Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.<p>I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.<p>The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.<p>Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.<p>Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.<p>Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.<p>Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.<p><i>::slow clap::</i> Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!
I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.
I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.<p>Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.<p>The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes.<p>On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.<p>On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but <i>that</i> goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.<p>I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of <i>quis custodiet ipsos custodes?</i> is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.<p>I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes<p>1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)<p>2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"<p>3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.
> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.<p>I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.<p>Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.
Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.
I think so too, but many people have many oppositions to AI and would prefer knowledge to be in the hands of knowledgeable community, rather than AI companies. SO was poised to be this alternative, but leadership showed they did not see value in knowledge-work for its own sake.
This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.
Having experienced the SO culture, I like to think the culture caused it - schadenfreude - but it was probably inevitable given AI.<p>Even if SO was the most wonderful friendly place in the galaxy, would you rather post a question and wait hours for a response, or get one instantly?
And in some ways AI "search" works like SO - you ask a question, you get an answer. If you don't understand the answer or something in the answer you ask for clarification and it provides it. And you don't have to wait a day or a week for it. (Ofcourse, the AI gets it answers from human curated info pools like SEs, pirated books etc ... but if these sources shrink / die to AI, it may not be able to provide new and current information, and we'll be back to SEs and Reddits and HNs again).
Push factors and pull factors do much more work together than either do on its own.
I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.<p>Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.<p>I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
I went to my old SO account and found these questions that were closed.<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-way-to-design-a-media-player-on-windows-phone" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-w...</a><p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trouble-determining-a-proper-way-to-divide-resources-evenly-in-a-exc" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trou...</a><p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-generate-a-list-of-datetime-intervals-that-are-in-between-two-dates" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-gener...</a><p>As someone who was a budding programmer, I felt like my questions were decent attempts at laying out my problem but they were closed anyways.
It's not uncommon for me, while debugging, to find that someone has had the exact same problem as me, asked the question on stackoverflow, and that it has been closed a duplicate of a question which is only slightly related to it (and therefore any answers to <i>that</i> question are pretty useless).
I have had questions edited and closed and I have also been reticent to ask questions just from my own personal experience.
I just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed.<p>And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.
Never had one closed, only ever bothered posting twice. One obscure tumbleweed issue that slowly turned into something I was quite proud of... And one that was so unpleasant a little experience I never came back. Nothing serious just god why.<p>What was my point... Oh right. I don't assume anyone's making this stuff up. The pla
It felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the same
Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.<p>That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
I asked two questions which were both locked as dupes. The referenced questions mine were supposed to have duplicated were not, in fact the same question. After that I didn't bother. If I could find my answer with a search engine, fine, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to engage on the site.
The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.<p>Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their <i>rise</i>, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.<p>It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!<p>But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.<p>(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)
You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.<p>This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.<p>A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.<p>The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.<p>But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.<p>Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.<p>The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.
Yeah, this is much more accurate to what was actually happening. During that high period they struggled to get people to stop posting low-quality "do my homework" style questions - despite what people on here say the barrier for entry was extremely low and those made up the vast majority of what was posted.<p>I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.
> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated<p><i>[citation needed]</i><p>Well here it is, and you're wrong: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics</a><p>The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.<p>The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.<p>StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.
You aren’t downvoted on Wikipedia. And people have been complaining about heavy handed editors and mods there for a long time. Same with SO.<p>It’s pretty much a meme now.
When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.
There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it.<p>I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.
My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most.<p>May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.
I did, and it wasn't much better on the other side.<p>And funnily enough, the questions that I answered that most contributed to getting me through the gauntlet years later were closed at duplicates (they weren't).
It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.
I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site).<p>AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord.<p>SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.
The worst stack overflow in this regard was meta. Most pathological corner of the internet I've ever encountered, up there with 4chan if you ask me.
> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.<p>Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.
> I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me<p>Damn. Doesn’t that just sum up so many interactions (and sadly, relationships) in life.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants<p>I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:<p>1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.<p>2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.<p>This was long before LLMs.
