Hacker News

StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month (data.stackexchange.com)

419 pointsby babelfish10 hours ago344 comments

kstrauser 7 hours ago

OK, let's get this out of the way:

1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.

2. AI clearly finished the job.

I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.

SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It dropped off a cliff when, 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow. Even then, it looks like 4 months of ChatGPT speed-ran about a year's worth of traffic decline, and then the slope went back to approximately the pre-AI angle.

I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L

tuveson 6 hours ago

I like that you can see a Covid bump in there and then it immediately craters lol

kstrauser 6 hours ago

Right? It's not a very subtle spike, is it? Even then, if you erased the bump, the graph is pretty close to a straight downward-sloped line from 2016 to late 2022.

It's kind of sad: I bet there was some excitement around the SO office. Is this it? Are we on the way back? Have people remembered that we're here and now they're returning? Alas, no, they weren't, and they weren't. That must've been rough.

dpark 6 hours ago

“Has our strategy of being openly hostile to anyone asking questions finally resulted in the increase in questions we always dreamed of? Did our long term bet on alienating the community finally pay off?”

wildzzz 5 hours ago

That's probably why the number of new questions asked dropped off. Once someone has asked "how to fizzbuzz in python", that's pretty much it. You'll get the textbook answer, the "why are you fizzbuzzing in the first place" answers, and then an answer a couple years later using the new python fizzbuzz built in library. You have a massive compendium of questions and answers and for most people, that's good enough. I don't think that stack overflow was necessarily less popular in visitors pre-LLMs but they certainly killed it off quick.

jmyeet 5 hours ago

This was all too common across tech. I know of many products at the time that, say, had their usage quadruple in Covid (from a very large baseline) and nobody in leadership seemed to ask the question "is this permanent or just an artifact of people being stuck at home?" Clearly the answer was "no".

zahlman 4 hours ago

Yeah, the newcomers asked worse questions than average. There was a huge flood of people presenting like they thought they had a difficult question about how neural network simulations work, but actually had code full of multiple elementary errors (completely unrelated to the domain, just learning the programming language kinda stuff) and no apparent willingness to read error messages even to the extent of "it says TypeError, I guess that must mean something is wrong with a type".

tayo42 5 hours ago

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.

jamesfinlayson 5 hours ago

I was using StackOverflow pretty heavily in that time. I was doing PHP, Java and Groovy at the time, and PHP's documentation is pretty good. JavaDoc generated from source not so much...

geraneum 3 hours ago

Maybe they visited the website and the existing questions were enough? These stats seems to be questions asked. Maybe that’s the reason.

justauserid 5 hours ago

I had stopped going to it quite some time ago.

1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).

2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.

3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.

This was before LLMs or COVID.

bulbar 4 hours ago

> 1. It was hard to ask any question.

Totally. There were so many safeguards in place, for a newcomer it is quite hard to contribute.

They also never understood a core principle of such platforms. The noise is not noise but what carries such platforms. They even had it quantified, some of their most upvoted questions are off topic because they are opinion based. Bad and good questions (and answers) come hand in hand.

Well, they were the backbone of professional IT/SWE, so of course they did a lot of things right obviously.

xtracto 4 hours ago

I hated asking Qs in SO, it felt terribly snobby. However, I used it a lot to search for answers. The alternatives were crap.

First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.

The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.

Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].

zahlman 4 hours ago

> The alternatives were crap. … Asking was still pretty terrible.

The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about. Asking was terrible because otherwise you get the other forms of crap. That's what everyone knew going in and it was a common observation that specifically motivated creating the site in the first place.

lexandstuff 21 minutes ago

I remember Experts Exchange somehow managed to have every question one could ever ask, but no actual answers - even with a paid account.

I was glad when S.O. put an end to them.

locknitpicker 3 hours ago

> It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe.

I feel this is the critical bit. People are quick to dismiss this problem as a moderation problem, but I don't agree. I believe it was a query problem, and the absolute lack of support for tying both questions and answers to specific software versions, or range of software versions. So you'd see answers from ages ago marked as the right answer to a question, even though it was using some deprecated version.

Questions on how to address the same issue when new versions were out where closed as duplicates because literally the question was asked before and answered as well. But the answer nowadays would not be applicable.

Then to sidestep this problem you see the phenomenon where ancient questions end up having multiple answers, with newer answers even out voting the accepted answer. And even those would be deprecated as well.

So SO was designed as a system where a single question can only possibly have a single accepted answer. Ever. And anyone asking similar questions would by design be routed to he question that was asked and answered. But the system was designed over the concept of static information and static notion of truth. Which the world definitely doesn't follow.

10111001 2 hours ago

> 1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).

> ...

> 3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.

Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there. And whenever I did I had to be super-defensive from the get go. It was either people trying their hardest to close it, or "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question).

I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions, but in retrospect they took the wrong approach. They should have let people ask and answer questions freely, even dups. Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.

alex7o 2 hours ago

Almost feels like training an llm on that caused it to ignore certain constraints that make a problem hard and solve an easier version of you problem instead.

Also a lot of communities do their own QA on discord where they can modererate themselves.

somenameforme an hour ago

Yip, LLMs were the executioners but SO had already long since put itself on death row for exactly what you're mentioning. I think sites like FlipCode were in many ways the spiritual predecessor of SO, and the questions were more of a part of the community rather than the definition of it. People need to feel free to communicate for something like SO to be successful, and they'd turned themselves into an absurdly user-hostile site where it seemed like people were competing against each other to see who could find a reason to close questions, rather than looking for a reason to answer them.

The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.

It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.

vintermann 24 minutes ago

A big part of the picture was that they'd gamified the heck out of it. Community moderation can work, somewhat, but I've never seen gamified moderation work. Gamification is the big killer of collaborative communities.

phatskat an hour ago

As someone who spent a lot of time answering and moderating (not full-on moderating, but editing, voting, reviewing first questions, etc) in the WordPress SE, it was jarring sometimes to see the attitudes that the real mods brought in.

However, when you spend an hour looking at low-quality answers, questions that have he's been asked like ten times already, etc, I get the sense that the people doing the moderating were trying their best - some of them, at least. No doubt there are mods there who just enjoy the miniature lower trip a la overzealous reddit mods, and I can't imagine the stress of trying to handle the amount of traffic some of the exchanges got.

kamaal an hour ago

>>Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there.

Have seen this every where, even in case of people. If people are dreading to even approach you for something, its over for you. You can't get just the good things to pass through a filter. No such thing exists.

In many ways you need to be open for everything(apart from outright wrong things, like abuse) including stupid things, to get the good things.

mschuster91 2 hours ago

> I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.

For the Javascript ecosystem in particular... it also massively helped that projects finally started to work on their documentation. The churn rate was insane and documentation or working examples took an afterthought for far too long, that is what drove so many people to SO in the first place.

shevy-java an hour ago

Well, 2) is often a honey pot trap since some projects have no documentation, or only so little documentation that spending time trying to figure out a project is a waste of time. There is a reason why SO got important in the first place. Horrible documentation was one reason.

NetOpWibby an hour ago

+1 to the outright hostility.

Good riddance.

eithed an hour ago

The most hilarious moment for me was when my question that was 5y old was closed as a duplicate of one that was couple of months old. I provided an answer on how to work around the issue; the new question didn't have an answer, but it had more points. From what I read the original issue was still there. At that point I was rarely visiting the website either way, but the absurdity of the situation was staggering.

tacone 36 minutes ago

I think they tried too hard to structure things and keep everything clean, which becomes difficult or even outright deleterious when the numbers are large.

