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StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Ya

• ronbenton 9mo ago
  I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.
  • stackskipton 9mo ago
    As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though." When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly in response to someone acting like "I just need to convince them"
    • j_w 9mo ago
      There are bad questions (and ideas, like you said). Stackoverflow tried to incentivize asking good, novel questions. You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case. A good question isn't just "how do I do x in y language?" But something more like "I'm trying to do x in y language. Here's what I've tried: <code> and here is the issue I have <output or description of issue>. <More details as relevant>" This does two things: 1. It demonstrates that the question ask-er actually cares about whatever it is they are doing, and it's just trying to get free homework answers. 2. Ideally it forces the ask-er to provide enough information that an answer-er can do so without asking follow ups.
      • stackskipton 9mo ago
        I'm reminded of this link: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Biggest thing as someone who has been in Discords that are geared towards support, you can either gear towards new people or professionals but walking the line between both is almost impossible.
        • zahlman 9mo ago
          I believe in gearing towards teachers. Q&A sites are often at their best when the Q and A come from the same source. But it needs to be someone who understands that the Q is common and can speak the language of those who don't know the A. Unfortunately, not a common skillset (typically doesn't pay the bills).
      • zahlman 9mo ago
        > You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case. There are no stupid questions, but there are stupid choices about whom to ask. Often the right choice is yourself.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • bachmeier 9mo ago
      The key part of your post is "has to tell people". Absolutely nobody on SO was obligated to respond to anything. The toxicity was a choice, and those doing it enjoyed it.
      • zahlman 9mo ago
        No, questions that don't meet the site's standards must be closed as quickly as possible, and it actively harms the site to ignore this duty. Please read "How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing?" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263), especially my answer (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/425738/523612 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/425738/523612), and "Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer?" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808).
  • AlexandrB 9mo ago
    To play devil's advocate, I think some people confuse terse, succinct communication with being mean. I find this to be a common cultural difference between contributors from different backgrounds. Personally I find a lot of "welcoming" language to be excessively saccharine and ultimately insincere. Something between being talked down to like I'm a child and corpo-slop. Ultimately I don't think there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution here and it's weird that some people expect that such a thing can or should exist.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • zahlman 9mo ago
      > To play devil's advocate, I think some people confuse terse, succinct communication with being mean. I agree completely (this was part of my findings in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/394952/173477 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/394952/173477).
    • BoxOfRain 9mo ago
      Personally I'm not a fan of terse writing; if something's worth saying at all it's worth using suitably expressive language to describe it, and being short and cold with people isn't a good form of interpersonal communication in my view. Pleasantries are important for establishing mutual respect, if they're considered the baseline of politeness in a particular culture then it's overtly disrespectful to forgo them with strangers. Terseness is efficient for the writer certainly, but it's not necessarily for the reader.
      • yencabulator 9mo ago
        Written like you're on one side of the cultural barrier and think that you have to be somehow naturally correct because that's what's natural to you. To others, that attitude is just arrogant and self-centered. Why should one particular culture dictate the behavior of everyone, and especially why should it be your culture? What you call "establishing mutual respect" is just "insincere and shallow" to others. I do not believe for a second that a grocery store cashier wants to know how my day has been.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • baranul 9mo ago
    Exactly. When a certain moderation style is allowed, it attracts aligned personality types and produces a distinct culture. When toxicity becomes the norm, it is enjoyed by sadists and the demented, who have positioned themselves appropriately to get off on it.
• brigade 9mo ago
  As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.
  • darkwater 9mo ago
    I question the "failed" here. You did land on their pages, after all. You most probably also clicked on an internal link and moved to another of their pages, and then bounced off.
    • phoronixrly 9mo ago
      Man, what a perverted definition of success... They failed in being useful to the end users, but they damned sure made their engagement KPI look good, and also got a few ad impressions on the way.
      • darkwater 9mo ago
        Maybe my tone was not clear enough but I wasn't implying they did a great job for the end user, but they surely did for their revenue stream.
        • zahlman 9mo ago
          What you seem to overlook is that the people curating the site and setting up duplicate links don't see a penny of revenue. There is extreme misalignment between them and the actual stakeholders. Nowadays the site staff/owners are seen by the meta community basically as active saboteurs.
