What is this "Stack Overflow" you speak of?<p>Oh yes. Now I remember. I used to visit the site <i>every day</i>.<p>I love helping my fellow developers and answering their questions whenever I can.<p>My reputation there is 29,020, and I've contributed 645 quality answers.<p>I used to brag about this.<p>Now I had to think a bit to remember SO still exists.<p>My last answer was on May 28, 2021, over five years ago.<p>Obviously it wasn't LLMs that drove me away. And I'm not sure what it was.<p>Was it the culture, as others here pointed out? Or did I just get busy with other things?<p>---<p>Update: Now I think I remember what muted my enthusiasm.<p>Some of you older programmers may have used jQuery.<p>There is a common convention to use $ as the first character of a variable name that is a jQuery object:<p><pre><code> var $foo = $('#foo');
</code></pre>
One of my few claims to fame is that I invented that convention and promoted it on the early jQuery mailing list.<p>Someone asked about this:<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/205853/why-would-a-javascript-variable-start-with-a-dollar-sign/48558883" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/205853/why-would-a-javas...</a><p>The top-rated answer, with 1542 votes, is a good summary.<p>The second answer, with 278 votes, is as irrelevant as an answer can be.<p>I'm in third place with 71 votes. I gave the story behind the naming convention, because I like people to know the "how and why".<p>It gets better! This question was marked as a duplicate of another one. That other question has a wild variety of answers, but none that does what I tried to do: explain the reason and background for the convention.<p>Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.
It's funny to see what a parallel you have to my story.<p>my reputation is 29,459, my last answer October 15, 2021, close enough to be considered the same IMO.<p>For me, the thing that drove me away, is that you'd spend time on writing good answers, to provider lore, etc, but it was increasingly difficult to find "good" questions to answer. There were increasingly many "homework" questions, and far fewer questions where people _had_ put the effort in.<p>And, an increasing animosity to the people answering the questions.<p>The community became toxic, and it wasn't the <i>only</i> the gatekeepers, everyone wanted something for free, and StackOverflow suffered from the "open source burn-out" problem.<p>Certainly I did.
Similar here. I don't share your numbers, but I had ~10,000 on SO and ~5,000 on Cross-Validated.<p>I started it as a way to learn things. Mostly picked questions that were on the edge of my understanding, researched the problem for myself, and then tried to provide clear and detailed answers. So I got a lot out of it too.<p>My view for when SO started to decline is also similar to yours - being flooded with poor quality questions. And on average people asking questions became more arrogant, put little effort in, and demanded the whole place to change so they can paste their broken code and have someone fix it for an upvote.<p>So I think I naturally and slowly drifted away from using SO. However, publicly stated reasons for SO's downfall often proclaim there was something wrong with people who answered questions. That they were rude or were "gatekeeping". I always feel alienated reading those, since it's very different from how I experienced the site.
Kudos to you, you're a more helpful person than I. I never looked for questions to help people, my interaction with SO was always "me first". If I had a problem before the AIpocalypse, I'd look on SO. If I couldn't find an answer I still had the problem and would have to figure it out the hard way. And once putting in the effort finding the answer it was little additional effort to provide it to others.<p>So I ended up with a large number of "revival" and "necromancer" badges for getting upvotes for answers on old previously unanswered questions. And many of my questions have my own answers posted a couple days later.<p>IOW, I provided a lot of value to SO. But I got even more value out of them, finding many more answers than I provided, especially since many of my answers were for very obscure questions. A real significant win-win.<p>I think this would have been a better model for SO -- encouraging more of this sort of drive by helpfulness rather than gamifying/socializing so much to encourage direct helping.
same - I only visited SO when I spent a lot of time looking for a solution / answer to something and I could not find it in documentaiton/man pages or on Google
I watched a few key tags around functional programming and JS, but someone would always answer first, so I eventually moved on because I wasn't needed. I for a time ended up just responding to random Tweets from African students posting about their programming achievements with tips for structuring code they posted better and stuff like that. It led to some fun conversations.<p>now I have kids, so they get my teaching attention instead. And I don't touch Twitter.
My reputation is 49,636 (I was a relative expert in iOS and git when both technologies were young, and answered a LOT of questions that are still getting upvoted to this day)<p>My last answer was December 28, 2015, and corresponds pretty closely with me getting a more interesting and engaging job. That, and the two areas I knew well were maturing and there were a lot fewer easy questions to answer.
Never ending September?
Same. For me it was basically that as a body of knowledge, it kind of stabilized. I didn't work in a rapidly developing field like the newest JS frameworks, so for what I knew, most stuff simply became answered.<p>Whenever I took the time to make a long answer on a question, I saw some mod close the question as a duplicate of an existing one - even though the question could have some minute detail that was different, or perhaps there was some recent change in the landscape that meant an answer in 2020 would be different from one in 2013. But no: aggressive marking as duplicate even though clearly as a _community_ it would be much better to have a more recent discussion, perhaps more alternative answers and just allowing the near-duplicates.
"Some of you older programmers may have used jQuery." Oh dear, I'm getting old as the jQuery era was my prime of programming before other activities in life took over. Apparently, as someone in their early fourties I am now in the older category.<p>On topic: thanks for this great summary of the issue. I too miss the prime stackoverflow days. Although the availability of LLMs has allowed me to learn new things and generate some code again, the passion and love for programming that was on (the early) stackoverflow, I do miss. Also the times of just buying a book to learn about a new tool or language (jQuery in Action teached me a lot) feels different from just asking Claude Code to fix or explain something.
> I'm in third place with 71 votes. I gave the story behind the naming convention, because I like people to know the "how and why".<p>Stuff like this is basically what drove me away as well. The top-rated answer was frequently not the answer. It was "an" answer to "a" question, but not the "the" answer to "the" question.<p>That, and I'd ask a variation of a question and it would get flagged as a duplicate of an already-answered question, except the original question and none of the scored answers contained the answer.
To be honest the accepted answer is just more to the point and helpful. I get your reasoning and its a nicer story, and the credit part.
I had the same thought when I read the top answer. But then I read the parent's answer, and it was quite pleasantly written. Ie it unfolded the thought process of why, which is what the question was about.<p>I also had the thought, I think I independently invented the same convention, but I am getting old and I probably at least somewhere read some code that was written that way and it made sense. Or maybe I read an article about it and started using it.<p>The thing about StackOverflow was it hit at a moment in time when everyone was excited about this stuff. I remember listening to Joel Spolski's and Jeff Atwood's podcast about building the site, Jeff thought it would take 3 months, Joel thought they needed a real timeline.<p>There was so much pent up demand for it, that it just immediately took off. But it also seemed to replace the various personal blogs where people would write about some problem they had and how they fixed it.<p>I don't really have a feeling about Stackoverflows demise one way or the other. I think I initially contributed one maybe two answers, got a couple nitpicks on the precise nature of the answer and kindof lost interest. Which is interesting because I remember Joel and Jeff explicitly wanting to solve for the issue that happened when someone asked a question and were immediately told they were taking the wrong approach, instead of just answering their question. I guess the burden shifted from the questioner to the answerer.
I had the same thought it’s a great example of why StackOverflow does work in this case.
Very much agree.<p>The query in this thread further confirms it, by november 2022 (ChatGPT reveal), usage had already dropped to ~109120 questions/month as compared to peak usage in March 2014 at 207169 questions/month.<p>The trend continued since but their decline is surely not caused by LLM:s.
I had moderator privileges and I used them mainly to just get people to follow the rules. But the higher ups didn't want you to do that due to the "be nice" policy. "But...but...it's a direct violation!" I'd say. Then I'd be declared a bad guy and put into moderator jail for a while.<p>That happened often enough that I just gave up. I rarely felt the need to ask questions cause I was pretty good at what I did so I quit altogether. For fun, I signed in and noticed about a 2000 uptick in my standing and three "best answer" awards.
The attrocious moderation was just an accelerator. SO was doomed the second it gained enough traction to become a resume padder and consultancy funnel.
A few weeks ago I was cleaning out some old boxes and found an envelope with SO and coding horror stickers, my Irish address was hand written and had Jeffs home address as a return address. SO was an amazing resource and I will be forever grateful that it existed.
> What is this "Stack Overflow" you speak of?<p>Oh let me remind you, it was the expertsexchange that was actually useful!
I upvoted. Your answer is at 91 now.
What I found was that there was a lot of repetition in the questions that were asked and so once the knowledge base was built up, less new stuff was being added.<p>There was a lot of blocking and downvoting of questions which was both a good and bad thing.<p>If you had an expertise on a certain topic, the questions were often very simple and repetitious (e.g. I knew a decent amount at relational databases), but also you'd get people asking for whole system designs which got a bit ridiculous.<p>It wasn't great for asking about little known products or libraries etc and I often found no one responded to questions on certain js libraries or BI tools. Which was quite annoying, maybe because it appealed more to certain types of developers.<p>I guess you served your time and most people don't want to be answering questions every day for ever! There was a guy called Tom Kyte from Oracle who ran a question site for over 20 years - it must have taken a lot of his time, but if you're out there Tom it was very much appreciated!