They should have accepted a certain level of mess instead of being so strict. After all, even good popular answers become outdated sooner or later.

DuncanCoffee 16 minutes ago

> It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).

I used to end the questions with "It's not a duplicate of AAA because BBB is different. It's also not a duplicate of CCC because DDD". It DID force you to check for already answered questions, but the automated hints while you typed was often good enough to spot duplicates.

In the end, imagine wasting half an hour to post a four-lines issue... No thanks.

mort96 6 minutes ago

My biggest issue with SO was that all the answers were outdated. In the beginning, if you found an answer on SO it'd be still relevant because SO was relatively new. But then as it got older, so did the answers to questions.

The ridiculously strict "no duplicates" policy guaranteed that the old, increasingly outdated answers would remain the only answers forever. In retrospect, I believe a site like SO wants to encourage some rate of duplicates, to ensure that answers remain fresh.

Just yesterday I looked something up on SO and the answer was 14 years old. Would've been a pretty relevant answer back when I first started using SO, but not now.

They really killed themselves through strict moderation. It's incredibly sad, it was a good resource while it lasted.

baud147258 3 minutes ago

[delayed]

Strilanc 4 hours ago

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:

    DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'
    SELECT
      site = [$site_name$],
      month = DATEADD(MONTH, DATEDIFF(MONTH, 0, CreationDate), 0),
      questions = COUNT(*)
    FROM PostsWithDeleted
    WHERE PostTypeId = 1
    GROUP BY DATEADD(MONTH, DATEDIFF(MONTH, 0, CreationDate), 0)
    ';

    EXEC dbo.sede_ineachdb
      @SQLCommand = @sql,
      @IncludeMainSites = 1,
      @IncludeMetaSites = 0,
      @IncludeMainMeta = 0;

anticensor 4 hours ago

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...

btilly 3 hours ago

I contend that shitty moderation was why it flatlined.

I enjoyed answering algorithm questions. Unfortunately, every so often, people who weren't into algorithms would show up. And somehow summoned each other. To close good questions.

It was clear that they didn't understand the topic. They couldn't recognize what a good question, or a good answer, was. I wound up going away, coming back every few years, go until my next bad experience, and leave again.

Each time, the population answering those questions was smaller.

I believe that a lot of good people left like I did. Then just didn't come back.

smsm42 3 hours ago

In my experience, SO became useless many years before AI showed up on the horizon. I stopped actively participating about 2019 and about 2022 gave up on it completely.

neya 3 hours ago

> 1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.

This was single-handedly the work of arrogant self-righteous moderators who would close random useful questions as not useful just to prove they were doing something. A lot of us long timers got annoyed at selective enforcement of rules and never looked back. It's sad because it was actually a fun place to hangout. Too much moderation always kills the vibe.

cubefox 2 hours ago

> SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017.

I'm fairly certain this early decline came from the fact that many common questions had already been answered, and therefore were available via Google, so hardly anybody asked them again. In the beginning there were just way more unanswered questions.

LaurensBER 2 hours ago

The issue was that Stack overflow never was enjoyable to use.

Asking questions was difficult and any difficulty questions I might ask would not get a response anyway.

Answering questions was a gamble, sometimes you would get rewarded, most of the time you would not.

jonwinstanley 42 minutes ago

Right when it first started it was so much better than what had been there before, and the way they assigned points was designed to encourage lots of people to chip in with answers.

Asking questions did become painful later on. But it was the default site to choose whenever you googled a programming issue for years after.

shevy-java an hour ago

Yes that was my impression too. SO already died before the rise of AI.

nomilk an hour ago

A downward trend in the number of questions doesn't imply the site was in decline, since there's only so many questions you can ask about a given technology, so would-be question askers find the answer via search engine rather than having to create a new question on the site.

Tangental, but I tried plotting number of questions by month including deleted questions. It shows similar trends to questions by month (so nothing particularly interesting): https://imgur.com/a/NLLB3OK

Query: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1969...

nitbard an hour ago

No surprises here. However I recently tried to register global account on Stack Exchange network, just to get to some organic conversations and meet people... and I couldn't. Gateway errors, "try again in a few minutes", etc. I did quick research and it seems that I'm not the only one. Maybe I just run into one of the bad days.

saonnet 32 minutes ago

Often overlooked but Discord(and similar communities) are also a big reason why people no longer ask ques. on SO.

hollowonepl 20 minutes ago

Agreed, I found SO and Quora and similar sites with general or specific question/answer based communities weak long before AI.

AI replaced Google Search in many ways more directly on arrival than those.

SO to me was weak as it had outdated answers to outdated questions (yet related to search queries) that nobody maintained well.. and the community more focused on patronising to push their point of view than being essentially objective in many ways.

that was a total killer to me and I started preferring to come back to books, manuals and researching topics myself than short cuts like SO.. and that research is heavily optimised during AI/LLM era, yes, but that's just one of many nails to SO's coffin.

foofoo4u an hour ago

I stopped posting questions onto Stack Overflow after experiencing two user-hostile practices of theirs.

The first was how they would repeatedly mark my posts as dupes when in reality they weren't. Sure, my questions had large overlaps with existing questions. But mine had sufficient nuanced differences that my questions warranted being open.

The second is how they would repeatedly rewrite my posts. And extensively so! It no longer sounded like it was written by me. And any sense of warmth or humanity of my posts were entirely stripped away! So sterile and cold. I have to tell you, having a post that you spend time composing, only to have some moderators a-hole rewrite it is a very negative feeling. And to see a message posted publicly to the web with my username next to it, as though I'm the one that wrote it, is wrong.

Stack Overflow brought their death to themselves.

cowlevel 9 hours ago

You're underselling it. It's less than in their second month of existence - and that has been true every month for the past year. For the last few months it's also lower than their first month. Stack Overflow, effectively, no longer exists.

And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.

NichoPaolucci 9 hours ago

Well, the community never made it a very welcoming place... But, I think a part of this is that it's just faster to throw a Q into ChatGPT. There's no waiting for a response, a major bonus is the non-hostility + willingness to respond to 'stupid' questions.

p-e-w 9 hours ago

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

Uh, no.

StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

avereveard 8 hours ago

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.

raincole 8 hours ago

It doesn't matter. Even if it were the most friendly community ever, as long as their core value were the same - answering programming questions that with clear answers - it would have been replaced by today's AI completely. It's irrelevant today how bad GPT3.5 once was.

johnfn 8 hours ago

I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI, which it unquestionably was. GPT-3.5 was able to answer some small chunk of my programming questions (like 10-20% of them), which seems clearly reflected in the graph.

dspillett 8 hours ago

> I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI

A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)

kstrauser 8 hours ago

Traffic started dropping precipitously in summer ‘20. There were no widely known LLMs then, let alone ones used outside labs. ChatGPT went public in November 2022, well into the decline.

While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.

Jtarii 8 hours ago

So you think there is a viable business around technical Q&A even with GPT 6 Astra or whatever existing?

LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.

Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.

kstrauser 8 hours ago

If there is, I’m not creative enough to imagine it. I don’t contend that SO could survive AI. You’ll never hear me arguing that. However, that graph shows that it was already dying before AI became widely available. AI 100% certainly kicked it while it was down. It just cannot have been the cause of the downturn because the downturn was in full swing before AI could’ve had any effect at all.

cwnyth 8 hours ago

I think you're forgetting of a certain major event that happened in 2020. An event that initially caused a lot of free time around the world and kept people indoors...

kstrauser 8 hours ago

You mean, the kind that made them more likely to sit around asking and answering questions because there wasn't anything else do to, and which caused an initial spike of traffic?

cwnyth 7 hours ago

I think it's pretty clear that was the cause of the 2020 spike and fall. Once people started going back to work (summer 2020 for us), questions dropped back to pre-2020 levels.

kstrauser 7 hours ago

Sure, but it rapidly fell before its pre-COVID levels and then kept dropping rapidly for the next year or so, and then AI really kicked in.

bsder 8 hours ago

Agreed.

StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".

Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.

After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.

THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.

autoexec 4 hours ago

I wonder if AI didn't end up having an impact in other ways. Did they get more aggressive about captchas or bot detection around the time when LLMs came out annoying or keeping out legit users? I imagine they were saw a lot of bot traffic in the years before AI chatbots went public and that probably continues even now that it's a ghost town.

cowlevel 8 hours ago

It's like how everyone hated dialup but still kept using it anyway until there was broadband.

dspillett 8 hours ago

People like me⁰, who I admit will also soon be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, will still refer to it for some time.

--------

[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay

[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!

theteapot 8 hours ago

Good luck. What are you thinking of moving on to?

Unai 8 hours ago

People used to add "reddit" at the end of their search queries, and now I'm sure many of those people just ask a bot. But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.

So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.

Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.

socalgal2 8 hours ago

To me your description is mythical reddit. Actual Reddit is every bit as hostile as stack overflow and unlike stack overflow, old questions can not be updated with new answers when existing answers get out of date.

cwnyth 8 hours ago

I think Reddit is even worse. You could get banned from SO for using pretty foul insults, but in some places of Reddit, it's business as usual.

mahboi 7 hours ago

Reddit is full of rage and also people getting banned for no reason. But crashing out on StackOverflow, now that's when someone needs help.

cwnyth 5 hours ago

I'm a mod on two SE sites. It definitely happens. And yes, (imo) they typically need help.

8n4vidtmkvmk 3 hours ago

What kind of help? Mental help, or getting their server back online?

mahboi 2 hours ago

I meant mental, but now that you mention it, probably both

cwnyth 8 hours ago

But SO was never a place to just talk to others. It's not a general purpose discussion site. It could have been a friendly place, but users still would have left, because it's just far easier to get an immediate answer from AI, and those answers have only been getting better.

Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.

cowlevel 8 hours ago

In the early years it very much was. You could ask just about anything that was programming related and had a question mark. In the middle times of SO a lot of those became "locked for historical preservation" and new ones weren't allowed.

zahlman 3 hours ago

It wasn't supposed to be like that. Atwood and Spolsky had an insufficiently refined concept of what makes a good question, that was overly tied to "keeping the riff-raff out" and insufficiently based in having a searchable reference that covers a full spectrum of "difficulty levels" but still having every question clearly posed and properly scoped.

Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.

It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2 hours ago

And yet it was best when it was before everyone really developed an "understanding of how questions for a Q&A site were supposed to look like". That's the time everyone in this thread is looking back at fondly.

zahlman 3 hours ago

> But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.

I hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.

But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was specifically intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to avoid chatter because that gets in the way of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.

grg0 7 hours ago

It is not obsolete insofar as it is a good source of Q/A material, which is useful to both humans (directly or indirectly) and bots. The only part of it that is obsolete is the search/query part. If the AI companies had an ounce of decency, they would see no problem injecting money into the platform to continue seeding that Q/A material which they have directly profited from. But investing in a commons is not on the playbook for vulture capitalism.

MBCook 7 hours ago

Because AI removed what little value it had.

AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.

People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.

If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.

AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.

reaperducer 6 hours ago

Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.

kelnos 5 hours ago

SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.

listenallyall 3 hours ago

the obvious reasoning is that the vast majority of common questions were already asked, and then still many, many uncommon questions, until the only things that hadn't been asked were very, very niche. It's the same reason complaints about mods marking lots of questions as duplicates didn't really pick up momentum until the mid/late 2010's.

scubadude 4 hours ago

SO responses were peer-reviewed code snippets or fixes. If something had 800 upvotes and comments outlining pros and cons, that is useful information. The bot gives you whatever it wants to give you, it could be information from a scientific paper or late night TV infomercial.

lossolo 8 hours ago

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.

nullbio 7 hours ago

Yeah, it has nothing to do with 'hostile attitude'. There's just no reason to use StackOverflow when I can use a chatbot that gives me infinite StackOverflow answers for any conceivable problem I have, within seconds.

Espressosaurus 7 hours ago

They were on their downswing but LLMs put a gun to their head and executed them. I don't use Stack Overflow anymore, just an LLM and cppreference.

Damn sad how quickly that habit changed for me.

Never asked a question, but got some good info from people who had asked questions and the people who replied.

Pet_Ant 8 hours ago

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.

It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.

It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.

I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.

ChrisMarshallNY 8 hours ago

> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.

Huh. I had the opposite experience. The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.

I stopped bothering, after a number of questions went answered only by me (after I found the solution on my own).

It did reduce the insults, but that seemed to be the only gain that I got, for carefully articulating my questions.

LLMs aren't perfect, but they don't imply that I'm being lazy, for not already having the answer, and they do give me an answer, instantly (and, like SO, the answer is not always the best one).

schneems 8 hours ago

I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.

I have engaged with some younger devs who don't even bother turning the thought into a question. They make statements and expect you to do the work of inferring the question. Which I feel like they got from chatbots since it's faster and LLMs don't care if you make them jump through hoops.

> The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.

There is a sweet spot of providing just enough detail but not too much in asking a good question. And even the best only “bat 300”. I've posted answers to my own questions plenty of times when I got no response.

I hear you on the hostility. Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow. The first time I tried asking a question on IRC I got mocked so bad I logged out and never tried again. Most forums were like that.

I gravitated to Ruby back then because it was one of the only forums people would be patient and empathetic with me.

ChrisMarshallNY 8 hours ago

I have heard great things about the Ruby community. I don't use the language, myself, so I wouldn't know from experience.

Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.

Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.

cowlevel 8 hours ago

I suspect that prior to Eternal September you could connect an online identity to a real life one. You might not know the guy but you knew it was J.Smith at MIT and if he acted bad enough your admin could ask their admin which idiot gave him a computer terminal.

noosphr 5 hours ago

You can easily read posts before 1994, what you're saying definitely did not happen.

usedtobegood 6 hours ago

> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting

I have repeatedly had this experience in trying to craft The perfect question for a consultant who was also a mathematics professor, in finding the essence of the question the answer becomes clear and I never even have to send the email

zahlman 4 hours ago

> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.

Yes, that was part of the point. I hope you posted anyway (after checking for a duplicate, and assuming the underlying problem wasn't just a typo), and provided your own answer for it. That is an explicit part of how the site is supposed to work (but an incredibly poorly communicated one).

> Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow.

