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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
This is literally what I did to learn node.js at a deeper level. Was a lot of fun for a while.
I became active on SO late (2018) and now have 6K reputation. Providing good answers to new questions was worth basically nothing. No one upvotes you.
90%+ of the upvotes come from super old questions that have been around forever. Google indexed them and sent traffic there. Old inactive accounts get 1000s of upvotes a day and if you weren’t active when Python 3 was new or when Apple released Swift or whatever then trying to build reputation felt like a waste of time.
Contrast that with Reddit: commenting on new posts is the only way to build karma. It incentivizes new activity.
I was also a heavy user of SO for many years. At the end, I noticed things started to get really weird. I would ask a carefully researched question, get multiple answers, and get zero upvotes on the question. The Win32 community got so weird that people would only post comments under your question, but zero answers would be posted.
Maybe we will look back at mid-life SO (its golden period) as something like bulletin boards in the 1990s. Once the Internet arrived, BBSes were wiped out.
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.
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.
The few times I asked questions I'd get people telling me I should be doing something else, then I'd have to explain why I was doing it this weird way that necessitated me asking this question in the first place and they'd never respond or bother to answer the original question. It was like people only wanted to tell you were you wrong instead of trying to help.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
One of my classes in college had an alternate question on a final exam to write a short program in MIPS R2000 binary. Lines and lines of 32 1's and 0's.
It was an easy program. We were allowed an 8.5x11 cheat sheet, I had managed to put a lot of the binary formats for common instructions on it. Easy peasy, got to skip like 1/4 of the other questions.
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).
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.
LOL - I literally found a Storm Linux T-shirt in the bottom of my drawer a couple of days ago. Time goes by soo fast - can't believe that Storm Linux was 20 years ago already. So many 'next big things' fade soo fast...
Wonder if these AI firms will have a better run then VA Linux did ?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember that happening to me once. The code example that I had written in my answer was edited in a style that wasn't mine and it even contained compile errors and wouldn't run if you were to copy-paste it. Made me quite irritated, since the answer was still signed with my name and it made me look bad.
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!
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.
I've answered 3,509 questions. Accumulated 334,126 points in reputation at the time of writing. I rank #164 globally .
I can safely say I owe my career to this platform. And it sucks big time to see what's happening here.
Hello, blast from the past! Feels like a lifetime ago.
I'm so grateful for WHATWG listening to the jquery community though, sizzle.js and the CSS query selector API made building dynamic websites so much easier.
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.
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.
The attrocious moderation was just an accelerator. SO was doomed the second it gained enough traction to become a resume padder and consultancy funnel.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
> Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.
It's to teach the user where it belongs, so they don't make the same mistake again, by making them actually go through the action of going to the other site. Otherwise by auto-migrating it they'll learn to just keep posting on the wrong site and someone else will do the work for them.
It wasn't a problem in the early 2010s because the moderator migration feature to actually move questions was more readily available then. They just deprecated it's use because of concerns about dumping poor quality questions as the size and number of sites grew. So unless the question is already extremely high quality -- which essentially zero questions ever are -- they just exclusively close them.
So it comes back to not doing anything to make asking higher quality questions important. The site is designed to be an open field filled with land mines.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> The percentage of questions closed as duplicates that actually: **Were actually duplicates of existing questions**; That had a correct, up to date answer -> was definitely less than 1%
> I didn't find anyone claiming that two questions are duplicate of one another in different programming languages unless the language is not relevant.
I am honestly at a loss here as to how you are not seeing this is a very different claim, and so am now also on the theory that this is some kind of performance art to reenact the frustration of someone claiming a question that is different is in fact some kind of duplicate content.
Again, this claim was made by a different user in a different branch of discussion off of this post, but it wasn't made by that user or even within this thread: Bratmon makes absolutely no claim about people crossing programming languages for marking duplicates. (I am done, though: feel free to now have the last word.)
You refuse to read the claim because you can't understand the claim? Branton said explicitly and I quoted the comment "The percentage of questions closed as duplicates that actually were actually duplicates of existing questions was definitely less than 1%" He's asserting that correct duplication is less than 1%, I am asserting that correct duplicates are about 80%. If I have to comment yet again, you need to get a LLM to understand what I'm saying because I'm done trying to make it more clear
I didn't read that comment. I don't care about that comment at all. I am someone that complains about sloppy duplicate question and it's only in fringe cases that I gave a example of. Branton is saying that almost all duplication is wrong, that's a lie, because if he had any concern by the truth he would not have made that assertion
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I provided thousands of answers on SO (1/3..1/2 accepted?). I can tell from experience that most questions were complete and utter garbage — questions that could have been solved with a single google search at the time. Most of them were answered many many times almost daily.
It is a good thing LLMs exist. Even current capabilities are above median of effort demonstrated by those questions. My target audience was people coming from google (first) and questions authors (second) — but even then you burn out after a while.
Mismanagement and forgetting its roots were just the final nail long before AI.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
>>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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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].
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Honestly, point seeking behaviour of people writing answers was one of the worst anti-patterns of SO. It would lead people in later years to quantity over quality (especially because of the bonus 15 rep that OP could give you by "accepting" an answer in addition to upvoting it). Worse, it would incentivize them to answer terrible questions that should have been swiftly closed and then deleted when OP inevitably failed to do anything about them. Instead, getting an answer in before closure would prevent the automatic timed deletion system from removing those bad questions.
Quality answers come from intrinsic motivation: from people wanting the site to be a place where people find quality answers. (Something I didn't personally understand in the early days is how important a quality question is to finding a quality answer.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
“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?”
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
I was a SO user from 2011 or so and have not experienced it. I'm with GP and GGP where whenever someone does post an example, it almost always shows them having misunderstood the site or misrepresented the situation, and should have been closed even in the good early days.
For example, one of the uses for closing a question is to give the asker time to improve it based on feedback before people start piling on irrelevant answers (such as including more detail showing why it's not a duplicate of another question). IIRC doing so automatically makes it eligible for reopening, without even having to ask.
Another is that duplicates are meant to point at the best version of the question/answer. Usually this is caught when the new question is posted and it's closed as a duplicate of the older one before answers are posted, so you don't see GGGP's situation, but if it's not caught by someone who knows about the older question the new one can become better and then, by design, the old one is closed and pointed at the better new question.
> one of the uses for closing a question is to give the asker time to improve it based on feedback
Pretty much, yeah.
There are multiple reasons to close a question, but fundamentally three categories: duplicates (which don't need to be changed unless you were misunderstood and a change would make it clear that you meant a different question); questions that can be fixed but require OP's private information to do so (e.g. expecting OP to focus on one question, or provide a proper example, or phrase things more clearly); and questions that fundamentally cannot be fixed (e.g. they're simply off topic).
Whenever a question can be fixed, it's expected that the asker tries to improve it.
But fundamentally the purpose of closing a question is to prevent answers to a question that doesn't meet the site standards. Where a question is fixable, this is only intended to last until it actually does get fixed.
