spotlight.
asimovDev 15 hours ago [-]
SO was often a productivity loss for me because I'd scroll down and get distracted by stackexchange questions on the right side of the screen for half an hour
joaovnunes 8 hours ago [-]
me too. eventually I adblocked the sidebar and the navbar and most things that weren't the question, comments and answers since I went to the pages directly from search engine. It looked very clean
kulahan 22 hours ago [-]
I really do love their other communities so much more. Lots of super interesting content - it feels like a new digg or something. I go to one of the other stacks and look at the most popular non-tech stack posts once or twice a week purely for entertainment. The breakdowns on obscure but interesting topics can get really fun to read!
EvanAnderson 22 hours ago [-]
On the more-and-more rare occasion that I end up on Stack Overflow as a result of a search I find myself losing excessive time to following the random links to other communities. The other communities really are good stuff.
usrusr 11 hours ago [-]
So many good answers here, all converging on moderation overreach stifling the page before LLM came in.
I'm not disagreeing at all, but I'd like to add that the moderation issues did not come from a vacuum: they were a reaction to SO reputation becoming so much of a CV optimisation metric that SO must have felt a lot of pressure to do something. Turns out that something wasn't good, but I'm not sure that other paths taken would have been much less bad. Some success just aren't set up to last.
Good4boothee 9 hours ago [-]
Everyone here complains about moderators closing questions and those ridiculous answer rewrites. Didn't anyone encounter rude question authors? Most entitles people on the earth. I pity the LLMs and discord channels that now handle them. By the way such encounters also led me to discover that SO places limits on removing own content posted there.
ourcat 15 hours ago [-]
I do not at all like how they changed most posting dates to just say "over a year ago". When looking up solutions to code issues, the date of the answer often matters a great deal.
asimovDev 15 hours ago [-]
I think they reversed this change, because I wanted to complain and agree with you , but decided to see how bad it was and found out that the site displays dates as it used to before
Oh that's a new change then, thanks for pointing it out. It was only last week I was annoyed at how it was hiding that the answers were from 2013-2014. I wonder if they've suddenly got someone there with a bit more sense?
f311a 16 hours ago [-]
I don't think this should be celebrated, even though they had a bad attitude.
We are losing communities and human communication to LLM chats.
sschueller 16 hours ago [-]
What I find much worse than someone talking directly to an LLM is when you are communicating with another human and they respond with LLM.
10111001 15 hours ago [-]
> What I find much worse than someone talking directly to an LLM is when you are communicating with another human and they respond with LLM.
And what's even worse than that is when they don't know what they're talking about, and launder their ignorance through an LLM. Then you get vapor laundered to look like a thoughtful and considered response.
nbajka 13 hours ago [-]
Was it really a community of human communication? I only remember going there for answers, not to make friends. The only person I remember from there was that obnoxious Italian guy who was obsessed with the Chinese government.
jdprgm 17 hours ago [-]
It's odd it still exists at all still. What would compel someone to even post a question on SO anymore.
Basically the equivalent of shouting out some highly specific technical query down a dark alleyway and hoping against all odds for a better response than models trained on all of stack overflow already.
kstrauser 15 hours ago [-]
From far down in the shady distance of the alley, a small voice shouts back: "Closed, duplicate!"
jason_oster 4 hours ago [-]
A few weeks ago, I discovered that my public IPv4 address had been blocked across all of the Stack Exchange network. That was surprising. My IPv4 rarely changes and I hardly visit any of the sites (who does? lol). I submitted a report to the email address listed. Never heard back from them, but a week later I randomly learned I was unblocked when another Stack Overflow answer appeared in a search. Just checked my IPv4, and yep, same one in the email I sent.
Stack Exchange is toast... I mean, cooked. They've been falling apart for years. Unlike the top comments, I stopped posting there in 2014.
shagie 8 hours ago [-]
I attribute much of Stack Overflow's decline to a mismatch of scaling... and that mismatch is in part what lead to the perceived hostility by askers and answerers. Overcorrection and changes (frequently removing of curation tools) often made this worse. (Part of this is inspired by a recent post on meta.stackexchange about how corporate is redoing question deleting and Shog's answer to it https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/420032 )
The scaling focuses around discoverability, (the rate of) asking questions, and the amount of time available for people to curate (which includes helping new users get onboarded).
Much of the early days of Stack Overflow, discoverability was trivial. It was easy to find an interesting question because few things were asked and this was the days when there was a lot of changes. We're dealing with 2008 and beyond - there were a lot of new frameworks and languages being updated then... Spring 3, Backbone, Knockout, Angular, React, Vue, Spring Boot 1, Java 7 and eventually Java 8.
This was a time of rapid change and the experts were answering on Stack Overflow - and it was scaling up to meet that demand with additional tools.
But it also started becoming a place where students were posting questions (every September you'd get the "how do you draw a triangle with stars?" questions 20 times a day in the Java or Python tags...)
This started being visible in 2010 with question quality and by 2014 it was a full on epidemic.
One part of this is that the original community of people who followed Jeff and Joel's blogs and helped barn raise the site had gotten smaller as an overall portion of the site because of that explosive growth. Some people wanted it to be a place where any user could get help with a question (and closing questions was antithetical to that) and others were looking for it to be more of a wikipedia. That conflict still simmers.
Another part of this is that a smaller and smaller percent of the overall user base was using the curation tools available. Fewer people were closing questions (that really did need to be closed) and helping onboard new users with expectations. When there are 6000 new questions a day that represents a lot of work for the volunteers to try to onboard them. Initially, everyone came from the same point and there wasn't much onboarding needed. With its growth, a lot of new people were coming to it from the approach that it was a forum or immediate feedback chat.
That growth without scaling up the tools for onboarding and curation (making it easier to do) meant that the people trying to help new users and make discovery of well written questions easier had less time per user (or question) to do so... and got increasingly curt - they couldn't spend 5 minutes per question anymore and instead were trying to do things in 30 seconds or less.
This was the beginning of "Stack Overflow is unfriendly."
The attempt that corporate had from this, instead of making it easier to help people took away curation tools and close reasons were made more specific... which in turn meant that the people trying to close questions to make discoverability of well written questions on the home page easier were incredibly pedantic in order to meet those reasons.
Some of the tooling is set up to be able to handle 6000 questions per day, and scales poorly back to having 100 questions per day.
The user base of Stack Overflow at 2 months old is very different than Stack Overflow today, even if it has the same question rate. There are very few people who are around to help onboard users (diamond mods if you read this - there's 25 of you and 100 questions per day... you can spend 5 minutes per new question per day to help onboard the user for expectations and still have half an hour a day for other moderation tasks).
Many of the people who did curation when SO was growing and at its peak have become disappointed with Stack Overflow and while they may look at it to see if its a site where their contributions would again be appreciated... though the changes that corporate appears to want have been additional curtailment of curation tools and have even proposed removing close votes all together ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438185/the-company-... ).
---
Stack Overflow is mostly dead. It lingers on, but every change that is being attempted or proposed in trying to get more "engagement" takes it further and further from being a place where new knowledge is collected and collated.
I would attribute this mostly to there aren't any curators left - so everything they try building turns into a mess. Corporate has leaned too hard on the community to do curation and diamond mods have largely stopped doing curation in favor of moderation.
With low activity and the largest ratio of staff and diamond mods to active users, this would be an excellent time for those two groups to completely take up the task of curation and onboarding to set a new standard for how it should be done... and if they aren't willing to do it, that really suggests that the final nail in the coffin is in place waiting to get hammered.
Paul_Clayton 5 hours ago [-]
For Stack Overflow, I only answered technically off-topic questions, so I contributed a bit to one problem of SO.
(I also made one "let me Google that for you" comment on an SE answer, though I tried to be polite asking what was not understood from the Google result. I cringe a bit when I remember that. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55752699/what-does-a-spl... if anyone is interested.)
I am not a programmer, but I do have some knowledge of computer architecture. Unfortunately for me, the Stack Exchange sites where such questions would be on-topic (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering/Electronics) did not get many questions that I could answer. (https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/123778 is one of my more popular answers.)
I do not remember exactly why my participation in Stack Exchange sites declined. Part of the motivation loss was from fewer "interesting" questions, part was from a slight decline in politeness, part was from modest discomfort with the policies that made asking questions more difficult, part was from general declining enthusiasm and competition with other interests.
I do remember what caused me to rage quit; it was my worldbuilding question being voted to close as too broad and this answer to the question: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/247948 .
Besides being just one specific use of adamant (when I was more looking for classes of uses), I felt it mocked my sense of high fantasy (which was one of the tags used). (I do not think this was the poster's intent and I was overly sensitive, but combined with general dissatisfaction and a declining mood this triggered a rage quit. Having something that annoyed me be extremely popular did not help.)
aljgz 14 hours ago [-]
It's ironic/unfortunate they took the moderationazy path right when the site needed to find its new direction.
Some months ago I posted a question there after a long time, something that the LLMs could not give me a satisfactory response. It got deleted for being unsuitable for the site.
I'm not particularly a new user of SO. been using for 15 years and 5.5k reputation, which does not say much more that I know how to ask questions there, or I used to know.
Desperate, I take the question to a meeting with the language team. The guy gets excited: "this kind of question is why we keep holding these sessions"
SO became what it was by setting rules that worked extremely well. They even occasionally let some QnAs slip by, like the famous Jon Skeet Chuck Norris facts[1]. Now those same rules don't work well for a vibrant community, and at the same time they are being followed pedantically.
For what it's worth, as bad as the site became for question askers, it got even worse for people who answer.
I don't particularly care for e-points and that sort of things, but SO had whole entire way of telling you you are wrong why did you even dare answering, then creating "classes" of user (I apparently made MORE ranking points after I stopped using it than before ? Giving me more moderation power), then seeing "your" answers being edited left and right by people who add a comma or whatever
The whole joy for me was in answering people. It's just fun, I think many hackers get it, bad questions notwithstanding. But as some point they made that ... Less fun, for a lack of a better description. So I just stopped answering.
I love it for what it brought and the great times I had on it for years, but I've stopped actively using it (as opposed to just finding the answer through a google search) for a while and it was way before the rise of LLMs.
lanyard-textile 14 hours ago [-]
StackOverflow's poor gameification of the platform is the singular reason it suffered from its awful culture.
If you had enough reputation, you'd be invited to these review queues, like the Close Vote queue.
You got a point toward a new badge if you voted to Close. You get nothing if you chose to keep it open. There was always a perverse incentive there to act, to make a question "better," to nitpick a perfectly fine answer.
mgdev 22 hours ago [-]
They should reboot, focused on
1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and
2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
This does four things simultaneously:
1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model
2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)
3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.
4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
hatthew 21 hours ago [-]
The discussion around who gets a green checkmark and +15 rep was bad enough. I can't imagine how it would be if there was real money involved.
bryant 21 hours ago [-]
> 2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?
mahboi 21 hours ago [-]
Who decides which person is correct?
aaronbrethorst 21 hours ago [-]
Maybe someone new could create a new community modeled along these lines where experts could exchange knowledge, or more junior people something else, for answers.
wondering5du 21 hours ago [-]
So instead of just not getting paid for my help I might even get to pay if my answer is deemed to be not good enough. Thanks but no thanks.
moffkalast 6 hours ago [-]
Hmm yes, how can we turn what remains of the burning pile of SO into a predatory polymarket knock off. This has to be the most disgustingly capitalistic take on anything I've heard this month.
kayalan 15 hours ago [-]
i know SO gets a lot of hate but it massively helped with my work. Majority of questions I had were already answered. Ive only posted 2 questions, and neither was taken down. My questions were specific and more to the point.
With LLMs around, I no longer use it as much. And its a shame because I am worried in general that we might be losing communities like these
Cort3z 12 hours ago [-]
Everyone is probably saying this, but in my opinion the whole site failed because people with high iq and low eq held all the power, scaring away new users, and old users like me.
It is a site about helping people where no one seemed interested in helping people.
werdnapk 22 hours ago [-]
And how much was AI trained on their data? That's the sad part. Nobody asking new questions, so not much more for AI to train from.
sureMan6 22 hours ago [-]
It's training on every single codebase in the world instead now
You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data
gwerbin 21 hours ago [-]
More importantly, the newer generation of models don't even need Stackoverflow. With tool calling they can pull up as much documentation and source code as you could possibly want, and in the past year they've become alarmingly good at piecing those things together to solve problems.
It's less efficient than being able to point to a canonical answer on a widely respected forum, yes. And it sucks immensely to have to rely on these horrible AI companies to replace the real human interactions that getting work done used to require, yes. But realistically, we are not looking at some kind of model collapse anytime soon due to lack of SO threads.
Losing Reddit and blogs and other forums is going to be a bigger problem. In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use? How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice? if the web becomes a ghost town and nobody is talking about anything anymore, there's no form thread it can uncover and say "that's the one everyone uses". Losing the library of technical Q&A is nothing close to the catastrophe of losing actual conversations between humans.
CamperBob2 19 hours ago [-]
In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use?
My guess is, you won't care.
How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice?
My guess is, it will make a good choice.
svieira 8 hours ago [-]
> a good choice
For who?
CamperBob2 5 hours ago [-]
For whatever requirements are specified by gwerbin.
22 hours ago [-]
bentcorner 18 hours ago [-]
Kind of makes me wonder how knowledge transfer is going to work in the future.
How many times have you found a random forum post solving your problem? How many countless people has that post likely helped?
Now every single person facing the same problem will regenerate from scratch the entire thought process and result. What a waste.
There needs to be some way to close the feedback loop from the work that LLMs do.
lo0dot0 5 hours ago [-]
Another way the questions were answered wasn't by searching through existing content , but talking to someone who knew how to solve the problem or how to get to an answer by trying some things.
mburns 22 hours ago [-]
FWIW, StackOverflow posts are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA v4.0, same as Wikipedia.
philsquared_ 22 hours ago [-]
With or without training they would have gotten eaten.
poszlem 22 hours ago [-]
There is a difference between dying tomorrow and dying in 5 years.
ahartmetz 22 hours ago [-]
Why?
hatthew 22 hours ago [-]
The golden age of SO was when all the important questions that have accumulated over decades were getting asked and answered. SO stabilized once that backlog got finished, and then started dying once people moved to github issues for project-specific questions. Chatgpt just replaced the last remaining type of questions ("plz do my work for me"), which arguably shouldn't have been getting asked in the first place.
SyneRyder 22 hours ago [-]
The peak number of questions was in 2013, and they had roughly zero growth between 2013 & 2016. They were in decline long before LLMs were on the scene.
francisofascii 10 hours ago [-]
In defense of SO. I don't think # of questions is not the best metric. Pageviews or up votes is better. If the question already exists, it doesn't need to be asked again. Also, I have the perception that tech stacks have stopped changing as much. Ten years ago we were constantly changing tech stacks and front-end frameworks, so we had to rely on SO to relearn constantly. That seemed to have stopped.
eluru 21 hours ago [-]
as a student i remmeber ikept getting my questions removed even after trying to follow every rule.
this one time i decided i will use their top questions as a template just to test it, so i did i made sure it was a new question, following each rule
It was also deleted, die already stack overflow
umvi 4 hours ago [-]
My question is: what percentage of frontier LLM's coding/troubleshooting prowess is due to SO, and if non-negligible, what will replace SO in the future as the premier training repository for coding LLMs? GitHub issues and such, maybe?
pseudosavant 22 hours ago [-]
Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.
Maybe the site was having issues when I looked at it earlier. All of those tabs weren’t showing me anything. I downloaded the CSV to view the results and graph it.
kstrauser 18 hours ago [-]
Fair.
zer00eyz 22 hours ago [-]
All I could think of when I looked at that is "Oh this is gonna be how Nvidia's chart looks some day soon(ish)"
tdb7893 21 hours ago [-]
I'm curious if the quality of AI answers will get worse without public sources like Stack Overflow or if LLMs have gotten to a point where that doesn't matter as much.
daniel_iversen 14 hours ago [-]
What in the world is the explanation for this google trends line[1]? I’d have assumed it would have been a rapid decline since ai but there was a wild spike earlier this year before a massive crash - any ideas?