SO actually considerably improved on that axis over time. It's just that tons of people erroneously think that being expected to meet certain standards in asking a question (in particular, doing the necessary debugging work to locate and reproduce a problem, or the necessary contemplation to properly specify a task), is the same thing as yelling at people for not knowing answers to easy things. That goes both ways: people get upset when their question is closed, and people think they're helping by excluding easily answered questions because they're easily answered. In reality, the main problem is questions that are easy but complex, i.e. which really break down into multiple separate easy questions or require digging through a code dump to find a trivial error.

cowlevel 8 hours ago

I found that Stack Overflow, like Reddit, rewired my perception of what "good" is and made me view bad things as good.

60000 rep btw

DANmode 6 hours ago

Was it a better question for skimming and quickly replying,

or just a great form of your question if someone genuinely wanted to answer it, not pump their score, dopamine etc?

RHSeeger 8 hours ago

> 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.

Gigachad 8 hours ago

You'd also get people downvoting completely valid rule abiding questions, and the site heavily punished being downvoted. So you'd get hit with a stick repeatedly for trying to engage with the site, it's no wonder everyone left as soon as there was an alternative.

mm321 7 hours ago

My experience with the late SO was, that the original question used to be ten years old and filled with responses that were no longer relevant to the current state.

What amazes me is that an LLM can actually make sense out of all this crappy training data and often produces meaningful answers. (maybe that's a sign that we already have AGI)

eYrKEC2 8 hours ago

It certainly didn't start that way, having been there and followed them on their podcast -- pre-launch. It became more and more hostile. It was initially positive, even when questions didn't fit the mold. Then successive waves of pedantic moderators chased out the altruism. There never seemed to be a suitable mechanism to slap down the haters, then years pass, you need to ask a question, and find out that it is causing you anxiety to just post a question..

slicktux 7 hours ago

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…

Aurornis 6 hours ago

> That’s why it succeeded.

The moderation style in the latter years was very different than at the beginning.

It was always heavily moderated, but after some point it felt like there were more layers of moderation and rules and cultural expectations added every year.

Moderation went from being a background cleanup operation that quietly kept the site in line to being the primary thing I expected to see when following a StackOverflow link from Google. In the later years it felt like every other StackOverflow search result was going to be the question I had followed by a moderator shutting it down for some reason before anyone could answer.

The moderation wore me out and I wasn’t even posting questions, just trying to find answers!

Skunkleton 4 hours ago

I asked a question about 15 years ago. Lots of responses/engagement and a good answer. I just got an email a month or so back telling me that question got closed as a dupe. I checked...it was not even close to a dupe. Exhausting.

zahlman 4 hours ago

Please show me the link.

zahlman 4 hours ago

> It was always heavily moderated

No, it absolutely very much was not. Even granting that you mean actions of the community (what we call "curation") rather than the small and extremely strained moderation team, way too much stuff historically got through, while people yelled at the OP in the comments and argued over downvotes instead of taking the action that actually matters: voting or flagging to close the question. Worse, people would post answers that acknowledge the problem with the question and asking OP in the answer text to fix things.

I know because I was part of that mess back then, because I didn't know better. That, in turn, was mostly because the entire set of ground expectations was poorly communicated, and the community wasn't given the tools to improve that communication (e.g. couldn't edit the help pages, had their feedback about the discoverability of site documentation ignored, etc.). But it was also because Atwood and Spolsky hadn't refined their intuition about why beginners' bad questions are bad. (Hint: it is not because most of their problems are easy to solve, or "beneath" experts.)

> when following a StackOverflow link from Google

Google got worse at search over the years, so you ended up seeing low-quality versions of the question more often. And the site got way too big (there is no reason why there should be more than three times as many publicly visible questions on Stack Overflow, as publicly visible articles on Wikipedia), such that search results could get diluted with irrelevant low-quality questions that happened to have a lot of keyword overlap with what you wanted. And misleading questions didn't get cleaned up, so you would search for X and find a question where the OP hadn't tried to analyze the situation at all and ended up asking about X when the problem was actually Y, and got the question closed as a duplicate of the main Y "canonical". (I know because I used to lose considerable amounts of hair trying to find the X canonical that I knew was there but stubbornly refused to turn up in searches.)

If "moderation" had actually "always" been "heavy" then you wouldn't have had this problem because this stuff would have gotten hidden from public view, one way or another.

> a moderator shutting it down

Again, these actions are overwhelmingly not taken by moderators, and phrasing things this way reflects a refusal to interact with the community on its own terms and understand its policies. Those who hold an outsider mindset are bound to end up feeling like outsiders.

jrflowers an hour ago

> actions of the community (what we call "curation")

You know that users are going to call anything that happens to their posts on any website “moderation” right, and after decades of that being the norm that’s what the word means

joe_the_user 3 hours ago

Yeah, it makes me curious about exactly what thinking was involved in the site going to heck like that. Part of it was questions and answers accumulating and so the question of duplicates thus apparently weighing on the moderators minds more. Part of it might have been an effort to prevent people gaming the system.

Actually, talking to ChatGpt, I found this article: “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.” ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...) and that actually shows what the SO admins didn't get (imo obviously).

They thought the problem was people not being nice. But that actual problem was that SO was "gamified" and it's gamified interface made it impossible to win unless someone was ultra-competitive (and I'd those types burned-out over time as well). People not being nice was real but it was side-effect of the situation (questions answered instantly so a would-be question answered had to be constantly racing).

It's easy to imagine how the admins didn't see the situation. Each up of intensity seemed to up the engagement and so seemed a good thing. The question of whether the process was sustainable didn't appear and when there were problems it was attributed to something else.

I think

yallpendantools 6 hours ago

I think the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application of the "hacker" mindset (more or less) to a lot of fields that do not benefit from the hacker mindset.

From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between "broadly applicable" and "too specific". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my homework by posting pictures of my WIP and citing Youtube videos I'm trying to follow but, apparently, this is already toeing the line. I honestly don't know what the mods expect of a good question there. Of course, there will be an appreciable degree of case-specificity in my questions because if the YT tutorials could already answer my problem, I would have no need to ask for help and advice!

Then we have sites like Literature SE which has been languishing in their sandbox since literally forever. Like most SE sites, the guidelines bid you to "avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussions" and "be specific" but I find that untenable in a Literature site. Notably, sister site SF&F is comparably thriving but there is a fair amount of open-ended speculation going on in there.

Lastly, IMO, it just suffers because at its core its problem is human and social, not technical. In an effort for better curation we ended up with Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Science. For some posters, finding the right SE site already introduces a huge wall to overcome for posting. This hampers a lot of the out group: students who might be seeking homework guidance or looking to supplement their own readings and lectures, amateurs who are just curious about something in the field. I've had a question in one of the Science SEs outside my field that was well-received by the community but one mod kept "tagging to delete" (I forgot the exact term) almost every year. This mod action has a prescriptive period and, boy, he kept at it. Honestly, I don't care in the end. I asked the question out of sheer curiosity and got a satisfactory answer. Yet I wonder how exactly they expect to foster a community this way.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

wbillingsley 5 hours ago

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.

rootsudo 5 hours ago

Ah I miss the old days of expert sex change.com

To be fair not really but it’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time and all it took was to scroll down to the end of the page to get your answer.

Real 20 year ago internet there.

ifixeditonmyown 5 hours ago

> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.