> IIRC doing so automatically makes it eligible for reopening, without even having to ask.
It is immediately eligible for reopening from the moment it's closed. Sometimes people make mistakes.
But whenever anyone edits the question (including OP) there is a checkbox that can be used to assert that the edit resolves the problem, which puts it in a specific queue for consideration (otherwise, someone would have to stumble on it randomly).
> but if it's not caught by someone who knows about the older question the new one can become better
On rare occasions, there has been a deliberate organized effort to do a new question, because the old one was deemed simply insufficient (usually not a matter of becoming outdated, but simply failing to present and address the subject matter in a way that would be accessible to the target audience).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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
> You know that users are going to call anything that happens to their posts on any website “moderation” right
I have an article published on LWN. The process of getting a pitch approved and then submitting an article and polishing it to editorial standards is quite impressive, and that's part of why reading articles there is so pleasant. And of course, they didn't have to accept my idea, and there was the possibility of coming to an impasse when trying to figure out a rewrite.
Was this process "moderation"? Do you think other Internet users would call it that? I would not.
The problem really is that the framing is already wrong: what you write on Stack Overflow is not a "post" in the first place, except in a really generic sense (or perhaps if you're looking at the database schema or maybe the codebase). Posts are what you put on discussion forums. Stack Overflow is there specifically to be something else. User generated content is not all "posts". (Would you use that term for a Wikipedia article?) Calling your writing a "post" comes with rhetorical baggage that gives a false impression of the site model.
That’s up to you. Do you go around saying “I like posting on LWN. I’m a big LWN poster. That’s where I do my best posts”? If so you probably already call the staff there “da mods” and wouldn’t need clarification.
> what you write on Stack Overflow is not a "post" in the first place
Yes it is. That website is overflowing with posts. It’s almost entirely posts aside from the bits you use to navigate between the posts.
> Would you use that term for a Wikipedia article?
I am receiving news that mods have taken to moderating more than just posts nowadays. They are moderating chat messages and wiki pages, and I’m being told that some of them have even confusingly decided to call themselves “admins,” it is a site to behold
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.
Only the users. The administration was very much keen to use those as evidence that we were not nice enough, that quality standards were unwelcoming, that closing was rude, that using the tools in the way they are intended to produce a library of high quality question pair wasn't something they were interested to facilitate
"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.
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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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..
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
Joel Spolsky used to work for Microsoft and Jeff Atwood was a Windows developer and they built StackOverflow on Windows + SQL Server. They commented that their audience is pragmatic developers who build for Windows because that's what their customers have to run software on.
When you look at experts from Microsoft world - the likes of Raymond Chen (Old New Thing), Jon Skeet (high profile Stackoverflow contributer in C#/.NET), Mark Russinovich (SysInternals creator), Dave Plummer (early Windows dev with YouTube channel now), they are/were employees and they present as polite and professional. Either they would not assume that everyone who doesn't know some obscure thing they know is an idiot, or they would keep that thought out of polite discussion.
Google AI answer says there are 35 million more developers today than in 2005, citing Evans Data Corp and Slashdata. There are tens of millions of developers around the planet writing internal desktop software, dashboards, reports, CRUD web pages, who have been in their jobs <3 years, and likely arrived to a language/framework/tooling/libraries they weren't familiar with.
I bet Spolsky naively expected that would be SO's userbase. Millions of company employees around the world asking each other politely "how to merge two lists in Python" or "what's the idiomatic way to read lines of text from a file in C#" or "what's this second parameter in this Win32 API call" and building an 'internal' company wiki of common questions and answers that people entering any environment/language/API/library commonly have.
Instead they opened to a world where flames and insults that would get someone written up or fired from a company are celebrated, particularly when directed at Microsoft users and ordinary company programmers. A world where people will not only assume that if someone doesn't know a programming fact they are an idiot, but will prefer insulting instead of saying nothing. A world where everyone is either an expert or an idiot with nothing in between.
It's a wonder SO worked as well as it did, for as long as it did.
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.
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
> 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.
Why should I give a damn about what you or others think is required for a "successful" website? Not everything is about profit or popularity or anything else. Some things are about making the thing that you set out to make.
> 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.
> People were going to the site to get problems solved
They were incorrect to take the approach that they did.
Last year, my friend's cat died. Imagine if he had gone to Wikipedia to edit the page for Cat, inserting his question in the page text, seeking veterinary advice. I hope you would agree that this would be an abuse of the system which should certainly not be rewarded.
Similarly, on a Q&A site like Stack Overflow when you ask a question, it is simply expected that you think about other people, and what their needs will be.
Specifically: a question and answer are added primarily so that, indefinitely into the future, other people can find them with a search engine, read the question and confirm that it matches what they're trying to find out, and go to the answers. Think about what those users would want the question and answer to look like. Think about whether they would ever be able to find the question with reasonable search terms, and whether an answer to you could possibly also answer them. Think about whether they would expect Stack Overflow to house that question. This is, really, at the root of all the reasons for closing a question.
> 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).
Quick context for anyone who isn't aware, rep there doesn't work like karma here: your question getting upvoted is apparently now +10 (used to be +5), your answer getting upvoted is +10, either getting downvoted is -2 (and costs the downvoter, they get -1), plus a few others.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There have been countless other places throughout the history of the public Internet which could be used in that way, and were explicitly designed for that. The "broad description" was mostly telephone game, but a good part of it came from making assumptions based on, as far as I can tell, nothing more than the existence of a submission form.
Where a community exists that is already organized around a common goal, following previous leadership, newcomers should not be permitted to decide that actually the community should/does work according to what they want. No matter how many of them there are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sure. But there were countless times that people insisted to me that their question was not a duplicate and that "the solution there" would not work, having not tried it (spoiler: it would work).
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
> 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/
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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 :)
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> Already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer, if it’s in there somewhere.
> Indeed, you can’t even have a discussion. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow, not knowing what to expect, and try to conduct a discussion when they should be answering the question. The trouble here is that answers are always listed in order of votes, not chronologically, so the discussion instantly becomes scrambled when the votes start coming in.
> Instead, we have editing. Once you’ve earned a little bit of reputation in the system (and there are all kinds of ways to earn reputation), you can edit questions and answers.
> ...
> There are lots of good ways to edit things. You can improve spelling, grammar, and even copy edit any question or answer to make it better. After all, for the next 20 years, this question will be the canonical place on the web where programmers will come to find out about enlarging fizzbars without overwriting snibbits. Anything you can do to clarify, explain, or improve the question or the answer will be a public service. If there’s code in the answer, you can debug it, refactor it, or tweak it to make it better.
> You can also improve on the answers. If an answer is incomplete, expand on it. If an answer has a bug in it or is obsolete, you can edit it and fix it. Because Q&A in Stack Overflow are editable, you can safely link to a Stack Overflow permalink knowing it will always have a good answer. Stack Overflow won’t have the problem of other sites where obsolete or incorrect answers have high Google PageRank simply because they’ve been on the Internet for so long. If someone finds a security bug in an answer, it can be fixed… it won’t keep coming up in Google’s results for years and years poisoning future code.