At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"
Because the person who asked the question has accepted the first answer that looked decent enough and moved on.<p>Usually the most superficial, not that it's always a bad thing.<p>Oh, also on SO there's this kind of exchange:<p>Q: "I want to do X because of this and that - or because I simply fucking want to".<p>A: You should never do X, do Y or Z instead.
I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.
S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
> aquire comment points to be able to answer<p>I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.
I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary.<p>I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get pointer on how to track that behavior I was seeing. Of course the second I post it I got a -1 plus “can’t reproduce”/“please add minimal example”.<p>An other time, I had a question that was very similar to an existing one, but different setup and the answer did not solve my problem at all. Mentioned all that, linked the other question and specifically wrote that it was NOT addressing my problem. Posted it, soon after tagged as duplicate with that one answer that did NOT solve the problem.<p>After that I rarely asked questions again.<p>Also the points system made it frustrating as a new user: someone 2 years ago asks a basic language question “+50 upvotes”. You asked a similar question, asking extra clarification on an aspect “-2, already answered, read the doc” and so on. And with such a big deal made about reputation it felt like just being born early and being able to be an early adopter meant you got east points. For new users, though luck.
The one advantage of actually trying to use SO was that the fear of asking a question usually made me do so much research that I'd solve my issue in the process of fully describing it.<p>That did also make the community lose out on the answer though.
I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?<p>Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing <i>answer</i> rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.<p>Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
The vast majority of duplicate closures use already answered questions as duplicates. So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. In my observation this is usually the case, though the answer might be more generic.<p>I have also seen bad duplicate closures that weren't actually exact duplicates. But people talk like this is the only kind of duplicate closure that actually happens. I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, or if people are missing that their question is actually answered in the duplicate.
I was extremely active on SO and other SE sites in the late 00s and early 10s. In those days it wasn't too bad, many duplicates were actually duplicates. However that really did start shifting. This is anecdata of course, but even questions that linked to possibel "duplicates" and pre-expalined why it wasn't the same question were often just closed as duplicates of the exact question that was linked. This happened to me several times before I got fed up and moved on with my life.<p>SO was a really rewarding place to ask and answer questions in those early days. It really is a crying shame what they did to the community by empowering the worst of the community to be the bosses.
> So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well.<p>The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might <i>think</i> the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not.<p>> I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed,<p>Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it. They only looked at the signal "does somebody with points think these questions are similar", and discarded the signal of whether the new user got any value out of the site, and I think that's what did them in.
I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.<p>Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.<p>LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort.<p>I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form.<p>These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine.<p>In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead?<p>Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.
The math subreddit is awful. Accusing everyone of asking homework questions if they weren’t formatted in perfect math notation.<p>Then there’s the godot subreddit. Asked 2 questions? That’s a ban.<p>Imagine a child learning math or game dev coming up against that.<p>I’d quit. Curiosity extinguished.<p>The godot github has one of those characters now too. Really anti new user. I worry, I worry.
FWIW I haven't had bad experiences on the Godot subreddit, but I haven't tried in three years since the API change. And AI seems laughably bad at Godot for any non-trivial questions, and for those trivial questions, it's better just to peruse the docs.
It's ok, the kids learning this stuff these days are on YouTube and Discord.
You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.
You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues.<p>I hope somebody saves it all.
Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.
Perhaps not what you intended, but most of it is stored in various models' weights.
For better or for worse, the contents of Stack Overflow are literally the reason LLM coding has taken over the world.
They used to publish a regular torrent of everything, not sure if they still do that? Maybe you could grab yourself a copy for posterity.
as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.
> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.<p>i got stung by exactly this.<p>i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.<p>and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.<p>dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like<p><pre><code> thanks in advance,
--
znpy
</code></pre>
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.<p>I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.
This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.<p>This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.
1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?<p>2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being set up like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki of questions and their answers.<p>3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?