Really? Because I only ever asked three things, technically two I suppose, and the only significant interaction I got from there was a guy saying they thought the third question was a duplicate but they only didn't mark it that way because they saw it was me asking again.

This dude straight up admitted to be on the hunt for marking things as duplicate and only put brainpower into doing not-that because something felt off in is gut.

Then someone else did.

No, he didn't actually answer my question. No one did.

noosphr 5 hours ago

At the start moderators worked with you, after 2014 they worked against you.

giancarlostoro 7 hours ago

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

That and [redacted] mods who delete your question “because its a duplicate” but its not, you just assume it is and lock it. Lots of this when .NET Core came out and it drove me up a wall. Wouldnt surprise me if a lot of “hallucination” type answers come from bad Stack Overflow data being interpreted as “fact” in earlier models.

zahlman 3 hours ago

Your question was neither deleted nor locked. It was closed as a duplicate, which immediately provides a link to existing useful information and helps keep the site organized by putting the best answers in one place.

My extensive experience has been that the overwhelming majority of the time that people complain "this isn't a duplicate", it actually quite obviously is. (And there were even more irritating complaints on the meta site at times; all the way up to the level of "you shouldn't ever close duplicates at all because I think you shouldn't", demonstrating no interest in even trying to understand the reasons for doing so.) Of course, people do make mistakes; there was an entire process for fixing this, but most people could not be bothered to engage with it productively (or even civilly). But feel free to give examples of things that you feel were wrongly closed from your own experience.

kstrauser 3 hours ago

It's astonishing how vastly different our experiences were. I trawled the new Python questions frequently, looking for fun, novel things to answer. It was dismaying how often they'd been wrongly marked as dupes, often because the original answer was ancient and obsolete. It would often be egregiously bad, like:

Q: How do Python's dict preserve insertion order?

A: [duplicate of "Why does a Python dict's keys have a different ordering each run?"]

It was clear that the mod/curator/whatever spent no time attempting to understand what was actually being asked, and linked it to something that was completely incorrect as an answer to the real question.

I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics. If you asked me "when did you last eat a fruit bat", I can tell you the month and year because that stood out. If you asked me "when did you last eat spaghetti", I'd have a hard time saying.

pdw an hour ago

In my experience, any questions about an obscure or rare problem was likely to be marked as a duplicate if it sounded even vaguely similar to a common problem. My impression was that some moderators just were unwilling to admit they didn't know the answer to a question.

creata 6 hours ago

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.

stopsayingsorry 6 hours ago

Let's just be blunt. The main target audience were clueless idiots who just wanted to solve their current programming problem, e.g. compiler error etc. They didn't care about anything else, they just wanted to copy-paste text and for the problem to go away, preferably without even needing to turn their brain on.

Now we have a new guy in town, who offers "robotized copy-paste the solution to YOUR specific programming problem, no reading required! we can even control your computer for you, so you can do something you actually enjoy and stop wasting time on this complicated computery thingy for boring nerds", which serves the aforementioned audience much better.

tornikeo 4 hours ago

are you perhaps a mod from SO? if not you should apply as one asap.

you sound exactly like the mfs that ruined that forum.

zahlman 3 hours ago

As one of those "mfs", we were undeniably correct in this, as any sampling of new questions at any point in the site history would amply illustrate. People really do just want their question answered without heed to what the site expects of questions. Web sites featuring user-generated content are allowed to set their own rules about how that content works. When people go to a new site with their own expectations about how the posting process works, and refuse to be corrected on that point, they are the ones in the wrong. Just because a website offers a Q&A interface absolutely does not in any way, shape or form mean that you can ask anything on topic, phrased in any manner, without any effort on your part, with no motivation beyond benefiting from getting an answer, and expect straightforward answers that accommodate your personal circumstances, for free.

But also, we were not "mods". We were just members of the community who did absolutely nothing to gain power over you except to participate by asking and answering questions. The actual moderators of the site, with a diamond next to their names, were almost literally one-in-a-million users. But it only took 3,000 reputation to cast a close vote, and 15 to flag to close a question (prioritizing it for consideration by the first group).

Posts like yours are made, IMX, because people had a bad experience asking a question. If that describes you, feel free to provide a link to the question and I'll be happy to give a detailed explanation of why things went as they did and what the site wanted you to do better in asking it.

harvey9 3 hours ago

As you said elsewhere here, the site is not good at communicating its expectations. To the outsider it looks like a huge pool of questions and answers to which you may as well add yours.

The one thing I really liked was how it tried to find existing questions and answers that were like yours during the question input phase, but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter

zahlman 3 hours ago

> The main target audience were…

"Target audience" connotes people that the site wanted to be there. That's just who showed up, because that's who will always show up basically anywhere that looks like it might be helpful to them, by default.

stopsayingsorry 3 hours ago

You are correct about that. But the fundamental design of the site facilitated the value extracting vermin. Then the biggest value extracting vermin the internet has ever seen came along, used you as the training data and replaced you.

The biggest suckers were the people who were genuinely putting it effort there. So, in the end, did they make the world a better place? One would like to hope they did, but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.

joquarky 5 hours ago

> It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

The same thing that happened to perl.

kstrauser 5 hours ago

How so? I stopped hanging around in Perl-land around 2001 and it seemed friendly enough way back then. What happened to it?

autoexec 4 hours ago

I remember seeing at least one person complain that perl forums were unfriendly, but in that case it turned out it was because he took it as an insult when after he posted code others would comment with re-writes using fewer lines/characters. He didn't understand that they were just playing and not critiquing or trying to tell him that his code should be have been written that way instead. If anything, the shortest possible way to do something should probably be avoided in perl code you plan on ever having to work on again, but it can still be fun to see how compact you can make it.

zahlman 3 hours ago

Yep, that sounds about right. Similarly, people would complain about SO being unfriendly because of people politely asking them to isolate a problem and produce a proper minimal reproducible example, or seeking clarification for a how-to question about what should happen in an edge case, or questioning whether the OP has an XY problem, or marking an obviously duplicate question as a duplicate, or just generally explaining that there are standards on the site and that you can't just treat it as a help desk.

epihelix 5 hours ago

Perl was my first love as a language, and I don't recall any hostility towards Perl users. On the contrary, the environment in the early 2000s was very supportive.

Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.

(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)

px1999 5 hours ago

Not just their users. My org got pitched stackoverflow careers and their private knowledgebase around 2019. We were somewhat interested but found it too hard to work with them.

We weren't going to be a huge contract (~100k/yr) but the tone was very much "conform or fuck off". I think the sticking point was that we were offered 1x permanent careers ad in North America and 2 in Oceana, and we wanted 3 in Oceana instead.

I've had a similar experience the couple of times I've asked or attempted to respond to questions (about software I wrote lol) - grammar and framing seemed more important than technical information/a solution.

N=1 anecdata ofc, but I'm not surprised at their demise

oblio an hour ago

> then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.

You must be new to IT. Software businesses rarely truly die off (unless they're really small one person operations). Even Expertsexchange is still around: https://go.experts-exchange.com/

jl6 39 minutes ago

SO in the end was like walking into a bar, and the music stops, and all the regulars stare at you, and say “Yeah, what do YOU want, kid? Quit wasting our time. And by the way, you opened the door wrong.”

Most of the easy questions have been asked. I stopped using it because I was asking questions that weren’t trivial to answer, and I guess it is easier to earn internet points through mod actions than through writing answers.