Can't see your link because it requires a google sign-in. But anecdotally earlier this year I stopped being able to visit SO due to cloudflare, whether it was enabling it at all or increasing its hostility level. Maybe they received a lot of bot traffic leading to this?
z3t4 13 hours ago [-]
Summer vacation, orgs choose what tech you use, but when you can choose yourself it's easier to find answers from the community
internet_points 13 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many people actually had bad experiences with SO vs how many people found it genuinely helpful. I'm going to guess the people with bad experiences are much more likely to comment about it loudly than all the people who found it helpful. (I always feel this dissonance when reading about the mean mods ruining the site, since I never experienced them firsthand.)
yuppiepuppie 13 hours ago [-]
My experience was both - I got some real valuable help esp. when I was learning how to program.
But... I also came across some real jacka*es. Those were on my questions, but also reading the responses from other peoples questions.
DharmaPolice 12 hours ago [-]
Those aren't mutually exclusive. SO was helpful many times but also there were many instances where I found someone asking exactly my question only to see the question was closed as a duplicate of another question which didn't have the same specific issue as I was experiencing.
It seems like their rules sometimes biased towards older questions/answers which in fast changing areas that's the wrong way round.
anakaine 13 hours ago [-]
I found it quite helpful at times. Learning in my own projects, and some professional things that I got stuck on I found some incredible help at times.
In my niche, we also had an absolute dictator of a moderator who was a condescending jerk online. Open belittling of people asking questions, connecting new questions to those which had been asked years ago in a different part of the stack and then closing the question, etc. Real tin pot tyrant nonsense, and frankly, a bully.
There was a day where I saw they had been denied a role they interviewed for since they posted about it. I already knew they were in my city. It was a role I had advertised and was the chair for. Im still not sure exactly which candidate, but have my suspicions. In any case, bullet dodged.
JakDrako 11 hours ago [-]
And of those, I bet 997 are closed as duplicates by admins who didn't understand the question asked.
JonChesterfield 15 hours ago [-]
Stack overflow started as maximize signal to noise for professionals.
It transitioned to emphasize "less toxic" and in the process minimized signal.
The result has no purpose.
pjmlp 13 hours ago [-]
I am into computers since 1986.
Sources of information like StackOverflow have come and gone, since the dawn of computer networking with online forums on BBSes and similar dial up systems.
Many sites like StackOverflow have predated it, and others will follow, or maybe not give AI, nonetheless no developer questions site lasts forever.
ChicagoDave 22 hours ago [-]
If there is any proof that no one will be writing code, this is it.
I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.
bytejanitor 12 hours ago [-]
Might be because a lot of questions are closed as duplicates.
Also questions now have a "staging area" that has to be passed before the question is posted for everyone. In the staging area moderators have to approve the question.
throwawayffffas 11 hours ago [-]
I remember SO answers almost always looked superficially correct but were almost always wrong in a nuanced way that required experience to divine. Kind of like circa 2025 chatbots.
But at least we had fun who can forget stacksort.
pkoird 4 hours ago [-]
I feel like the real reason for this has just been that everything moved to GitHub issues as people could directly talk to the devs/maintainers.
shireboy 9 hours ago [-]
I’m old enough to remember experts-exchange, a site so terrible and if you removed a dash…. But somehow everyone used it, until stack overflow made it 100x better. After a while in IT I’ve gotten numb to the hype cycles, and recognize just how temporary everything is. I can pretty much guarantee you that even big names today like OpenAi, Microsoft, Apple, will eventually go the way of IBM or worse.
himata4113 14 hours ago [-]
After posting a few questions to SO I often ended up not getting a response or solving the problem myself after further research which in reality sums up the site is a whole.
1) If you already have enough programming experience to understand algorithms and abstract concepts in programming you can find the answer by doing research.
2) More often than not the answers were citing answers that already exist elsewhere.
3) A lot of the trivial answers were marked as low quality, dupes and so on when these were the people who could benefit from SO the most.
Eventually I stopped visiting the site around 2 years after getting into programming since it rarely provided anything of value.
--
Serverfault was great and I will miss it.
Cockbrand 4 hours ago [-]
Adding to the nostalgia: who will teach people that (X)HTML cannot be parsed with a Regex once SO is gone?
skc 15 hours ago [-]
Is there a word that explicitly captures the fear and stress induced by hitting "save" on a stack overflow question you've spent 30 minutes formatting and triple checking to ensure that it won't get thrown out by mods?
edelbitter 15 hours ago [-]
How about: civility?
Because I'd argue that was always the expected, the appropriate thing to do. Always watch for feedback and quickly edit any missed meta-issues with your question. So that during the slim window it can reasonably be shoved into possible answerers faces it will not waste their time.
nphardon 6 hours ago [-]
Im trying to disentangle from the llms and get back to writing code and thinking for myself again, and so i am finding myself back on stack overflow and its like a ghost town.
lacoolj 18 hours ago [-]
This might be the saddest, non-family related thing ive seen in years.
I love you stack exchange and all related sites.
All yall need to keep learning
anonzzzies 15 hours ago [-]
I still dream of driving to the moderators houses and hurting them. Not really of course but it was one nasty place in the end with all little tech gestapos on their sad little thrones. Happy it’s gone.
clickety_clack 20 hours ago [-]
I do not miss StackOverflow. It wasn’t a community, it was a toxic environment that rewarded asshole behavior.
cs02rm0 11 hours ago [-]
There seems to be some agreement that the hostile attitudes towards the bulk of its own users killed SO before AI got the chance. I'm inclined to agree at least in part.
Which begs a more interesting question, perhaps; if a SO was recreated in a more forgiving fashion today, would it stance a chance competing against AI?
ritzaco 14 hours ago [-]
From May, but I wrote about how similar social/community sites have been following this upside down bell pattern for decades. In this case it might be caused by AI, but you can't conclude anything about AI just by looking at the graph
SO was invented as a Q&A site, where human experts might answer specific technical questions, in a precise, preferably provable way. This is what machines now do well enough.
But there's a need to talk to human experts, learn their opinions, personal experience, non-obvious bits. E.g. I enjoyed asking certain questions at Software Engineering and Emacs SE sites. Sometimes I just ended up talking with a maintainer of a specific package I had questions about. This is something Claude and ChatGPT cannot easily replace, and maybe something that may keep certain SO communities alive. (Unless Reddit eats the remnants of their lunch.)
pawnandqueen 4 hours ago [-]
I have a special place in my heart for that place for all the help it provided me over the years, regardless of its current state. But it's definitely interesting how time changes things.
glimshe 11 hours ago [-]
Once upon a time there were "developers" known for doing their work by basically copying code from Stack Overflow without caring to understand it. Building applications as a sort of legos where stack overflow answers were the pieces.
Today they are vibe coders and no longer need stack overflow.
freecodeio 10 hours ago [-]
I think that was a joke more or less. You couldn't build an entire app with just stackoverflow pieces even if I hanged 1m dollars over your head with a fishing rod.
alexpadula 4 hours ago [-]
StackOverflow would be a super hard business to sustain today.
darksim905 18 hours ago [-]
Fewer than 1,000? To be honest, even before AI, I'm surprised it ever got more than 50 or a 100 in some StackExchanges. It was on borrowed time especially after reading a lot about the moderator drama/issues.
taftster 17 hours ago [-]
The two takeaways from me are that:
1. AI allows you to ask stupid questions or the same question without (typically) ridiculing or demeaning you for doing so.
2. Context changes as time rolls by. A question that was asked some period ago might just need to be re-asked, continuously and ongoing.
Now, SO had already suffered its demise prior to AI. But good riddance, from my point of view. StackOverflow was great in its day, essential even. But it fell victim to its own success, I guess.
kelseydh 18 hours ago [-]
StackOverflow jobs was great when it existed, found great opportunities through there. So dumb they killed it especially with LLM's eating their core business.
HumblyTossed 6 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised at that many. Claude doesn't give me attitude when I have a question.
yitchelle 14 hours ago [-]
while the SO is dying a painful death (not going to sugar coat it), my questions whether the knowledge in there is already assimilated into the AI's knowledge database? If it is, it can be retrievable in the future.
A lot of the answers are factually useful and it would a massive loss if it ever just disappear into the ether.
closetheloopdev 13 hours ago [-]
I used to land on SO questions and answers through Google. Nowadays I ask ChatGPT or Claude instead of Google, and then go to the links they give me to verify. The links are either to the official docs or some blog posts. Never have I seen LLMs recommend any SO links.
niltecedu 13 hours ago [-]
I just dont go there at all because they added the weird copied of stackoverflow feature when copying code from there. Like even if I want to use its actively hostile, I need to paste it somewhere remove all of the extra things added and then copy properly
hackerbone 15 hours ago [-]
I'm just feeling bad just because stackoverflow was my coding bible (back when AI did not exist)
Getting second hand sadness
amacalac 23 hours ago [-]
They get that many?!
cylemons 12 hours ago [-]
I have almost never explicitly searched for stack overflow. I google something, top result is a stackoverflow question, I visit. Nowadays that role has been taken by google's AI summary in most cases
rcleveng 11 hours ago [-]
Is this count before or after it's closed by someone else as a duplicate of another question that's close but not really the same question?
(I can't tell from PostTypeId = 1)
internet101010 16 hours ago [-]
I rarely wish for the downfall of things, but StackOverflow is one of those exceptions. Good riddance.
8n4vidtmkvmk 16 hours ago [-]
Why's that? Were the moderators mean to you?
opan 17 hours ago [-]
I've browsed SO and friends a lot over the years, and still do, but not sure I ever posted a question there. I read answers, and posted a few answers. I think I'd go to IRC or a forum or issue tracker to ask for help instead. Maybe some generational or cultural thing going on.
isolay 13 hours ago [-]
Unrelated to AI, they engineered their own downfall with the way they treat contributors and the questions they still do get. I have practically forgotten that this platform exists at all.
piker 14 hours ago [-]
People blame AI and/or the culture there, but IMO competition got it. As more and more code went to public domains (i.e., mostly GitHub), it became just as quick and often better to go to the source itself.
sreekanth850 13 hours ago [-]
I was wondering where all those egoistic developers with superiority complexes go these days to feed their egos. I was scared every time asking even a single question on SO. The place was toxic as hell.
ggregoire 21 hours ago [-]
Meh… you can't create duplicated questions on SO so obviously 20 years later there is not much left to ask.
A better metric would be visits per month… which probably doesn't look very pretty too. I used to visit SO every day several times a day for like 15 years: ask a technical question on google, click on the first SO result, get the solution I was looking for. Now I still ask google but I just have to read the AI Overview to get the solution I'm looking for…
nreece 21 hours ago [-]
Still over $100M in revenue, now mainly from AI and Enterprise customers.
It was a fascinating social experiment.
I'm glad it's over.
coderot_ai 4 hours ago [-]
Is it employees keeping it alive? :D
h4kunamata 21 hours ago [-]
Deserved.
Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:
* 1 trip to mars
* 10 trips to the Moon
* Converted water to wine
The worst system until you can finally help others.
Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.
A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
This complaint makes no sense whatsoever.
There was never any restriction on posting answers unless you had explicitly and repeatedly violated policy. Posting questions and answers was a default privilege extended to everyone at account creation.
It did require a small amount of reputation (50 points) to comment on posts that were not your own.
But none of {questions, answers, comments} are "reply posts". That's just not at all how the site worked. It also comes across that you imagine that "helping others" on Stack Overflow entails writing something (either a comment or an answer) that addresses what the OP is asking. That, too, is not how the site worked. A Q&A site like Stack Overflow works by producing reference material in Q&A format.
The point is that other people can search it later, and get direct answers without having to parse through someone else's comment discussion, walking a beginner through debugging steps just to get the necessary information to understand the question, etc.
hatthew 21 hours ago [-]
What do you mean? You could always answer questions without any barriers, and partial answers were acceptable. Unless you're talking about protected questions (very rare), or you had such a fundamental misunderstanding of the site that you got answer-banned.
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
Even "protected questions" only required 10 reputation to answer, and that restriction was usually in place because there were already dozens of redundant, crap answers.
franze 12 hours ago [-]
95% of them closed immediately as duplicate or off topic?
elmer2 11 hours ago [-]
They sold it at a good time. It reminds me of the broadcast.com acquisition.
It made Mark Cuban very wealthy and was worth pennies within a few years.
teunispeters 6 hours ago [-]
The rise of slop (answers made to look good, not be correct, and the bonus to the poster) - was really the start of the slide down. And this started happening more than a decade ago.
I really like SO. I couldn't post answers much, because I had to vet anything I could have said past management. But it was a favoured place to find how to solve questions I didn't deal with daily - up until the slop grew too much.
Oh I'm not really blaming the "slop" on anyone (although it feeds heavily into why AI produces such slop) - it was just connected with the rise of popularity worldwide, and gamed by people wanting to improve their perceived prestige, to open more doors. And, once upon a time, stackoverflow DID open more doors, for a lot of people.
otohp 6 hours ago [-]
Is this trend true for all other SE sites as well?
morganf 19 hours ago [-]
Woooow. That makes me feel... old.
thereforegrin 10 hours ago [-]
I actually don't miss it. I liked it in the beginning but towards the end the management and moderation pretty much derailed the project.
AI came at the right moment to save the knowledge from the knowledge keeper.
I can only hope that some other technology will save the knowledge once again, before the AI companies go completely rogue and hostile towards their end-users.
hacker_88 16 hours ago [-]
Questions and answers are locked inside discord, slacks and LLM chats
transitorykris 16 hours ago [-]
Every interesting problem I ever had that I checked SO for was either off topic and modded down or the original poster said “I found a solution” and disappeared. Pure misery!
bronlund 20 hours ago [-]
I do have a webarchive of StackOverflow on some backup disc somewhere - just in case :D
scottLobster 6 hours ago [-]
I tried a couple of times to post questions on SO. Every time I followed the instructions, searched first and didn't find an answer, spent the better part of an hour composing the best possible question and simplified examples...
All to have my post locked/marked/closed/whatever either as a duplicate (it wasn't) or some other bullshit.
Call it a skill issue if you want, but I was going there for help at the time and just got the door slammed in my face repeatably with no guidance as to how to stop that from happening. The gate-keeping was simply insane, and it's clear I wasn't the only one that decided it wasn't worth the time.
abetusk 17 hours ago [-]
Note that I recently tried to sign up so that I could answer/update some questions that I have expertise in and was refused because my email address wasn't recognized.
mawadev 22 hours ago [-]
I have some wishful thinking for everyone reading this: what if the people at StackOverflow built one of the best bot protections out there? I would honestly expect the graph to go up with all the LLMs and automated content spamming..
cowlevel 22 hours ago [-]
The graph doesn't include Stack Overflow for Agents, which is a real product that exists for some reason.
wildpeaks 10 hours ago [-]
One problem is the gamification rewarded some bad behaviors, especially once one accrues enough points to get away with it.
I know exactly when I permanently stopped contributing to the site: it had been a few years since I happen to have something worth posting a question about, but for once I had a niche question about a popular-enough framework it was worth a shot.
A guy replied with a generic wall of text that had nothing to do with what I had asked, merely contained some of the keywords I also used.
When I politely pointed out it's not what I asked and reformulated in case he merely misunderstood, he got mad that I had refused to just give him the points.
He got extra mad when I figured out the answer on my own and posted it as answer in case others stumbled on the same issue, so he tried to edit my answer to make it look irrelevant.
Unfortunately for him, he didn't realize I also have enough points to edit it back, so he gave up and deleted all his comments to make it look like I'm talking to nobody, then went to downvote a bunch of my older posts.
And the sad part is that guy initially seemed well regarded in our small community, kinda killed my motivation to contribute to the site again after that. Plus I usually always find answers on my own, and anything I can't figure out on my own is so niche it would be pointless to ask.
assumed_throwaw 14 hours ago [-]
It's funny how my experience with SO is nowhere near as bad as what HN usually reports.
I admit that my first few questions earned me a lot of downvotes due to their poor quality. But it humbled me and taught me the importance to create minimal reproducible examples.
After that, some of my questions were answered in depth by experts. I was blown away and very grateful that some random stranger would take the time to answer such a niche question I had.
Besides, I've seen colleagues of mine whom I consider brilliant but whose questions on public forums were bad... They give too many details, leave out part of the context, don't make it easy to reproduce their error, ask vague questions, and so on. I wonder if it's for the same reasons that HN has trouble with SO.
dmcgill50 21 hours ago [-]
It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated. Just like a bronze sword.
tpoacher 8 hours ago [-]
Give it time. The bubble will blow and it'll be back.