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!
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You will catch political sub bans for posting in and/or joining all sorts of other political subs, no matter what you actually said. I got more than a few from the exact opposite end of the political spectrum. All the political subs have been bought and paid for by propagandists for atleast a decade now. And having to either catching more random bans or having to self-censor myself, I left.
Hell there were even multiple political sub moderator purges that were right out in the open. Entire mod lists changing over night in multiple subs even way back.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I am very into powerlifting and bodybuilding. So, I've been religiously following Mr Olympia (once a year event which is the largest bodybuilding show in the world). Last year, on Mr Olympia day, there was no thread about the Mr Olympia. Similar thing happened this year:
How does the bodybuilding sub not have tons of threads about the biggest bodybuilding competition? I don't know but I think it's because people gave up on posting due to abusive mods:
Last year, I made a post on that sub with comparison pics of the top 3 competitors. That post got deleted by the mods saying it was a duplicate of existing post (???). I tried messaging the mods that there was no duplicate and they first gave me attitude and then silenced me from messaging them.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Somehow over the last couple of years it feels more and more like screaming into a void. It doesn't feel like I'm interacting with people anymore. There are no reactions anymore...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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-... ).
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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 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.
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.
SO was great. A well formed question would get an answer within an hour or two. I asked so many questions I got to top 5% without even answering much myself. It was my early LLM, and it also taught me how to ask questions really well, and that helps a lot with prompting.
Now I get my answer in minutes.
Someone took the parts of the original mousetrap and built a new mousetrap from it.
Time will tell how well those parts hold up as things change without a good source of data.
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.
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
> 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?
To participate you must also install surveillance software on your machine that can confirm the positive or negative label of applying the result. Of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do seem to be misremembering. I see there's the Custodian, Reviewer, and Steward badges after all.
I wonder if there was a quirk with the way these worked? Or were these introduced later along the way? I do remember taking legit issue with this all that time 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant regardless of how many questions are asked, because most of asked questions were irrelevant anyway, it was noise, new users who didn't even perform a simple search before asking, closed rapidly.
I used it 99% for searching, reading, 0.9% answering, 0.1% asking.
What would be relevant is how many answers are actually read today. It must have dropped a lot, but still, when people come, they're probably looking for something different than what LLMs provide.
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.
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).
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.)
wild how many people in the comments are saying "it wasn't ai it was the toxicity/moderation." like saying "cars didn't outperform horses; horses just misbehaved too much."
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I have used SO daily, for over a decade, almost every single day. I never saw anything hostile there. I guess this is something that you only see when you are trying to write answers or replies.
For someone who just wants to quickly scroll to the green checkmark and get shit done, that site was absolute god-tier.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SO’s demise was two conflicting user bases who wanted mutually exclusive things: the questioners a space to learn and grow without judgement, and the point collectors a glorified FAQ for programming and social media network.
The operators of the platform never grappled with the reality that these two users want opposing things, and LLMs were just the final nail in the coffin.
I am a first-year CS student. Stack Overflow really helped me during my early days. But now none of my friends nor coursemate use or even know about it....
Everyone just defaults to ChatGPT and Claude for debugging and assignments. In fact, even newcommers are adviced to ask LLMs first rather than searching through pre-existing discussions or reading official documentations.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I promise you nobody felt entitled to have an asshole respond to their question. Probably they'd rather it go left unattended.
"XY problem" meme where "insufferable, pedantic forum culture where posters refuse to answer the actual question" is a thing for a reason.
Plus the closing out of questions because that were "already asked" but not really, or the answers were ancient and out-of-date but it was impossible to boost the correct, modern answer high enough to compete with the 500pt bogus answer..
The problem wasn't the people asking questions, it was STACK OVERFLOW getting people on the internet to answer questions for free and completely failing to establish and enforce community standards and culture.
They did, in fact, establish and enforce community standards and culture.
They just weren't the standards and culture that you feel they ought to have been.
Communities are supposed to get to decide these things for themselves, not conform to the expectation of outsiders as a condition of them considering the community legitimate.
It is despicable that large language models have depleted the content of Stack Overflow.
Even before the advent of LLMs, online communities were plagued by individuals who would pointlessly complain and downvote questions or answers, as well as those who would post low-quality content solely to farm points, sometimes even using sock-puppet accounts to inflate their own metrics.
It was great when they offered prizes and similar incentives, but they were essentially seeking free labor; once they established themselves as a primary reference, they discontinued the practice, which is understandable.
The only thing community driven I used nowadays is for cooking because LLM recipes are always the most generic thing. (Though I use LLMs for converting metrics or question if something goes wrong)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly they should build for AI users. AI asking questions, AI answering, AI upvoting. Like a "good/not evil" version of the AI agent coordination message board
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
What is this "Stack Overflow" you speak of?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
This is literally what I did to learn node.js at a deeper level. Was a lot of fun for a while.
I became active on SO late (2018) and now have 6K reputation. Providing good answers to new questions was worth basically nothing. No one upvotes you.
90%+ of the upvotes come from super old questions that have been around forever. Google indexed them and sent traffic there. Old inactive accounts get 1000s of upvotes a day and if you weren’t active when Python 3 was new or when Apple released Swift or whatever then trying to build reputation felt like a waste of time.
Contrast that with Reddit: commenting on new posts is the only way to build karma. It incentivizes new activity.
I was also a heavy user of SO for many years. At the end, I noticed things started to get really weird. I would ask a carefully researched question, get multiple answers, and get zero upvotes on the question. The Win32 community got so weird that people would only post comments under your question, but zero answers would be posted.
Maybe we will look back at mid-life SO (its golden period) as something like bulletin boards in the 1990s. Once the Internet arrived, BBSes were wiped out.
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.
Mind if I ask if you stayed at that job, and if so for how long?
I was there 5 years
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.
That "big crowd" sounds just like people who want to believe in LLMs rather than think, or at least not think too much.
The few times I asked questions I'd get people telling me I should be doing something else, then I'd have to explain why I was doing it this weird way that necessitated me asking this question in the first place and they'd never respond or bother to answer the original question. It was like people only wanted to tell you were you wrong instead of trying to help.
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.
Same sort of numbers, same sort of story here...
Never ending September?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
As someone in the "some of you older programmers may have used Z80 assembly" territory, I find that hilarious.
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.
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)
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.
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.
One of my classes in college had an alternate question on a final exam to write a short program in MIPS R2000 binary. Lines and lines of 32 1's and 0's.
It was an easy program. We were allowed an 8.5x11 cheat sheet, I had managed to put a lot of the binary formats for common instructions on it. Easy peasy, got to skip like 1/4 of the other questions.
[dead]
Heresy! 6502/6510 was the only true CPU back then!
(In other words, my daddy bought me a C64 in the eighties. ;-))
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).