> 1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?<p>It pissed off znpy so bad that many years later they still recall on HN how irritated that made them! Now you could argue that letting znpy's pleasantries stay would have cumulatively pissed off more people in the long wrong. But I very seriously doubt it would.
> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?<p>Yes.<p>Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.<p>Ironically, erasing that kind of stuff is likely very good good for training large language models.
>> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?<p>> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.<p>Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.)
>StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions<p>This is significantly under selling it.<p>Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.<p>I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable<p>I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.<p>His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”<p>At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive<p>I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one
SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community.<p>I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see <i>if</i> there is an answer.<p>Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.<p>It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype <i>is</i> the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.<p>One feature they could've built that <i>would</i> have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"<p>Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.<p>Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.<p>And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
> would've been a "newcomer track"<p>It's there now. Too late I guess. <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground</a>
>Staging Ground is available to two different types of users on Stack Overflow:
>
> - Users who are asking their first questions
> - Users who want to review and offer guidance on newcomers’ posts<p>It looks a little different, like a "learn to use stack overflow correctly" type spot. I think what newbies want (I would have loved when I started out) is a "why is my code broken" type spot.
My favorite thing was how for half the stuff I Googled, the top result would be a StackOverflow reply telling me to Google it.
The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.
Off topic, closed.
SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people.<p>Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.
An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.
There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.<p>It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"
> SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form<p>SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.<p>Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.
Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.<p>Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."
Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.
Yup, there was some political bill discussion about some recent issue and others were posting links, so I thought I'd concur with an interesting vote breakdown link showing how each house/party voted. Something anyone I would gather was in good faith.
Nope, instant longtime account shadow permanent ban. Wow.
Reddit has many different subs that suffer from its problems in different degrees, so there's still islands of relative calm and sanity, usually in low-traffic subs. To some extent this was also true of different sites in the overall StackExchange network, but SO itself always dominated the network, it was designed and run as a monoculture, and that culture was, well ... <i>gestures vaguely in SO's direction</i>
It’s very easy to destroy a specific sub (if it’s not too big and doesn’t have half a dozen mods).<p>it's like those ddos rings, but works on social networks.<p>You can create a sub and a Discord group, then ask people in the Discord group to launch a mass report against your competing sub and its moderators. You can use scanners to find questionable stuff that you can report, and more often than not, this will get the mod banned. If the sub doesn’t have multiple mods (with unique IPs, as Reddit tracks fingerprints), the sub is now in the hands of Reddit’s mod team.<p>Back then it was not this easy, but now with AI and residential IPs you can create lots of fake users and reports etc... and take almost any avg redditor down.
It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.
I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.
Can confirm for some dumb joke subs.<p>You want to blow off some steam, and there is a laundry list of rules to read through.<p>Yeah, not bothering with all that.
[flagged]
It's so weird how slightly different usage can create vastly different experiences and impressions of a site. I wouldn't really describe Reddit as "politically biased to the left", but I never go to the front page, just a few select subs. I don't see any political bias in subs about Hollow Knight or weed. I DO see bias in my country's political site, but it swings all over the place depending on who's in power at the given time.<p>I see a similar thing on X (well, I would if I still used it) where my personal feed is very, very different from the curated 'for you' one.
often people make a sub, it gets popular because of specific content.
then the original mod gets banned, now their sub is orphan and reddit team assigns it to someone else.<p>many times you'll notice the new mod became active as a contributor on specific sub only 2-3 days before the OG mod gets banned and sub declared orphan.<p>Coincidence?<p>How can reddit even hand over a sub to someone who has nothing to do with a community? Simply because they install and control who controls the sub.<p>Mods get "comment/post removal" power, so they use it to shape the community towards specific "narrative", there is no audit trail for any mod specific actions unless you are a mod you perhaps can't see what all a mod is doing on a sub.<p>Also, they can simply make an automod/bot rule which simply removes your comment by creating a rule with your username after that you'll not know your comment is gone but others will not see it!