BenzeneDream 8 hours ago [-]
When pigs fly, of course
geoduck14 11 hours ago [-]
They have also launched agents.stackoverflow.com - a place for agents to interact.
oytis 12 hours ago [-]
It's because it has already answered everything and anything new would be a duplicate
17 hours ago [-]
osigurdson 16 hours ago [-]
Incredible that SO sold for $1.8B at one point.
dyzone 15 hours ago [-]
I'm gonna flag this post as duplicate.
turing_complete 6 hours ago [-]
did stackoverflow get any LLM money or were they just ingested and destroyed?
whatever1 20 hours ago [-]
Mods are finally happy.
lukeify 20 hours ago [-]
I'm hopeful Reddit will succumb to the same fate. There's too many power hungry people who capriciously control large elements of societal communication these days.
marhee 17 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity, is Joel Spolsky still involved in SO? What’s he up to these days?
I enjoyed reading his articles but it feels eons ago.
oblio 14 hours ago [-]
He's gone, probably fully retired. He doesn't even attend conferences anymore.
usr1106 16 hours ago [-]
What will LLMs be trained on when SO does no longer exist (or is an archive of increasingly obsolete answers)?
msalihb 15 hours ago [-]
I remember the day I ask my first question about C, instead of an answer I got -1.
15 hours ago [-]
pseingatl 15 hours ago [-]
Half the time the communities were helpful, half the time they were hostile.
fergie 15 hours ago [-]
And like 950 of them were probably closed for being "off-topic".
phendrenad2 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of talk about the demise of Stack Overflow. But let's have some positive reminiscence: They really captured lightning in a bottle at one point. On the internet, everyone has an opinion, and they fight like hell to defend them. It's amazing that SO was able to remain civil for as long as it did. People actually wanted to help! And the best answers typically rose to the top. I don't know what went wrong, I suspect it was a variation on Gresham's Law: "bad social currency chases out good social currency".
ho_schi 13 hours ago [-]
Selling it the Prosus killed it, they don’t have a clue about it and how it should work.
1. LLMs don’t blame you when you ask for book recommendations or say “you must use Superuser instead of Stackoverflow or Linux…”. But it also gave as a bit of community and entertainment.
2. LLMs are useless with the data input from Gitlab, GitHub and Stackoverflow. Especially Stackoverflow, because the snippets, good comments and ratings are invaluable.
3. Removal of job adds. That was the obvious and non disturbing money source.
Stackoverflow is also one of the last platforms allowing you to downvote and put a “price tag” on downvotes. This is incredible helpful in preventing hostile voting. And still allow counter-measures against bad answers.
Please. Cannot the original founders take a data dump and let use re-launch it? Or we just do it.
atomicnature 12 hours ago [-]
"Stackoverflow for agents" still not there?
delbronski 14 hours ago [-]
I’m still sour about my first and only SO question attempt.
After such a long time user, here I was, finally interacting with the community. My first question. I spent at least an hour composing it. Something about Django and Celery. Then came the mods. Crushed my dreams. I tried editing the question. Crushed again.
And I remember thinking, wtf? I’m just trying to ask for some help. Why is this so damn hard? Never tried again.
shark1 12 hours ago [-]
Their not-welcoming community has some guilty too.
pseingatl 15 hours ago [-]
The communities were helpful half the time and hostile the other half.
partsch 15 hours ago [-]
Stackoverflow had such a toxic and beginner-unfriendly community...
gspr 15 hours ago [-]
Did it really? It would be nice to see some concrete examples.
nneonneo 18 hours ago [-]
SO turned into a place that heavily favoured their experienced answerers over new answerers and askers. Admittedly, I fell into the former camp: someone with some excess time on his hands and an itch to answer interesting questions - and like most of the experienced answerers, I ended up being very disinterested in answering homework questions, “lazy” questions, and the like. “Downvote and move on” was the motto.
In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave easy questions to be answered by new answerers. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.
In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.
Jean-Papoulos 15 hours ago [-]
SO's motto was to ignore the particular constraints of your use case, rewrite your question for you and then answer that (often marking it as a duplicate).
No wonder no ones uses it anymore, its environment is actively hostile to new users.
StackOverflow had the most toxic community didn't it?
jehnnysmith 11 hours ago [-]
Perhaps reddit is next in the list?
Rapzid 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is definitely due to AI.
But let me address the "toxic" moderation. They needed something like appeals courts. SO should have installed a layers above the community mods that could review and rebuke the decisions of the "lower" mods to steer things.
Oops, all assholes.
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
1. The overwhelming majority of people you're talking about were, objectively, not moderators, and calling them that betrays an unwillingness to engage with the community on its own terms or even attempt to understand its policies.
2. Have you seen https://meta.stackoverflow.com ? It is the exact thing you believe they "needed". As for "layers", the tiny group of people with diamond symbols next to their names (the actual moderators) did in fact have authority over others.
3. As demonstrated by the posts there, the large majority of "toxicity" came from the people who refused to accept the site's standards, and the large majority of question closures were clearly correct.
4. To me, the word "asshole" suggests a sense of entitlement. This was most clearly demonstrated by those who felt entitled to get people on the Internet to volunteer to solve their problems for free, without heed to whether the resulting Q&A could be of benefit to others. That is not how the site worked, or how it was designed to work.
dankobgd 11 hours ago [-]
Because site is shit. I ask a question, well formed and formatted and thought out, and i answer it myself and still get downvoted for 0 reasons but these people can't solve shit themselves
mococa 8 hours ago [-]
Duplicated, closed.
is_true 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe they should create an API for llms to use.
I blame google partially for this because when searching for bugs/errors I stopped seeing SO on results and instead I got sites that regurgitated SO's content
throwpoaster 11 hours ago [-]
And all get closed as duplicates, right?
jan_m_savage 10 hours ago [-]
I had been a non-contributing reader (only short-term) on SO when I decided to write answers. The whole thing reeked of a mild version of The Lord of the Flies-esque sophomorism.
The toxicity was too much for me. On HN, when a toxic entity points their sting at me, at least their comment gets flagged within 24 hours. No such thing on SO. The moderators themselves are toxic as batshit.
FrustratedMonky 6 hours ago [-]
When StackOverflow is gone, what will AI train on? That is the problem, what will the next generation of AI, a decade from now, be able to learn from?
Nothing, unless it becomes able to read documents, try things, and come up with best practices all on its own.
est 19 hours ago [-]
Stackoverflow wasn't killed by AI, it's long dead because of those "Closed Question" bummbers.
I've never seen an online community incentives vandalism rather than contributions.
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
Closing questions is literally the opposite of vandalism.
jocoda 10 hours ago [-]
Not uncommon - kuro5hin.org also killed by its own community just because they could.
edit - fixed .com to .org
tclancy 18 hours ago [-]
I blame that one Jon Skeet dude for answering everything.
LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:
Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?
A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]
I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.
zahlman 1 hours ago [-]
Your link does nothing to establish the "why". It just shows that some recent questions were downvoted. Which is a completely different issue from question closure, and there's nothing to say it isn't deserved.
> Nothing's quite as demoralizing as
I can tell you from years and years of experience that this is just not what happened in the common case. Of course, there were a few incidents where someone slipped up, which is why there was a meta site to discuss these things. And in the cases where someone had a point about a wrong duplicate closure on meta, that was well received and the problem got fixed.
But we also got a constant stream of people complaining about the equivalent of:
Q. How do I iterate over a tuple?
A. [closed as a duplicate of "how do I iterate over a list?"]
and it became clear that the OP was not even willing to try the code provided, which would work for their situation.
There were cases where people refused to recognize a duplicate of what was clearly the same question, because a different code sample was provided with different variable names or something.
There were people whose argument essentially boiled down to "you shouldn't close duplicates as duplicates ever, because that's how I think it should work". IOW, a complete refusal to engage with the site's policy or the clearly established, stated reasons behind it (and the many years of history needed to refine that policy).
> but even I gave up trying to ask a question.
I think it's quite easy to ask a question that meets standards; it just requires skills (basic debugging / communicating a clear unambiguous specification) that don't necessarily align with the people who are most likely to want to ask questions generally (beginners).
If there's a specific question you wanted to ask but felt unable to, post it here and I'll be happy to explain where it might have been lacking.
AtNightWeCode 7 hours ago [-]
I think the way SO works became a burden as the pace of the industry increased. It frustrated a lot of people. I also wonder how much impact changes to Google search had in that initial decline.
cebert 23 hours ago [-]
I don’t think they’re gonna be long for the world
22 hours ago [-]
rrrx3 8 hours ago [-]
Brutal.
user3939382 8 hours ago [-]
Look up answer, most are closed as off topic even though they're the leading answer to the question. Try to answer, closed as off topic. Bye SO you won't be missed.
MisterMunchkin 13 hours ago [-]
It was a very flawed site. If you ever tried to ask a question they'd tell you to fuck off, but 99% of their threads were just empty with toxic comments from the mods. You'd find the perfect thread for your problem, and then it would just be locked as a dupe with no actual answer thread available.
esafak 22 hours ago [-]
It is sad because it was such a well designed community. But its lessons live on.
kstrauser 22 hours ago [-]
Nah. It launched well, but sorely needed a BDFL. Almost without fail, services that delegate moderation duties to users are ruined. Inevitably, well-meaning people form councils and boards, and then those get taken over by people with nothing but time on their hands. It's the same thing that happens with school boards and HOAs: the last people you want running them are the ones that have the time and the drive to actually want to be in charge of them.
esafak 21 hours ago [-]
How are you going to run a community at scale without delegation? The only alternative is to let the computer do it.
kstrauser 21 hours ago [-]
HN does a pretty good job of it. Turns out paid employees seem to be more incentivized to keep people coming back.
esafak 8 hours ago [-]
Putting your site in the hands of one person is very risky, plus StackOverflow was much bigger than Hacker News; it served the whole software community.
nullsanity 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jdthorpe 22 hours ago [-]
It was an AMAZING community... right up until it wasn't. I cut my teeth on trying to answer questions and learned how much I didn't know when other people's answers were better than mine. Literally made a career out of what I learned there, and I thoroughly enjoyed welcoming people to SO and encouraging new coders to keep learning. But then dang, the question purists and eager close-every-question jocks came to dominate the platform and made it no fun to ask or answer. Even if AI was never a thing, the change in culture probably would have opened the doors to a competitor.
glouwbug 22 hours ago [-]
Everything is cyclical. Maybe they come back when AI gets heavily regulated or pay gated. Who knows
hackersnooze1 22 hours ago [-]
does well designed mean rotten and pointlessly hostile
reassess_blind 22 hours ago [-]
StackOverflow helped build the LLMs that replaced it.
gscott 19 hours ago [-]
They should just make all of their answers incorrect, poison llms, return everybody back to programming again.
eluru 21 hours ago [-]
it was as well designed as the nipples on a man
paulddraper 22 hours ago [-]
The highly technical sites -- StackOverflow, Unix & Linux, MathOverflow -- see little use.
Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.
Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.
serguzest 11 hours ago [-]
StackOverflow moderation was hijacked by army of Sheldon Coopers
syngrog66 12 hours ago [-]
The silver lining, if any, is Jeff Atwood made FU levels of money (AFAIK) from it, ultimately, and now he's become a philanthropist.
karel-3d 12 hours ago [-]
I feel sad honestly.
Yes all the bureaucracy was annoying. But when I asked on Stack Overflow, the same question is there 5 7 10 years later, queryable by everyone. Ironically by LLMs too.
While when I ask LLMs - as I do now, of course, nobody has time for SO nowadays - nothing is left, everything is ephemeral, LLM forgets, the world doesn't learn.
Oh well. They will surely bolt LLM to SO one day as Quora did already.
mono442 13 hours ago [-]
The current way too write software is too just ask the ai do it. StackOverflow will be soon mostly irrelevant completely.
rvba 14 hours ago [-]
I tried using it and my question never got answered :(
pmdr 11 hours ago [-]
We're now building some of the same superiority complex into commercial AIs to effectively refuse any wrongspeak.
greenbit 12 hours ago [-]
"I come to bury SO, not to praise it"
.. something.. something
"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones"
fHr 15 hours ago [-]
Good, that site sucked after 2015 pretty much. Museum of powertripping mods.
gspr 15 hours ago [-]
Everyone seems to say that it was always a terrible place to ask questions where you'd have your question closed for no reason.
I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
I think it's good that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.
code_duck 14 hours ago [-]
From what I recall, there was a golden era where the site was growing and it was useful and entertaining. One problem is that it had a learning curve. I think it got worse when every answer became editable by other people, and power users and rules lawyers became entrenched and they started closing basically every question as a duplicate. That often resulted to sending people to questions that weren't precisely the same, and often with out of date answers. It felt like they never seemed to figure out whether it was supposed to be a Q&A site, a wiki, or a forum (I suppose forum was generally nixed, other than discussion in comments).
Markoff 16 hours ago [-]
Well deserved, site full of toxic users who will do anything but answer your question, LLM FTW.
avonile 12 hours ago [-]
they really can go fall into black hole with Adobe
m00dy 10 hours ago [-]
it's time to pivot.
6510 22 hours ago [-]
This question has already been asked?
Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.
It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.
paulpauper 22 hours ago [-]
I am amazed it's still that high
hemalathamadesw 8 hours ago [-]
lowk they were all bullies, not too sad to see it go
nikanj 11 hours ago [-]
Mods must be on cloud 9. Finally, serenity
tamimio 18 hours ago [-]
The question that a lot of people aren’t asking, these AI models were trained on human actual data, researches, answers, and books. Now AI removed the need to create those and people aren’t incentivized to make any new ones, the newer models say in a year or so will be trained on slop, piles and piles of slop, how’s their intelligence will be?
BrenBarn 21 hours ago [-]
I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).
etchalon 21 hours ago [-]
SO suffered from its success and, bluntly, the laziness of humans.
I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.
I stopped contributing.
astura 13 hours ago [-]
Back in the early days of SO, around 2009 or maybe 2010, I asked a Motif question. I got told that I I was an idiot and I shouldn't be using Motif because it was obsolete, how dare I ask a question about it? Blah blah blah.
Yeah, no shit nobody uses Motif for new development, but if you haven't guessed, I was working on a legacy enterprise system.
Just rubbed me the wrong way and still kinda annoys me to this day. Not everyone is dicking around for fun or works at startups where you can light other people's money on fire. Some of us have paying clients, I'm not using Motif because I want to.
shevy-java 15 hours ago [-]
SO died some time ago already though; I'd say even before AI.
I remember that I once asked a question about dual-licencing
MIT and GPL 2.0 in the same project. Within an hour or two,
it was downvoted to -7. Now this alone is already quite
concerning (it was a genuine question), but what was even
more annoying was that not a single person who downvoted
this, explained as to why. So, if my time investment here for
asking a question, gets negative karma without any explanation,
and then subsequently no useful answer at all: what is the point
of SO? I still answered a few questions here or there, but the
whole karma system just discourages contributions and I stopped
using it with regards to both asking anything or giving answers.
SO is not useless since some answers still hold useful answers,
but they really should have started to fix SO early on. Instead
they just gave up.
Vaslo 22 hours ago [-]
I answered a number of questions on there. Some non-native English speaker started going my answers and making language editing suggestions. The grammar was fine. I refused all the changes because they were at best basically the same or at worst incorrect. I refused maybe 4-5. The next day the guy got on and had done a bunch more then went to some of my answers and made hostile comments about my answers on simple things like Pandas for Python.
That was that for that site.
hollerith 9 hours ago [-]
I won't miss it.
I hate how the site clutters every page with hundreds of shiny tokens whose only purpose is gamification (with no way to turn the gamification off in site settings).
I now read the answers to my technical questions from Emacs buffers containing ASCII text only.
nekusar 10 hours ago [-]
My anecdote:
I created an account, specifically cause I found a few questions that I knew the answers to, and could cite properly.
So, I answered 2. All is good...
Next day, 1 is marked as dupe (?!) and there's literally no other answers. So, duping what? Nope, not permitted to know that.