> Was it the culture, as others here pointed out? Or did I just get busy with other things?<p>Culture or no culture LLMs killed SO for good, there's simply no need for it anymore
So it was a Hungarian $ - got to know :)
> Was it the culture, as others here pointed out?<p>Rather than culture, for me it was the moderation body.<p>There were a bunch of people that were policing the dumbest minutie, and being assholish about that.<p>I occasionally would get my answers rewritten to have a completely different tone. My tone was not polemical or controversial in any way. It was just my tone. It was me. And somebody was not okay with that. They would edit MY TEXT and potentially put words in my mouth.<p>That's absolutely unacceptable.<p>Ten years on and i'm still salty about that, and i cheerish stackoverflow's death every time it gets brought up.<p>StackOverflow: Rest in piss, you won't be missed.
I'm starting to feel old. I remember fondly using jQuery. Oh, and MoTools.
MooTools. Also, I fondly remember YUI Library that Yahoo created.
I bet on MooTools and lost. <i>sigh</i><p>Now its legacy is that its prototype pollution is the reason we can't have `contains` and call `includes` instead.
LMAO.
So absolutely zero self-awareness from you that not only did you add confidently incorrect “corrections” to the accepted answer, but your “lore” is verbose and uninteresting.<p>“I noticed $email looked like $('#email')” isn’t exactly an exciting bit of history, even if you spend multiple paragraphs trying to pump yourself up.
I've got a similar story and similar rep, although I only have about a dozen answers posted after 2021. I haven't ever told anyone how much I answered questions there, either. I wasn't there for the points, I was there for the puzzles. I think I've gotten like another 3k rep since I stopped going there. It looks like I finally lost my "Top 2%" status, or else they got rid of that for everyone.<p>For me, I think I left for a few reasons. All of them are some flavor of "the design is user-hostile".<p>The first reason is the "traps" they put in the moderation review queue process. These <i>always</i> felt like shit, even if you were right. And for some reason they frequently picked questions where you could reasonably pick multiple reasons to close a question... and they'd yell at you for getting it wrong! Really, this needlessly punitive experience is the heart of why SO was so awful, because everything is like that across the whole site. <i>Some</i> of the network sites aren't like that, but it's rare. And there were just so many Meta questions where the upvoted response was "this would be hard to do right, so instead we're going to do it the way we all know is wrong but it's easy."<p>The second reason is just how awful the onboarding is. The site constantly had problems with people either not posting code or posting screenshots of code. I don't know why they didn't make a beginner form, similar to what you often see on GitHub issue trackers for large projects (i.e., always include this, always include this, include this if it's relevant, etc. and it's <i>in the textarea box when you start a question</i>). Instead they assume that you know how to ask a question, give you a completely blank form, and then aggressively policy anything where you didn't do it right. I think the one thing to come out of that site is that <i>people do not inherently know how to ask questions</i>. [Which, if anybody has been responsible for responding to IT tickets, oh, boy, do they not know how to ask questions or report problems. "I'm getting errors running my report in the Finance application. I need this report soon! Help!" No mention of which report. No mention of what the report parameters were. No mention of which error message. They don't know what the error message means so, obviously, it must not be useful to anybody.]<p>The third reason is the site finger-pointing. "This doesn't belong here so <i>I'm locking and closing your question</i>," is possibly the most ridiculous thing ever. Why doesn't it <i>move</i> the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.<p>But, I think the final nail in the coffin is just how aggressively awful rpg.stackexchange.com is, which seeks objective, hyperliteral answers to game questions that are, by design, subjective and intentionally meant to be played with interpretation and nuance. The result is a handful of highly active users will nit pick any answer or question they don't like. Really, I think it's the GameFAQs Forum clique problem, to a significant extent. Some people really have nothing better to do except quash the utility of a site they have a small amount of control over, and it largely ruins the whole experience for the majority of other people. And, unlike a subreddit, you can't just go make your own version on the same topic. It doesn't work like that.
It might have happened because there are currents on the net and platforms where the only purpose is to pull out as much data from you and other humans as possible and give back NOTHING. Be wary what you post and about what.<p>They exploit the basic human needs and build whole exploiting platforms on it and then kick you out from the nest like a cuckoo does with other bird chicks. The abnormal modding and other shenanigans also killed my interest quite quickly, but in hindsight I have to say, good riddance. People are naive and gullible, and give out decades of experience on a whim, because they think that everyone is as good and benevolent as them. While in reality there are a lot of truly evil and selfish people out there and at the end of the day using their knowledge against the good ones.<p>And now here we are in the AI madness, where a similar exploitation is happening just at a much bigger scale, using the benevolent and naive ones information against them.
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Now your intelligence was shamelessly stolen and other people making billions of it.
Stack Overflow is CC licensed<p>> Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0.
CC BY-SA requires attribution. And is actually quite like GPL, in that it requires derivatives to be under CC BY-SA too!
And not only CC BY-SA 2.5 requires attribution which wasn't provided by any of the AI corpos stealing that data, it also requires that derivative product MUST be licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 too. So literally all AI models are in violation.
True for OP and true for Linus Torvalds. Is the solution to stop with open source, and never to publish anything? ;)
They were publicly posting to a search-indexed website with the intent of helping people. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that they understood that SO owned the messages and were already profiting off of them.
I believe the GP is referring to the LLM firms that have hoovered up all works they can find, legally or not.<p>Of course stepping past the licensing question - I would have never contributed to SO as I did had I known what was to come.<p>With SO itself I could at least see the value in having a central store of knowledge for these topics and so, hey, I don’t mind that they got to be the ones to make it happen and profit.
OK, let's get this out of the way:<p>1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.<p>2. AI clearly finished the job.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L</a>
SO was a governance disaster. It was the infighting it was the strike, it was bad auto moderation tools.
And the Stack Exchange strike wasn't really about AI. AI was just the final trigger after years of management undermining the community that made the platform valuable.<p>Stack Exchange was built on an implicit social contract people contributed their expertise and thousands of hours of unpaid work because they believed they were building a collectively governed knowledge resource. The company owned the platform, but the community created its value.<p>After time, management became increasingly centralized and disconnected from contributors. Also the policing of questions based on geeky criteria and not what users wanted. The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone, qmd at least thats why i quit. Quality control gradually became useless gatekeeping.<p>So there were really more than one problems, corporate management treating contributors as free labor, and established contributors treating their moderation as authority over everyone else, there were bad tools closing questions.
The platform had become extremely hard to use for posting questions, finding amswers, moderator work. For me it was useless. Incidentally the closing of “opinion” questions was the worst decision since it was the only thing that could make it distinct from AI produced answers.<p>For some of the events there is paper here with details
<a href="https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08884v1" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08884v1</a>
> Also the policing of questions based on geeky criteria and not what users wanted.<p>This is wrong. People don't get that SO is moderated almost entirely by users. Users are those that down vote. Users are those who vote to close a question, and when a question reaches consensus it's closed. Users are those watching the review queue. Mods mainly did bigger stuff with additional tools.<p>So <i>users</i> wanted it how it was. And for good reason. If you actually participated on the site, like watching new questions arriving in a constant stream, it was obvious that most of it was low quality. People here will bemoan they got a question closed or no help, but that's to me mostly entitlement. The rules are clear, it was to create a Q&A site, not solve your specific question for free. To me that's not hostile.
> This is wrong.<p>This is exactly what drove me away. It's basically Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy. SO got so overrun with people that were dedicated to Maintaining Order that the site itself stopped being useful. I feel like at least half the time I would go visit, the question that brought me there had been marked as a duplicate or closed. Pointing out that the fire hose is mostly low quality doesn't change this.<p>All those people fighting to keep SO pristine now preside over a kingdom of nothing.
There are real differences and experiences between heavy users and occasional users, voters and moderators, question posters and contributors. Unless you're careful it's very easy to develop a culture of gatekeeping that is off putting to a broader community. SO wasn't able to successfully steer between the sometimes competing interests of these groups.
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> The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone, qmd at least thats why i quit.<p>This. Way before LLMs.
You've described many things over the past few years. COVID is also one of them. Stuff that was just basically holding on anyway based on history and momentum just couldn't handle an additional body blow. (And, in a number of cases, didn't really care to.)
For me the main problem was that the level was so incredibly low.<p>Already when I was writing my master thesis I could get very little out of it.<p>All of my questions were too specific and went unanswered.<p>My most voted answer explains how to install header files on debian.
I had stopped going to it quite some time ago.<p>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 (?).<p>2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.<p>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.<p>This was before LLMs or COVID.
> 1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).<p>> ...<p>> 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.<p>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).<p>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" <i>from</i> them.
Yip, LLMs were the executioners but SO had already long since put itself on death row for exactly what you're mentioning. I think sites like FlipCode were in many ways the spiritual predecessor of SO, and the questions were more of a part of the community rather than the definition of it. People need to feel free to communicate for something like SO to be successful, and they'd turned themselves into an absurdly user-hostile site where it seemed like people were competing against each other to see who could find a reason to close questions, rather than looking for a reason to answer them.<p>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.<p>It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.
A big part of the picture was that they'd gamified the heck out of it. Community moderation can work, somewhat, but I've never seen <i>gamified</i> moderation work. Gamification is the big killer of collaborative communities.