I'm not sure why that would kill reddit? It's an inherent feature of the political left that an echo chamber is preferable to any reasoned debate. Any space that allows flowing debate will lean conservative and leftist will complain, downvote, etc and ultimately spend less time on the platform.
Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the <i>question</i> would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance <i>forever</i>.<p>They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.<p>It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were <i>ready</i> to abandon SO.
I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.<p>Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?<p>Because I <i>have</i> supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.<p>So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.<p>I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.<p>The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.<p>Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.<p>IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.<p>But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.<p>As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.<p>And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.<p>SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.<p>And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.
The anonymity of people giving aggressive and confrontational "answers" to a question reminds me of:<p><a href="https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies" rel="nofollow">https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...</a>
I stopped posting there around then. Multiple times in a row I asked a question, got it closed as a duplicate/pointed to another thread/met with "why are you even trying to do that" despite being clear about my problem. It was obvious the people answering/closing the question skimmed it and I already gave a ton of context. It just stopped being useful
>"no conversation please"<p>Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that
Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI?<p>I don't buy it.
People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
I personally left SO because I felt moderation had become toxic, and that was before AI. And I was relatively active, like in the top 5%.
How eager people are to find something better IS a factor in the decline of websites/businesses. Not just that there is something better that exists.
See the decline of the graph even before the spring of ’22?
I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.
I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]<p>Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.<p>---<p>[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by-prosus-for-a-reported-1-8-billion/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...</a><p>[2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion
<a href="https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-stack-overflow" rel="nofollow">https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...</a>
I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.
The sale is relevant. The spike in activity right before the sale already shows the management hand and how they actively ran the org to optimize for this sale. The rebound right after is hard, and it was (right) before chatgpt<p>They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over
So you think its mostly just coincidence that 4 years after AI is introduced stack overflow is dead?
No, of course not coincidence. It's just that people didn't have an alternative until 2021-ish. Users hated SO for many years prior, but had nowhere to go other than small niche communities. When LLMs came into play, it was just the obvious choice.<p>In an alternate universe, where LLMs didn't exist, I bet you SO would be equally dead by this decade. Someone better, with healthier values and a more welcoming community, would come up and steal their lunch.
If stack overflow was universally loved, AI would still kill it.<p>People here seem to be so emotionally invested in hating stack overflow that they seem to think AI was like ~10% of the reason it died, when it was 95%.
This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.
Do you mean that curious growth spike in mid 2020? If so, can you think of anything else significant that happened in mid 2020...?
I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer.<p>There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.
I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
It is curation process, so when you search you are not overwhelmed by 100 identical answers.<p>Being stupid in this case is irrational self-(mis)-perception.<p>Probably they really meant to say you are lazy and shift work on mods.
Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.<p>Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.<p>Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.
The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.
Sometimes? It happened more and more and when every second question was like this, I left. I wasn't going to fight against moderators forever.<p>That was before AI.
And your second attempt would get closed as a duplicate of your <i>first</i> attempt.
The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.<p>I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...
There's always going to be lots of latent insecurity among amateurs when a pro shows up.<p>Honestly because of this and the relative lack of actual pros on the site, real pros will get pushed out and the site will actually build a collection of misinformation. That's probably why pros feel that software quality has dropped so much in since stackoverflow.
The collapse into a ghost town is striking.<p>Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO.<p>This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.<p>SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.
There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.
> This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.<p>Literally describing how academia has worked since time immemorial.
I remember a time when people were posting their SO link and karma on their resumes. O how have the times changed.
check the graph and superpose the ai adoption curve, you're right to be skeptical
One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.
Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.<p>I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.<p>AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.
The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.
Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.
> at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered<p>I don’t buy this.<p>Programming as an industry is famous for constantly evolving and changing.
Yet the most viewed questions are about how to undo git commit, how to sort an array, how to select stuff in jquery, how to group by in SQL and so on.<p>General questions about programming languages, SQL and git don't change that much.
for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.
- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only"<p>- Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library<p>- Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked<p>- Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs<p>- Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP<p>- Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong
Usually #1 actually works, most cases, and missing discord, several healthy communities on Discord nowadays
yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world
You’re using your mom for rubber duck debugging, then. An LLM can work for that as well, usually better because it knows a lot more than your mom.
Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision<p>Edit: <a href="https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb" rel="nofollow">https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb</a>
Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.
I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
Add it to the list:<p>- the downfall of junior devs<p>- bad hiring market<p>- layoffs in practically every sector<p>theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.
I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial. There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI, and strong reason to believe that we would see it with AI. So we have a model that makes testable predictions, and data strongly consistent with those testable predictions, in the form of an acceleration of existing downward trends. What more do you want?
>I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial<p>I think if you actually look at the <i>data</i> for these trends rather than asking AI what it thinks you might experience some cognitive dissonance.<p>>There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI<p>It's called hiked interest rates. The economy is not doing so great for several reasons but the main one is wars.
People love simplistic narratives, i usually don't mind but this is just ridiculous. AI hate is gently overtaking AI hype as the most stupid thing around
It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.
You mean the fall to a thousand questions per month. Now that the volume is low enough someone has a chance of looking at every single one of them, maybe the StackOverflow community can finally collaborate in peace, safe from the onslaught of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation.
<a href="https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb" rel="nofollow">https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb</a><p>Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073<p>It's very much a bell curve
Just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times.
> just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve<p>I'm going to assume this is bait...
Do you mean "just because it's a bell curve, doesn't make it a normal distribution"?
Those graphs look nothing alike, except for "going up and then vaguely going down."
I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.<p>> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years<p>Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only
need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it.
AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already
largely prior to AI.
this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.
This isn't really a bell curve.
You don't just fit a Gaussian distribution to a timeseries dataset. That's not what a Gaussian curve is designed for at all.
<a href="https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regression" rel="nofollow">https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regr...</a>
Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users
If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did.<p>What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.
The users being generally unhelpful wasn't an issue for them, since they were still significantly more helpful than users anywhere else on the internet. Reddit was and still is filled with completely unvetted answers (on pretty much all topics not just programming), Quora was/is a joke, Yahoo answers had some funny posts I guess but nothing you could actually learn from, what else really was there? Before AI, Stack Overflow was as good as it gets.
It just accelerated the trend, and I am sure that reddit took over for a lot of new users.
The different problems with SO has been well documented.<p>And they killed maybe one of the most side features of it : <a href="https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-jobs-developer-story" rel="nofollow">https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...</a><p>So yeah metakill your own brands with stupid policies.
It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.
Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong:<p>* Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it.<p>* Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.
Yeah, I used to mostly answer there instead of ask and was in the top % for several big tags whatever that means / is worth, but then at some point I realized things had changed and I was spending more time fighting rules and guidelines rather than sharing knowledge and having a good time so I just stopped.
Discussion in January:<p><i>Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345</a><p>And previously in 2025:<p><i>Stack overflow is almost dead</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999125">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999125</a>
It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems<p>A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community
The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"
I have never actively asked a question on SO either. But for every programming question I ever had (literally!), I always either found the solution to it, or the reason why my question was stupid. (Which usually boils down to me not understanding sthg about the technology I'm working with.)<p>Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...
I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.
So... nothing that it wasn't already doing to itself? There's no one drop where "AI got into the market", SO had been declining steadily for years. I actually expected this post to be about how SO survived by selling its internal organs to AI.<p>Now do a graph for the money.<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-giants-pay-for-data/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...</a>
Some of the pre-ai decline in questions might just be that they had filled out of alot of the question space. What might be more interesting is the traffic graph as it would be possible to have a decline in questions but still have traffic rising to the existing ones.<p>Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.
The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it.
You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation.<p>Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
This query is even better: <a href="https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/cumulative-unanswered-questions-per-month" rel="nofollow">https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/c...</a>
Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph
I am surprised how early the overall downward trend developed. There is no doubt LLMs put a nail in the coffin, but the 5 years from 2017 to 2022 look to have brought a non trivial decline of their own
The graph starts falling shortly after 2020. AI certainly contributed but Stack Overflow was dying without it.