The other answer, some braindead idiot mod decided to change my answer to wrong garbage. No request to change. No verification. No nothing.
Shortly thereafter, those 2 responses were downmodded, leaving my karma negative. So basically, can't do anything. So I left. I'll spend my time on communities that actually give a fuck, cause SO didn't.
pchandrasekar 4 hours ago [-]
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arbor-group 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
robbie_cox 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
axionbraid 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mehdizare 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
shubhamjain 14 hours ago [-]
Too many harsh words in this thread for Stack Overflow without enough appreciation for what Joel and Jeff built.
Right from the start, the content was as open as possible, and community ownership was a core principle. As a programmer with limited resources back in 2010, I have every reason to be grateful for Stack Overflow because back then Experts Exchange was paywalled, and most other forums were either language-specific or drowning in spam.
Stack Overflow's strict moderation was a direct response to those forums, where you often had to scroll through pages of noise to find one useful answer. Yes, it eventually became a hall-monitor type of clique obsessed with enforcing rules, but that moderation wasn't useless. People here forgot Googling a programming question and clicking StackOverflow link? We did this for years, imagine the time saved not going through manuals.
Obviously, there's much less reason to use it in the age of AI. But let's show a little gratitude for what it gave us instead of just grumbling about what it became.
Unified-Mentor 9 hours ago [-]
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sanjays442 14 hours ago [-]
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minfazhai 18 hours ago [-]
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minzf581 19 hours ago [-]
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boldaxolotl 14 hours ago [-]
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hackersnooze1 22 hours ago [-]
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eluru 21 hours ago [-]
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chasil 22 hours ago [-]
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so-cal-schemer 14 hours ago [-]
I never used stack overflow.
Preferred books at the library.
rurban 16 hours ago [-]
Quora took it over. Better layout, better moderation, better answers.
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:
One of my few claims to fame is that I invented that convention and promoted it on the early jQuery mailing list.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.
my reputation is 29,459, my last answer October 15, 2021, close enough to be considered the same IMO.
For me, the thing that drove me away, is that you'd spend time on writing good answers, to provider lore, etc, but it was increasingly difficult to find "good" questions to answer. There were increasingly many "homework" questions, and far fewer questions where people _had_ put the effort in.
And, an increasing animosity to the people answering the questions.
The community became toxic, and it wasn't the only the gatekeepers, everyone wanted something for free, and StackOverflow suffered from the "open source burn-out" problem.
Certainly I did.
So I ended up with a large number of "revival" and "necromancer" badges for getting upvotes for answers on old previously unanswered questions. And many of my questions have my own answers posted a couple days later.
IOW, I provided a lot of value to SO. But I got even more value out of them, finding many more answers than I provided, especially since many of my answers were for very obscure questions. A real significant win-win.
I think this would have been a better model for SO -- encouraging more of this sort of drive by helpfulness rather than gamifying/socializing so much to encourage direct helping.
now I have kids, so they get my teaching attention instead. And I don't touch Twitter.
I started it as a way to learn things. Mostly picked questions that were on the edge of my understanding, researched the problem for myself, and then tried to provide clear and detailed answers. So I got a lot out of it too.
My view for when SO started to decline is also similar to yours - being flooded with poor quality questions. And on average people asking questions became more arrogant, put little effort in, and demanded the whole place to change so they can paste their broken code and have someone fix it for an upvote.
So I think I naturally and slowly drifted away from using SO. However, publicly stated reasons for SO's downfall often proclaim there was something wrong with people who answered questions. That they were rude or were "gatekeeping". I always feel alienated reading those, since it's very different from how I experienced the site.
I actually got hounded / insulted on a couple of my last answers for not providing timely responses to their comments on my answer and that was the last straw.
My last answer was December 28, 2015, and corresponds pretty closely with me getting a more interesting and engaging job. That, and the two areas I knew well were maturing and there were a lot fewer easy questions to answer.
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.
I would generally classify those as “homework” questions.
I don’t think anyone in the org wanted to face the fact that the underlying assumptions in their model was flawed. The older an upvote the less reliable it becomes.
I feel that people are not getting that is one of the larger issues with AI and pretty much everywhere people interact online.
Many of these places and projects were things we truly poured our energy into. But people change, just as operating systems and commandline executables do. At the same time, places like that, once they are gone, lose their weight... so any site that was really large or particularly represented a version of the zeitgeist of whatever subgroup, once it goes defunct, is kind of written out of any sort of AI historical lookup.
Also, there's so many answers on SO that a lot of people just use the Search function to find answers, if they choose to use SO instead of google or whatever. It is very useful for older and historical answers.
This has very interesting implications for everything in the world, btw. Correctness does not track majority consensus.
It's global arbitrage of the "top answers". It's a new form of SEO because that's basically all LLMs are: a search engine in natural language.
This risk of staleness is also a huge risk for AI. It's actually worse than that since people are more willing than ever to stake so much on such an unstable technology.
I'm calling bullshit on that one. I don't doubt that some top-voted answers were wrong, but the vast majority of the time I used it, the top-voted answer was correct. This just feels like trying to paint with an extremely broad brush. I'm not denying that SO had problems, but there's no way I'm taking "the majority of top answers were wrong" without any evidence.
Stuff like this is basically what drove me away as well. The top-rated answer was frequently not the answer. It was "an" answer to "a" question, but not the "the" answer to "the" question.
That, and I'd ask a variation of a question and it would get flagged as a duplicate of an already-answered question, except the original question and none of the scored answers contained the answer.
I still left eventually and LLM has nothing to do with it. It’s the “closing as duplicate”, it’s the “provide text explanation not just code”, it’s the “deleted as off topic”.
I can’t tell you how many times I was finding useful info in DELETED answers (I see them as moderator). And the existing “vote for undelete/reopen” procedure does not work.
SO did not die because of LLLMs. It died because it was driven to the ground then sold private equity and about to be sold again (mark my words)
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.
Z80 Assembly! Fortran! ENIAC cables!
And the ghost of Alan Turing shows up.
(not even joking)
Our products are both mature, entirely finished, fully deterministic and the last attempt at this using the same approach just burned all the money that was spent instead of generating any new revenue.
(In other words, my daddy bought me a C64 in the eighties. ;-))
That's like saying you played games on your dad's Philips G8.
Larn was a text-based RPG that was in fact easily run as a networked game over a modem to a server at GenRad where my dad worked. Details escape me (it was over 40 years ago, I was like 12 years old) but these basics are factual.
Even so, at some point I made sure to answer a few questions, to get enough reputation to upvote and occasionally comment. I wanted at least to be able to reward / thank those who had posted answers that I found helpful. Even for 5 or 10 year-old answers, if an answer helped me I'd upvote it.
Now we're all "taking" via AI. We don't know who posted a helpful answer 10 years ago that the AI learned from in order to help us. That saddens me.
But in a way that's just the way of the world. We know to credit Pythagorus and Fourier and a few others whose names are attached to their methods. But for the most part we're all constantly standing on the shoulders of anonymous giants whose names are long lost.
IMO the uselessness of the answers just became more and more apparent, so fewer people contributed, so they rotted further. Good riddance, I say - it had a brief couple years where it was excellent because all information was new enough to be useful, and then it started dying like all stagnant things do.
Stack Exchanges that do not have such a bias for time-sensitive information are still going relatively well AFAICT, e.g. math exchange. The model works fine for some things, just not general tech assistance.
I also had the thought, I think I independently invented the same convention, but I am getting old and I probably at least somewhere read some code that was written that way and it made sense. Or maybe I read an article about it and started using it.
The thing about StackOverflow was it hit at a moment in time when everyone was excited about this stuff. I remember listening to Joel Spolski's and Jeff Atwood's podcast about building the site, Jeff thought it would take 3 months, Joel thought they needed a real timeline.
There was so much pent up demand for it, that it just immediately took off. But it also seemed to replace the various personal blogs where people would write about some problem they had and how they fixed it.
I don't really have a feeling about Stackoverflows demise one way or the other. I think I initially contributed one maybe two answers, got a couple nitpicks on the precise nature of the answer and kindof lost interest. Which is interesting because I remember Joel and Jeff explicitly wanting to solve for the issue that happened when someone asked a question and were immediately told they were taking the wrong approach, instead of just answering their question. I guess the burden shifted from the questioner to the answerer.
They are both good answers, depending on what you're looking for. The first is clear, concise, and correct -- pretty much exactly what you want to read and write code with the $ prefix.
The other one is more interesting in a behind-the-scenes way, and goes through the thinking process behind it.
I can see why the first answer gets the most votes -- that's usually all people want. The other gets votes for the people looking for a somewhat deeper answer and are willing to spend more time reading to get it.
It shouldn't necessarily be about winning the voting... different perspectives are useful.
But now we have llms and we are even farther from any sort of community. And llms for all their faults are very pleasant to work with, and completely obviate the need to interact with anyone. And all those posts on stackoverflow and all those blog posts that everyone wrote free of charge all got slurped up, so when I ask it to port a big mess of jquery to react, somewhere in the matrix multiplications going on at scale in a data center somewhere is benefiting from some compressed knowledge that $ at the beginning of a variable means its likely a reference to an object that is a jquery wrapped set. And the connection to stratoscope thinking this up gets lost in a sea of diffuse indirection.
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.
Had similar thing happen to my colleague too, in both cases they were pretty deep technical questions
Stopped using that ego bubble blower page shortly after
Or my favourite entire IP ranges or whole ISPs blocked because eighteen years ago someone used a sock puppet account from their and there is no recourse because the High Doge has decreed it from their throne in Moderator Palazzo - you can appeal but the lord chief's decision is FINAL, and they're all too busy infighting and empire building to care about such trivia as users anyway
Oh let me remind you, it was the expertsexchange that was actually useful!
Hearing this story is helpful.
There was a lot of blocking and downvoting of questions which was both a good and bad thing.
If you had an expertise on a certain topic, the questions were often very simple and repetitious (e.g. I knew a decent amount at relational databases), but also you'd get people asking for whole system designs which got a bit ridiculous.
It wasn't great for asking about little known products or libraries etc and I often found no one responded to questions on certain js libraries or BI tools. Which was quite annoying, maybe because it appealed more to certain types of developers.
I guess you served your time and most people don't want to be answering questions every day for ever! There was a guy called Tom Kyte from Oracle who ran a question site for over 20 years - it must have taken a lot of his time, but if you're out there Tom it was very much appreciated!
And they're too aggressive about duplicates. My question shared almost nothing with the duplicate I was pointed to--yes, the answer was correct, but that's not a lack of research on my part as I never would have recognized the question as relevant.
Culture or no culture LLMs killed SO for good, there's simply no need for it anymore
That happened often enough that I just gave up. I rarely felt the need to ask questions cause I was pretty good at what I did so I quit altogether. For fun, I signed in and noticed about a 2000 uptick in my standing and three "best answer" awards.
Now its legacy is that its prototype pollution is the reason we can't have `contains` and call `includes` instead.
For me, I think I left for a few reasons. All of them are some flavor of "the design is user-hostile".
The first reason is the "traps" they put in the moderation review queue process. These always felt like shit, even if you were right. And for some reason they frequently picked questions where you could reasonably pick multiple reasons to close a question... and they'd yell at you for getting it wrong! Really, this needlessly punitive experience is the heart of why SO was so awful, because everything is like that across the whole site. Some of the network sites aren't like that, but it's rare. And there were just so many Meta questions where the upvoted response was "this would be hard to do right, so instead we're going to do it the way we all know is wrong but it's easy."
The second reason is just how awful the onboarding is. The site constantly had problems with people either not posting code or posting screenshots of code. I don't know why they didn't make a beginner form, similar to what you often see on GitHub issue trackers for large projects (i.e., always include this, always include this, include this if it's relevant, etc. and it's in the textarea box when you start a question). Instead they assume that you know how to ask a question, give you a completely blank form, and then aggressively policy anything where you didn't do it right. I think the one thing to come out of that site is that people do not inherently know how to ask questions. [Which, if anybody has been responsible for responding to IT tickets, oh, boy, do they not know how to ask questions or report problems. "I'm getting errors running my report in the Finance application. I need this report soon! Help!" No mention of which report. No mention of what the report parameters were. No mention of which error message. They don't know what the error message means so, obviously, it must not be useful to anybody.]
The third reason is the site finger-pointing. "This doesn't belong here so I'm locking and closing your question," is possibly the most ridiculous thing ever. Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.
But, I think the final nail in the coffin is just how aggressively awful rpg.stackexchange.com is, which seeks objective, hyperliteral answers to game questions that are, by design, subjective and intentionally meant to be played with interpretation and nuance. The result is a handful of highly active users will nit pick any answer or question they don't like. Really, I think it's the GameFAQs Forum clique problem, to a significant extent. Some people really have nothing better to do except quash the utility of a site they have a small amount of control over, and it largely ruins the whole experience for the majority of other people. And, unlike a subreddit, you can't just go make your own version on the same topic. It doesn't work like that.
Rather than culture, for me it was the moderation body.
There were a bunch of people that were policing the dumbest minutie, and being assholish about that.
I occasionally would get my answers rewritten to have a completely different tone. My tone was not polemical or controversial in any way. It was just my tone. It was me. And somebody was not okay with that. They would edit MY TEXT and potentially put words in my mouth.
That's absolutely unacceptable.
Ten years on and i'm still salty about that, and i cheerish stackoverflow's death every time it gets brought up.
StackOverflow: Rest in piss, you won't be missed.
It isn't your text. All content is submitted under a Creative Commons license[1][2] which lets StackOverflow 'adapt remix transform' as long as they give credit (username) and indicate if changes were made (edit history). StackOverflow is particularly sucsceptible to this "I imagine the site is something else and I'm making myself mad and blaming them". I don't know why because it's never been a discussion forum which changed, or a personal blog, it's always been a Wikipedia style public edit site. It's like people assume all websites with a textbox and a submit button are required to be the same website and behave the same way.
The first podcast[3] with Spolsky and Atwood from April 2008 has them talking about the site they are designing, and they mention editing other people's answers:
"""Spolsky: Our longer term goal, if we’re successful, is that you're trying to figure out how to do something in Python like how to merge two arrays in Python and you go to Google and you type "merge two arrays python" and submit that, and our goal is to be the number one hit that comes up with a really good edited answer to that question that some individual has contributed and maybe other individuals have edited."""
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
[2] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110827210055/https://stackover...
> I think goats are sexy.
> - jodrellblank
Even if the site allowed it, or even encouraged it in certain small circles, you would not be OK with this. Or if you would, surely you could appreciate that other people absolutely would not be.
Sometimes people edited my SO answers in ways that were factually incorrect. A colleague or would-be employer might see that wrong answer attributed to me and suspect that I'm incompetent. That is not acceptable. Again, it doesn't matter if the license permits it. Morals and ethics do not.
This is different from, say, forking my software project and releasing an altered version. People would prominently see that you're publishing the changed version under your own name. That's fine. You having the ability to go in and change my own published code, without my permission, so that people see my name on your work, is morally and ethically wrong (and a major security risk). No rule or guideline on SO can override that principle.
They exploit the basic human needs and build whole exploiting platforms on it and then kick you out from the nest like a cuckoo does with other bird chicks. The abnormal modding and other shenanigans also killed my interest quite quickly, but in hindsight I have to say, good riddance. People are naive and gullible, and give out decades of experience on a whim, because they think that everyone is as good and benevolent as them. While in reality there are a lot of truly evil and selfish people out there and at the end of the day using their knowledge against the good ones.
And now here we are in the AI madness, where a similar exploitation is happening just at a much bigger scale, using the benevolent and naive ones information against them.
> Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0.
Of course stepping past the licensing question - I would have never contributed to SO as I did had I known what was to come.
With SO itself I could at least see the value in having a central store of knowledge for these topics and so, hey, I don’t mind that they got to be the ones to make it happen and profit.
“I noticed $email looked like $('#email')” isn’t exactly an exciting bit of history, even if you spend multiple paragraphs trying to pump yourself up.
1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.
2. AI clearly finished the job.
I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.
SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It dropped off a cliff when, 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow. Even then, it looks like 4 months of ChatGPT speed-ran about a year's worth of traffic decline, and then the slope went back to approximately the pre-AI angle.
I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L
Stack Exchange was built on an implicit social contract people contributed their expertise and thousands of hours of unpaid work because they believed they were building a collectively governed knowledge resource. The company owned the platform, but the community created its value.