I think you got it in one.<p>The one thing that always struck me, was that <i>most</i> (not <i>some</i>) of the high-score individuals had 1-digit question counts (with that digit frequently being "0"). It was clear that asking questions was a "demerit." These were folks judging questions, that <i>had no idea how to ask a question, themselves.</i><p>Also, I found that many were not ones that worked on <i>shipping</i> software. It seemed that their vocation was SO. That's very much like the kid that spends all his time, playing Counterstrike, and giving advice to soldiers in theater.<p>I'm really big on apprenticeships. We become masters, by moving through being juniors. It gives us an extremely solid base, and elicits acknowledgment from others.<p>Journeymen can often be demanding and irascible, but they command respect, by demonstrating that they have been in your shoes, and that's really important. You suffer the slings and arrows, because you know that there's a clear path to where they are at.<p>I have friends that are former US Marines, and they all have Boot Camp stories. These stories all feature downright abusive Drill Sergeants. But they also <i>all</i> profess immense respect for these dudes, because they came from years of experience, and they often showed boots how to do something, by demonstrating it, themselves, at a high degree of skill.<p><i>> "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves."<p>-Brendan Behan</i>
Community moderation at that scale just doesn't work, period. It always attracts the worst office chair nazis who enjoy lording their petty power over other users.
> "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question)<p>> I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions<p>I think both of these are true, but I'm not sure that many of the contributors (or even many of the moderators?) _really_ cared too much about building the "curated list of questions".<p>I'd posit that part of the problem was also its competitiveness – contributors wanted to earn rep, so they ignored constraints or answered the question they really wanted to answer. Some of the tags I used to frequent had a few contributors who seemed to do nothing but answer SO questions, so there were never any good questions left for a mere mortal with other commitments in their day.<p>I am generally unconvinced that reputation-based systems like SO's are actually useful. Contrast SO with a project mailing list or issue tracker – where I've had some of the best support – where there's nobody tracking rep or keeping a tally, and everyone is there to simply help and share their knowledge.<p>> Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.<p>I did plenty of free moderation over time on the review queues. I have no idea today why I invested so much time in that, for it was a thankless task and ultimately didn't feel I could move the needle on the bigger problems.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Also a lot of communities do their own QA on discord where they can modererate themselves.
On most forums, ending up with power-tripping asshat moderators is purely accidental.<p>In reading the site rules and meta discussions, SO always seemed to have been explicitly designed to invite, cater to, and directly nurture them.
>>Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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 <i>encourage</i> some rate of duplicates, to ensure that answers remain fresh.<p>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.<p>They really killed themselves through strict moderation. It's incredibly sad, it was a good resource while it lasted.
To me, the way the site was organized was absurd. It was difficult to <i>answer</i> questions.<p>The one time I tried, I couldn't answer directly because I had no reputation, and I couldn't comment either, but I could edit the question (!) which someone else had already done, answering the question in the question. It was an incomplete answer, so I added another edit with a complete answer. Then the mod who approved my edit also added a newline to it, so it was them and not me who was credited (unless you went to the 'history' page).<p>I gave up after that.
> 1. It was hard to ask any question.<p>Totally. There were so many safeguards in place, for a newcomer it is quite hard to contribute.<p>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.<p>Well, they were the backbone of professional IT/SWE, so of course they did a lot of things right obviously.
The most hilarious moment for me was when my question that was 5y old was closed as a duplicate of one that was couple of months old. I provided an answer on how to work around the issue; the new question didn't have an answer, but it had more points. From what I read the original issue was still there. At that point I was rarely visiting the website either way, but the absurdity of the situation was staggering.
It's only absurd if you think the question being closed as a duplicate was calling you out for doing something wrong. This was how it intentionally worked: group everything, and provide a canonical answer. Duplicates were <i>good</i>, the idea being that more ways to ask the same question could lead more people to find the answer. The other question just happened to have more people find it (hence more points), but someone finding yours could then be redirected to the more popular variation of the question.
I think they tried too hard to structure things and keep everything clean, which becomes difficult or even outright deleterious when the numbers are large.<p>They should have accepted a certain level of mess instead of being so strict. After all, even good popular answers become outdated sooner or later.
I hated asking Qs in SO, it felt terribly snobby. However, I used it a lot to search for answers. The alternatives were crap.<p>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 <i>existing</i> info. Asking was still pretty terrible.<p>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.<p>Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].
I remember Experts Exchange somehow managed to have every question one could ever ask, but no actual answers - even with a paid account.<p>I was glad when S.O. put an end to them.
> The alternatives were crap. … Asking was still pretty terrible.<p>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.
> 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 (?).<p>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.<p>In the end, imagine wasting half an hour to post a four-lines issue... No thanks.
I always found that the SO search was frustratingly bad and users NEED to use search to find the authoritative question for your needs.<p>And even if I find the right existing question, the accepted answer might not be the one I need. Sometimes the question asked accepts the wrong question. Sometimes the current right answer didn't exist at the time of the answer acceptance.<p>SO was a good first approximation of a good Q&A site. It didn't evolve with the times.
+1 to the outright hostility.<p>Good riddance.
> It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I agree that SO became very hostile at some point. But I also moderated a bit around 2014-2019 and the vast majority of questions in my field were very low effort. People would just dump their code with no context and ask why it doesn't work.<p>So, the place was a shit hole.
As someone who spent some time participating in the filtering of SO's questions, considering the quality of some of the new question, I understand why the volunteer moderators pushed SO/SE for those question quality control tools and a push for users to use them. But sadly, unlike the upvote/downvote mechanism, the incentives to use them resulted in hasty decisions (close as dupe), which had an adverse effect on the site's reputation.
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.
> I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.<p>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.
> 1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.<p>This was single-handedly the work of arrogant self-righteous moderators who would close random useful questions as not useful just to prove they were doing something. A lot of us long timers got annoyed at selective enforcement of rules and never looked back. It's sad because it was actually a fun place to hangout. Too much moderation always kills the vibe.
I contend that shitty moderation was why it flatlined.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Each time, the population answering those questions was smaller.<p>I believe that a lot of good people left like I did. Then just didn't come back.
The issue was that Stack overflow never was enjoyable to use.<p>Asking questions was difficult and any difficulty questions I might ask would not get a response anyway.<p>Answering questions was a gamble, sometimes you would get rewarded, most of the time you would not.
Right when it first started it was so much better than what had been there before, and the way they assigned points was designed to encourage lots of people to chip in with answers.<p>Asking questions did become painful later on. But it was the default site to choose whenever you googled a programming issue for years after.
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: <a href="https://x.com/CraigGidney/status/2115664509042053377/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/CraigGidney/status/2115664509042053377/photo/1</a><p>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.<p>I got the cross-site data from data.stackexchange.com with this vibe-coded query:<p><pre><code> 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;</code></pre>
That's interesting, thanks! The peak for most topics was around 2015-2020 apparently, and then came a "continuous" decline. If it really was a major event that caused the decline, wouldn't we expect to see a volatile plunge, like on the stock market?
I don't get why there is actual complaining about that outcome, because that seemed what the actual intention was. SO made it clear, that they do not want to be a Q&A forum, but a collection of novel and interesting questions. Naturally, a lot of newly asked question were already asked in a similar fashion, which for SO philosophy meant that they could be merged. In addition, they gradually increased the "quality" level new questions need to be have, to be kept.<p>The declining number of questions is hence not a side-effect or a mistake, but just means that they reach their end-goal. It's actual a measure of success. (Now you can disagree, whether that philosophy was reasonable or sustainable in the first place, but given there choice, this is the logical conclusion and end goal.)
<a href="https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/cumulative-unanswered-questions-per-month" rel="nofollow">https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/c...</a> shows the situation even better.<p>And, StackExchange has adjusted stale/inactive question deletion scripts as a result of this change: <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/419988/we-ve-reworked-automatic-question-deletion-let-s-talk-about-why" rel="nofollow">https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/419988/we-ve-rework...</a>
Agreed, I found SO and Quora and similar sites with general or specific question/answer based communities weak long before AI.<p>AI replaced Google Search in many ways more directly on arrival than those.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Tangental, but I tried plotting number of questions by month <i>including deleted questions</i>. It shows similar trends to questions by month (so nothing particularly interesting): <a href="https://imgur.com/a/NLLB3OK" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/NLLB3OK</a><p>Query: <a href="https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1969373" rel="nofollow">https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1969...</a>
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.
I like that you can see a Covid bump in there and then it immediately craters lol
Right? It's not a very subtle spike, is it? Even then, if you erased the bump, the graph is pretty close to a straight downward-sloped line from 2016 to late 2022.<p>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.
Yeah, the newcomers asked worse questions than average. There was a huge flood of people presenting like they thought they had a difficult question about how neural network simulations work, but actually had code full of multiple elementary errors (completely unrelated to the domain, just learning the programming language kinda stuff) and no apparent willingness to read error messages even to the extent of "it says TypeError, I guess that must mean something is wrong with a type".
This was all too common across tech. I know of many products at the time that, say, had their usage quadruple in Covid (from a very large baseline) and nobody in leadership seemed to ask the question "is this permanent or just an artifact of people being stuck at home?" Clearly the answer was "no".
Often overlooked but Discord(and similar communities) are also a big reason why people no longer ask ques. on SO.
The graph makes it clear; the question I have though, between the start of SO decline and up to when AI became able to answer SO-like questions (or remove the need for them altogether), where did people go to find an answer?
Copilot in VS Code with OpenAI Codex came out in June 2021.
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.
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.<p>Maybe it was more consolidation of tech and better docs over time.
Maybe they visited the website and the existing questions were enough? These stats seems to be questions asked. Maybe that’s the reason.
I was using StackOverflow pretty heavily in that time. I was doing PHP, Java and Groovy at the time, and PHP's documentation is pretty good. JavaDoc generated from source not so much...
Github issues
[flagged]
Yes that was my impression too. SO already died before the rise of AI.
> SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017.<p>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.