EvanAnderson 9 hours ago

I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.

I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.

When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)

Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.

Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.

Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.

dspillett 8 hours ago

> I miss Server Fault

Same. And DBA.se. I was a top contributor of both for the first few years at least, even got sent some free swag a couple of times, not because I cared about the points and being in the first page of people ordered by them, but because I felt genuinely useful and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.

I never really did the social side though, I have problems with distance friendships including online communities (I just don't connect well with people that way) which is one reason that I'm hating tech work more and more these days (being on a remote team is not good for my mental health, while I'm not a huge people person it turns out I absolutely need some in my life, and really in my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).

mahboi 7 hours ago

I used to spend time on these sites answering questions. It was actually fun and educational.

kstrauser 6 hours ago

I did too! The gamification was fun, but more than that it was just really enjoyable to help other people. I like teaching, and SO was like the crack cocaine version of that.

8n4vidtmkvmk 2 hours ago

I was/am big on Stack Overflow. I always found it amusing when my coworkers stumbled upon my questions or answers. Or i'd find one of my own years later and maybe even try upvoting it before realizing it was my own.

Can't say I formed any connections there though. Just a few negative interactions.

aljgz 20 minutes 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.

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...

nolok 5 minutes ago

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.

faangguyindia 9 hours ago

Reddit is going the same way.

I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.

Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.

Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.

But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.

luqtas 8 hours ago

and hopefully soon we have decentralized protocols as the standard when we think about user spaces. amen

unethical_ban 8 hours ago

I used to be a lot more enthusiastic about decentralized protocols. I don't know how to solve the AI problem though. I think the Internet as we knew it for assumed-human interaction is dead, and the surest way to believe you're interacting with humans now is through existing trusts, such as accounts older than AI and highly-moderated forums, and to charge for access.

EvanAnderson 8 hours ago

We had it. Reddit should have just been NNTP. You can't "monetize" NNTP though.

namrog84 8 hours ago

There was that 1 person who used to work(paid?/volunteer?) at Reddit that actively tried to cultivate high-quality AMA on Reddit. Ever since they've been gone. It hasn't felt the same.

Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.

Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.

I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.

Gigachad 8 hours ago

I think the various reddit dramas over the years have taken their toll on the site even if they didn't completely kill it. You can see it in moderation these days, individual sub mods have called out the fact that no one pays them and they don't have the motivation to spend all day enforcing quality for free. No one has stepped up to replace them so most moderation on Reddit is site wide LLM powered moderation.

saimiam 7 hours ago

Victoria (I think)!

Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.

gwerbin 8 hours ago

I stopped using Reddit not because I got banned, but because it has been steadily converted from the world's most popular forum platform to a trash heap of engagement hacks and shady practices. Moreso than SO, which was already struggling with existential problems before AI, Reddit did itself in.

ryandrake 8 hours ago

I stopped when they killed old.reddit.com for non-logged-in users.

nichos 6 hours ago

The updated Firefox plugin still works.

dawnerd 3 hours ago

They're also blocking you from using even the new site on mobile.

fishingisfun 6 hours ago

there is an amazing opportunity on the internet for proper community that isnt slinging shooting to either extreme of the political spectrum. we need a decent discussion board like reddit without the horrible mods banning or automods deleteing something because it wasnt EXACTLY following 19 different rules in the sub baar.

heresie-dabord 4 hours ago

> there is an amazing opportunity on the internet for proper community

But how will you design it to survive in this age of malicious actors and persona farms?

mike_hearn 2 hours ago

Rely completely on LLM moderators. But it's problems largely stem from its reliance on volunteer human moderators, who often self-select for strange and problematic characteristics (e.g. they are attempting to advance a political agenda by manipulating what people can read on the site).

ergocoder 6 hours ago

Reddit has the most advanced AI system.

I tried to post on r/showerthoughts several times over the past 10 years. And every time it deleted my post saying my thought wasn't original. I was wow how they would even know that, and this was pre-AI.

paraknight 5 hours ago

I've been struggling to find something that scratches the Reddit itch, in the lineage of Slashdot, then Fark, then Digg. Any recommendations? I don't mean niche communities, there needs to be enough of a mainstream critical mass the makes it _the_ place to go. I don't think it's Lemmy, though maybe it could be.

IshKebab an hour ago

There isn't one unfortunately. Some nerd is ok on Lemmy but you'll never find stuff like knitting or local communities. Not with any people on them anyway.

cferry an hour ago

This site is a prime example of the worst kind of enshittification that could happen around an IPO. I left when the first moves around that were looming (API restrictions and 3rd party app ban). This is one of the rare decisions of mine that I have yet to be critical about.

When I read old.reddit.com was disabled for non-logged-in users, to be sure I'd never hit this site again even by mistake, I put a rule in my router's DNS resolver to lie and pretend an NXDOMAIN.

EvanAnderson 8 hours ago

I refused to make a Reddit account. I knew my personality would lead me to wasting entirely too much time on the site if I could reply. (Like here... >sigh<)

When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.

I suppose I was never their target market anyway.

cellsstudio 8 hours ago

I am totally addicted to reddit. Good instincts - stay off it hahaha

cwnyth 8 hours ago

There's Old Reddit Redirect extension in Firefox, but honestly, you're not missing out on anything there anyway.

8note 4 hours ago

doesnt work as of today

unethical_ban 8 hours ago

My account of well over a year and 11k karma was banned by admins presumably for an admin-deleted comment where I said "Hi kids, buy our product!" as a Steve-Buschemi-meme reference, and was flagged as spam. To your point they also have their Comment Quality Score (CQS) which lowers you automatically if you use Proton email aliases, lowers you if you use VPN to access the site, among other things.

Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.

firesteelrain 7 hours ago

I was banned from subreddits for belonging to r/conservative. Mods wanted me to disavow that subreddit to atone for the sin of belonging to that subreddit.

tdb7893 8 hours ago

I went on Reddit recently to look something up and some of the niche subreddits were decent but I was shocked at the amount of just total garbage that's there now (including lots of weird misogyny) so it's not just the bans that are a problem. It feels like every social media platform is just miserable to use now. Except occasionally posting here my only social media is just Discord servers with my actual real life friends.

cellsstudio 8 hours ago

Honestly, agree. I find the niche subreddits are nice because they are still very human, in terms of both users and mods, but once they get a bit bigger it just gets destroyed by new users and bots.

Gigachad 8 hours ago

Problem is there are no niche subreddits anymore, there are no walls between subreddits at all. Reddit runs on a modern algorithm where any individual post which scores well will be shown to the whole site regardless of users individual subscriptions.

Gigachad 8 hours ago

Everything moved to Discord now. Reddit started ignoring subreddit subscriptions which made the whole platform a homogeneous blob of slop. Discord has maintained separation between communities and has minimal discoverability features so users stick to the servers they participate which builds a sense of community.

ricardobeat 7 hours ago

Surprised to hear this, I'm not alone!

My account was banned back around 2021. I had a separate account on mobile, which got subsequently banned for 'evading a ban'. Have been unable to create an account since then, even on entirely new machines, different OS, renewed IP. Whatever tracking techniques they use are downright scary.

The worst part is that all of this started because a mod in a right-leaning sub silenced my account, then decided to turn it into a permanent ban for no reason.