After time, management became increasingly centralized and disconnected from contributors. Also the policing of questions based on geeky criteria and not what users wanted. The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone, qmd at least thats why i quit. Quality control gradually became useless gatekeeping.
So there were really more than one problems, corporate management treating contributors as free labor, and established contributors treating their moderation as authority over everyone else, there were bad tools closing questions. The platform had become extremely hard to use for posting questions, finding amswers, moderator work. For me it was useless. Incidentally the closing of “opinion” questions was the worst decision since it was the only thing that could make it distinct from AI produced answers.
For some of the events there is paper here with details https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08884v1
This. Way before LLMs.
This is wrong. People don't get that SO is moderated almost entirely by users. Users are those that down vote. Users are those who vote to close a question, and when a question reaches consensus it's closed. Users are those watching the review queue. Mods mainly did bigger stuff with additional tools.
So users wanted it how it was. And for good reason. If you actually participated on the site, like watching new questions arriving in a constant stream, it was obvious that most of it was low quality. People here will bemoan they got a question closed or no help, but that's to me mostly entitlement. The rules are clear, it was to create a Q&A site, not solve your specific question for free. To me that's not hostile.
This is exactly what drove me away. It's basically Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy. SO got so overrun with people that were dedicated to Maintaining Order that the site itself stopped being useful. I feel like at least half the time I would go visit, the question that brought me there had been marked as a duplicate or closed. Pointing out that the fire hose is mostly low quality doesn't change this.
All those people fighting to keep SO pristine now preside over a kingdom of nothing.
"How do I do X in Python?"
"This has already been answered in <other question>. Closing as duplicate."
And then you look up that other question and it's "How do I do X in PHP?"
Ask how to prevent XSS, and someone will flag it as a duplicate of a question asking how to prevent SQL Injection. Ask how to encode something in Base64, someone will flag it as a duplicate of a question about how to encrypt something with AES.
And the worst part, is that these moron moderators pat themselves on the back for keeping SO clean.
And even if the questions were actually duplicates, far too often the answers would be so out of date that it would be better if the question (and the answers) were allowed to start again from scratch.
And I agree: the "opinion" close was toxic as well.
A tragic gamification failure, that contributed significantly to my drift away from SO.
One of the oft repeated ideas is that you got points for closing questions.
You don't. The only ways to get rep on stack overflow is described at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation
You do not get any points for closing a question.They did not directly increase the integer counter of their reputation score. They did use it to explain why they should be granted increased human reputation as a moderator.
Do you spend much time on Quora? Or AskReddit? Do you like that they are endlessly 'the same' questions over and over and over?
That's a bit clearer. Bit long to engrave on a tombstone though, but SO will remain unburied because after all, most coffins are pretty similar.
1. Were actually duplicates of existing questions
2. That had a correct, up to date answer
was definitely less than 1%
It got grossly misapplied because it became "look at any answer, if one of the answers it the same, then they are duplicate". Note how likeness became overlap and likelyhood became certainty. Two questions where restart might solve the problem became duplicates under that absurd policy. Your example on the other hand I didn't find. I didn't find anyone claiming that two questions are duplicate of one another in different programming languages unless the language is not relevant.
Did... Did you just mentally mark my comment as a duplicate question and copy/paste an unrelated answer?
No. A duplicate is fine.
What was wrong was when "duplicate" questions were closed in favor of other more-upvoted questions with less-correct answers, or questions that were marked duplicate which were in fact not duplicate.
It isn't self-appointed, everyone is a 'moderator'. And 'everyone' could vote to re-open closed questions.
That is, typically the largest consolidated voting group is going to be your moderators. 5 or 6 people with one particular problem don't represent enough voting pressure to re-open any topic.
A group of active users wanted it that way. Some other group of users didn't necessarily understand the power mechanisms, others would would have liked to be active users were driven away.
It's however tough to know what a quiet diverse majority would have liked.
The problem is that measuring the unknown is tough.
Easy to spot. Just spend some time browsing through the activity of super users with astronomical point scores. It's pretty obvious that they were doing what they were doing to get points, rather than to make the site better or easier to use, many of whom had quite unimpressive technical skills.
The obvious toxic effects of gamification was a substantial contributor to my personal drift away from SO. But what really killed my interest: the toxic effects of close-dup, which produced rapidly accelerating content rot. It is true that, at some point, they started applying penalties to old answers; but that seemed to have no real effect on the toxic effects of "close-dup".
e.g. Questions raised against Android 14 being close-dup-ed against questions that were originally raised against Android 4.0, where the top thee answers, each of which had 1400 upvotes, was that "you can't do that", even though you absolutely could on Android 14.
That and the fact that I had discovered (as I think many others had) that you actually got much better answers if you appended "reddit" to the start of you google search queries, and skipped over the SO answers altogether.
My final point score on SO: somewhere around 8,000 I think. So not a casual user. I'm pretty sure that about 3,000 of those points were given for an answer that applied to Android 4.0, that stopped being accurate in Android 9.0, and I (shamefully) never got around to updating for modern Android tools.
I tried adding an explicit dual license to the code in my answers; but moderators would any answer that tried to do that.
Not so much that I care about the copyright of my code; but more a question of whether I would find a lawsuit from SO on my doorstep because I had neglected to credit SO for three lines of code that somebody ELSE had contributed to SO. A very real problem, given that SO management after the takeover had shown itself to be not really trustable.
Already when I was writing my master thesis I could get very little out of it.
All of my questions were too specific and went unanswered.
My most voted answer explains how to install header files on debian.
1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.
3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
This was before LLMs or COVID.
> ...
> 3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there. And whenever I did I had to be super-defensive from the get go. It was either people trying their hardest to close it, or "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question).
I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions, but in retrospect they took the wrong approach. They should have let people ask and answer questions freely, even dups. Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.
It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.
The one thing that always struck me, was that most (not some) of the high-score individuals had 1-digit question counts (with that digit frequently being "0"). It was clear that asking questions was a "demerit." These were folks judging questions, that had no idea how to ask a question, themselves.
Also, I found that many were not ones that worked on shipping software. It seemed that their vocation was SO. That's very much like the kid that spends all his time, playing Counterstrike, and giving advice to soldiers in theater.
I'm really big on apprenticeships. We become masters, by moving through being juniors. It gives us an extremely solid base, and elicits acknowledgment from others.
Journeymen can often be demanding and irascible, but they command respect, by demonstrating that they have been in your shoes, and that's really important. You suffer the slings and arrows, because you know that there's a clear path to where they are at.
I have friends that are former US Marines, and they all have Boot Camp stories. These stories all feature downright abusive Drill Sergeants. But they also all profess immense respect for these dudes, because they came from years of experience, and they often showed boots how to do something, by demonstrating it, themselves, at a high degree of skill.
> "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves."
-Brendan Behan
Yes this! I found it painful to watch abuse being heaped upon obviously junior programmers. Points should have beem award for mentoring those on the path, not gratuitously rejecting their questions.
However, when you spend an hour looking at low-quality answers, questions that have he's been asked like ten times already, etc, I get the sense that the people doing the moderating were trying their best - some of them, at least. No doubt there are mods there who just enjoy the miniature lower trip a la overzealous reddit mods, and I can't imagine the stress of trying to handle the amount of traffic some of the exchanges got.
> I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions
I think both of these are true, but I'm not sure that many of the contributors (or even many of the moderators?) _really_ cared too much about building the "curated list of questions".
I'd posit that part of the problem was also its competitiveness – contributors wanted to earn rep, so they ignored constraints or answered the question they really wanted to answer. Some of the tags I used to frequent had a few contributors who seemed to do nothing but answer SO questions, so there were never any good questions left for a mere mortal with other commitments in their day.
I am generally unconvinced that reputation-based systems like SO's are actually useful. Contrast SO with a project mailing list or issue tracker – where I've had some of the best support – where there's nobody tracking rep or keeping a tally, and everyone is there to simply help and share their knowledge.
> Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
I did plenty of free moderation over time on the review queues. I have no idea today why I invested so much time in that, for it was a thankless task and ultimately didn't feel I could move the needle on the bigger problems.
Also a lot of communities do their own QA on discord where they can modererate themselves.
Have seen this every where, even in case of people. If people are dreading to even approach you for something, its over for you. You can't get just the good things to pass through a filter. No such thing exists.
In many ways you need to be open for everything(apart from outright wrong things, like abuse) including stupid things, to get the good things.
In reading the site rules and meta discussions, SO always seemed to have been explicitly designed to invite, cater to, and directly nurture them.
The ridiculously strict "no duplicates" policy guaranteed that the old, increasingly outdated answers would remain the only answers forever. In retrospect, I believe a site like SO wants to encourage some rate of duplicates, to ensure that answers remain fresh.
Just yesterday I looked something up on SO and the answer was 14 years old. Would've been a pretty relevant answer back when I first started using SO, but not now.
They really killed themselves through strict moderation. It's incredibly sad, it was a good resource while it lasted.
That was a terrible, awful plan, and I always reverted edits to my answers that went beyond fixing typos or updating old links.
The one time I tried, I couldn't answer directly because I had no reputation, and I couldn't comment either, but I could edit the question (!) which someone else had already done, answering the question in the question. It was an incomplete answer, so I added another edit with a complete answer. Then the mod who approved my edit also added a newline to it, so it was them and not me who was credited (unless you went to the 'history' page).
I gave up after that.
Totally. There were so many safeguards in place, for a newcomer it is quite hard to contribute.
They also never understood a core principle of such platforms. The noise is not noise but what carries such platforms. They even had it quantified, some of their most upvoted questions are off topic because they are opinion based. Bad and good questions (and answers) come hand in hand.
Well, they were the backbone of professional IT/SWE, so of course they did a lot of things right obviously.
But it's also what wrecks such platforms.
SO didn't arise in a vacuum; it was explicitly a reaction to how shitty ExpertSexchange had gotten by then with an anything-goes moderation policy.
They should have accepted a certain level of mess instead of being so strict. After all, even good popular answers become outdated sooner or later.
I used to end the questions with "It's not a duplicate of AAA because BBB is different. It's also not a duplicate of CCC because DDD". It DID force you to check for already answered questions, but the automated hints while you typed was often good enough to spot duplicates.
In the end, imagine wasting half an hour to post a four-lines issue... No thanks.
First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.
The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.
Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].
I was glad when S.O. put an end to them.
The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about. Asking was terrible because otherwise you get the other forms of crap. That's what everyone knew going in and it was a common observation that specifically motivated creating the site in the first place.
And even if I find the right existing question, the accepted answer might not be the one I need. Sometimes the question asked accepts the wrong question. Sometimes the current right answer didn't exist at the time of the answer acceptance.
SO was a good first approximation of a good Q&A site. It didn't evolve with the times.
Good riddance.
I feel this is the critical bit. People are quick to dismiss this problem as a moderation problem, but I don't agree. I believe it was a query problem, and the absolute lack of support for tying both questions and answers to specific software versions, or range of software versions. So you'd see answers from ages ago marked as the right answer to a question, even though it was using some deprecated version.
Questions on how to address the same issue when new versions were out where closed as duplicates because literally the question was asked before and answered as well. But the answer nowadays would not be applicable.
Then to sidestep this problem you see the phenomenon where ancient questions end up having multiple answers, with newer answers even out voting the accepted answer. And even those would be deprecated as well.
So SO was designed as a system where a single question can only possibly have a single accepted answer. Ever. And anyone asking similar questions would by design be routed to he question that was asked and answered. But the system was designed over the concept of static information and static notion of truth. Which the world definitely doesn't follow.
So, the place was a shit hole.
For the Javascript ecosystem in particular... it also massively helped that projects finally started to work on their documentation. The churn rate was insane and documentation or working examples took an afterthought for far too long, that is what drove so many people to SO in the first place.
This was single-handedly the work of arrogant self-righteous moderators who would close random useful questions as not useful just to prove they were doing something. A lot of us long timers got annoyed at selective enforcement of rules and never looked back. It's sad because it was actually a fun place to hangout. Too much moderation always kills the vibe.
I enjoyed answering algorithm questions. Unfortunately, every so often, people who weren't into algorithms would show up. And somehow summoned each other. To close good questions.
It was clear that they didn't understand the topic. They couldn't recognize what a good question, or a good answer, was. I wound up going away, coming back every few years, go until my next bad experience, and leave again.
Each time, the population answering those questions was smaller.
I believe that a lot of good people left like I did. Then just didn't come back.
One way that stackoverflow does stand out from the other stackexchange sites is that its half life appears far shorter. On a log scale plot it has a steeper descent than the other stackexchange sites. I'm not sure what to make of that. Another interesting thing is that the math stackexchange initially declines more slowly than the others for a year or two and then decays pretty similarly. You can also see examples in some of the other sites of their decay beginning before chatgpt releases (e.g. drupal). You can also see some sites decaying a decade earlier (e.g. expressionengine). I think those outliers are from their subject being too specific and going out of style.
I got the cross-site data from data.stackexchange.com with this vibe-coded query:
Asking questions was difficult and any difficulty questions I might ask would not get a response anyway.
Answering questions was a gamble, sometimes you would get rewarded, most of the time you would not.
Asking questions did become painful later on. But it was the default site to choose whenever you googled a programming issue for years after.
And, StackExchange has adjusted stale/inactive question deletion scripts as a result of this change: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/419988/we-ve-rework...
It's kind of sad: I bet there was some excitement around the SO office. Is this it? Are we on the way back? Have people remembered that we're here and now they're returning? Alas, no, they weren't, and they weren't. That must've been rough.
AI replaced Google Search in many ways more directly on arrival than those.
SO to me was weak as it had outdated answers to outdated questions (yet related to search queries) that nobody maintained well.. and the community more focused on patronising to push their point of view than being essentially objective in many ways.
that was a total killer to me and I started preferring to come back to books, manuals and researching topics myself than short cuts like SO.. and that research is heavily optimised during AI/LLM era, yes, but that's just one of many nails to SO's coffin.
> Q: What HTTP library should I use?
> A: Last year everyone liked Requests [link to chat], and that's still good, but if you're using async you might look at aiohttp which is newer and not quite as polished yet but has much better async support.
Those were the answers that would've kept SO relevant: here's what we all thought last time this came up, but here's how the situation has evolved since then.
Reddit came with its own problems, of course. The programming subreddits hadn't (yet?) been as weighed down with those issues when I weaned myself off going there.
The declining number of questions is hence not a side-effect or a mistake, but just means that they reach their end-goal. It's actual a measure of success. (Now you can disagree, whether that philosophy was reasonable or sustainable in the first place, but given there choice, this is the logical conclusion and end goal.)
Tangental, but I tried plotting number of questions by month including deleted questions. It shows similar trends to questions by month (so nothing particularly interesting): https://imgur.com/a/NLLB3OK
Query: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1969...
Maybe it was more consolidation of tech and better docs over time.
I'm fairly certain this early decline came from the fact that many common questions had already been answered, and therefore were available via Google, so hardly anybody asked them again. In the beginning there were just way more unanswered questions.
The first was how they would repeatedly mark my posts as dupes when in reality they weren't. Sure, my questions had large overlaps with existing questions. But mine had sufficient nuanced differences that my questions warranted being open.
The second is how they would repeatedly rewrite my posts. And extensively so! It no longer sounded like it was written by me. And any sense of warmth or humanity of my posts were entirely stripped away! So sterile and cold. I have to tell you, having a post that you spend time composing, only to have some moderators a-hole rewrite it is a very negative feeling. And to see a message posted publicly to the web with my username next to it, as though I'm the one that wrote it, is wrong.
Stack Overflow brought their death to themselves.
https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/37205153
And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.
It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.
It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.
I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
The moderation style in the latter years was very different than at the beginning.
It was always heavily moderated, but after some point it felt like there were more layers of moderation and rules and cultural expectations added every year.
Moderation went from being a background cleanup operation that quietly kept the site in line to being the primary thing I expected to see when following a StackOverflow link from Google. In the later years it felt like every other StackOverflow search result was going to be the question I had followed by a moderator shutting it down for some reason before anyone could answer.
The moderation wore me out and I wasn’t even posting questions, just trying to find answers!
Doesn't have to be yours, just anyone that you've seen.