  • Permit 9mo ago
    > I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.
• Someone1234 9mo ago
  Which directly resulted in the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025. They drove people away, on purpose, who were creating their content. Which was a successful strategy until it wasn't.
  • socalgal2 9mo ago
    Sounds like Reddit to me. Topics closed, answers out of date, ask again, closed as dupe
    • Someone1234 9mo ago
      I would agree, Reddit is in a slow death spiral. I'd point at bad management primarily. The main thing keeping them afloat may be lack of good competition.
      • cogman10 9mo ago
        The reddit death spiral is AI, bots, and brigading. I think they've accelerated it by making it easy to make all comments private and by hamstringing moderators. Part of that directly ties back to AI as well. The API limiting has a lot to do with making it hard to scrape reddit for data.
        • Someone1234 9mo ago
          I definitely think that has made it worse, but Reddit was on the downward spiral before LLNs/Bots/etc for years. Keep in mind that ownership changed twice in the years before ChatGPT et al appeared, and the new owners didn't really understand the site.
          • zahlman 9mo ago
            > but Reddit was on the downward spiral before LLNs/Bots/etc for years. Keep in mind that ownership changed twice in the years before ChatGPT et al appeared, and the new owners didn't really understand the site. Stack Overflow's situation, of course, is totally different. It only changed ownership once.
• simianparrot 9mo ago
  And they get confident lies back 2/10 times, not enough to make them constantly question the answers, but just enough to _really_ mess with them over time. And not just that, almost no new good questions and answers are created anymore for the next iterations of LLM's to train on, so they'll be consuming more and more AI-centered SEO slop until that ratio becomes so high it becomes useless. But by then most of us who used to answer human questions won't give a s*t anymore. You reap what you sow. Best of both worlds? I disagree vehemently. At least my job is secure; experts with decades of experience are in high demand, and I can be even more selective who I decide to work for. I'm done contributing for free to the corpo Internet though.
  • smallerfish 9mo ago
    > And they get confident lies back 2/10 times That _might_ have been true in 2023.
    • simianparrot 9mo ago
      If you think it's not true today, it's just the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
      • smallerfish 9mo ago
        You're claiming 20% of LLM responses are hallucinations, today?
        • zahlman 9mo ago
          Nowadays when I do a conventional search for information, the results on all sorts of topics are dominated by obviously LLM slop articles trying their hardest to SEO by padding out the page with tons of tangential dreck. When I can actually scroll through and glean the information I'm looking for, it's wrong in at least some subtle technical detail a significant fraction of the time, yes. And then, the other day someone showed an example of a "how to configure WireGuard" article, padded to hell, in LLM house style, aimlessly wandering... being hosted on the webpage of a industrial company selling products made out of wire meshes.
• closewith 9mo ago
  > StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this. > > The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.
  • zahlman 9mo ago
    > Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this. It always looks like this from the outside. Especially for those who don't understand what the quality standards are, or what the motivations are for having those standards. There is a Code of Conduct and a flagging system for a reason. > It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available. This is not a contradiction or rebuttal. Every Internet community is allowed to decide its own objectives. Stack Overflow's was explicitly not "help the question-askers". It was brought into existence specifically because of the social problems, and lack of utility for later searchers, observed in "help the question-asker" environments (i.e., traditional discussion forums). Of course there was an exodus when it was no longer required to bother a human to make a natural-language query find the right information (more or less, most of the time). From Stack Overflow's perspective, that's just an improvement on conventional search, and no more of a problem than the fact that Google used to be good at indexing the site. (I still don't understand why Firefox spell-check doesn't think "asker" and "answerer" are words. They're not in my /usr/dict/share/words, either. I've been speaking English for over four decades and I still hate it.)
• kstrauser 9mo ago
  Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwellers got their way and drove everyone else away. Instead of a rich interaction forum, it became a gamified version of Appease The Asshole. I stopped playing when I realized I’d rather be doing almost anything else with my free time. For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run, who is empowered to say “I appreciate your efforts but this isn’t how we want to do things here” and veto the ruiners. Otherwise you inevitably seem to end up with a self-elected bureaucracy that exists to keep itself in place, all else be damned. (Bringing it back to a local example, I can’t imagine HN without dang and the new mods. Actually, I guess I can: it would look a lot like Reddit, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I vastly prefer the quality of conversation here, thanks.)