I stopped posting questions onto Stack Overflow after experiencing two user-hostile practices of theirs.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Stack Overflow brought their death to themselves.
The problem was that you would get points as an editor, so people would just rewrite everything even when it didn't it.
I had forgotten about that. I also had some of my questions rewritten by other users. That felt so ridiculous. If there is something to add, add in a comment? Why is anyone even able to rewrite what others wrote? Who thought this was a good idea?
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.<p>And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.<p>No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.<p>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.<p>It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.<p>It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.<p>I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
> That’s why it succeeded.<p>The moderation style in the latter years was very different than at the beginning.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The moderation wore me out and I wasn’t even posting questions, just trying to find answers!
I asked a question about 15 years ago. Lots of responses/engagement and a good answer. I just got an email a month or so back telling me that question got closed as a dupe. I checked...it was not even close to a dupe. Exhausting.
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.<p>Actually, talking to ChatGpt, I found this article: “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.”
( <a href="https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...</a>) and that actually shows what the SO admins didn't get (imo obviously).<p>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).<p>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.<p>I think
> It was always heavily moderated<p>No, it <i>absolutely very much was not</i>. 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 <i>instead of</i> 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.<p>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 <i>why</i> beginners' bad questions are bad. (Hint: it is <i>not</i> because most of their problems are easy to solve, or "beneath" experts.)<p>> when following a StackOverflow link from Google<p>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 <i>irrelevant</i> low-quality questions that happened to have a lot of keyword overlap with what you wanted. And <i>misleading</i> questions didn't get cleaned up, so you would search for X and find a question where the OP hadn't tried to <i>analyze the situation at all</i> 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.)<p>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.<p>> a moderator shutting it down<p>Again, these actions are <i>overwhelmingly not taken by moderators</i>, 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.
<i>> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.</i><p>Huh. I had the opposite experience. The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.<p>I stopped bothering, after a number of questions went answered only by me (after I found the solution on my own).<p>It did reduce the insults, but that seemed to be the only gain that I got, for carefully articulating my questions.<p>LLMs aren't perfect, but they don't imply that I'm being lazy, for not already having the answer, and they do give me an answer, instantly (and, like SO, the answer is not always the best one).
I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.<p>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.<p>> The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I gravitated to Ruby back then because it was one of the only forums people would be patient and empathetic with me.
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting<p>The “answer my own question” feature was meant for exactly that. Had quite a few like that, and sometimes I still got better answers than I found
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting<p>I have repeatedly had this experience in trying to craft
The perfect question for a consultant who was also a mathematics professor, in finding the essence of the question the answer becomes clear and I never even have to send the email
I have heard great things about the Ruby community. I don't use the language, myself, so I wouldn't know from experience.<p>Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.<p>Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.<p>Yes, that was part of the point. I <i>hope you posted anyway</i> (after checking for a duplicate, and assuming the underlying problem wasn't just a typo), and provided your own answer for it. <i>That is an explicit part of how the site is supposed to work</i> (but an incredibly poorly communicated one).<p>> Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow.<p>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 <i>because they're easily answered</i>. In reality, the main problem is questions that are easy but complex, i.e. which really break down into multiple separate easy questions or require digging through a code dump to find a trivial error.
I found that Stack Overflow, like Reddit, rewired my perception of what "good" is and made me view bad things as good.<p>60000 rep btw
Was it a better question <i>for skimming and quickly replying</i>,<p>or just a great form of your question if someone genuinely wanted to answer it, not pump their score, dopamine etc?
I think the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application of the "hacker" mindset (more or less) to a lot of fields that do not benefit from the hacker mindset.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html</a>
> It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.<p>That's exactly what it turned into, though.<p><a href="https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320536/what-is-the-best-triage-response-for-give-me-teh-codez-questions" rel="nofollow">https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320536/what-is-the-...</a>
> That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new.<p>And _then_ it became so much more hostile to users - and lost a lot of what made it so wonderful. It became very common that asking a new, good question would be marked as a duplicate because there was something it wasn't a duplicate of.
My experience with the late SO was, that the original question used to be ten years old and filled with responses that were no longer relevant to the current state.<p>What amazes me is that an LLM can actually make sense out of all this crappy training data and often produces meaningful answers. (maybe that's a sign that we already have AGI)
You'd also get people downvoting completely valid rule abiding questions, and the site heavily punished being downvoted. So you'd get hit with a stick repeatedly for trying to engage with the site, it's no wonder everyone left as soon as there was an alternative.
It certainly didn't start that way, having been there and followed them on their podcast -- pre-launch. It became more and more hostile. It was initially positive, even when questions didn't fit the mold. Then successive waves of pedantic moderators chased out the altruism. There never seemed to be a suitable mechanism to slap down the haters, then years pass, you need to ask a question, and find out that it is causing you anxiety to just post a question..
At the start moderators worked with you, after 2014 they worked against you.
Agreed, being a n00b in the open source & hacker community I recall asking half assed question on forums and IRC and would get the infamous RTFM.<p>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.<p>I really appreciate that experience…
When Attwood and Spolsky founded it, they commented on it being because Experts Exchange was hostile to users. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656581">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656581</a><p>If StackOverflow is being considered hostile now it's big ... well, Google the three stages of enshittification I suppose.
> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Then someone else did.<p>No, he didn't actually answer my question. No one did.
Well, the community never made it a very welcoming place... But, I think a part of this is that it's just faster to throw a Q into ChatGPT. There's no waiting for a response, a major bonus is the non-hostility + willingness to respond to 'stupid' questions.
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.<p>Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.
Let's just be blunt. The main target audience were clueless idiots who just wanted to solve their current programming problem, e.g. compiler error etc. They didn't care about anything else, they just wanted to copy-paste text and for the problem to go away, preferably without even needing to turn their brain on.<p>Now we have a new guy in town, who offers "robotized copy-paste the solution to YOUR specific programming problem, no reading required! we can even control your computer for you, so you can do something you actually enjoy and stop wasting time on this complicated computery thingy for boring nerds", which serves the aforementioned audience much better.
> The main target audience were…<p>"Target audience" connotes people that the site <i>wanted</i> to be there. That's just <i>who showed up</i>, because that's who will <i>always</i> show up basically <i>anywhere</i> that looks like it might be helpful to them, by default.
You are correct about that. But the fundamental design of the site facilitated the value extracting vermin. Then the biggest value extracting vermin the internet has ever seen came along, used you as the training data and replaced you.<p>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.
are you perhaps a mod from SO? if not you should apply as one asap.<p>you sound exactly like the mfs that ruined that forum.
As one of those "mfs", <i>we were undeniably correct</i> 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 <i>absolutely does not in any way, shape or form</i> 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.<p>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 <i>almost literally</i> one-in-a-million users. But it only took 3,000 reputation to cast a close vote, and <i>15</i> to flag to close a question (prioritizing it for consideration by the first group).<p>Posts like yours are made, IMX, because people had a bad experience asking a question. If that describes you, feel free to provide a link to the question and I'll be happy to give a detailed explanation of why things went as they did and what the site wanted you to do better in asking it.
As you said elsewhere here, the site is not good at communicating its expectations. To the outsider it looks like a huge pool of questions and answers to which you may as well add yours.<p>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
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They started losing traffic at catastrophic rates before ChatGPT was released. You can check this information yourself, we did not <i>have</i> AI when SO started falling off a cliff
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>N=1 anecdata ofc, but I'm not surprised at their demise
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.<p>That and [redacted] mods who delete your question “because its a duplicate” but its not, you just assume it is and lock it. Lots of this when .NET Core came out and it drove me up a wall. Wouldnt surprise me if a lot of “hallucination” type answers come from bad Stack Overflow data being interpreted as “fact” in earlier models.
Your question was neither deleted nor locked. It was <i>closed</i> 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.<p>My extensive experience has been that the overwhelming majority of the time that people complain "this isn't a duplicate", it actually quite obviously is. (And there were even more irritating complaints on the meta site at times; all the way up to the level of "you shouldn't ever close duplicates at all because I think you shouldn't", demonstrating no interest in even trying to understand the reasons for doing so.) Of course, people do make mistakes; there was an entire process for fixing this, but most people could not be bothered to engage with it productively (or even civilly). But feel free to give examples of things that you feel were wrongly closed from your own experience.
It's astonishing how vastly different our experiences were. I trawled the new Python questions frequently, looking for fun, novel things to answer. It was dismaying how often they'd been wrongly marked as dupes, often because the original answer was ancient and obsolete. It would often be egregiously bad, like:<p>Q: How do Python's dict preserve insertion order?<p>A: [duplicate of "Why does a Python dict's keys have a different ordering each run?"]<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Spotting some stackoverflow mods in this subthread!
> then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.<p>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: <a href="https://go.experts-exchange.com/" rel="nofollow">https://go.experts-exchange.com/</a>
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.<p>Uh, no.<p>StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
People used to add "reddit" at the end of their search queries, and now I'm sure many of those people just ask a bot. But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.<p>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.<p>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 <i>because</i> it was hostile.
> But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.<p>I hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.<p>But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was <i>specifically</i> intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to <i>avoid</i> chatter because <i>that gets in the way</i> of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.
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.
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.<p>Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.