Definitely the better CPU. You could write position independent code on it for a start.
That, the MUL instruction, hardware support for multi-tasking. Atomics.
Get off my lawn! I was playing Larn on my dad's VT100 long before the C64 was released.
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.
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.
Honestly I bought a 6502 (BBC Micro) after I got tired of the Z80.
LOL - I literally found a Storm Linux T-shirt in the bottom of my drawer a couple of days ago. Time goes by soo fast - can't believe that Storm Linux was 20 years ago already. So many 'next big things' fade soo fast...
Wonder if these AI firms will have a better run then VA Linux did ?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think "wrong answer" was the wrong phrasing. I meant it wasn't the best answer on the page.
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)
> 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.
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.
The Trending (recent votes count more) feature was implemented years ago. Not perfect, but helps a lot.
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.
Not my experience. If there is a new answer it usually brings it to the top or near it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had the same thought it’s a great example of why StackOverflow does work in this case.
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.
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
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…
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
I can reliably say that Wiki has had the digital fiefdom issue for more than 10 years. It is not recent.
See this kind of bullshit is what drove people actually providing the answers away.
And if no-one is answering the questions, people will stop asking them.
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.
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.
> What is this "Stack Overflow" you speak of?
Oh let me remind you, it was the expertsexchange that was actually useful!
And the one not blocked by stupid url filters.
Would hate to hear about people having inexpert ones!
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, good ol innocent times.
> 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.
> "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."""
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
[2] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110827210055/https://stackover...
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.
Lol they died.
Creative commons all you want, they’re still essentially out of business. Thank god.
I remember that happening to me once. The code example that I had written in my answer was edited in a style that wasn't mine and it even contained compile errors and wouldn't run if you were to copy-paste it. Made me quite irritated, since the answer was still signed with my name and it made me look bad.
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!
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.
I've answered 3,509 questions. Accumulated 334,126 points in reputation at the time of writing. I rank #164 globally . I can safely say I owe my career to this platform. And it sucks big time to see what's happening here.
RIP stack overflow.
Had to check the nickname before I realized.
Hello, blast from the past! Feels like a lifetime ago.
I'm so grateful for WHATWG listening to the jquery community though, sizzle.js and the CSS query selector API made building dynamic websites so much easier.
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.
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.
Oh, I remember those. Answering a question, and then a copy of my answer submitted 2 minutes ago gets accepted. Eh
A bit over 19K here. The vast majority was Questions (3X), not Answers. It was indispensable in my early days learning a new framework and language.
> 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
To be fair the other replies had a 9 year head start
The attrocious moderation was just an accelerator. SO was doomed the second it gained enough traction to become a resume padder and consultancy funnel.
So it was a Hungarian $ - got to know :)
I upvoted. Your answer is at 91 now.
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!"
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.
fantastic story I always hate $before variables like in php
I'm starting to feel old. I remember fondly using jQuery. Oh, and MoTools.
MooTools. Also, I fondly remember YUI Library that Yahoo created.
YUI library was amazing and all the Yahoo coding stuff, it is sad they were all just discarded because it was not financially viable.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. The site's success was, in part, due to gamification. However, for some reason, the game they picked to mimic was Minesweeper.
SO shows "like" questions--but doesn't do a very good job of it.
> Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.
It's to teach the user where it belongs, so they don't make the same mistake again, by making them actually go through the action of going to the other site. Otherwise by auto-migrating it they'll learn to just keep posting on the wrong site and someone else will do the work for them.
> It's to teach the user where it belongs, so they don't make the same mistake again
> StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month.
Yup, treating the user like a child and making them feel like a dumbfuck was definitely the right move! Good riddance!
Sure didn't cause any problems when usage was rapidly rising in the early 2010s. That was not a new policy.
It wasn't a problem in the early 2010s because the moderator migration feature to actually move questions was more readily available then. They just deprecated it's use because of concerns about dumping poor quality questions as the size and number of sites grew. So unless the question is already extremely high quality -- which essentially zero questions ever are -- they just exclusively close them.
So it comes back to not doing anything to make asking higher quality questions important. The site is designed to be an open field filled with land mines.
[dead]
[flagged]
Now your intelligence was shamelessly stolen and other people making billions of it.
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.
CC BY-SA requires attribution. And is actually quite like GPL, in that it requires derivatives to be under CC BY-SA too!
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.
True for OP and true for Linus Torvalds. Is the solution to stop with open source, and never to publish anything? ;)
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.
No, the solution is to force tech companies to pay a VAT that can then be used for public benefit software projects.
Yes
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Presenting CC-BY-SA as "SO owns anything" is an even more terrible lack of understanding.
Your comment is low quality; it's an insult, it explains nothing, and the nitpick changes nothing about the point.
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.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L
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.
For some of the events there is paper here with details https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08884v1
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.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.
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.
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.
A gold tag badge lets you do some things like closing a question with a single vote.
Most of the badges was for reviewing, a "this question looks fine to me" gave the same progress as "close the question".
> "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?
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.
Because the people providing the value here, those answering, saw them day after day. That the freeloaders didn't holds no weight.
If you aren't paid and you are not having fun, why "provide value"?
"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.
> 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.
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!
> "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.
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.
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.
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%
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.
> 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, I'm classifying your assertion as false and offered reasons why it's false
But Bratmon didn't make any such assertion about programming languages... there was another thread here which did, though?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291174
> The percentage of questions closed as duplicates that actually: **Were actually duplicates of existing questions**; That had a correct, up to date answer -> was definitely less than 1%
No, Bratmon does exactly the same assertion
> I didn't find anyone claiming that two questions are duplicate of one another in different programming languages unless the language is not relevant.
I am honestly at a loss here as to how you are not seeing this is a very different claim, and so am now also on the theory that this is some kind of performance art to reenact the frustration of someone claiming a question that is different is in fact some kind of duplicate content.
Again, this claim was made by a different user in a different branch of discussion off of this post, but it wasn't made by that user or even within this thread: Bratmon makes absolutely no claim about people crossing programming languages for marking duplicates. (I am done, though: feel free to now have the last word.)
You refuse to read the claim because you can't understand the claim? Branton said explicitly and I quoted the comment "The percentage of questions closed as duplicates that actually were actually duplicates of existing questions was definitely less than 1%" He's asserting that correct duplication is less than 1%, I am asserting that correct duplicates are about 80%. If I have to comment yet again, you need to get a LLM to understand what I'm saying because I'm done trying to make it more clear
I didn't read that comment. I don't care about that comment at all. I am someone that complains about sloppy duplicate question and it's only in fringe cases that I gave a example of. Branton is saying that almost all duplication is wrong, that's a lie, because if he had any concern by the truth he would not have made that assertion
> 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.
What matters is however the active users answering questions.
Well, if they drive away interesting questions or interesting answers that matters, too.
The problem is that measuring the unknown is tough.
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.
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.
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.
but now the same moderators are on reddit
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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.)
The toxicity (we know best) was there from the start when they refused to let you create a local account and forced OpenID.