  • Groxx 9mo ago
    Fully agreed with your reason for leaving, but I'll throw in: it's absolutely terrible at showing time relevant information, seemingly on the theory that someone will dedup and edit every question and answer as it becomes history rather than helpful. That became more and more clear as the site and content aged, and afaict they have done absolutely nothing to address it. So after a few years the site had good information... but often only if you had accidentally time traveled. I had FAR too many cases where the correct answer now was much further down the page, and the highest rated (and correct at the time) answer was causing damage, and editing it to fix that would often be undone unless it was super obvious (if I even could). It shifted the site from "the most useful" to "everything still needs to be double checked off-site" and at that point any web search is roughly equivalent. And when it's not a destination for answers, it's not a destination for questions (or moderation) either.
    • kstrauser 9mo ago
      Definitely. And interestingly, that sucked for authors of the old answers, too. I had a few highly ranked answers from around 2010 or so. Every now and then I’d get a new notification about someone telling me I was completely wrong and should be embarrassed. Look, my time traveling friend, that answer was perfectly reasonable when I wrote it 16 years ago. It’s not my fault that the ebbs and currents of SO pushed you to it today. I’d answer differently today, but I’m not going to go back and “fix” all my old suggestions to keep them up to date. That’s the weird feedback loop from practically forcing new askers back to the old answers, which was bad for everyone involved.
• phoronixrly 9mo ago
  > Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds Mindless stackoverflow copy-pasting was a scourge of the programming world before. I can't imagine the same low quality stackoverflow answers mashed into slop being the best of any world...
• morsecodist 9mo ago
  I would never ask a question on stack overflow because half the time it seemed to be flagged a dupe or for some other reason and it brought you closer to being disallowed to ask. I actually have answered a good amount of stack overflow questions to get a higher score but the overzealous question shutdowns totally had a chilling effect.
  • Someone1234 9mo ago
    One thing that isn't talked about enough is the impact aggressive moderation had on people answering too. If you were in the New queue, and found a question you could answer, by the time you posted your answer the question itself may have been nuked by mods making your answer/effect not seen by many.
    • kstrauser 9mo ago
      Oh, man. That was kind of the end of the line for me, too. I’d get roped into conversations trying to defend the question, which wasn’t even mine, because I thought it was novel and interesting enough to be worth answering in the first place. And then I asked myself what I was doing getting suckered into these talks. I don’t need that kind of tarpit.
    • zahlman 9mo ago
      Yes. The problem is that the model was questions open by default, so you had exposure to the question before it could be properly be considered for inclusion. The Staging Ground fixed this, but too little (only applied to a small random sampling of questions) and way too late. It's considered part of your responsibility, as someone answering questions, to understand the standards for closing questions (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) and the motivations behind those standards, and to skip over (better yet, flag or vote to close) those not meeting those standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808). You complain, but actually the deck is heavily stacked in your favour: there is a 5-minute grace period on answers; plus you can submit the answer by yourself, regardless of your reputation score, while typical closures (not duplicates and not questions flagged and then seen by someone on the very small moderation team) require three high-rep users (and it used to be five) to agree. However, the question was not "nuked": the OP gets at least 9 days to fix it and submit for reconsideration before the system deletes it automatically (unless it's so bad that multiple even higher rep users take even further consensus action, on the belief that it fundamentally can't be fixed: see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-acceptable-to-delete-a-question/426219#426219 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-a...). And this overwhelmingly was not done "by mods". It's done by people who acquired significant reputation (of course, this also generally describes the mods), typically by answering many questions.