I think it's a combination of both...<p>Before AI people would still try asking questions on SO despite the hostility because it was the only/main place to get answers. Over this time, SO popularity was deteriorating.<p>After AI people who had bad experiences with asking questions on SO would ask the AI instead. This is because the AI wouldn't mark your question as a duplicate, wouldn't question its validity [1], etc. It would just answer your question. You could even ask it follow-up questions if the answer wasn't quite what you were looking for. All of this in real time, not waiting to get an answer.<p>[1] Unless the question triggered the safety gates that the AI companies have in place.
Because AI removed what little value it had.<p>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.<p>People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.<p>If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.<p>AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it <i>tries</i>. StackOverflow stopped <i>trying</i> to answer questions.
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.
<a href="https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L</a>
People like me⁰, who I admit will also soon be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, will still refer to it for some time.<p>--------<p>[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<p>[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!
<a href="https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflows-decline/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflow...</a><p>It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.
It doesn't matter. Even if it were the most friendly community ever, as long as their core value were the same - answering programming questions that with clear answers - it would have been replaced by today's AI completely. It's irrelevant today how bad GPT3.5 once was.
I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI, which it unquestionably was. GPT-3.5 was able to answer some small chunk of my programming questions (like 10-20% of them), which seems clearly reflected in the graph.
<i>> I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI</i><p>A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)
Traffic started dropping precipitously in summer ‘20. There were no widely known LLMs then, let alone ones used outside labs. ChatGPT went public in November 2022, well into the decline.<p>While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.
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.
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...
So you think there is a viable business around technical Q&A even with GPT 6 Astra or whatever existing?<p>LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.<p>Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.
If there is, I’m not creative enough to imagine it. I don’t contend that SO could survive AI. You’ll never hear me arguing that. However, that graph shows that it was already dying before AI became widely available. AI 100% certainly kicked it while it was down. It just cannot have been the cause of the downturn because the downturn was in full swing before AI could’ve had any effect at all.
Agreed.<p>StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".<p>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.<p>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.<p>THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.
SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.
the obvious reasoning is that the vast majority of common questions were already asked, and then still many, many uncommon questions, until the only things that hadn't been asked were very, very niche. It's the same reason complaints about mods marking lots of questions as duplicates didn't really pick up momentum until the mid/late 2010's.
It's like how everyone hated dialup but still kept using it anyway until there was broadband.
<i>Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.</i><p>The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.
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.
> It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.<p>The same thing that happened to perl.
Perl was my first love as a language, and I don't recall any hostility towards Perl users. On the contrary, the environment in the early 2000s was very supportive.<p>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.<p>(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)
How so? I stopped hanging around in Perl-land around 2001 and it seemed friendly enough way back then. What happened to it?
I remember seeing at least one person complain that perl forums were unfriendly, but in that case it turned out it was because he took it as an insult when after he posted code others would comment with re-writes using fewer lines/characters. He didn't understand that they were just playing and not critiquing or trying to tell him that his code should be have been written that way instead. If anything, the shortest possible way to do something should probably be avoided in perl code you plan on ever having to work on again, but it can still be fun to see how compact you can make it.
Yep, that sounds about right. Similarly, people would complain about SO being unfriendly because of people politely asking them to isolate a problem and produce a proper minimal reproducible example, or seeking clarification for a how-to question about what should happen in an edge case, or questioning whether the OP has an XY problem, or marking an obviously duplicate question as a duplicate, or just generally <i>explaining that there are standards</i> on the site and that you can't just treat it as a help desk.
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.<p>I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.
They were on their downswing but LLMs put a gun to their head and executed them. I don't use Stack Overflow anymore, just an LLM and cppreference.<p>Damn sad how quickly that habit changed for me.<p>Never asked a question, but got some good info from people who had asked questions and the people who replied.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with 'hostile attitude'. There's just no reason to use StackOverflow when I can use a chatbot that gives me infinite StackOverflow answers for any conceivable problem I have, within seconds.
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So you're arguing that SO was really un-hostile at first but at some point it became hostile, causing the crash in usage? My recollection is that SO always was very hostile towards users, even during the time period when it was growing rapidly. So hostility alone is not a sufficient explanation.
Other question asking platforms like Reddit and Discord are still going well. Nothing has been hit as hard as Stack Overflow, because people hated having to use the site the whole time.
sort of like the hostility you're showing?
Punters with enough good boy points were rolling into very obscure and technical tags to close questions as duplicate (they weren't). When I saw how impossible it was for people to ask questions in a tag I was an expert in I knew the site was cooked. Imagine, like, giving physiotherapy forum power users moderator privileges on HN.
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.”<p>Most of the easy questions have been asked. I stopped using it because I was asking questions that weren’t trivial to answer, and I guess it is easier to earn internet points through mod actions than through writing answers.
Your experience matches most closely to mine. I started on SO early in their existence and got plenty of points answering easy PHP and jQuery type questions.<p>As my career progressed I took on deep problems with complex issues and complex answers. Not much sense in asking as no one ever managed to help me with them. I’d just end up answering my own question a week or a month later perhaps.<p>And of course the moderation and karma farming - I oh so ‘fondly’ remember the one user that would take your question and run some auto-formatter on it so that it would fit his personal style guide and then get a percentage of the points as your now “co-author.” What fun!
The old adage comes to mind that you don't get answers on the internet by asking questions but by posting the wrong answer.
I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854" rel="nofollow">https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854</a> (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)<p>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.<p>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.<p>Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.
Oh, the memories! We're still around. I remember when you handed the torch off to me on the leaderboard.<p>The real life examples and synergies were a plus. I got so much work from that ServerFault presence.
<i>> I miss Server Fault</i><p>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 <i>useful</i> and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.<p>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 <i>in</i> my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).
I was/am big on Stack Overflow. I always found it amusing when my coworkers stumbled upon my questions or answers. Or i'd find one of my own years later and maybe even try upvoting it before realizing it was my own.<p>Can't say I formed any connections there though. Just a few negative interactions.
I used to spend time on these sites answering questions. It was actually fun and educational.
Everyone here complains about moderators closing questions and those ridiculous answer rewrites. Didn't anyone encounter rude question authors? Most entitles people on the earth. I pity the LLMs and discord channels that now handle them. By the way such encounters also led me to discover that SO places limits on removing own content posted there.
Reddit is going the same way.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
I stopped using Reddit not because I got banned, but because it has been steadily converted from the world's most popular forum platform to a trash heap of engagement hacks and shady practices. Moreso than SO, which was already struggling with existential problems before AI, Reddit did itself in.
I've been struggling to find something that scratches the Reddit itch, in the lineage of Slashdot, then Fark, then Digg. Any recommendations? I don't mean niche communities, there needs to be enough of a mainstream critical mass the makes it _the_ place to go. I don't think it's Lemmy, though maybe it could be.
I really enjoy lemmy with summit client on my phone. Never been on it from my desktop though. Probably a good thing all things considered.<p>It's got pretty good coverage of most things related to my country and interests, but if you go too far afield/niche theres not many users on many topics
There isn't one unfortunately. Some nerd is ok on Lemmy but you'll never find stuff like knitting or local communities. Not with any people on them anyway.
TikTok, but you'll have to suffer the video format
I stopped when they killed old.reddit.com for non-logged-in users.
There's a FFox plugin to enforce old.reddit.com's old CSS.
They're also blocking you from using even the new site on mobile.
The updated Firefox plugin still works.
Reddit has the most advanced AI system.<p>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.
I have upgraded my reddit experience to no account and not browsing the comments.
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 <i>EXACTLY</i> following 19 different rules in the sub baar.
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.<p>When I read old.reddit.com was disabled for non-logged-in users, to be sure I'd never hit this site again even by mistake, I put a rule in my router's DNS resolver to lie and pretend an NXDOMAIN.
Reddit is an absolutely hostile platform now, the amount of dogpiling is insane. Say the wrong thing and apparently you're simultaneously a bot, and a valid target for harassment (why people are so invested in harassing people they think are bots, I have no clue?)
I 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.
I went on Reddit recently to look something up and some of the niche subreddits were decent but I was shocked at the amount of just total garbage that's there now (including lots of weird misogyny) so it's not just the bans that are a problem. It feels like every social media platform is just miserable to use now. Except occasionally posting here my only social media is just Discord servers with my actual real life friends.
Everything moved to Discord now. Reddit started ignoring subreddit subscriptions which made the whole platform a homogeneous blob of slop. Discord has maintained separation between communities and has minimal discoverability features so users stick to the servers they participate which builds a sense of community.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.<p>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.<p>I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.
I think the various reddit dramas over the years have taken their toll on the site even if they didn't completely kill it. You can see it in moderation these days, individual sub mods have called out the fact that no one pays them and they don't have the motivation to spend all day enforcing quality for free. No one has stepped up to replace them so most moderation on Reddit is site wide LLM powered moderation.
Victoria (I think)!<p>Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.
Its not so much the moderation, its more the random nature of the links, and the anonymization of user contributions.<p>One thing is that there are lots of bots on the site, another is that the site now seems to be specifically designed for bots.
I am so deeply banned from Reddit it feels retaliatory in some way.<p>Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.
> never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.<p>The trick is to delete your browser cache (not just things related to reddit, everything), then wait a week to a month before creating the next account.
The Reddit banning algorithm is strange in its own way.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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
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.
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<)<p>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.<p>I suppose I was never their target market anyway.
There's Old Reddit Redirect extension in Firefox, but honestly, you're not missing out on anything there anyway.
I am totally addicted to reddit. Good instincts - stay off it hahaha
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.<p>Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.