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.
I provided thousands of answers on SO (1/3..1/2 accepted?). I can tell from experience that most questions were complete and utter garbage — questions that could have been solved with a single google search at the time. Most of them were answered many many times almost daily.
It is a good thing LLMs exist. Even current capabilities are above median of effort demonstrated by those questions. My target audience was people coming from google (first) and questions authors (second) — but even then you burn out after a while.
Mismanagement and forgetting its roots were just the final nail long before AI.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
>>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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
I think SO really needed a "vote to unaccept / mark outdated this answer" or proper supercession process.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
The solution was the one they arrived at way too late: have a "starter zone" for entry level stuff.
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.
This doesn't make sense to me, because anyone could answer questions. You only ever needed 1 reputation to do so, which you got on signup.
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.
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.
He just explained that that question didn't have an answer. Redirecting people to a question with no answer isn't helpful.
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.
> 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.
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.
Do you have a link?
No, I used my real name for stack overflowing and not willing to link it to this account
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.
You do not get points for closing questions, and you get negative points for downvoting. Where did that lie come from?
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].
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.
good ol' expert sex change
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Honestly, point seeking behaviour of people writing answers was one of the worst anti-patterns of SO. It would lead people in later years to quantity over quality (especially because of the bonus 15 rep that OP could give you by "accepting" an answer in addition to upvoting it). Worse, it would incentivize them to answer terrible questions that should have been swiftly closed and then deleted when OP inevitably failed to do anything about them. Instead, getting an answer in before closure would prevent the automatic timed deletion system from removing those bad questions.
Quality answers come from intrinsic motivation: from people wanting the site to be a place where people find quality answers. (Something I didn't personally understand in the early days is how important a quality question is to finding a quality answer.)
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.
+1 to the outright hostility.
Good riddance.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You need to go deeper. The problem wasn't shitty moderation; it was shitty gamification.
If you look at the data on a log scale, and include other stack exchange sites, it's apparent that the serious decline is starting after ChatGPT launches: https://x.com/CraigGidney/status/2115664509042053377/photo/1
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:
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/c... shows the situation even better.
And, StackExchange has adjusted stale/inactive question deletion scripts as a result of this change: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/419988/we-ve-rework...
Nice. But about 10 years late. They should have seen for 2 years from 2014 to 2016 the damage done from their deletion policy.
I like that you can see a Covid bump in there and then it immediately craters lol
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.
“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?”
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.
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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".
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".
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.
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.
Often overlooked but Discord(and similar communities) are also a big reason why people no longer ask ques. on SO.
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.
Maybe they visited the website and the existing questions were enough? These stats seems to be questions asked. Maybe that’s the reason.
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...
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.
Github issues
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> 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.
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.
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.
> SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017.
During this peak popularity period, they were actively trying to stop people from flooding the site with low-quality "do my homework"-style questions.
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?
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.
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.)
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
Query: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1969...
Copilot in VS Code with OpenAI Codex came out in June 2021.
Yes that was my impression too. SO already died before the rise of AI.
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.
> 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.
> 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!
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.
Please show me the link.
[flagged]
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.
I was a SO user from 2011 or so and have not experienced it. I'm with GP and GGP where whenever someone does post an example, it almost always shows them having misunderstood the site or misrepresented the situation, and should have been closed even in the good early days.
For example, one of the uses for closing a question is to give the asker time to improve it based on feedback before people start piling on irrelevant answers (such as including more detail showing why it's not a duplicate of another question). IIRC doing so automatically makes it eligible for reopening, without even having to ask.
Another is that duplicates are meant to point at the best version of the question/answer. Usually this is caught when the new question is posted and it's closed as a duplicate of the older one before answers are posted, so you don't see GGGP's situation, but if it's not caught by someone who knows about the older question the new one can become better and then, by design, the old one is closed and pointed at the better new question.
> one of the uses for closing a question is to give the asker time to improve it based on feedback
Pretty much, yeah.
There are multiple reasons to close a question, but fundamentally three categories: duplicates (which don't need to be changed unless you were misunderstood and a change would make it clear that you meant a different question); questions that can be fixed but require OP's private information to do so (e.g. expecting OP to focus on one question, or provide a proper example, or phrase things more clearly); and questions that fundamentally cannot be fixed (e.g. they're simply off topic).
Whenever a question can be fixed, it's expected that the asker tries to improve it.
But fundamentally the purpose of closing a question is to prevent answers to a question that doesn't meet the site standards. Where a question is fixable, this is only intended to last until it actually does get fixed.
> IIRC doing so automatically makes it eligible for reopening, without even having to ask.
It is immediately eligible for reopening from the moment it's closed. Sometimes people make mistakes.
But whenever anyone edits the question (including OP) there is a checkbox that can be used to assert that the edit resolves the problem, which puts it in a specific queue for consideration (otherwise, someone would have to stumble on it randomly).
> but if it's not caught by someone who knows about the older question the new one can become better
On rare occasions, there has been a deliberate organized effort to do a new question, because the old one was deemed simply insufficient (usually not a matter of becoming outdated, but simply failing to present and address the subject matter in a way that would be accessible to the target audience).
Therefore it should be easy to show evidence of that :)
Doesn't have to be yours, just anyone that you've seen.
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.
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
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.
> 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)
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bdisputed-review-a...
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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
> You know that users are going to call anything that happens to their posts on any website “moderation” right
I have an article published on LWN. The process of getting a pitch approved and then submitting an article and polishing it to editorial standards is quite impressive, and that's part of why reading articles there is so pleasant. And of course, they didn't have to accept my idea, and there was the possibility of coming to an impasse when trying to figure out a rewrite.
Was this process "moderation"? Do you think other Internet users would call it that? I would not.
The problem really is that the framing is already wrong: what you write on Stack Overflow is not a "post" in the first place, except in a really generic sense (or perhaps if you're looking at the database schema or maybe the codebase). Posts are what you put on discussion forums. Stack Overflow is there specifically to be something else. User generated content is not all "posts". (Would you use that term for a Wikipedia article?) Calling your writing a "post" comes with rhetorical baggage that gives a false impression of the site model.
> Was this process "moderation"?
That’s up to you. Do you go around saying “I like posting on LWN. I’m a big LWN poster. That’s where I do my best posts”? If so you probably already call the staff there “da mods” and wouldn’t need clarification.
> what you write on Stack Overflow is not a "post" in the first place
Yes it is. That website is overflowing with posts. It’s almost entirely posts aside from the bits you use to navigate between the posts.
> Would you use that term for a Wikipedia article?
I am receiving news that mods have taken to moderating more than just posts nowadays. They are moderating chat messages and wiki pages, and I’m being told that some of them have even confusingly decided to call themselves “admins,” it is a site to behold
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.
Trying to figure out if you’re talking about users or admins here
Only the users. The administration was very much keen to use those as evidence that we were not nice enough, that quality standards were unwelcoming, that closing was rude, that using the tools in the way they are intended to produce a library of high quality question pair wasn't something they were interested to facilitate
"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.