Actually, talking to ChatGpt, I found this article: “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.” ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...) and that actually shows what the SO admins didn't get (imo obviously).
They thought the problem was people not being nice. But that actual problem was that SO was "gamified" and it's gamified interface made it impossible to win unless someone was ultra-competitive (and I'd those types burned-out over time as well). People not being nice was real but it was side-effect of the situation (questions answered instantly so a would-be question answered had to be constantly racing).
It's easy to imagine how the admins didn't see the situation. Each up of intensity seemed to up the engagement and so seemed a good thing. The question of whether the process was sustainable didn't appear and when there were problems it was attributed to something else.
I think
Even though you didn't get a reputation score for that specific action as I remember, it still gave you the little "I'm helping" feeling.
The honeypots in the review queue trained you to err on the side of closing questions - you were punished for not closing a honeypot when other people had closed it, regardless of whether it actually deserved to be closed. Complaints about incorrect honeypots were frequent and the system was not improved.
There's zero reward for closing a question. I know that because I casted 2 thousands of those, no reward ever came my way.
> The honeypots in the review queue trained you to err on the side of closing questions
That's also false, there were as many for either side in the audit queue. There's a whole list of post about people complaining[1]. Most of the time, the answer is the same: if you are not sure, hit skip.
For most the negatives audits, SO famously used spam rather than bad posts (which also taught the wrong lesson)
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bdisputed-review-a...
Question-closing was a big complaint through-out SO's history. My guess is that the top people were unconcerned because someone who complained about it was by the way the system defined people, a bad user (since they were lumped-in with those who really did ask already answered questions).
No, it absolutely very much was not. Even granting that you mean actions of the community (what we call "curation") rather than the small and extremely strained moderation team, way too much stuff historically got through, while people yelled at the OP in the comments and argued over downvotes instead of taking the action that actually matters: voting or flagging to close the question. Worse, people would post answers that acknowledge the problem with the question and asking OP in the answer text to fix things.
I know because I was part of that mess back then, because I didn't know better. That, in turn, was mostly because the entire set of ground expectations was poorly communicated, and the community wasn't given the tools to improve that communication (e.g. couldn't edit the help pages, had their feedback about the discoverability of site documentation ignored, etc.). But it was also because Atwood and Spolsky hadn't refined their intuition about why beginners' bad questions are bad. (Hint: it is not because most of their problems are easy to solve, or "beneath" experts.)
> when following a StackOverflow link from Google
Google got worse at search over the years, so you ended up seeing low-quality versions of the question more often. And the site got way too big (there is no reason why there should be more than three times as many publicly visible questions on Stack Overflow, as publicly visible articles on Wikipedia), such that search results could get diluted with irrelevant low-quality questions that happened to have a lot of keyword overlap with what you wanted. And misleading questions didn't get cleaned up, so you would search for X and find a question where the OP hadn't tried to analyze the situation at all and ended up asking about X when the problem was actually Y, and got the question closed as a duplicate of the main Y "canonical". (I know because I used to lose considerable amounts of hair trying to find the X canonical that I knew was there but stubbornly refused to turn up in searches.)
If "moderation" had actually "always" been "heavy" then you wouldn't have had this problem because this stuff would have gotten hidden from public view, one way or another.
> a moderator shutting it down
Again, these actions are overwhelmingly not taken by moderators, and phrasing things this way reflects a refusal to interact with the community on its own terms and understand its policies. Those who hold an outsider mindset are bound to end up feeling like outsiders.
You know that users are going to call anything that happens to their posts on any website “moderation” right, and after decades of that being the norm that’s what the word means
Huh. I had the opposite experience. The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
I stopped bothering, after a number of questions went answered only by me (after I found the solution on my own).
It did reduce the insults, but that seemed to be the only gain that I got, for carefully articulating my questions.
LLMs aren't perfect, but they don't imply that I'm being lazy, for not already having the answer, and they do give me an answer, instantly (and, like SO, the answer is not always the best one).
I have engaged with some younger devs who don't even bother turning the thought into a question. They make statements and expect you to do the work of inferring the question. Which I feel like they got from chatbots since it's faster and LLMs don't care if you make them jump through hoops.
> The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
There is a sweet spot of providing just enough detail but not too much in asking a good question. And even the best only “bat 300”. I've posted answers to my own questions plenty of times when I got no response.
I hear you on the hostility. Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow. The first time I tried asking a question on IRC I got mocked so bad I logged out and never tried again. Most forums were like that.
I gravitated to Ruby back then because it was one of the only forums people would be patient and empathetic with me.
I have repeatedly had this experience in trying to craft The perfect question for a consultant who was also a mathematics professor, in finding the essence of the question the answer becomes clear and I never even have to send the email
Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.
Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.
The “answer my own question” feature was meant for exactly that. Had quite a few like that, and sometimes I still got better answers than I found
Yes, that was part of the point. I hope you posted anyway (after checking for a duplicate, and assuming the underlying problem wasn't just a typo), and provided your own answer for it. That is an explicit part of how the site is supposed to work (but an incredibly poorly communicated one).
> Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow.
SO actually considerably improved on that axis over time. It's just that tons of people erroneously think that being expected to meet certain standards in asking a question (in particular, doing the necessary debugging work to locate and reproduce a problem, or the necessary contemplation to properly specify a task), is the same thing as yelling at people for not knowing answers to easy things. That goes both ways: people get upset when their question is closed, and people think they're helping by excluding easily answered questions because they're easily answered. In reality, the main problem is questions that are easy but complex, i.e. which really break down into multiple separate easy questions or require digging through a code dump to find a trivial error.
60000 rep btw
or just a great form of your question if someone genuinely wanted to answer it, not pump their score, dopamine etc?
From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between "broadly applicable" and "too specific". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my homework by posting pictures of my WIP and citing Youtube videos I'm trying to follow but, apparently, this is already toeing the line. I honestly don't know what the mods expect of a good question there. Of course, there will be an appreciable degree of case-specificity in my questions because if the YT tutorials could already answer my problem, I would have no need to ask for help and advice!
Then we have sites like Literature SE which has been languishing in their sandbox since literally forever. Like most SE sites, the guidelines bid you to "avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussions" and "be specific" but I find that untenable in a Literature site. Notably, sister site SF&F is comparably thriving but there is a fair amount of open-ended speculation going on in there.
Lastly, IMO, it just suffers because at its core its problem is human and social, not technical. In an effort for better curation we ended up with Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Science. For some posters, finding the right SE site already introduces a huge wall to overcome for posting. This hampers a lot of the out group: students who might be seeking homework guidance or looking to supplement their own readings and lectures, amateurs who are just curious about something in the field. I've had a question in one of the Science SEs outside my field that was well-received by the community but one mod kept "tagging to delete" (I forgot the exact term) almost every year. This mod action has a prescriptive period and, boy, he kept at it. Honestly, I don't care in the end. I asked the question out of sheer curiosity and got a satisfactory answer. Yet I wonder how exactly they expect to foster a community this way.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
And _then_ it became so much more hostile to users - and lost a lot of what made it so wonderful. It became very common that asking a new, good question would be marked as a duplicate because there was something it wasn't a duplicate of.
What amazes me is that an LLM can actually make sense out of all this crappy training data and often produces meaningful answers. (maybe that's a sign that we already have AGI)
That's exactly what it turned into, though.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320536/what-is-the-...
I detested it but quickly realized that I needed to put in work and learn and only when I understand can I ask valid questions to real problems…not just asking for someone to spoon feed me an answer.
I really appreciate that experience…
After hundreds of thousands of rep points (it's a long time I haven't been there,) - this is simply not true anymore.
It was the case at the very beginning, and then there was a flood of useless questions, and the psychotic users decided to downvote everyone. Some groups (such as Golang) became a real sect. Meta was for unhinged psychopaths.
I loved SO and spent a long time there. At some point it became a 4chan. Shame.
Plenty of the nework sites zre still great though.
Really? Because I only ever asked three things, technically two I suppose, and the only significant interaction I got from there was a guy saying they thought the third question was a duplicate but they only didn't mark it that way because they saw it was me asking again.
This dude straight up admitted to be on the hunt for marking things as duplicate and only put brainpower into doing not-that because something felt off in is gut.
Then someone else did.
No, he didn't actually answer my question. No one did.
If StackOverflow is being considered hostile now it's big ... well, Google the three stages of enshittification I suppose.
To be fair not really but it’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time and all it took was to scroll down to the end of the page to get your answer.
Real 20 year ago internet there.
Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.
Now we have a new guy in town, who offers "robotized copy-paste the solution to YOUR specific programming problem, no reading required! we can even control your computer for you, so you can do something you actually enjoy and stop wasting time on this complicated computery thingy for boring nerds", which serves the aforementioned audience much better.
"Target audience" connotes people that the site wanted to be there. That's just who showed up, because that's who will always show up basically anywhere that looks like it might be helpful to them, by default.
The biggest suckers were the people who were genuinely putting it effort there. So, in the end, did they make the world a better place? One would like to hope they did, but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.
you sound exactly like the mfs that ruined that forum.
But also, we were not "mods". We were just members of the community who did absolutely nothing to gain power over you except to participate by asking and answering questions. The actual moderators of the site, with a diamond next to their names, were almost literally one-in-a-million users. But it only took 3,000 reputation to cast a close vote, and 15 to flag to close a question (prioritizing it for consideration by the first group).
Posts like yours are made, IMX, because people had a bad experience asking a question. If that describes you, feel free to provide a link to the question and I'll be happy to give a detailed explanation of why things went as they did and what the site wanted you to do better in asking it.
The one thing I really liked was how it tried to find existing questions and answers that were like yours during the question input phase, but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter
The biggest blocker to this is that the site itself did not provide ways for the community to fix the front matter, and the site ownership ignored pleas to fix that front matter and to take more action to make people read it before participating.
There's also a huge problem that people equate popularity with success. It's the same phenomenon that leads people to declare the site "dead" (or not) based on the rate of new incoming questions. No; it's dead because the site management pushes ever more AI involvement that fights against the policy forbidding AIGC in questions and answers; and because they're destroying the core principles of participation in the site in the hope of making that question rate go up again (while ignoring the voices of those who would otherwise answer those questions).
> but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter
Questions only really had downvotes because they went into a public queue immediately and that was the mechanism to hide low quality content. It is not a problem to ask a duplicate and fail to recognize it; someone closing your question as a duplicate is helping you get a cached answer immediately, while also helping make that answer easier to find in the future. Anyone who downvoted a question merely because it was a duplicate was misunderstanding the system. On the other hand, getting through that filter, and even if you had a genuinely new question, doesn't mean you had a good question.
It should never have worked like that; this was counterproductive to the site's stated goals (but it was what the founders came up with, and doing it the right way would have killed engagement right out of the gate). What you really want is for the question to start out effectively closed, in a state where it can be workshopped, without the voting system. Anything that made it through that system would, in theory, never attract downvotes because the legitimate reasons to downvote it would have been addressed already. And by doing it that way, you limit exposure to the question to people who are interested in fixing questions, and let the people interested in answering questions have their own feed. (Of course, people can also wear multiple hats, but you get the idea.)
In fact, we had something like that for a little while, called the Staging Ground. It was, in my view, the only good idea the company had after the Prosus acquisition, in a sea of bad ones. It was not perfect, but it was a damn sight better than the traditional system.
This is what killed SO. People were going to the site to get problems solved, not to add to their list of problems.
That and [redacted] mods who delete your question “because its a duplicate” but its not, you just assume it is and lock it. Lots of this when .NET Core came out and it drove me up a wall. Wouldnt surprise me if a lot of “hallucination” type answers come from bad Stack Overflow data being interpreted as “fact” in earlier models.
My extensive experience has been that the overwhelming majority of the time that people complain "this isn't a duplicate", it actually quite obviously is. (And there were even more irritating complaints on the meta site at times; all the way up to the level of "you shouldn't ever close duplicates at all because I think you shouldn't", demonstrating no interest in even trying to understand the reasons for doing so.) Of course, people do make mistakes; there was an entire process for fixing this, but most people could not be bothered to engage with it productively (or even civilly). But feel free to give examples of things that you feel were wrongly closed from your own experience.
Q: How do Python's dict preserve insertion order?
A: [duplicate of "Why does a Python dict's keys have a different ordering each run?"]
It was clear that the mod/curator/whatever spent no time attempting to understand what was actually being asked, and linked it to something that was completely incorrect as an answer to the real question.
I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics. If you asked me "when did you last eat a fruit bat", I can tell you the month and year because that stood out. If you asked me "when did you last eat spaghetti", I'd have a hard time saying.
Yes, it is. Especially considering that I too was mainly "trawling the new Python questions" for similar reasons, and being dismayed at how many dupes there were and how hard it was to find an actually good version of that question to use as the duplicate target for something that was constantly asked.
> I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics.
Without specifics I really can't engage with that, sorry. I would encourage you to check out the [reopen-closed] tag on the meta site, in chronological order (or take a random sample) and see what kinds of things people think should be reopened and how off-base they are (and also see how it is explained that things are in fact duplicates).
As it happens, I have a single "saved" (site bookmarking feature) question on the meta site with that tag, saved because I wrote what I think is a useful reference answer to the general question of why duplicates get closed so quickly: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422581
> often because the original answer was ancient and obsolete
This does not make a question "not a duplicate". The fact that there are different ways to solve the problem now, doesn't make it not the same problem. It is, instead, a reason to write a new answer, but we still want all the high-quality answers in the same place.
From time to time, a new "canonical" gets chosen for FAQs, because the community recognizes that it's better quality. "Up-to-date" is one consideration in that equation. But a lot of the time, people argue that an old Q&A should be disregarded or replaced simply because it is old, and this is often just not true. For example, the question 'What does if __name__ == "__main__": do?' (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/419163) was posted in 2009; as it turns out, it still does the same thing in Python 3.15 and the reasons for using (or not using) it are the same as well.
No amount of “you’re holding it wrong” could convince me that the millions of people who wanted to use it the way it was broadly described were truly doing it wrong. The payoff for slavishly doing things the “right” moderator-approved way just wasn’t worth the effort.
Generally, the people doing this are familiar with the material. Fast closures are motivated by an unconscious "ugh, not THIS question again". And the kinds of things that get asked over and over usually don't change very much.
There's a particular type of question asker who likes to say "what's the way to do this in [current year]?" as if to imply that it should be something different from before. But it very often isn't. And indeed, developers complain when languages/libraries/ecosystems change too quickly, which makes language designers/library authors more conservative about those changes.
The top answer is still up to date
https://stackoverflow.com/q/493386/792066
Fair, I got my wording wrong, its been a while since I've landed on the site... Sadly, I used to love reading SO for fun and to learn random tidbits.
I've run into way too many "this is a duplicate of" and its referencing something from 2003 in 2025 where the runtime has changed, and a similar looking issue was confused for the actual issue, the resolution in the linked "duplicate" doesn't apply or work. In my opinion, if you're going to call something a duplicate, prove that the solution there works before you lock it down.
We weren't going to be a huge contract (~100k/yr) but the tone was very much "conform or fuck off". I think the sticking point was that we were offered 1x permanent careers ad in North America and 2 in Oceana, and we wanted 3 in Oceana instead.
I've had a similar experience the couple of times I've asked or attempted to respond to questions (about software I wrote lol) - grammar and framing seemed more important than technical information/a solution.
N=1 anecdata ofc, but I'm not surprised at their demise
You must be new to IT. Software businesses rarely truly die off (unless they're really small one person operations). Even Expertsexchange is still around: https://go.experts-exchange.com/
Uh, no.
StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.
Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.
I hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.
But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was specifically intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to avoid chatter because that gets in the way of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.
Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.
Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.
It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.
For reference, here is the verbatim (except for code formatting for HN) Markdown of the initial version of a question asked in 2010, my answer to which became my highest-ever scoring answer (and which ended up getting over 2 million views):
AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.
People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.
If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.
AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.
Before AI people would still try asking questions on SO despite the hostility because it was the only/main place to get answers. Over this time, SO popularity was deteriorating.
After AI people who had bad experiences with asking questions on SO would ask the AI instead. This is because the AI wouldn't mark your question as a duplicate, wouldn't question its validity [1], etc. It would just answer your question. You could even ask it follow-up questions if the answer wasn't quite what you were looking for. All of this in real time, not waiting to get an answer.