Surprised to hear this, I'm not alone!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Reddit still has a place for very niche communities. To this day it can be the best place for a lot of things.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.
and hopefully soon we have decentralized protocols as the standard when we think about user spaces. amen
We had it. Reddit should have just been NNTP. You can't "monetize" NNTP though.
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.
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.<p>And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.
subreddit specific mods can't ban you directly site wide, but they have tools through which they can report your second account for ban evasion, and if the automated system runs a check and finds you had an old banned account on the same sub, your new one is perma banned too.
> 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.<p>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.
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?
It's kind of like the opposite of the Nazi bar problem.<p>You purge some Nazis, then run out of Nazis to purge, but you've got a good purge system going...
all hidden accounts posting political propaganda day and night in the name of privacy was enough to turn me off
So many good answers here, all converging on moderation overreach stifling the page before LLM came in.<p>I'm not disagreeing at all, but I'd like to add that the moderation issues did not come from a vacuum: they were a reaction to SO reputation becoming so much of a CV optimisation metric that SO must have felt a lot of pressure to do <i>something</i>. Turns out that something wasn't good, but I'm not sure that other paths taken would have been much less bad. Some success just aren't set up to last.
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.
Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use
There is something about the gamification of social interaction which breeds a hostile community. Power hungry users chasing internet points, or moderators needlessly raising their hammer.<p>I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.
The “can't answer” thing is probably the reason I never contributed. I don't know the specific reasoning behind it, but it's such a self-defeating solution to whatever problem they thought they were solving.
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?
My favorite point was when you're the single person to have worked on a problem, published an answer, published a paper had the answer accepted and some MUPPET edits your answer to mean something else entirely, and it has your 'name' now beside an incorrect answer.
That infuriated me and I revoked those edits constantly, until I gave up and left the site altogether. I'd rather you steal my answer and put your name on it than put your own words under my name. Fix some dumb typo I made on mobile or something, sure, fine. Edit my answer to change the meaning or phrasing whatsoever? Oh hell no. Go make your own answer, and don't lie and say that I was the one speaking your words.
The numbers suggest that said hostile community is actually very small, or that it never intended to contribute to the site in the first place. As opposed to Wikipedia for example, where the very hostile admins and moderators actually add a lot of content.
SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.
I remember when SO had codegolf on the main site. Maybe if they weren't such killjoys people would have still been interested in participating in <i>some</i> programming oriented community even though AI displaced the actual writing of computer languages.
The problem was it <i>was</i> a discussion forum. They just didn't like that.
> SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming.<p>They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.
I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions <i>in the process of being closed</i> 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).
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.
ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.
Does it really? I'm not going to mess with biotech because I have no idea what I am on about there. I did ask about Samsung TVs:<p><a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db80d" rel="nofollow">https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...</a>
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.<p>So there's a clear difference in expected utility.
it does not
[flagged]
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.<p>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.
Was it so hostile?<p>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.<p>Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?
I always hate it when a person tries to "X Y problem" me.<p>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.<p>People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.
To be fair, there was <i>a lot</i> 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!"<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.
My biggest turnoff was dealing with the gatekeepers who will treat you like you were asking stupid questions to a topic you obviously didn't know. I am glad AI is here and killed that; there is not stupid questions for AI. The walls for learning have been breached.
As someone with many gold awards and notable questions, I stopped participating in stack overflow when they decided to withhold our open data from us. Our deal was that I spend time and effort asking quality questions and providing quality answers for free in return for open (free speech, not free beer) access to the entire qa dataset.<p>The new owners either did not understand this arrangement or did not value it enough. I now have my kwix backups and my open weight LLM. This should be more than enough to hold me over until a stack exchange substitute pops up.
I’m old enough to remember experts-exchange, a site so terrible and if you removed a dash…. But somehow everyone used it, until stack overflow made it 100x better. After a while in IT I’ve gotten numb to the hype cycles, and recognize just how temporary everything is. I can pretty much guarantee you that even big names today like OpenAi, Microsoft, Apple, will eventually go the way of IBM or worse.
Related discussion <i>What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph</i> (483 points, 3 months ago, 595 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949</a>
I don't think this should be celebrated, even though they had a bad attitude.<p>We are losing communities and human communication to LLM chats.
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.
> 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.<p>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.
Was it really a community of human communication? I only remember going there for answers, not to make friends. The only person I remember from there was that obnoxious Italian guy who was obsessed with the Chinese government.
It's odd it still exists at all still. What would compel someone to even post a question on SO anymore.<p>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.
SO has been useless for years now, but the other Stack Exchanges can be interesting, they deserve more spotlight.
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
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!
They should reboot, focused on<p>1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and<p>2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)<p>This does four things simultaneously:<p>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<p>2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)<p>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.<p>4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
The discussion around who gets a green checkmark and +15 rep was bad enough. I can't imagine how it would be if there was real money involved.
> 2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)<p>> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems<p>I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?
Who decides which person is correct?
Maybe someone new could create a new community modeled along these lines where experts could exchange knowledge, or more junior people something else, for answers.
So instead of just not getting paid for my help I might even get to pay if my answer is deemed to be not good enough. Thanks but no thanks.
I do not at all like how they changed most posting dates to just say "over a year ago". When looking up solutions to code issues, the date of the answer often matters a great deal.
I 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<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19712903/reverse-contents-in-array" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19712903/reverse-content...</a>
And of those, I bet 997 are closed as duplicates by admins who didn't understand the question asked.
In defense of SO. I don't think # of questions is not the best metric. Pageviews or up votes is better. If the question already exists, it doesn't need to be asked again. Also, I have the perception that tech stacks have stopped changing as much. Ten years ago we were constantly changing tech stacks and front-end frameworks, so we had to rely on SO to relearn constantly. That seemed to have stopped.
I remember SO answers almost always looked superficially correct but were almost always wrong in a nuanced way that required experience to divine. Kind of like circa 2025 chatbots.<p>But at least we had fun who can forget stacksort.
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.<p>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
Might be because a lot of questions are closed as duplicates.<p>Also questions now have a "staging area" that has to be passed before the question is posted for everyone. In the staging area moderators have to approve the question.
There seems to be some agreement that the hostile attitudes towards the bulk of its own users killed SO before AI got the chance. I'm inclined to agree at least in part.<p>Which begs a more interesting question, perhaps; if a SO was recreated in a more forgiving fashion today, would it stance a chance competing against AI?
It's ironic/unfortunate they took the moderationazy path right when the site needed to find its new direction.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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"<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts" rel="nofollow">https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...</a>
For what it's worth, as bad as the site became for question askers, it got even worse for people who answer.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.
I wonder how many people actually had bad experiences with SO vs how many people found it genuinely helpful. I'm going to guess the people with bad experiences are much more likely to comment about it loudly than all the people who found it helpful. (I always feel this dissonance when reading about the mean mods ruining the site, since I never experienced them firsthand.)
Those aren't mutually exclusive. SO was helpful many times but also there were many instances where I found someone asking exactly my question only to see the question was closed as a duplicate of another question which didn't have the same specific issue as I was experiencing.<p>It seems like their rules sometimes biased towards older questions/answers which in fast changing areas that's the wrong way round.
My experience was both - I got some real valuable help esp. when I was learning how to program.<p>But... I also came across some real jacka*es. Those were on my questions, but also reading the responses from other peoples questions.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I am into computers since 1986.<p>Sources of information like StackOverflow have come and gone, since the dawn of computer networking with online forums on BBSes and similar dial up systems.<p>Many sites like StackOverflow have predated it, and others will follow, or maybe not give AI, nonetheless no developer questions site lasts forever.
Once upon a time there were "developers" known for doing their work by basically copying code from Stack Overflow without caring to understand it. Building applications as a sort of legos where stack overflow answers were the pieces.<p>Today they are vibe coders and no longer need stack overflow.
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?<p>[1] <a href="https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Stack%20overflow&date=today%205-y&geo=Worldwide" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Stack%20overflow&date=to...</a>
Can't see your link because it requires a google sign-in. But anecdotally earlier this year I stopped being able to visit SO due to cloudflare, whether it was enabling it at all or increasing its hostility level. Maybe they received a lot of bot traffic leading to this?
Summer vacation, orgs choose what tech you use, but when you can choose yourself it's easier to find answers from the community
StackOverflow's poor gameification of the platform is the singular reason it suffered from its awful culture.<p>If you had enough reputation, you'd be invited to these review queues, like the Close Vote queue.<p>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.
And how much was AI trained on their data? That's the sad part. Nobody asking new questions, so not much more for AI to train from.
It's training on every single codebase in the world instead now<p>You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data
More importantly, the newer generation of models don't even need Stackoverflow. With tool calling they can pull up as much documentation and source code as you could possibly want, and in the past year they've become alarmingly good at piecing those things together to solve problems.<p>It's less efficient than being able to point to a canonical answer on a widely respected forum, yes. And it sucks immensely to have to rely on these horrible AI companies to replace the real human interactions that getting work done used to require, yes. But realistically, we are not looking at some kind of model collapse anytime soon due to lack of SO threads.<p>Losing Reddit and blogs and other forums is going to be a bigger problem. In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use? How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice? if the web becomes a ghost town and nobody is talking about anything anymore, there's no form thread it can uncover and say "that's the one everyone uses". Losing the library of technical Q&A is nothing close to the catastrophe of losing actual conversations between humans.
<i>In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use?</i><p>My guess is, you won't care.<p><i>How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice?</i><p>My guess is, it will make a good choice.