> 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).
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.
> 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
It's called rubber duck debugging.
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.
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.
You can easily read posts before 1994, what you're saying definitely did not happen.
The world's first spammer was prosecuted.
[[citation needed]]
> 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
> 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.
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
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?
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.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
> 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.
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)
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.
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..
At the start moderators worked with you, after 2014 they worked against you.
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…
> It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.
That's exactly what it turned into, though.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320536/what-is-the-...
> 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.
> 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.
When Attwood and Spolsky founded it, they commented on it being because Experts Exchange was hostile to users. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656581
If StackOverflow is being considered hostile now it's big ... well, Google the three stages of enshittification I suppose.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> You are correct about that. But the fundamental design of the site facilitated the value extracting vermin.
For sure. The site was quite poorly designed for its stated goals.
> but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.
I cannot see fit to blame people for the actions of others they enabled, even deliberately let alone inadvertently.
Joel Spolsky used to work for Microsoft and Jeff Atwood was a Windows developer and they built StackOverflow on Windows + SQL Server. They commented that their audience is pragmatic developers who build for Windows because that's what their customers have to run software on.
When you look at experts from Microsoft world - the likes of Raymond Chen (Old New Thing), Jon Skeet (high profile Stackoverflow contributer in C#/.NET), Mark Russinovich (SysInternals creator), Dave Plummer (early Windows dev with YouTube channel now), they are/were employees and they present as polite and professional. Either they would not assume that everyone who doesn't know some obscure thing they know is an idiot, or they would keep that thought out of polite discussion.
Google AI answer says there are 35 million more developers today than in 2005, citing Evans Data Corp and Slashdata. There are tens of millions of developers around the planet writing internal desktop software, dashboards, reports, CRUD web pages, who have been in their jobs <3 years, and likely arrived to a language/framework/tooling/libraries they weren't familiar with.
I bet Spolsky naively expected that would be SO's userbase. Millions of company employees around the world asking each other politely "how to merge two lists in Python" or "what's the idiomatic way to read lines of text from a file in C#" or "what's this second parameter in this Win32 API call" and building an 'internal' company wiki of common questions and answers that people entering any environment/language/API/library commonly have.
Instead they opened to a world where flames and insults that would get someone written up or fired from a company are celebrated, particularly when directed at Microsoft users and ordinary company programmers. A world where people will not only assume that if someone doesn't know a programming fact they are an idiot, but will prefer insulting instead of saying nothing. A world where everyone is either an expert or an idiot with nothing in between.
It's a wonder SO worked as well as it did, for as long as it did.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
You're trying to build ever larger walls over the desire path. This is not a recipe for a successful website.
So?
Why should I give a damn about what you or others think is required for a "successful" website? Not everything is about profit or popularity or anything else. Some things are about making the thing that you set out to make.
the thing is, you are just making a pedantic asshole out of yourself
hope that helps :)
> 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.
> People were going to the site to get problems solved
They were incorrect to take the approach that they did.
Last year, my friend's cat died. Imagine if he had gone to Wikipedia to edit the page for Cat, inserting his question in the page text, seeking veterinary advice. I hope you would agree that this would be an abuse of the system which should certainly not be rewarded.
Similarly, on a Q&A site like Stack Overflow when you ask a question, it is simply expected that you think about other people, and what their needs will be.
Specifically: a question and answer are added primarily so that, indefinitely into the future, other people can find them with a search engine, read the question and confirm that it matches what they're trying to find out, and go to the answers. Think about what those users would want the question and answer to look like. Think about whether they would ever be able to find the question with reasonable search terms, and whether an answer to you could possibly also answer them. Think about whether they would expect Stack Overflow to house that question. This is, really, at the root of all the reasons for closing a question.
They came to get free help and couldn't even bother to put a little effort into their questions. What do they expect?
> 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).
Quick context for anyone who isn't aware, rep there doesn't work like karma here: your question getting upvoted is apparently now +10 (used to be +5), your answer getting upvoted is +10, either getting downvoted is -2 (and costs the downvoter, they get -1), plus a few others.
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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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There have been countless other places throughout the history of the public Internet which could be used in that way, and were explicitly designed for that. The "broad description" was mostly telephone game, but a good part of it came from making assumptions based on, as far as I can tell, nothing more than the existence of a submission form.
Where a community exists that is already organized around a common goal, following previous leadership, newcomers should not be permitted to decide that actually the community should/does work according to what they want. No matter how many of them there are.
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.
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.
Printing a string in python changed exactly twice. This is a 17 years old question about printing.
The top answer is still up to date
https://stackoverflow.com/q/493386/792066
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.
Which mod? Show the question
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.
> 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.
Sure. But there were countless times that people insisted to me that their question was not a duplicate and that "the solution there" would not work, having not tried it (spoiler: it would work).
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
> 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/
Lycos as well.
Spotting some stackoverflow mods in this subthread!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
I'm a mod on two SE sites. It definitely happens. And yes, (imo) they typically need help.
What kind of help? Mental help, or getting their server back online?
I meant mental, but now that you mention it, probably both
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.
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.
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.
People like me⁰, who I admit will also soon be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, will still refer to it for some time.
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[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!
Good luck. What are you thinking of moving on to?
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.
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.
> 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.
https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflow...
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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 :)
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's like how everyone hated dialup but still kept using it anyway until there was broadband.
https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L
Push factors and pull factors work together far more effectively than either do on their own.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
The same thing that happened to perl.
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.)
How so? I stopped hanging around in Perl-land around 2001 and it seemed friendly enough way back then. What happened to it?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
sort of like the hostility you're showing?
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...
> Already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer, if it’s in there somewhere.
> Indeed, you can’t even have a discussion. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow, not knowing what to expect, and try to conduct a discussion when they should be answering the question. The trouble here is that answers are always listed in order of votes, not chronologically, so the discussion instantly becomes scrambled when the votes start coming in.
> Instead, we have editing. Once you’ve earned a little bit of reputation in the system (and there are all kinds of ways to earn reputation), you can edit questions and answers.
> ...
> There are lots of good ways to edit things. You can improve spelling, grammar, and even copy edit any question or answer to make it better. After all, for the next 20 years, this question will be the canonical place on the web where programmers will come to find out about enlarging fizzbars without overwriting snibbits. Anything you can do to clarify, explain, or improve the question or the answer will be a public service. If there’s code in the answer, you can debug it, refactor it, or tweak it to make it better.
> You can also improve on the answers. If an answer is incomplete, expand on it. If an answer has a bug in it or is obsolete, you can edit it and fix it. Because Q&A in Stack Overflow are editable, you can safely link to a Stack Overflow permalink knowing it will always have a good answer. Stack Overflow won’t have the problem of other sites where obsolete or incorrect answers have high Google PageRank simply because they’ve been on the Internet for so long. If someone finds a security bug in an answer, it can be fixed… it won’t keep coming up in Google’s results for years and years poisoning future code.
