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SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allo

• bluedino 3mo ago
  There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss. It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"
  • rib3ye 3mo ago
    As noted by others, the initializer for the curt communication culture was "don't ask stupid questions, idiot."
  • frollogaston 3mo ago
    Once or twice someone on SO used their chat feature to help me out after I asked a question, back when I was a n00b. That was really kind of them. Eventually, once I actually knew my stuff, I spent some time answering good questions on there. And yeah I had to be discerning.
• embedding-shape 3mo ago
  SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people. Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.
  • tokioyoyo 3mo ago
    An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.
• Havoc 3mo ago
  >"no conversation please" Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that
  • lima 3mo ago
    It always worked like that
• mort96 3mo ago
  Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever. They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks. It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.
  • heisenbit 3mo ago
    It was also the rise of Github and the importance of the software hosted there. More consistent documentation and transparent issue trackers/PRs helped a lot dealing with evolving software.
    • pseudalopex 3mo ago
      The data showed Stack Overflow declined from 2017. This followed GitHub's rise distantly. GitHub made documentation more consistent how? GitHub issues were more transparent how? A PR answered a question I would have asked Stack Overflow never I think.
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    > and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. No; answers got outdated because of people not doing what they were supposed to do, which is: post a new answer on the old question. (Assuming that the old answers actually are outdated. It happens all the time that decade-old answers are still perfectly relevant, or even still represent the Right Way to Do It(TM).) Somehow, people never wanted to do that when it actually mattered, but would constantly post new, repetitive, low-quality answers on popular old questions (often re-combining multiple old answers) even though the solutions hadn't actually become outdated, simply because they were popular questions and they hoped to gain visibility from it (whether from reputation, or because user profile pages had a "number of users reached" metric which literally just sums the view counts of the pages where you have a question or answer, including views that occurred before your post). That said, there are plenty of cases where an old question got closed as a duplicate of a newer question: either because it went unnoticed before, or because of deliberate action to reverse the direction of closure, with the goal of pointing future viewers to the best possible Q&A. This was explicitly in accordance with policy: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251938 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251938 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423085 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423085 . As a general rule, policy is "timeless": the timestamp on a post is not relevant to determining the right thing to do with it.
• faangguyindia 3mo ago
  Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw. Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."
  • NordStreamYacht 3mo ago
    Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do. BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
      • mort96 3mo ago
        Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too. Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.
        • embedding-shape 3mo ago
          They're slowly boiling the frog, I've been expecting old. to work for maybe 1-2 more years then it'll also be going away. Probably in the same way as they're actively removing r/all, at first it just didn't show up in the sidebar on mobile, but you could go to r/all manually by clicking links in the client. Then those stopped working, but r/All (uppercase A) worked. Then that went away. By now I think it's impossible to see r/all at all in the mobile client or the modern website, you can only access it via old.reddit.com.
• sevenseacat 3mo ago
  I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.
  • mort96 3mo ago
    A Q&A site where the community asks questions and the community answers them. That doesn't work without a community.
    • skillina 3mo ago
      Community won't stick around if the questions they're shown aren't stimulating, either.
      • nolok 3mo ago
        Which is exactly why "extended discussion" should have been nurtured in their own way rather than fought against, that's how you get stimulating conversations.
• bartread 3mo ago
  I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy. Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know? Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging. So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help. I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post. The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect. Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available. IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem. But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site. As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down. And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years. SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming. And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.
  • walrus01 3mo ago
    The anonymity of people giving aggressive and confrontational "answers" to a question reminds me of: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
• morningsam 3mo ago
  That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer. Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details. It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly. One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
  • tannertech 3mo ago
    Off topic, closed.
  • andai 3mo ago
    My favorite thing was how for half the stuff I Googled, the top result would be a StackOverflow reply telling me to Google it.
    • freedomben 3mo ago
      Yep, or the top 10 hits on Google all pointing to a "duplicate" that didn't have the answer (or even the same question). Such a squandering of discoverability it's hard to even fathom who thought that was a good idea.
  • 3mo ago
• amelius 3mo ago
  Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI? I don't buy it.
  • baq 3mo ago
    People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Reddit is full of bots instead of actual humans. Arguably, so is HN.
      • baq 3mo ago
        SO doesn’t even have bots.
      • frollogaston 3mo ago
        Reddit was full of fake users even day 1, they admitted to bootstrapping the website that way.
  • unreal37 3mo ago
    How eager people are to find something better IS a factor in the decline of websites/businesses. Not just that there is something better that exists.
  • palata 3mo ago
    I personally left SO because I felt moderation had become toxic, and that was before AI. And I was relatively active, like in the top 5%.
  • Jolter 3mo ago
    See the decline of the graph even before the spring of ’22?
• Aurornis 3mo ago
  > SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions. Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    I'm used to enjoying your comments here, but this is an unusually bad take, and frankly personally hurtful. None of this was ever about that kind of power or control, and hearing constant accusations to the contrary was one of the things that compounded the stress of curation for me.
• sobellian 3mo ago
  Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.
• juanpicardo 3mo ago
  In an age where we all get the same generic answer from LLMs, SO could have been the place to have meaningful conversations on tech topics. Instead they became irrelevant