Kind of makes me wonder how knowledge transfer is going to work in the future.<p>How many times have you found a random forum post solving your problem? How many countless people has that post likely helped?<p>Now every single person facing the same problem will regenerate from scratch the entire thought process and result. What a waste.<p>There needs to be some way to close the feedback loop from the work that LLMs do.
FWIW, StackOverflow posts are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA v4.0, same as Wikipedia.
With or without training they would have gotten eaten.
I actually don't miss it. I liked it in the beginning but towards the end the management and moderation pretty much derailed the project.<p>AI came at the right moment to save the knowledge from the knowledge keeper.<p>I can only hope that some other technology will save the knowledge once again, before the AI companies go completely rogue and hostile towards their end-users.
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.<p>1) If you already have enough programming experience to understand algorithms and abstract concepts in programming you can find the answer by doing research.<p>2) More often than not the answers were citing answers that already exist elsewhere.<p>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.<p>Eventually I stopped visiting the site around 2 years after getting into programming since it rarely provided anything of value.<p>--<p>Serverfault was great and I will miss it.
Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged <i>per month</i> in 2024.
I'm curious if the quality of AI answers will get worse without public sources like Stack Overflow or if LLMs have gotten to a point where that doesn't matter as much.
as a student i remmeber ikept getting my questions removed even after trying to follow every rule.
this one time i decided i will use their top questions as a template just to test it, so i did i made sure it was a new question, following each rule<p>It was also deleted, die already stack overflow
Is this count before or after it's closed by someone else as a duplicate of another question that's close but not really the same question?<p>(I can't tell from PostTypeId = 1)
Is there a word that explicitly captures the fear and stress induced by hitting "save" on a stack overflow question you've spent 30 minutes formatting and triple checking to ensure that it won't get thrown out by mods?
How about: civility?
Because I'd argue that was always the expected, the appropriate thing to do. Always watch for feedback and quickly edit any missed meta-issues with your question. So that during the slim window it can reasonably be shoved into possible answerers faces it will not waste their time.
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<p><a href="https://techstackups.com/articles/stackoverflow-graphs-prove-nothing/" rel="nofollow">https://techstackups.com/articles/stackoverflow-graphs-prove...</a>
I still dream of driving to the moderators houses and hurting them. Not really of course but it was one nasty place in the end with all little tech gestapos on their sad little thrones. Happy it’s gone.
Everyone is probably saying this, but in my opinion the whole site failed because people with high iq and low eq held all the power, scaring away new users, and old users like me.<p>It is a site about helping people where no one seemed interested in helping people.
If there is any proof that no one will be writing code, this is it.<p>I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.
One problem is the gamification rewarded some bad behaviors, especially once one accrues enough points to get away with it.<p>I know exactly when I permanently stopped contributing to the site: it had been a few years since I happen to have something worth posting a question about, but for once I had a niche question about a popular-enough framework it was worth a shot.<p>A guy replied with a generic wall of text that had nothing to do with what I had asked, merely contained some of the keywords I also used.<p>When I politely pointed out it's not what I asked and reformulated in case he merely misunderstood, he got mad that I had refused to just give him the points.<p>He got extra mad when I figured out the answer on my own and posted it as answer in case others stumbled on the same issue, so he tried to edit my answer to make it look irrelevant.<p>Unfortunately for him, he didn't realize I also have enough points to edit it back, so he gave up and deleted all his comments to make it look like I'm talking to nobody, then went to downvote a bunch of my older posts.<p>And the sad part is that guy initially seemed well regarded in our small community, kinda killed my motivation to contribute to the site again after that. Plus I usually always find answers on my own, and anything I can't figure out on my own is so niche it would be pointless to ask.
I have almost never explicitly searched for stack overflow. I google something, top result is a stackoverflow question, I visit. Nowadays that role has been taken by google's AI summary in most cases
This might be the saddest, non-family related thing ive seen in years.<p>I love you stack exchange and all related sites.<p>All yall need to keep learning
They sold it at a good time. It reminds me of the broadcast.com acquisition.<p>It made Mark Cuban very wealthy and was worth pennies within a few years.
Stack overflow started as maximize signal to noise for professionals.<p>It transitioned to emphasize "less toxic" and in the process minimized signal.<p>The result has no purpose.
I used to land on SO questions and answers through Google. Nowadays I ask ChatGPT or Claude instead of Google, and then go to the links they give me to verify. The links are either to the official docs or some blog posts. Never have I seen LLMs recommend any SO links.
I just dont go there at all because they added the weird copied of stackoverflow feature when copying code from there. Like even if I want to use its actively hostile, I need to paste it somewhere remove all of the extra things added and then copy properly
SO was invented as a Q&A site, where human experts might answer specific technical questions, in a precise, preferably provable way. This is what machines now do well enough.<p>But there's a need to talk to human experts, learn their opinions, personal experience, non-obvious bits. E.g. I enjoyed asking certain questions at Software Engineering and Emacs SE sites. Sometimes I just ended up talking with a maintainer of a specific package I had questions about. This is something Claude and ChatGPT cannot easily replace, and maybe something that may keep certain SO communities alive. (Unless Reddit eats the remnants of their lunch.)
Unrelated to AI, they engineered their own downfall with the way they treat contributors and the questions they still do get. I have practically forgotten that this platform exists at all.
while the SO is dying a painful death (not going to sugar coat it), my questions whether the knowledge in there is already assimilated into the AI's knowledge database? If it is, it can be retrievable in the future.<p>A lot of the answers are factually useful and it would a massive loss if it ever just disappear into the ether.
I do not miss StackOverflow. It wasn’t a community, it was a toxic environment that rewarded asshole behavior.
They have also launched agents.stackoverflow.com - a place for agents to interact.
I'm just feeling bad just because stackoverflow was my coding bible (back when AI did not exist)<p>Getting second hand sadness
Fewer than 1,000? To be honest, even before AI, I'm surprised it ever got more than 50 or a 100 in some StackExchanges. It was on borrowed time especially after reading a lot about the moderator drama/issues.
I was wondering where all those egoistic developers with superiority complexes go these days to feed their egos. I was scared every time asking even a single question on SO. The place was toxic as hell.
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.
The two takeaways from me are that:<p>1. AI allows you to ask stupid questions or the same question without (typically) ridiculing or demeaning you for doing so.<p>2. Context changes as time rolls by. A question that was asked some period ago might just need to be re-asked, continuously and ongoing.<p>Now, SO had already suffered its demise prior to AI. But good riddance, from my point of view. StackOverflow was great in its day, essential even. But it fell victim to its own success, I guess.
StackOverflow jobs was great when it existed, found great opportunities through there. So dumb they killed it especially with LLM's eating their core business.
I rarely wish for the downfall of things, but StackOverflow is one of those exceptions. Good riddance.
I've browsed SO and friends a lot over the years, and still do, but not sure I ever posted a question there. I read answers, and posted a few answers. I think I'd go to IRC or a forum or issue tracker to ask for help instead. Maybe some generational or cultural thing going on.
It's because it has already answered everything and anything new would be a duplicate
They get that many?!
Meh… you can't create duplicated questions on SO so obviously 20 years later there is not much left to ask.<p>A better metric would be visits per month… which probably doesn't look very pretty too. I used to visit SO every day several times a day for like 15 years: ask a technical question on google, click on the first SO result, get the solution I was looking for. Now I still ask google but I just have to read the AI Overview to get the solution I'm looking for…
Every interesting problem I ever had that I checked SO for was either off topic and modded down or the original poster said “I found a solution” and disappeared. Pure misery!
It's funny how my experience with SO is nowhere near as bad as what HN usually reports.<p>I admit that my first few questions earned me a lot of downvotes due to their poor quality. But it humbled me and taught me the importance to create minimal reproducible examples.<p>After that, some of my questions were answered in depth by experts. I was blown away and very grateful that some random stranger would take the time to answer such a niche question I had.<p>Besides, I've seen colleagues of mine whom I consider brilliant but whose questions on public forums were bad... They give too many details, leave out part of the context, don't make it easy to reproduce their error, ask vague questions, and so on. I wonder if it's for the same reasons that HN has trouble with SO.
Still over $100M in revenue, now mainly from AI and Enterprise customers.<p><a href="https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-dotnet/stack-overflow-lost-99-of-its-questions-last-year-it-turned-its-first-profit-be52fb865574" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...</a>
Questions and answers are locked inside discord, slacks and LLM chats
Perhaps reddit is next in the list?
I had been a non-contributing reader (only short-term) on SO when I decided to write answers. The whole thing reeked of a mild version of <i>The Lord of the Flies</i>-esque sophomorism.<p>The toxicity was too much for me. On HN, when a toxic entity points their sting at me, at least their comment gets flagged within 24 hours. No such thing on SO. The moderators themselves are toxic as batshit.
Their not-welcoming community has some guilty too.
"Stackoverflow for agents" still not there?
Woooow. That makes me feel... old.
95% of them closed immediately as duplicate or off topic?
Note that I recently tried to sign up so that I could answer/update some questions that I have expertise in and was refused because my email address wasn't recognized.
Selling it the Prosus killed it, they don’t have a clue about it and how it should work.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange</a><p>1. LLMs don’t blame you when you ask for book recommendations or say “you must use Superuser instead of Stackoverflow or Linux…”. But it also gave as a bit of community and entertainment.
2. LLMs are useless with the data input from Gitlab, GitHub and Stackoverflow. Especially Stackoverflow, because the snippets, good comments and ratings are invaluable.