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!
Jeff Atwood
I didn't know this was a thing until now. This is so stupid
The problem was that you would get points as an editor, so people would just rewrite everything even when it didn't it.
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
https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/37205153
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
I used to spend time on these sites answering questions. It was actually fun and educational.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
TikTok, but you'll have to suffer the video format
I stopped when they killed old.reddit.com for non-logged-in users.
They're also blocking you from using even the new site on mobile.
There's a FFox plugin to enforce old.reddit.com's old CSS.
The updated Firefox plugin still works.
Yea, but I just don't feel like going to a site that doesn't want me as a visitor. F them.
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.
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.
> 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?
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).
I have upgraded my reddit experience to no account and not browsing the comments.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You will catch political sub bans for posting in and/or joining all sorts of other political subs, no matter what you actually said. I got more than a few from the exact opposite end of the political spectrum. All the political subs have been bought and paid for by propagandists for atleast a decade now. And having to either catching more random bans or having to self-censor myself, I left.
Hell there were even multiple political sub moderator purges that were right out in the open. Entire mod lists changing over night in multiple subs even way back.
It was r/AdviceAnimals two years ago
There was a major left / liberal takeover of most of the subs when Trump was being re elected
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
It’s censorship
the sub that censors the rest of the reddit userbase gets censored by the rest of the reddit userbase, color me surprised
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.
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1rllqrw/ban_bot_po...
There is a policy of ideological gatekeeping by certain Moderators.
> 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
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.
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.
Victoria (I think)!
Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.
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.
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.
> 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.
I am so deeply banned from Reddit it feels retaliatory in some way.
Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.
I am very into powerlifting and bodybuilding. So, I've been religiously following Mr Olympia (once a year event which is the largest bodybuilding show in the world). Last year, on Mr Olympia day, there was no thread about the Mr Olympia. Similar thing happened this year:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bodybuilding/comments/1wqgday/do_we...
How does the bodybuilding sub not have tons of threads about the biggest bodybuilding competition? I don't know but I think it's because people gave up on posting due to abusive mods:
Last year, I made a post on that sub with comparison pics of the top 3 competitors. That post got deleted by the mods saying it was a duplicate of existing post (???). I tried messaging the mods that there was no duplicate and they first gave me attitude and then silenced me from messaging them.
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
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.
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.
I am totally addicted to reddit. Good instincts - stay off it hahaha
There's Old Reddit Redirect extension in Firefox, but honestly, you're not missing out on anything there anyway.
doesnt work as of today
It worked fine earlier this week, but I guess that's that for Reddit. It had been a (not so) good run.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Somehow over the last couple of years it feels more and more like screaming into a void. It doesn't feel like I'm interacting with people anymore. There are no reactions anymore...
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.
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.
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.
and hopefully soon we have decentralized protocols as the standard when we think about user spaces. amen
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.
We had it. Reddit should have just been NNTP. You can't "monetize" NNTP though.
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.
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?
all hidden accounts posting political propaganda day and night in the name of privacy was enough to turn me off
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...
[dead]
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.
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!
The old adage comes to mind that you don't get answers on the internet by asking questions but by posting the wrong answer.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Codegolf still exists, it's just not part of stackoverflow.
> 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.
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).
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).
The problem was it was a discussion forum. They just didn't like that.
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.
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.
ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.
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:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...
> 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.
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.
it does not
[flagged]
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.
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?
But it charges you for both the question and answer.
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.
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 :)
Related discussion What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph (483 points, 3 months ago, 595 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949
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.
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.
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-... ).
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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.
SO has been useless for years now, but the other Stack Exchanges can be interesting, they deserve more spotlight.
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.
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.
SO was great. A well formed question would get an answer within an hour or two. I asked so many questions I got to top 5% without even answering much myself. It was my early LLM, and it also taught me how to ask questions really well, and that helps a lot with prompting.
Now I get my answer in minutes.
Someone took the parts of the original mousetrap and built a new mousetrap from it.
Time will tell how well those parts hold up as things change without a good source of data.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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?
Who decides which person is correct?
To participate you must also install surveillance software on your machine that can confirm the positive or negative label of applying the result. Of course.
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.
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.
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.
YC is a capitalist machine. Why are you surprised?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> a good choice
For who?
For whatever requirements are specified by gwerbin.
FWIW, StackOverflow posts are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA v4.0, same as Wikipedia.
With or without training they would have gotten eaten.
There is a difference between dying tomorrow and dying in 5 years.
Why?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is not correct. You got points for doing reviews, no matter which option you chose in the review (except for skipping it obviously).
I do seem to be misremembering. I see there's the Custodian, Reviewer, and Steward badges after all.
I wonder if there was a quirk with the way these worked? Or were these introduced later along the way? I do remember taking legit issue with this all that time ago.
Maybe I was mad at nothing :)
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.
[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...
These days everyone just asks Claude or ChatGPT, sure. But what they don't tell is that Claude and ChatGPT just ask Jon Skeet.
Considering coding LLMs are heavily dependent on SO posts, that's probably not much of an exaggeration!
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.
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.
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
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
Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.
I put it in a quick chart to make the rise and fall more visual. https://imgur.com/a/046CfZ2
How is that different from clicking the Graph tab on that page? https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1925371/n...
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.
Fair.
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)"
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.
I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant regardless of how many questions are asked, because most of asked questions were irrelevant anyway, it was noise, new users who didn't even perform a simple search before asking, closed rapidly.
I used it 99% for searching, reading, 0.9% answering, 0.1% asking.
What would be relevant is how many answers are actually read today. It must have dropped a lot, but still, when people come, they're probably looking for something different than what LLMs provide.
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.
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).
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.)
wild how many people in the comments are saying "it wasn't ai it was the toxicity/moderation." like saying "cars didn't outperform horses; horses just misbehaved too much."
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".
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
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.
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.
I do not miss StackOverflow. It wasn’t a community, it was a toxic environment that rewarded asshole behavior.
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.
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.
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?
[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Stack%20overflow&date=to...
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?
Summer vacation, orgs choose what tech you use, but when you can choose yourself it's easier to find answers from the community
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.
I have used SO daily, for over a decade, almost every single day. I never saw anything hostile there. I guess this is something that you only see when you are trying to write answers or replies.
For someone who just wants to quickly scroll to the green checkmark and get shit done, that site was absolute god-tier.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
And of those, I bet 997 are closed as duplicates by admins who didn't understand the question asked.
I rarely wish for the downfall of things, but StackOverflow is one of those exceptions. Good riddance.
Why's that? Were the moderators mean to you?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They get that many?!
SO’s demise was two conflicting user bases who wanted mutually exclusive things: the questioners a space to learn and grow without judgement, and the point collectors a glorified FAQ for programming and social media network.
The operators of the platform never grappled with the reality that these two users want opposing things, and LLMs were just the final nail in the coffin.