Looks like the decline started before the ai boom.<p>I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.
Where will AI's get the training data to answer questions now?
The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.
Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin.<p>Interesting to compare with MathOverflow which has distinctly different policies (only research-level questions) and professional community: <a href="https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/stackoverflow#graph" rel="nofollow">https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/st...</a> - also falling lately, but by a factor of 2-3x from peak rather than 1000x.
There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.
My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…
Wow!! I checked for English learners, Artificial Intelligence and GenAI as well and even they suck :D<p>Guess where these people went? Reddit?
While I never posted much to Stackoverflow I have fond memories of it as a sole developer, finding other people with similar issues and the quality solutions offered that often got me out of a jam.
I never understood the point if having the unfathomable churn of thousands of new questions per day. The value of SO to me was always a knowledge base with reputation mechanics, and that did not change. I still default to searching before asking AI.
AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene.<p>I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.
I’m surprised the site had that little activity, relatively, around 2010. That’s when I was using it the most. It seemed plenty large to me at the time… I can’t imagine the experience was that great a few years later. I wasn’t really paying attention by the time it reached the peaks later that decade.<p>I always found the format of the side obtuse and the culture not very welcoming. My most popular answer ever was something about JavaScript from 2008 or 2009, and to this day, people come in and say “this isn’t the way to do it, this is outdated“. No kidding, but every new question about that gets closed as a duplicate.
Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.
Didn't Stack Overflow have a similar impact on Experts Exchange?
I miss Joel Spolsky's writings especially in this dark age of AI.
Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there.<p>Funnily enough, there's now a "StackOverflow for Agents": <a href="https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent" rel="nofollow">https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent</a>
Can it please do the same to reddit?
I've only posted <i>one</i> question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.
The site looks like it was actually dying since 2014 and AI just turned off the life support.<p>It was such a hostile environment. It always seemed like you basically had to already know the answer to ask a question.
I think Ai is not the issue here. SEO on the other hand very much. It’s not like any one ever went to stackoverflow to find a solution, it was just that they were the google results for a lot of things
Honestly SO helped me a lot in Uni 10 years ago. However I was banned 5+ times for just asking a normal question with attempts at answering. Can’t say I’m surprised. It was not welcoming, massively exclusive and had a rude community. RIP
I will miss their yearly developer survey. Otherwise I won’t miss them. What a frustrating experience it was.
ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022, and frankly wasn't very good originally. The SO decline started occurring almost two years ahead of that, and was already on a sharp decline before ChatGPT shipped, and certainly before ChatGPT actually became <i>good</i>.<p>This is revisionist history. People told SO that they were leaving for YEARS because of how incredibly toxic it had become. It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately.<p>Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended."<p>They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.
Two years before ChatGPT is shortly after Joel and Jeff sold Stack Overflow to private equity.<p>The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.
The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?<p>In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy pro-AI decisions from the admin.
AI was the final nail but SO was already on a downward trajectory imo. Too much angry rule setting and confident jerks.
Yeah, I don't remember when was the last time I even visited stackexchange. AI is so much better, it's not even a contest. The real question is where AI will get its knowledge in 10 or 15 years when there is no training material anymore...
people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird.<p>i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.
Did anyone use the site search? Whenever I tried it it was disappointing. After ~two attempts I always went back to Google. Having the answer is of no use if you refuse to give it. LLMs didn't happen overnight. With all the aging questions, perhaps it was always doomed to be replaced by something.
Perhaps the harshest lesson of stackoverflow is that it represented what happens when you give programmer-types unfettered control of a culture. A bitter pill indeed.
Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.<p>Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
AI <i>and</i> ridiculously aggressive moderation. If it had been a more welcoming place it probably would have lasted longer.