Nowadays, I'd still like to visit r/programming for a change, and share some of my work, but otherwise it's such a cesspool of AI-generated content and bots that the appeal has almost entirely faded.

lifeisloving 6 hours ago

Ive experienced this as well, i confronted some reddit devs at a conference about their ability to track sock accounts and they kinda just smiled and acknowledged what I suspected vaguely.

nullbio 7 hours ago

Reddit is by far the most toxic place on the web, yet somehow manages to get the least amount of scrutiny from regulators. Makes you wonder why, doesn't it?

itomato 7 hours ago

I am so deeply banned from Reddit it feels retaliatory in some way.

Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.

vivzkestrel 6 hours ago

all hidden accounts posting political propaganda day and night in the name of privacy was enough to turn me off

lifeisloving 6 hours ago

Also subreddit mods can ban your entire account..wtf. I was banned for arguing in a poltical subreddit. So if a mod doesn't like your political beliefs they can ban you (and your devices apparently) from the site.

And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.

faangguyindia 2 hours ago

subreddit specific mods can't ban you directly site wide, but they have tools through which they can report your second account for ban evasion, and if the automated system runs a check and finds you had an old banned account on the same sub, your new one is perma banned too.

ViscountPenguin 6 hours ago

Reddit is an absolutely hostile platform now, the amount of dogpiling is insane. Say the wrong thing and apparently you're simultaneously a bot, and a valid target for harassment (why people are so invested in harassing people they think are bots, I have no clue?)

yolo1897 3 hours ago

I thought that calling people bots was just a way to dehumanize what they perceive as an opponent, just like in wars, but they know that it's a person.

bawolff 6 hours ago

In general, in online communities - i think there is no such thing as free moderators. If you aren't paying them in money then you pay them in power.

srvmshr 5 hours ago

The Reddit banning algorithm is strange in its own way.

In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).

Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.

A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing

jmyeet 5 hours ago

Reddit still has a place for very niche communities. To this day it can be the best place for a lot of things.

But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.

One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.

I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.

You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.

bakugo 5 hours ago

> Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.

Meanwhile bots are running rampant and I can't scroll through the site for 10 minutes without seeing an obvious bot post or comment. Dead internet is real.

howunfortunate 5 hours ago

It's kind of like the opposite of the Nazi bar problem.

You purge some Nazis, then run out of Nazis to purge, but you've got a good purge system going...

fergie 2 hours ago

Its not so much the moderation, its more the random nature of the links, and the anonymization of user contributions.

One thing is that there are lots of bots on the site, another is that the site now seems to be specifically designed for bots.

Gareth321 36 minutes ago

This happened to me and I haven't bothered to create a new account. I was a 16+ year user. Banned over something innocuous. I tried appealing but it was clearly AI which denied the appeal - despite them claiming it was a human.

Something most people don't know is that Reddit now has a kind of AI partnership with moderators of the larger subreddits. If those mods ban a user from their sub, the AI can suspend or ban a user for "breaking the terms of service." Given the state of Reddit, and the kind of people who moderate the large subreddits, it's creating a fairly violent and polarised community.

wraptile 34 minutes ago

I gave up on contributing on reddit as everything is being removed by auto moderation as if bots can't spam /r/funny to farm some karma, and how am I supposed to get 1,000 upvotes if I post only in communities that have 1,000 active users? The entire thing is rigged to favor bots and propaganda over genuine human interactions.

sreekanth850 10 minutes ago

I was wondering where all those egoistic developers with superiority complexes go these days to feed their egos. I was scared every time asking even a single question on SO. The place was toxic as hell.

internet_points 18 minutes ago

I wonder how many people actually had bad experiences with SO vs how many people found it genuinely helpful. I'm going to guess the people with bad experiences are much more likely to comment about it loudly than all the people who found it helpful. (I always feel this dissonance when reading about the mean mods ruining the site, since I never experienced them firsthand.)

yuppiepuppie 14 minutes ago

My experience was both - I got some real valuable help esp. when I was learning how to program.

But... I also came across some real jacka*es. Those were on my questions, but also reading the responses from other peoples questions.

anakaine 12 minutes ago

I found it quite helpful at times. Learning in my own projects, and some professional things that I got stuck on I found some incredible help at times.

In my niche, we also had an absolute dictator of a moderator who was a condescending jerk online. Open belittling of people asking questions, connecting new questions to those which had been asked years ago in a different part of the stack and then closing the question, etc. Real tin pot tyrant nonsense, and frankly, a bully.

There was a day where I saw they had been denied a role they interviewed for since they posted about it. I already knew they were in my city. It was a role I had advertised and was the chair for. Im still not sure exactly which candidate, but have my suspicions. In any case, bullet dodged.

ritzaco 20 minutes ago

From May, but I wrote about how similar social/community sites have been following this upside down bell pattern for decades. In this case it might be caused by AI, but you can't conclude anything about AI just by looking at the graph

https://techstackups.com/articles/stackoverflow-graphs-prove...

himata4113 29 minutes ago

After posting a few questions to SO I often ended up not getting a response or solving the problem myself after further research which in reality sums up the site is a whole.

1) If you already have enough programming experience to understand algorithms and abstract concepts in programming you can find the answer by doing research.

2) More often than not the answers were citing answers that already exist elsewhere.

3) A lot of the trivial answers were marked as low quality, dupes and so on when these were the people who could benefit from SO the most.

Eventually I stopped visiting the site around 2 years after getting into programming since it rarely provided anything of value.

--

Serverfault was great and I will miss it.

inY2K 2 hours ago

My biggest turnoff was dealing with the gatekeepers who will treat you like you were asking stupid questions to a topic you obviously didn't know. I am glad AI is here and killed that; there is not stupid questions for AI. The walls for learning have been breached.

daniel_iversen an hour ago

What in the world is the explanation for this google trends line[1]? I’d have assumed it would have been a rapid decline since ai but there was a wild spike earlier this year before a massive crash - any ideas?

[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Stack%20overflow&date=to...

duskdozer 30 minutes ago

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?

ryandrake 8 hours ago

StackOverflow is great if your question is "How would we have done X back in 2012?" Because you can't re-ask or re-answer questions that have had their correct answers change as technology changed. So the sites is stuck back in time when each question was first answered.

minitech 6 hours ago

> or re-answer

Sure you can. (But it is a significant problem that they start at the bottom of the score-based answer sort and don’t get attention.)

ailearneditther 4 hours ago

This is why you give the updated answer as a comment under the top answer, with a casual "shouldnt we do xyz in [anno domini NOW] instead". Then some established answerer takes what you just said, edits it into the top answer, and steals all credit. But hey, at least you got the answer to be updated, not in your words, and no trace of your input into it. But still updated, right?

I'm not pouring one out for SO's death. Because I already did years ago.

kayalan an hour ago

i know SO gets a lot of hate but it massively helped with my work. Majority of questions I had were already answered. Ive only posted 2 questions, and neither was taken down. My questions were specific and more to the point.

With LLMs around, I no longer use it as much. And its a shame because I am worried in general that we might be losing communities like these

MisterMunchkin 4 minutes ago

It was a very flawed site. If you ever tried to ask a question they'd tell you to fuck off, but 99% of their threads were just empty with toxic comments from the mods. You'd find the perfect thread for your problem, and then it would just be locked as a dupe with no actual answer thread available.