• zahlman 9mo ago
  Well put. It's maddening that people still don't get it 17 and a half years later. (It's interesting that Spolsky is giving the talk, since to my understanding Atwood was considerably more hard-line about it, and was always the one blogging about the high concept.) I mostly chalk it up to UI affordances. The most obvious one: the site constantly presents an "Ask Question" button; it gives you a form to type in a question; people come to the site because they have a question, and it goes live to a general audience[1] as soon as it's posted. No amount of emphasis on search is ever going to override that. Less obvious but much more important is that the community can't actually put information about community norms in front of new users, except by scolding them for mistakes. No matter how polite you are about giving people links to the tour[2] or to policies[3], Then of course, they wanted the site to actually grow at the start, so we got that terribly conceived reputation system best described as Goodhart's law incarnate[4]. And it was far too successful at that early growth, such that if anyone actually understood the idea properly at the start, they were overwhelmed by new users (including the experts answering questions) and had no chance to instill a site culture. It took until 2012 or so until a significant chunk of the experts were getting frustrated with... all the same things they were historically frustrated with on actual forums; then we got the "What Stack Overflow is Not" incident[5]. A lot of the frustration was misdirected except for a general annoyance at certain stereotypes of typical users. It took until at least 2014, from my assessment of the old meta posts, for a real consensus to start emerging about what makes a good question, and even then there was a lot of confusion[6]. Newer sites like Codidact[7] have a chance to learn from this mess, establishing ideas about what good questions look like, and about site scope, from the start[8]. 1. Notwithstanding more recent efforts, like the Staging Ground and now a new "question type" feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/435293 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/435293) which seems to have been recently rolled back in preparation for something bigger (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437856 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437856), and the various attempts to force AI into the process, etc. 2. https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour 3. Especially things like 'Under what circumstances may I add "urgent" or other similar phrases to my question, in order to obtain faster answers?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569) and 'Why is "Can someone help me?" not a useful question?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236). See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485817 . 4. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-exchange-reputation-system-whats-working-whats-not/387550#387550 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex... ; the anchor is for my own answer but please scroll around and read other points of view. 5. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/137795 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/137795. Back then I was actively using the site but not active on meta; I pretty well gave up in 2015 for largely unrelated (personal) reasons, then came back in mid 2019, coincidentally shortly before the Monica situation[9]. 6. In particular, see 'How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592), originally authored 2013, and especially compare the original answers to newer ones. Notably there were also quite a few deleted answers on this one, for those of you with the reputation to view them. Also see 'How do I ask and answer homework questions?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334822 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334822) which largely misses the point: it's not so much about the ethics of someone cheating on homework, but about the question fitting the site model. 7. https://codidact.com https://codidact.com , with subdomains for various topics. Notably, "programming" as a topic is not privileged; unlike how the Stack Exchange network started with Stack Overflow which still dominates everything else put together, software.codidact.com is just another section of the site. Full disclosure: I am a moderator for that section. 8. See for example https://software.codidact.com/posts/285035/289176#answer-289176 https://software.codidact.com/posts/285035/289176#answer-289... ; https://software.codidact.com/posts/291064 https://software.codidact.com/posts/291064 ; https://software.codidact.com/posts/284979 https://software.codidact.com/posts/284979 ; https://software.codidact.com/posts/292960 https://software.codidact.com/posts/292960 ; https://software.codidact.com/posts/294610 https://software.codidact.com/posts/294610 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289910 https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289910 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/290028 https://meta.codidact.com/posts/290028 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/291121/291156#answer-291156 https://meta.codidact.com/posts/291121/291156#answer-291156 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289687 https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289687 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289951 https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289951 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/284169 https://meta.codidact.com/posts/284169. Yes, this is a carefully hand-picked list. I have a fairly clear mental image of one more but was somehow unable to search for it. 9. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965 and many others. It's a deep rabbit hole. It's also the triggering incident leading to the creation of Codidact[7].
• tstrimple 9mo ago
  I was a user of StackOverflow for quite a while. I appreciated the friction. It taught me how to ask better questions to the point where I'd be doing all the research needed to ask a good question and just solve it myself along the way. It's a skill that has made a world of difference in my career relative to my peers. Makes me want to reply to my coworkers simply with "Closed as Duplicate" or "Closed - Needs details or clarity".
• beeboop0 9mo ago
  The toxicity was the point? That's a psychopathic take on the matter, I'm sorry. Nothing or no one forced anyone to be harsh to other human beings. That was a deliberate choice by a bunch of sociopaths