[1] Unless the question triggered the safety gates that the AI companies have in place.
--------
[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay
[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!
I'm not qualified for anything else that isn't also remote, full of AI and getting more so, or both, so I may quite literally end up waiting tables, I have friends who can help me skip the queue there with an “he's a good bloke” recommendation. While I was in hospital recently (gallbladder trouble and liver infection) talking to one of the porters who was wheeling to & from the CT scanner, they apparently need more bodies ATM, I could certainly do that (other than the temporary issue I was in there for I'm fit & healthy) and might actually find some enjoyment in it. Both involve dealing with real people who are in the room with me. Anything I do once I leave here will be result in a massive pay cut, but if the change saves my sanity then that will have to be acceptable.
I don't contest productivity benefits and there's a time and place for Claude in my workflow but I fear sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day. Half joking. But it makes 1:1s even more awkward now when I have to put on a show for the GenAI parade.
Thanks. I might need it!
> sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day
We track who uses what AI and how much. For billing/expense tracking purposes, as we've gone from “use it as much as you can” to “use it as much as you need to but don't waste it”, but there will be a table somewhere with my name in the bottom section next to a bit fat 0.
> has been pretty pushy when it comes to GenAI use tho … Flat out saying no comes with …
You'll have to deal with that or get out, eventually, how soon depends on your management. AI is not going away, even when/if the costs rise when all that investment capital starts being clawed back. If it is any help in choosing an exit strategy: under UK employment law (if you are elsewhere you'll have to verify how things work in your jurisdiction) they can't force you to use AI or punish/sack you for not as it can be argued to be a material change of role (as it is described as revolutionary, or in less breathy terms “like becoming a manager”, etc.) not just a different tool. But if you refuse then the same argument can be used to make you redundant (“we need more AI people and fewer traditional devs, traditional devs are being declared redundant, would you like to switch roles instead?” would be perfectly legal). As much as the payout for my long years in the same place would be nice, personally I don't think I can sit it out long enough for that to happen.
It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.
A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)
While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.
LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.
Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.
StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".
Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.
After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.
THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.
The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.
The same thing that happened to perl.
Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.
(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)
I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.
Damn sad how quickly that habit changed for me.
Never asked a question, but got some good info from people who had asked questions and the people who replied.
Most of the easy questions have been asked. I stopped using it because I was asking questions that weren’t trivial to answer, and I guess it is easier to earn internet points through mod actions than through writing answers.
As my career progressed I took on deep problems with complex issues and complex answers. Not much sense in asking as no one ever managed to help me with them. I’d just end up answering my own question a week or a month later perhaps.
And of course the moderation and karma farming - I oh so ‘fondly’ remember the one user that would take your question and run some auto-formatter on it so that it would fit his personal style guide and then get a percentage of the points as your now “co-author.” What fun!
It stayed useful as a reference tool for quite a while, for when I needed to look something up that was fairly common but that I wasn't personally familiar with. But as others have said, the way they handled dupes and supposed opinion-based answers was really poor and meant that the top answers got more and more out of date each year. By the time LLMs came around they were strictly better for those kinds of lookups. Strictly better for now at least, LLMs will themselves get enshittified in the coming years.
I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.
When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)
Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.
Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.
Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.
Same. And DBA.se. I was a top contributor of both for the first few years at least, even got sent some free swag a couple of times, not because I cared about the points and being in the first page of people ordered by them, but because I felt genuinely useful and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.
I never really did the social side though, I have problems with distance friendships including online communities (I just don't connect well with people that way) which is one reason that I'm hating tech work more and more these days (being on a remote team is not good for my mental health, while I'm not a huge people person it turns out I absolutely need some in my life, and really in my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).
Can't say I formed any connections there though. Just a few negative interactions.
The real life examples and synergies were a plus. I got so much work from that ServerFault presence.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
It's got pretty good coverage of most things related to my country and interests, but if you go too far afield/niche theres not many users on many topics
I tried to post on r/showerthoughts several times over the past 10 years. And every time it deleted my post saying my thought wasn't original. I was wow how they would even know that, and this was pre-AI.
But how will you design it to survive in this age of malicious actors and persona farms?
When I read old.reddit.com was disabled for non-logged-in users, to be sure I'd never hit this site again even by mistake, I put a rule in my router's DNS resolver to lie and pretend an NXDOMAIN.
We're increasingly pushed into different groups and sides with little to no toleration of each other. It's been progressing more over the past 10-15 years in the UK, US, and possibly elsewhere.
Where are you seeing this? When? I go to "Home" and I only see my subscriptions.
I have a cosmetic filter to avoid clicking on the "Popular" link but I never see anything from the front page that's not part of my subreddits. I don't use the app.
Something most people don't know is that Reddit now has a kind of AI partnership with moderators of the larger subreddits. If those mods ban a user from their sub, the AI can suspend or ban a user for "breaking the terms of service." Given the state of Reddit, and the kind of people who moderate the large subreddits, it's creating a fairly violent and polarised community.
Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.
Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.
I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.
Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.
Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.
One thing is that there are lots of bots on the site, another is that the site now seems to be specifically designed for bots.
In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).
Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.
A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing
The trick is to delete your browser cache (not just things related to reddit, everything), then wait a week to a month before creating the next account.
When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.
I suppose I was never their target market anyway.
Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.
Reddit took action in March 5, 2026 to stop that practice.
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1rllqrw/ban_bot_po...
There is a policy of ideological gatekeeping by certain Moderators.
no it bans you for not having a conservative viewpoint, that's completely different from wanting you
I tried making another account, and you are right, it got banned a few days later. Tried once again after learning how they do persistent bans and found they let me keep posting, but after 3 days my post views always stayed at 1... in others words they didn't "ban" me but my comments were clearly no longer visible to anyone else, and I haven't been back since. What a joke of a company.
My account was banned back around 2021. I had a separate account on mobile, which got subsequently banned for 'evading a ban'. Have been unable to create an account since then, even on entirely new machines, different OS, renewed IP. Whatever tracking techniques they use are downright scary.
The worst part is that all of this started because a mod in a right-leaning sub silenced my account, then decided to turn it into a permanent ban for no reason.
Nowadays, I'd still like to visit r/programming for a change, and share some of my work, but otherwise it's such a cesspool of AI-generated content and bots that the appeal has almost entirely faded.
Meanwhile bots are running rampant and I can't scroll through the site for 10 minutes without seeing an obvious bot post or comment. Dead internet is real.
But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.
One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.
I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.
You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.
And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.
You purge some Nazis, then run out of Nazis to purge, but you've got a good purge system going...
For me, the crazy everything-is-a-dupe drove me away. Same as so many others mentioning here.
But a lot of other things were also wrong and they are worth listing too:
I stopped looking at the answers as they aged. So many of the top or accepted answers were quickly out of date (but you couldn’t ask again because or the dupe mods).
A lot of the accepted or top answers had always been wrong even when written. If you knew more about something you could spot this but it was pointless to engage and try and change it. Popularity is not about being correct.
There was no need for all the other sites. It would have been better with one inclusive site. So often a good question would be asked and mods would comment it should be asked on some niche site with no traction and so died the question.
The gamification point system favoured the early people like me. I probably got most of my points long after I had actually moved on because my top answers were still racking up votes. There was no hope for a more recent joiner (even joining 10 years ago) to ever catch up.
And the hardest most interesting questions got no answers. If you were truly stumped on a difficult algorithm then it really wasn’t the place to ask.
That’s some of what I remember being wrong with SO long before LLMs were mainstream.
I shudder to think that LLMs learn from SO answers. It would explain so much of the worst vibe coding though :)
Sure you can. (But it is a significant problem that they start at the bottom of the score-based answer sort and don’t get attention.)
I'm not pouring one out for SO's death. Because I already did years ago.
I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.
They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.
However, they didn't really understand what makes a question valuable, or why low-quality beginner questions are low quality, and thus what exactly to expect in order to get higher quality things that could be helpful to other beginners. And yes, they did initially make some gestures towards some threshold of question difficulty, but this was a misstep (and also hard to disentangle from question complexity, as well as whether a question is interesting and to whom). And yes there were experiments like the Documentation project (which I lamented the loss of). And yes the reputation system was a totally broken idea and implementation, inconsistent with stated goals.
It turns out that when you have a critical mass of users and the alternatives are frustrating enough, you can get away with a lot of those missteps.
As for enforcement, that's what happens when the overwhelming majority of it is assigned as the community's responsibility. Misconceptions about the site's purpose compound when some users get away with them and then gain reputation from a single old/popular Q&A. (I had some, too.)
Fundamentally the site failed to figure out how to impress those values upon people before they got too involved. I think this was out of a fear of scaring users away, but clearly this was counterproductive — surfacing the misconceptions and conflicts later on only made things worse. An ideal system would have started questions closed, so that having one closed on you wouldn't feel like a final judgement (despite it not being one); and it would have shielded you from downvotes until question opening (because the entire point of this would be to recognize that questions require work by default to meet the site standards). In other worse, what the half-baked Staging Ground was trying to accomplish (and mostly did, for the small minority of questions the system decided to send there at random).
If the community could have tweaked that system, we absolutely would have. The site owners never gave us that access, and it got much worse after getting bought by Prosus.
But yes, on a Q&A site you absolutely should be prevented from asking certain questions. The fact that they're facially "on topic" does not save them, just like how there are guidelines to post on HN that go beyond "make sure it has something to do with technology". Because it is not the purpose of a site like SO to answer your question just because you asked it. The purpose is to have good Q&A that everyone can refer to in order to learn something. The root of the "hostility" is in the selfishness of those who won't consider the perspective of everyone else who's going to see the question later. Which, you know, is the exact problem with the traditional discussion forums that SO was created explicitly to provide an alternative to.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...
Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276998 lack of knowledge doesn't prevent people from using random biotech keywords as measure against LLM's assisted reverse engineering.
So there's a clear difference in expected utility.
Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.
I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.
People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.
No, they absolutely do not.
They propose that you might be having an XY problem because they have seen people commonly ask the same thing before and turn out to have that same XY problem, and they want to help you by making sure that you are asking a question where the answer will actually be useful to you. Or else they genuinely cannot understand why a person would want to solve X.
I'm not saying that's the problem you had, not at all. I do see why some of the answerers were quick to jump to it though.
The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?
StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.
Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.
Turns out, it was just a system message "You are now able to set your unique username for your profile." Someone who was responsible for growth marketing probably figured this would boost user engagement. The last gasps of a once vibrant platform.
Search engines no longer surfacing useful results didn't help the web in general. Outside of a handful of sites everyone knows the Internet seems to have become a ghost town over the past decade.
But to be honest I expect that would have just delayed its death. AI is so good now I think I'd use it even if Stackoverflow was really friendly.
My attempts at discussing AI related questions with AI itself have been pretty frustrating, especially in the early years, since they are either just uninformed about what's currently going on in the AI space or recite random blog posts of questionable value, often they couldn't even tell what they themselves are capable of.
The new owners either did not understand this arrangement or did not value it enough. I now have my kwix backups and my open weight LLM. This should be more than enough to hold me over until a stack exchange substitute pops up.
- If something was marked as a dupe by mods, that was it. There was no way to suggest that a dupe was marked in error on your question or others.
- The site had no standard mechanisms for separating questions in time or by version. So many answers for "python 3" that answered for, like, 3.8 or whatever. Same for operating system and basically any other contextual category.
- Following answers was incredibly inelegant. Would you like to know if the chosen answer switches? What about if there is a new answer for the next version of the software? Trick question we don't track software versions!
- The community had an extremely high learning curve, I think in part because the site had so few affordances. It was very easy to be rude on accident and it left a bad taste in ones mouth.
- The site decided to entirely ignore meta organization. Do you want a category of questions that are kinda silly? What about separating highly complex questions or debugging particular errors from general questions about how to use the tools? Nope, we're not going to do any of that.
I am shocked it lasted as long as it did.
I'm not disagreeing at all, but I'd like to add that the moderation issues did not come from a vacuum: they were a reaction to SO reputation becoming so much of a CV optimisation metric that SO must have felt a lot of pressure to do something. Turns out that something wasn't good, but I'm not sure that other paths taken would have been much less bad. Some success just aren't set up to last.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19712903/reverse-content...
We are losing communities and human communication to LLM chats.
And what's even worse than that is when they don't know what they're talking about, and launder their ignorance through an LLM. Then you get vapor laundered to look like a thoughtful and considered response.
Basically the equivalent of shouting out some highly specific technical query down a dark alleyway and hoping against all odds for a better response than models trained on all of stack overflow already.
Stack Exchange is toast... I mean, cooked. They've been falling apart for years. Unlike the top comments, I stopped posting there in 2014.
The scaling focuses around discoverability, (the rate of) asking questions, and the amount of time available for people to curate (which includes helping new users get onboarded).
Much of the early days of Stack Overflow, discoverability was trivial. It was easy to find an interesting question because few things were asked and this was the days when there was a lot of changes. We're dealing with 2008 and beyond - there were a lot of new frameworks and languages being updated then... Spring 3, Backbone, Knockout, Angular, React, Vue, Spring Boot 1, Java 7 and eventually Java 8.
This was a time of rapid change and the experts were answering on Stack Overflow - and it was scaling up to meet that demand with additional tools.
But it also started becoming a place where students were posting questions (every September you'd get the "how do you draw a triangle with stars?" questions 20 times a day in the Java or Python tags...)
This started being visible in 2010 with question quality and by 2014 it was a full on epidemic.
One part of this is that the original community of people who followed Jeff and Joel's blogs and helped barn raise the site had gotten smaller as an overall portion of the site because of that explosive growth. Some people wanted it to be a place where any user could get help with a question (and closing questions was antithetical to that) and others were looking for it to be more of a wikipedia. That conflict still simmers.
Another part of this is that a smaller and smaller percent of the overall user base was using the curation tools available. Fewer people were closing questions (that really did need to be closed) and helping onboard new users with expectations. When there are 6000 new questions a day that represents a lot of work for the volunteers to try to onboard them. Initially, everyone came from the same point and there wasn't much onboarding needed. With its growth, a lot of new people were coming to it from the approach that it was a forum or immediate feedback chat.
That growth without scaling up the tools for onboarding and curation (making it easier to do) meant that the people trying to help new users and make discovery of well written questions easier had less time per user (or question) to do so... and got increasingly curt - they couldn't spend 5 minutes per question anymore and instead were trying to do things in 30 seconds or less.
This was the beginning of "Stack Overflow is unfriendly."
The attempt that corporate had from this, instead of making it easier to help people took away curation tools and close reasons were made more specific... which in turn meant that the people trying to close questions to make discoverability of well written questions on the home page easier were incredibly pedantic in order to meet those reasons.
Some of the tooling is set up to be able to handle 6000 questions per day, and scales poorly back to having 100 questions per day.
The user base of Stack Overflow at 2 months old is very different than Stack Overflow today, even if it has the same question rate. There are very few people who are around to help onboard users (diamond mods if you read this - there's 25 of you and 100 questions per day... you can spend 5 minutes per new question per day to help onboard the user for expectations and still have half an hour a day for other moderation tasks).
Many of the people who did curation when SO was growing and at its peak have become disappointed with Stack Overflow and while they may look at it to see if its a site where their contributions would again be appreciated... though the changes that corporate appears to want have been additional curtailment of curation tools and have even proposed removing close votes all together ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438185/the-company-... ).
---
Stack Overflow is mostly dead. It lingers on, but every change that is being attempted or proposed in trying to get more "engagement" takes it further and further from being a place where new knowledge is collected and collated.
I would attribute this mostly to there aren't any curators left - so everything they try building turns into a mess. Corporate has leaned too hard on the community to do curation and diamond mods have largely stopped doing curation in favor of moderation.
With low activity and the largest ratio of staff and diamond mods to active users, this would be an excellent time for those two groups to completely take up the task of curation and onboarding to set a new standard for how it should be done... and if they aren't willing to do it, that really suggests that the final nail in the coffin is in place waiting to get hammered.
(I also made one "let me Google that for you" comment on an SE answer, though I tried to be polite asking what was not understood from the Google result. I cringe a bit when I remember that. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55752699/what-does-a-spl... if anyone is interested.)