999900000999 9 hours ago

Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use

tintor 9 hours ago

ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.

gerdesj 9 hours ago

Does it really? I'm not going to mess with biotech because I have no idea what I am on about there. I did ask about Samsung TVs:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...

yongjik 8 hours ago

Well, maybe it does, but it seems that an average developer asks which IDE to use a thousand times more often than what malwares are installed in their Samsung TV.

So there's a clear difference in expected utility.

eluru 8 hours ago

it does not

hatthew 9 hours ago

SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.

p-e-w 8 hours ago

> SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming.

They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.

hatthew 8 hours ago

I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).

sobellian 3 hours ago

I remember when SO had codegolf on the main site. Maybe if they weren't such killjoys people would have still been interested in participating in some programming oriented community even though AI displaced the actual writing of computer languages.

IshKebab an hour ago

The problem was it was a discussion forum. They just didn't like that.

EvanAnderson 8 hours ago

I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.

bombcar 7 hours ago

Those people are always drawn to these unpaid positions of power and they’re absolute death-knells for the community. Time and time again you see it.

fps-hero 8 hours ago

There is something about the gamification of social interaction which breeds a hostile community. Power hungry users chasing internet points, or moderators needlessly raising their hammer.

I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.

cwillu 8 hours ago

The “can't answer” thing is probably the reason I never contributed. I don't know the specific reasoning behind it, but it's such a self-defeating solution to whatever problem they thought they were solving.

worthless-trash 8 hours ago

My favorite point was when you're the single person to have worked on a problem, published an answer, published a paper had the answer accepted and some MUPPET edits your answer to mean something else entirely, and it has your 'name' now beside an incorrect answer.

kstrauser 6 hours ago

That infuriated me and I revoked those edits constantly, until I gave up and left the site altogether. I'd rather you steal my answer and put your name on it than put your own words under my name. Fix some dumb typo I made on mobile or something, sure, fine. Edit my answer to change the meaning or phrasing whatsoever? Oh hell no. Go make your own answer, and don't lie and say that I was the one speaking your words.

minitech 6 hours ago

I’m curious what both of these comments are referring to, since it’s not supposed to take any privileges to answer a question on Stack Overflow (you can even answer without making an account). Maybe some anti-spam block?

lazyjones an hour ago

The numbers suggest that said hostile community is actually very small, or that it never intended to contribute to the site in the first place. As opposed to Wikipedia for example, where the very hostile admins and moderators actually add a lot of content.

ranger_danger 7 hours ago

Most online platforms I have used to ask questions or make comments (whether it's real-time chat, mailing lists, forums, etc.) were extremely hostile and always have been... I guess it's just human nature.

StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.

Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.

ergocoder 5 hours ago

I always hate it when a person tries to "X Y problem" me.

I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.

People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.

kstrauser 5 hours ago

To be fair, there was a lot of X Y question asking there. "Would it be better to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to implement a clone of the Redis protocol? We're deploying an app that needs a 100% compatible Redis API. We own the Linux server it'll run on. Which should we use?" Uh, can you just use Redis? "Don't XY me!"

I'm not saying that's the problem you had, not at all. I do see why some of the answerers were quick to jump to it though.

damowangcy 5 hours ago

In a dystopian fufure where a few or ONE AI company bested the rest, the company might banned you from using the AI for coding because the AI thinks you're incompetent or require you to pass a test to activate the coding function, because it's dangerous.

Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.

gspr 2 hours ago

Was it so hostile?

The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?

gnabgib 9 hours ago

Related discussion What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph (483 points, 3 months ago, 595 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949

cowlevel 9 hours ago

AI didn't do it to SO. SO's new ownership did it to SO. It's a hostile place with or without AI.

mahboi 8 hours ago

Unfortunately they changed ownership very close to when ChatGPT got released, so I can't point to timing, but there's just no way this is not because of AI.

motionlessveloc 6 hours ago

The same decline is visible on all Stack Exchange sites, regardless of moderation policy.

IshKebab an hour ago

SO's extreme hostility definitely drove people to the first viable alternative (AI) as quickly as possible, so it might have survived longer if it hadn't been so hostile.

But to be honest I expect that would have just delayed its death. AI is so good now I think I'd use it even if Stackoverflow was really friendly.

ourcat 2 hours ago

I do not at all like how they changed most posting dates to just say "over a year ago". When looking up solutions to code issues, the date of the answer often matters a great deal.

asimovDev 2 hours ago

I think they reversed this change, because I wanted to complain and agree with you , but decided to see how bad it was and found out that the site displays dates as it used to before

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19712903/reverse-content...

f311a 3 hours ago

I don't think this should be celebrated, even though they had a bad attitude.

We are losing communities and human communication to LLM chats.

sschueller 3 hours ago

What I find much worse than someone talking directly to an LLM is when you are communicating with another human and they respond with LLM.

10111001 2 hours ago

> What I find much worse than someone talking directly to an LLM is when you are communicating with another human and they respond with LLM.

And what's even worse than that is when they don't know what they're talking about, and launder their ignorance through an LLM. Then you get vapor laundered to look like a thoughtful and considered response.

piker 29 minutes ago

People blame AI and/or the culture there, but IMO competition got it. As more and more code went to public domains (i.e., mostly GitHub), it became just as quick and often better to go to the source itself.

jdprgm 4 hours ago

It's odd it still exists at all still. What would compel someone to even post a question on SO anymore.

Basically the equivalent of shouting out some highly specific technical query down a dark alleyway and hoping against all odds for a better response than models trained on all of stack overflow already.

kstrauser 2 hours ago

From far down in the shady distance of the alley, a small voice shouts back: "Closed, duplicate!"

mgdev 8 hours ago

They should reboot, focused on

1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and

2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)

This does four things simultaneously:

1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model

2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)

3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.

4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems

bryant 8 hours ago

> 2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)

> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems

I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?

mahboi 8 hours ago

Who decides which person is correct?

aaronbrethorst 8 hours ago

Maybe someone new could create a new community modeled along these lines where experts could exchange knowledge, or more junior people something else, for answers.

hatthew 8 hours ago

The discussion around who gets a green checkmark and +15 rep was bad enough. I can't imagine how it would be if there was real money involved.

wondering5du 8 hours ago

So instead of just not getting paid for my help I might even get to pay if my answer is deemed to be not good enough. Thanks but no thanks.

armchairhacker 9 hours ago

SO has been useless for years now, but the other Stack Exchanges can be interesting, they deserve more spotlight.

kulahan 9 hours ago

I really do love their other communities so much more. Lots of super interesting content - it feels like a new digg or something. I go to one of the other stacks and look at the most popular non-tech stack posts once or twice a week purely for entertainment. The breakdowns on obscure but interesting topics can get really fun to read!

EvanAnderson 8 hours ago

On the more-and-more rare occasion that I end up on Stack Overflow as a result of a search I find myself losing excessive time to following the random links to other communities. The other communities really are good stuff.

asimovDev an hour ago

SO was often a productivity loss for me because I'd scroll down and get distracted by stackexchange questions on the right side of the screen for half an hour

lanyard-textile an hour ago

StackOverflow's poor gameification of the platform is the singular reason it suffered from its awful culture.

If you had enough reputation, you'd be invited to these review queues, like the Close Vote queue.

You got a point toward a new badge if you voted to Close. You get nothing if you chose to keep it open. There was always a perverse incentive there to act, to make a question "better," to nitpick a perfectly fine answer.