I am a first-year CS student. Stack Overflow really helped me during my early days. But now none of my friends nor coursemate use or even know about it.... Everyone just defaults to ChatGPT and Claude for debugging and assignments. In fact, even newcommers are adviced to ask LLMs first rather than searching through pre-existing discussions or reading official documentations.
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
https://techstackups.com/articles/stackoverflow-graphs-prove...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The silver lining, if any, is Jeff Atwood made FU levels of money (AFAIK) from it, ultimately, and now he's become a philanthropist.
Still over $100M in revenue, now mainly from AI and Enterprise customers.
https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm just feeling bad just because stackoverflow was my coding bible (back when AI did not exist)
Getting second hand sadness
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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised at that many. Claude doesn't give me attitude when I have a question.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Woooow. That makes me feel... old.
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.
I do have a webarchive of StackOverflow on some backup disc somewhere - just in case :D
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.
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..
The graph doesn't include Stack Overflow for Agents, which is a real product that exists for some reason.
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.
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.
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
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.
It is sad because it was such a well designed community. But its lessons live on.
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.
How are you going to run a community at scale without delegation? The only alternative is to let the computer do it.
HN does a pretty good job of it. Turns out paid employees seem to be more incentivized to keep people coming back.
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.
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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.
Everything is cyclical. Maybe they come back when AI gets heavily regulated or pay gated. Who knows
does well designed mean rotten and pointlessly hostile
StackOverflow helped build the LLMs that replaced it.
They should just make all of their answers incorrect, poison llms, return everybody back to programming again.
it was as well designed as the nipples on a man
It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated. Just like a bronze sword.
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).
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.
I am actually surprised that it survived for so long in AI era, but it's time for them admit it and we can drop a nostalgic tear about it :(
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.
Questions and answers are locked inside discord, slacks and LLM chats
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.
Not uncommon - kuro5hin.org also killed by its own community just because they could.
edit - fixed .com to .org
Closing questions is literally the opposite of vandalism.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
Mods are finally happy.
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.
95% of them closed immediately as duplicate or off topic?
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?
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.
for one thing those guys proved how far you could go on commodity hardware and a little bit of nice engineering.
Incredible that SO sold for $1.8B at one point.
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.
The current way too write software is too just ask the ai do it. StackOverflow will be soon mostly irrelevant completely.
StackOverflow bans questions about AI first situations as irrelevant :(
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.
He's gone, probably fully retired. He doesn't even attend conferences anymore.
Adding to the nostalgia: who will teach people that (X)HTML cannot be parsed with a Regex once SO is gone?
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.
I'm gonna flag this post as duplicate.
And all get closed as duplicates, right?
What will LLMs be trained on when SO does no longer exist (or is an archive of increasingly obsolete answers)?
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.
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.
Well deserved, site full of toxic users who will do anything but answer your question, LLM FTW.
It's because it has already answered everything and anything new would be a duplicate
They have also launched agents.stackoverflow.com - a place for agents to interact.
I remember the day I ask my first question about C, instead of an answer I got -1.
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.
Good, that site sucked after 2015 pretty much. Museum of powertripping mods.
Half the time the communities were helpful, half the time they were hostile.
It was a fascinating social experiment. I'm glad it's over.
And like 950 of them were probably closed for being "off-topic".
The communities were helpful half the time and hostile the other half.
StackOverflow would be a super hard business to sustain today.
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.
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.
I promise you nobody felt entitled to have an asshole respond to their question. Probably they'd rather it go left unattended.
"XY problem" meme where "insufferable, pedantic forum culture where posters refuse to answer the actual question" is a thing for a reason.
Plus the closing out of questions because that were "already asked" but not really, or the answers were ancient and out-of-date but it was impossible to boost the correct, modern answer high enough to compete with the 500pt bogus answer..
The problem wasn't the people asking questions, it was STACK OVERFLOW getting people on the internet to answer questions for free and completely failing to establish and enforce community standards and culture.
They did, in fact, establish and enforce community standards and culture.
They just weren't the standards and culture that you feel they ought to have been.
Communities are supposed to get to decide these things for themselves, not conform to the expectation of outsiders as a condition of them considering the community legitimate.
Stackoverflow had such a toxic and beginner-unfriendly community...
Did it really? It would be nice to see some concrete examples.
StackOverflow moderation was hijacked by army of Sheldon Coopers
It is despicable that large language models have depleted the content of Stack Overflow. Even before the advent of LLMs, online communities were plagued by individuals who would pointlessly complain and downvote questions or answers, as well as those who would post low-quality content solely to farm points, sometimes even using sock-puppet accounts to inflate their own metrics. It was great when they offered prizes and similar incentives, but they were essentially seeking free labor; once they established themselves as a primary reference, they discontinued the practice, which is understandable.
The only thing community driven I used nowadays is for cooking because LLM recipes are always the most generic thing. (Though I use LLMs for converting metrics or question if something goes wrong)
Give it time. The bubble will blow and it'll be back.
When pigs fly, of course
Selling it the Prosus killed it, they don’t have a clue about it and how it should work.
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.
My list of grievances include:
Same quality of questions started being rudely rejected around 2016
You had to know the answer in order to make the question
I spent time writing an answer, just to find the question was unfairly closed
Some questions were closed even when they matched the quality of most upvoted questions. When I faced the moderators about this I got shitt excuses.
In economics, questions were turned into political activism.
In the end I was convinced the site was intentionally destroyed.
I tried using it and my question never got answered :(
I'm closing this down as duplicate and pointless.
Is this trend true for all other SE sites as well?
"Stackoverflow for agents" still not there?
"This problem was already solved: https://news.ycombinator.com/404"
StackOverflow had the most toxic community didn't it?
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.
Their not-welcoming community has some guilty too.
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.
And here's why: https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-ove...
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.
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.
Will reddit have the same fate?
I don’t think they’re gonna be long for the world
I blame that one Jon Skeet dude for answering everything.
Is it employees keeping it alive? :D
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.
> So, duping what? Nope, not permitted to know that.
Every duplicate closure comes with a link to the other question.
> leaving my karma negative. So basically, can't do anything.
Your reputation on SO can’t go below the initial value of 1.
I suspect the rest of your anecdote has about the same level of competence/accuracy.
Perhaps reddit is next in the list?
I am amazed it's still that high
Honestly they should build for AI users. AI asking questions, AI answering, AI upvoting. Like a "good/not evil" version of the AI agent coordination message board
https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/10/announcing-stack-overf...
https://agents.stackoverflow.com/all
did stackoverflow get any LLM money or were they just ingested and destroyed?
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.
Duplicated, closed.
they really can go fall into black hole with Adobe
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.
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.
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
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
Mods must be on cloud 9. Finally, serenity
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.
Brutal.
it's time to pivot.
"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"
We're now building some of the same superiority complex into commercial AIs to effectively refuse any wrongspeak.
lowk they were all bullies, not too sad to see it go
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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.
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I never used stack overflow.
Preferred books at the library.
Quora took it over. Better layout, better moderation, better answers.