I am not a programmer, but I do have some knowledge of computer architecture. Unfortunately for me, the Stack Exchange sites where such questions would be on-topic (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering/Electronics) did not get many questions that I could answer. (https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/123778 is one of my more popular answers.)
I do not remember exactly why my participation in Stack Exchange sites declined. Part of the motivation loss was from fewer "interesting" questions, part was from a slight decline in politeness, part was from modest discomfort with the policies that made asking questions more difficult, part was from general declining enthusiasm and competition with other interests.
I do remember what caused me to rage quit; it was my worldbuilding question being voted to close as too broad and this answer to the question: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/247948 .
Besides being just one specific use of adamant (when I was more looking for classes of uses), I felt it mocked my sense of high fantasy (which was one of the tags used). (I do not think this was the poster's intent and I was overly sensitive, but combined with general dissatisfaction and a declining mood this triggered a rage quit. Having something that annoyed me be extremely popular did not help.)
Some months ago I posted a question there after a long time, something that the LLMs could not give me a satisfactory response. It got deleted for being unsuitable for the site.
I'm not particularly a new user of SO. been using for 15 years and 5.5k reputation, which does not say much more that I know how to ask questions there, or I used to know.
Desperate, I take the question to a meeting with the language team. The guy gets excited: "this kind of question is why we keep holding these sessions"
SO became what it was by setting rules that worked extremely well. They even occasionally let some QnAs slip by, like the famous Jon Skeet Chuck Norris facts[1]. Now those same rules don't work well for a vibrant community, and at the same time they are being followed pedantically.
[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...
I don't particularly care for e-points and that sort of things, but SO had whole entire way of telling you you are wrong why did you even dare answering, then creating "classes" of user (I apparently made MORE ranking points after I stopped using it than before ? Giving me more moderation power), then seeing "your" answers being edited left and right by people who add a comma or whatever
The whole joy for me was in answering people. It's just fun, I think many hackers get it, bad questions notwithstanding. But as some point they made that ... Less fun, for a lack of a better description. So I just stopped answering.
I love it for what it brought and the great times I had on it for years, but I've stopped actively using it (as opposed to just finding the answer through a google search) for a while and it was way before the rise of LLMs.
If you had enough reputation, you'd be invited to these review queues, like the Close Vote queue.
You got a point toward a new badge if you voted to Close. You get nothing if you chose to keep it open. There was always a perverse incentive there to act, to make a question "better," to nitpick a perfectly fine answer.
1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and
2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
This does four things simultaneously:
1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model
2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)
3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.
4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?
With LLMs around, I no longer use it as much. And its a shame because I am worried in general that we might be losing communities like these
It is a site about helping people where no one seemed interested in helping people.
You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data
It's less efficient than being able to point to a canonical answer on a widely respected forum, yes. And it sucks immensely to have to rely on these horrible AI companies to replace the real human interactions that getting work done used to require, yes. But realistically, we are not looking at some kind of model collapse anytime soon due to lack of SO threads.
Losing Reddit and blogs and other forums is going to be a bigger problem. In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use? How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice? if the web becomes a ghost town and nobody is talking about anything anymore, there's no form thread it can uncover and say "that's the one everyone uses". Losing the library of technical Q&A is nothing close to the catastrophe of losing actual conversations between humans.
My guess is, you won't care.
How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice?
My guess is, it will make a good choice.
For who?
How many times have you found a random forum post solving your problem? How many countless people has that post likely helped?
Now every single person facing the same problem will regenerate from scratch the entire thought process and result. What a waste.
There needs to be some way to close the feedback loop from the work that LLMs do.
It was also deleted, die already stack overflow
[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Stack%20overflow&date=to...
But... I also came across some real jacka*es. Those were on my questions, but also reading the responses from other peoples questions.
It seems like their rules sometimes biased towards older questions/answers which in fast changing areas that's the wrong way round.
In my niche, we also had an absolute dictator of a moderator who was a condescending jerk online. Open belittling of people asking questions, connecting new questions to those which had been asked years ago in a different part of the stack and then closing the question, etc. Real tin pot tyrant nonsense, and frankly, a bully.
There was a day where I saw they had been denied a role they interviewed for since they posted about it. I already knew they were in my city. It was a role I had advertised and was the chair for. Im still not sure exactly which candidate, but have my suspicions. In any case, bullet dodged.
It transitioned to emphasize "less toxic" and in the process minimized signal.
The result has no purpose.
Sources of information like StackOverflow have come and gone, since the dawn of computer networking with online forums on BBSes and similar dial up systems.
Many sites like StackOverflow have predated it, and others will follow, or maybe not give AI, nonetheless no developer questions site lasts forever.
I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.
Also questions now have a "staging area" that has to be passed before the question is posted for everyone. In the staging area moderators have to approve the question.
But at least we had fun who can forget stacksort.
1) If you already have enough programming experience to understand algorithms and abstract concepts in programming you can find the answer by doing research.
2) More often than not the answers were citing answers that already exist elsewhere.
3) A lot of the trivial answers were marked as low quality, dupes and so on when these were the people who could benefit from SO the most.
Eventually I stopped visiting the site around 2 years after getting into programming since it rarely provided anything of value.
--
Serverfault was great and I will miss it.
I love you stack exchange and all related sites.
All yall need to keep learning
Which begs a more interesting question, perhaps; if a SO was recreated in a more forgiving fashion today, would it stance a chance competing against AI?
https://techstackups.com/articles/stackoverflow-graphs-prove...
But there's a need to talk to human experts, learn their opinions, personal experience, non-obvious bits. E.g. I enjoyed asking certain questions at Software Engineering and Emacs SE sites. Sometimes I just ended up talking with a maintainer of a specific package I had questions about. This is something Claude and ChatGPT cannot easily replace, and maybe something that may keep certain SO communities alive. (Unless Reddit eats the remnants of their lunch.)
Today they are vibe coders and no longer need stack overflow.
1. AI allows you to ask stupid questions or the same question without (typically) ridiculing or demeaning you for doing so.
2. Context changes as time rolls by. A question that was asked some period ago might just need to be re-asked, continuously and ongoing.
Now, SO had already suffered its demise prior to AI. But good riddance, from my point of view. StackOverflow was great in its day, essential even. But it fell victim to its own success, I guess.
A lot of the answers are factually useful and it would a massive loss if it ever just disappear into the ether.
Getting second hand sadness
(I can't tell from PostTypeId = 1)
A better metric would be visits per month… which probably doesn't look very pretty too. I used to visit SO every day several times a day for like 15 years: ask a technical question on google, click on the first SO result, get the solution I was looking for. Now I still ask google but I just have to read the AI Overview to get the solution I'm looking for…
https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...
Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:
* 1 trip to mars
* 10 trips to the Moon
* Converted water to wine
The worst system until you can finally help others.
Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.
A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.
There was never any restriction on posting answers unless you had explicitly and repeatedly violated policy. Posting questions and answers was a default privilege extended to everyone at account creation.
It did require a small amount of reputation (50 points) to comment on posts that were not your own.
But none of {questions, answers, comments} are "reply posts". That's just not at all how the site worked. It also comes across that you imagine that "helping others" on Stack Overflow entails writing something (either a comment or an answer) that addresses what the OP is asking. That, too, is not how the site worked. A Q&A site like Stack Overflow works by producing reference material in Q&A format.
The point is that other people can search it later, and get direct answers without having to parse through someone else's comment discussion, walking a beginner through debugging steps just to get the necessary information to understand the question, etc.
It made Mark Cuban very wealthy and was worth pennies within a few years.
I really like SO. I couldn't post answers much, because I had to vet anything I could have said past management. But it was a favoured place to find how to solve questions I didn't deal with daily - up until the slop grew too much.
Oh I'm not really blaming the "slop" on anyone (although it feeds heavily into why AI produces such slop) - it was just connected with the rise of popularity worldwide, and gamed by people wanting to improve their perceived prestige, to open more doors. And, once upon a time, stackoverflow DID open more doors, for a lot of people.
AI came at the right moment to save the knowledge from the knowledge keeper.
I can only hope that some other technology will save the knowledge once again, before the AI companies go completely rogue and hostile towards their end-users.
All to have my post locked/marked/closed/whatever either as a duplicate (it wasn't) or some other bullshit.
Call it a skill issue if you want, but I was going there for help at the time and just got the door slammed in my face repeatably with no guidance as to how to stop that from happening. The gate-keeping was simply insane, and it's clear I wasn't the only one that decided it wasn't worth the time.
I know exactly when I permanently stopped contributing to the site: it had been a few years since I happen to have something worth posting a question about, but for once I had a niche question about a popular-enough framework it was worth a shot.
A guy replied with a generic wall of text that had nothing to do with what I had asked, merely contained some of the keywords I also used.
When I politely pointed out it's not what I asked and reformulated in case he merely misunderstood, he got mad that I had refused to just give him the points.
He got extra mad when I figured out the answer on my own and posted it as answer in case others stumbled on the same issue, so he tried to edit my answer to make it look irrelevant.
Unfortunately for him, he didn't realize I also have enough points to edit it back, so he gave up and deleted all his comments to make it look like I'm talking to nobody, then went to downvote a bunch of my older posts.
And the sad part is that guy initially seemed well regarded in our small community, kinda killed my motivation to contribute to the site again after that. Plus I usually always find answers on my own, and anything I can't figure out on my own is so niche it would be pointless to ask.
I admit that my first few questions earned me a lot of downvotes due to their poor quality. But it humbled me and taught me the importance to create minimal reproducible examples.
After that, some of my questions were answered in depth by experts. I was blown away and very grateful that some random stranger would take the time to answer such a niche question I had.
Besides, I've seen colleagues of mine whom I consider brilliant but whose questions on public forums were bad... They give too many details, leave out part of the context, don't make it easy to reproduce their error, ask vague questions, and so on. I wonder if it's for the same reasons that HN has trouble with SO.
I enjoyed reading his articles but it feels eons ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange
1. LLMs don’t blame you when you ask for book recommendations or say “you must use Superuser instead of Stackoverflow or Linux…”. But it also gave as a bit of community and entertainment. 2. LLMs are useless with the data input from Gitlab, GitHub and Stackoverflow. Especially Stackoverflow, because the snippets, good comments and ratings are invaluable. 3. Removal of job adds. That was the obvious and non disturbing money source.
Stackoverflow is also one of the last platforms allowing you to downvote and put a “price tag” on downvotes. This is incredible helpful in preventing hostile voting. And still allow counter-measures against bad answers.
Please. Cannot the original founders take a data dump and let use re-launch it? Or we just do it.
After such a long time user, here I was, finally interacting with the community. My first question. I spent at least an hour composing it. Something about Django and Celery. Then came the mods. Crushed my dreams. I tried editing the question. Crushed again.
And I remember thinking, wtf? I’m just trying to ask for some help. Why is this so damn hard? Never tried again.
In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave easy questions to be answered by new answerers. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.
In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.
No wonder no ones uses it anymore, its environment is actively hostile to new users.
StackOverflow had the most toxic community didn't it?
But let me address the "toxic" moderation. They needed something like appeals courts. SO should have installed a layers above the community mods that could review and rebuke the decisions of the "lower" mods to steer things.
Oops, all assholes.
2. Have you seen https://meta.stackoverflow.com ? It is the exact thing you believe they "needed". As for "layers", the tiny group of people with diamond symbols next to their names (the actual moderators) did in fact have authority over others.
3. As demonstrated by the posts there, the large majority of "toxicity" came from the people who refused to accept the site's standards, and the large majority of question closures were clearly correct.
4. To me, the word "asshole" suggests a sense of entitlement. This was most clearly demonstrated by those who felt entitled to get people on the Internet to volunteer to solve their problems for free, without heed to whether the resulting Q&A could be of benefit to others. That is not how the site worked, or how it was designed to work.
I blame google partially for this because when searching for bugs/errors I stopped seeing SO on results and instead I got sites that regurgitated SO's content
The toxicity was too much for me. On HN, when a toxic entity points their sting at me, at least their comment gets flagged within 24 hours. No such thing on SO. The moderators themselves are toxic as batshit.
Nothing, unless it becomes able to read documents, try things, and come up with best practices all on its own.
I've never seen an online community incentives vandalism rather than contributions.
edit - fixed .com to .org
LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:
Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?
A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]
I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.
> Nothing's quite as demoralizing as
I can tell you from years and years of experience that this is just not what happened in the common case. Of course, there were a few incidents where someone slipped up, which is why there was a meta site to discuss these things. And in the cases where someone had a point about a wrong duplicate closure on meta, that was well received and the problem got fixed.
But we also got a constant stream of people complaining about the equivalent of:
Q. How do I iterate over a tuple?
A. [closed as a duplicate of "how do I iterate over a list?"]
and it became clear that the OP was not even willing to try the code provided, which would work for their situation.
There were cases where people refused to recognize a duplicate of what was clearly the same question, because a different code sample was provided with different variable names or something.
There were people whose argument essentially boiled down to "you shouldn't close duplicates as duplicates ever, because that's how I think it should work". IOW, a complete refusal to engage with the site's policy or the clearly established, stated reasons behind it (and the many years of history needed to refine that policy).
> but even I gave up trying to ask a question.
I think it's quite easy to ask a question that meets standards; it just requires skills (basic debugging / communicating a clear unambiguous specification) that don't necessarily align with the people who are most likely to want to ask questions generally (beginners).
If there's a specific question you wanted to ask but felt unable to, post it here and I'll be happy to explain where it might have been lacking.
Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.
Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.
Yes all the bureaucracy was annoying. But when I asked on Stack Overflow, the same question is there 5 7 10 years later, queryable by everyone. Ironically by LLMs too.
While when I ask LLMs - as I do now, of course, nobody has time for SO nowadays - nothing is left, everything is ephemeral, LLM forgets, the world doesn't learn.
Oh well. They will surely bolt LLM to SO one day as Quora did already.
.. something.. something
"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones"
I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
I think it's good that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.
Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.
It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.
I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.
I stopped contributing.
Yeah, no shit nobody uses Motif for new development, but if you haven't guessed, I was working on a legacy enterprise system.
Just rubbed me the wrong way and still kinda annoys me to this day. Not everyone is dicking around for fun or works at startups where you can light other people's money on fire. Some of us have paying clients, I'm not using Motif because I want to.
I remember that I once asked a question about dual-licencing MIT and GPL 2.0 in the same project. Within an hour or two, it was downvoted to -7. Now this alone is already quite concerning (it was a genuine question), but what was even more annoying was that not a single person who downvoted this, explained as to why. So, if my time investment here for asking a question, gets negative karma without any explanation, and then subsequently no useful answer at all: what is the point of SO? I still answered a few questions here or there, but the whole karma system just discourages contributions and I stopped using it with regards to both asking anything or giving answers.
SO is not useless since some answers still hold useful answers, but they really should have started to fix SO early on. Instead they just gave up.
That was that for that site.
I hate how the site clutters every page with hundreds of shiny tokens whose only purpose is gamification (with no way to turn the gamification off in site settings).
I now read the answers to my technical questions from Emacs buffers containing ASCII text only.
I created an account, specifically cause I found a few questions that I knew the answers to, and could cite properly.
So, I answered 2. All is good...
Next day, 1 is marked as dupe (?!) and there's literally no other answers. So, duping what? Nope, not permitted to know that.
The other answer, some braindead idiot mod decided to change my answer to wrong garbage. No request to change. No verification. No nothing.
Shortly thereafter, those 2 responses were downmodded, leaving my karma negative. So basically, can't do anything. So I left. I'll spend my time on communities that actually give a fuck, cause SO didn't.
Right from the start, the content was as open as possible, and community ownership was a core principle. As a programmer with limited resources back in 2010, I have every reason to be grateful for Stack Overflow because back then Experts Exchange was paywalled, and most other forums were either language-specific or drowning in spam.
Stack Overflow's strict moderation was a direct response to those forums, where you often had to scroll through pages of noise to find one useful answer. Yes, it eventually became a hall-monitor type of clique obsessed with enforcing rules, but that moderation wasn't useless. People here forgot Googling a programming question and clicking StackOverflow link? We did this for years, imagine the time saved not going through manuals.
Obviously, there's much less reason to use it in the age of AI. But let's show a little gratitude for what it gave us instead of just grumbling about what it became.
Preferred books at the library.