3. Removal of job adds. That was the obvious and non disturbing money source.<p>Stackoverflow is also one of the last platforms allowing you to downvote and put a “price tag” on downvotes. This is incredible helpful in preventing hostile voting. And still allow counter-measures against bad answers.<p>Please. Cannot the original founders take a data dump and let use re-launch it? Or we just do it.
I do have a webarchive of StackOverflow on some backup disc somewhere - just in case :D
Out of curiosity, is Joel Spolsky still involved in SO? What’s he up to these days?<p>I enjoyed reading his articles but it feels eons ago.
I remember the day I ask my first question about C, instead of an answer I got -1.
What will LLMs be trained on when SO does no longer exist (or is an archive of increasingly obsolete answers)?
It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated. Just like a bronze sword.
I have some wishful thinking for everyone reading this: what if the people at StackOverflow built one of the best bot protections out there? I would honestly expect the graph to go up with all the LLMs and automated content spamming..
And like 950 of them were probably closed for being "off-topic".
I’m still sour about my first and only SO question attempt.<p>After such a long time user, here I was, finally interacting with the community. My first question. I spent at least an hour composing it. Something about Django and Celery. Then came the mods. Crushed my dreams. I tried editing the question. Crushed again.<p>And I remember thinking, wtf? I’m just trying to ask for some help. Why is this so damn hard? Never tried again.
Half the time the communities were helpful, half the time they were hostile.
The communities were helpful half the time and hostile the other half.
Stackoverflow had such a toxic and beginner-unfriendly community...
"This problem was already solved: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/404">https://news.ycombinator.com/404</a>"<p>StackOverflow had the most toxic community didn't it?
SO's motto was to ignore the particular constraints of your use case, rewrite your question for you and then answer that (often marking it as a duplicate).<p>No wonder no ones uses it anymore, its environment is actively hostile to new users.
Because site is shit. I ask a question, well formed and formatted and thought out, and i answer it myself and still get downvoted for 0 reasons but these people can't solve shit themselves
And all get closed as duplicates, right?
SO turned into a place that heavily favoured their experienced answerers over new answerers <i>and</i> askers. Admittedly, I fell into the former camp: someone with some excess time on his hands and an itch to answer interesting questions - and like most of the experienced answerers, I ended up being very disinterested in answering homework questions, “lazy” questions, and the like. “Downvote and move on” was the motto.<p>In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave <i>easy questions to be answered by new answerers</i>. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.<p>In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.
I'm gonna flag this post as duplicate.
Incredible that SO sold for $1.8B at one point.
Yeah, this is definitely due to AI.<p>But let me address the "toxic" moderation. They needed something like appeals courts. SO should have installed a layers above the community mods that could review and rebuke the decisions of the "lower" mods to steer things.<p>Oops, all assholes.
Deserved.<p>Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:<p>* 1 trip to mars<p>* 10 trips to the Moon<p>* Converted water to wine<p>The worst system until you can finally help others.<p>Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.<p>A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.
What do you mean? You could always answer questions without any barriers, and partial answers were acceptable. Unless you're talking about protected questions (very rare), or you had such a fundamental misunderstanding of the site that you got answer-banned.
StackOverflow moderation was hijacked by army of Sheldon Coopers
Mods must be on cloud 9. Finally, serenity
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.
We're now building some of the same superiority complex into commercial AIs to effectively refuse any wrongspeak.
I blame that one Jon Skeet dude for answering everything.
Mods are finally happy.
The silver lining, if any, is Jeff Atwood made FU levels of money (AFAIK) from it, ultimately, and now he's become a philanthropist.
I feel sad honestly.<p>Yes all the bureaucracy was annoying. But when I asked on Stack Overflow, the same question is there 5 7 10 years later, queryable by everyone. Ironically by LLMs too.<p>While when I ask LLMs - as I do now, of course, nobody has time for SO nowadays - nothing is left, everything is ephemeral, LLM forgets, the world doesn't learn.<p>Oh well. They will surely bolt LLM to SO one day as Quora did already.
it's time to pivot.
I never used stack overflow.<p>Preferred books at the library.
And here's why: <a href="https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-overflow.html" rel="nofollow">https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-ove...</a><p>LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:<p>Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?<p>A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]<p>I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.
The current way too write software is too just ask the ai do it. StackOverflow will be soon mostly irrelevant completely.
"I come to bury SO, not to praise it"<p>.. something.. something<p>"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones"
I don’t think they’re gonna be long for the world
they really can go fall into black hole with Adobe
I tried using it and my question never got answered :(
I'm closing this down as duplicate and pointless.
I won't miss it.<p>I hate how the site clutters every page with hundreds of shiny tokens whose only purpose is gamification.<p>I now read the answers to my technical questions from Emacs buffers containing ASCII text only.
Good, that site sucked after 2015 pretty much. Museum of powertripping mods.
Everyone seems to say that it was always a terrible place to ask questions where you'd have your question closed for no reason.<p>I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.<p>I think it's <i>good</i> that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.
From what I recall, there was a golden era where the site was growing and it was useful and entertaining. One problem is that it had a learning curve. I think it got worse when every answer became editable by other people, and power users and rules lawyers became entrenched and they started closing basically every question as a duplicate. That often resulted to sending people to questions that weren't precisely the same, and often with out of date answers. It felt like they never seemed to figure out whether it was supposed to be a Q&A site, a wiki, or a forum (I suppose forum was generally nixed, other than discussion in comments).
I answered a number of questions on there. Some non-native English speaker started going my answers and making language editing suggestions. The grammar was fine. I refused all the changes because they were at best basically the same or at worst incorrect. I refused maybe 4-5. The next day the guy got on and had done a bunch more then went to some of my answers and made hostile comments about my answers on simple things like Pandas for Python.<p>That was that for that site.
Well deserved, site full of toxic users who will do anything but answer your question, LLM FTW.
My anecdote:<p>I created an account, specifically cause I found a few questions that I knew the answers to, and could cite properly.<p>So, I answered 2. All is good...<p>Next day, 1 is marked as dupe (?!) and there's literally no other answers. So, duping what? Nope, not permitted to know that.<p>The other answer, some braindead idiot mod decided to change my answer to wrong garbage. No request to change. No verification. No nothing.<p>Shortly thereafter, those 2 responses were downmodded, leaving my karma negative. So basically, can't do anything. So I left. I'll spend my time on communities that actually give a fuck, cause SO didn't.
This question has already been asked?<p>Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.<p>It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.
It is sad because it was such a well designed community. But its lessons live on.
Nah. It launched well, but sorely needed a BDFL. Almost without fail, services that delegate moderation duties to users are ruined. Inevitably, well-meaning people form councils and boards, and then those get taken over by people with nothing but time on their hands. It's the same thing that happens with school boards and HOAs: the last people you <i>want</i> running them are the ones that have the time and the drive to actually want to be in charge of them.
It was an AMAZING community... right up until it wasn't. I cut my teeth on trying to answer questions and learned how much I didn't know when other people's answers were better than mine. Literally made a career out of what I learned there, and I thoroughly enjoyed welcoming people to SO and encouraging new coders to keep learning. But then dang, the question purists and eager close-every-question jocks came to dominate the platform and made it no fun to ask or answer. Even if AI was never a thing, the change in culture probably would have opened the doors to a competitor.
Everything is cyclical. Maybe they come back when AI gets heavily regulated or pay gated. Who knows
does well designed mean rotten and pointlessly hostile
StackOverflow helped build the LLMs that replaced it.
it was as well designed as the nipples on a man
The highly technical sites -- StackOverflow, Unix & Linux, MathOverflow -- see little use.<p>Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.<p>Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.
I am amazed it's still that high
good, make it die faster
SO suffered from its success and, bluntly, the laziness of humans.<p>I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.<p>I stopped contributing.
Back in the early days of SO, around 2009 or maybe 2010, I asked a Motif question. I got told that I I was an idiot and I shouldn't be using Motif because it was obsolete, how dare I ask a question about it? Blah blah blah.<p>Yeah, no shit nobody uses Motif for new development, but if you haven't guessed, I was working on a legacy enterprise system.<p>Just rubbed me the wrong way and still kinda annoys me to this day. Not everyone is dicking around for fun or works at startups where you can light other people's money on fire. Some of us have paying clients, I'm not using Motif because I want to.
The question that a lot of people aren’t asking, these AI models were trained on human actual data, researches, answers, and books. Now AI removed the need to create those and people aren’t incentivized to make any new ones, the newer models say in a year or so will be trained on slop, piles and piles of slop, how’s their intelligence will be?
I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).
SO died some time ago already though; I'd say even before AI.<p>I remember that I once asked a question about dual-licencing
MIT and GPL 2.0 in the same project. Within an hour or two,
it was downvoted to -7. Now this alone is already quite
concerning (it was a genuine question), but what was even
more annoying was that not a single person who downvoted
this, explained as to why. So, if my time investment here for
asking a question, gets negative karma without any explanation,
and then subsequently no useful answer at all: what is the point
of SO? I still answered a few questions here or there, but the
whole karma system just discourages contributions and I stopped
using it with regards to both asking anything or giving answers.<p>SO is not useless since some answers still hold useful answers,
but they really should have started to fix SO early on. Instead
they just gave up.
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Quora took it over. Better layout, better moderation, better answers.
Stackoverflow wasn't killed by AI, it's long dead because of those "Closed Question" bummbers.<p>I've never seen an online community incentives vandalism rather than contributions.