When an ecological shoes company pivot to AI, I wonder why StackOverflow executives don't pilot for AI now.
They are trying I guess: <a href="https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/10/announcing-stack-overflow-for-agents/" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/10/announcing-stack-overf...</a>
There's still a question of what that would do for them. I haven't used SO in years because I haven't <i>needed</i> it in years.<p>That's primarily due to AI answering my technical questions.
I can't see any specific "and then AI happened" in this graph? SO made a lot of dumb choices that made it less and less useful for people independent of forcing AI in there, nothing in this graph is a clear indicator that AI was even a blip on the rapid decline of a service intent on making itself as poor an experience as possible for folks wanting to help other folks.
As others said it wasn't just AI but their excessive moderation
Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
Should read what Google did to remove sites from search results.
AI didn't start the decline, it just finished it.
SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc<p>And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
no wonders,
this will keep going on same trend
The site for lazy code monkeys is dead.
What I like about AI is that it doesn't close my chats as "duplicate" and link to something unrelated. It doesn't refuse to tell me how to do something just because there's another way to do something else that I am not interested in and didn't ask for.
SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet.<p>I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too.<p>And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes.<p>Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help.<p>Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely.<p>There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high.<p>Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.
They had a good run!
By now I’m more and more starting to wonder how this graph looks for Google itself
Slightly accelerated their decline. You have a drop around chatgpt release then the slope returns to its previous pace of decline.
Hehe, I'm so glad I blew the lid on this thing some time ago.<p>Mods were so shitty I always wanted to have my schadenfreude on them.
Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.<p>Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.
The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.<p>That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.
Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.
The trend might've stalled or even reversed if it weren't for AI, we can't just assume the same end was written in stone.
Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.
StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.<p>Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
joining the space and getting to know this site in 2015ish it was toxic af, well deserved
I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.
that must be depressing to the owners and the investors.
Sadge
Now that Stack Overflow is mostly dead, what's the experience of asking a question there? Will you still get berated or are people chilled out?
same story for blogs
It wasn't only LLMs it was also the downright user-hostile attitude prevalent on many sites on the SE network: <a href="https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX</a><p>Yeah, bro, I'm not a statistics professor so I can't provide you with the "details or clarity" you need. I tried my best and if that's not enough, fuck it. Same story on history.SE: <a href="https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hitler-view-his-botched-career-as-a-painter" rel="nofollow">https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hi...</a> If you're gonna require "evidence of prior research" I won't bother. The bots are way friendlier and just as knowledgeable.<p>The golden goose were users <i>asking questions</i>, not the anal-retentive <i>content curators</i>. SO let the latter drive away the former.
If there is not allowed to be duplicate questions isn't it by design that as the site and industry matures the number of posts go down.
The company my friend works for has a slack channel for help with code, like an internal stackoverflow. It’s almost inactive now.<p>I asked to see one of the questions from 2024 - it could have been solved with one LLM search.<p>We have eliminated a whole genre of peer to peer communication.
Stackoverflow deserved to die
This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before
AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a
peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in
2008, and I would reason it took a few years,
say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to
about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.<p>It still has some value today, as sometimes you
can find useful information on SO, but its peak
days are long over and I don't see how it can
manage to come back, with or without AI slop.
It would basically require a lot of re-design
and some things that never worked, such as the
karma system, should be changed. Also moderators -
they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave
up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.
I disagree. From what I see, company specific stackoverflow like mailing lists or slack channels are also dead.<p>The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.<p>One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.<p>FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.
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The move the current companies are missing is to have a legislation declaring ai as a person. Just like how corporations are people, if ai is a person then they don’t have to show number of people fired, can argues content creation and engagement is through the roof and so many other possibilities. /s
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Wikipedia seems to be going the same way.
Picking on SO and the mods in particular is a popular HN pasttime. I'd like to add that I interacted a bit with SO (1k points) and never really had any problems with them. I must be lucky...
Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.<p>Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.<p>Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.<p>Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.<p>Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.<p>Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?<p>Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?