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Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclus

• executivevice 3mo ago
  S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
  • baq 3mo ago
    It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
    • palata 3mo ago
      This. I left SO before AI because moderators were terrible.
      • bombcar 3mo ago
        SO collapsed twice - first when everyone stopped contributing, and then AI stopped anyone even reading.
  • gs17 3mo ago
    > aquire comment points to be able to answer I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
    • marcosdumay 3mo ago
      The rules changed, a lot. You created an account one day and the only things you could do were commenting and asking questions; you created it some other day and the only things you could do were asking and answering questions; some other day the only thing you could do was asking questions. Any day you signed up, asking any question first was a sure way to be downvoted bellow the threshold that would ban you from the site.
      • zahlman 3mo ago
        > The rules changed, a lot. No, they didn't. I joined in late 2010 to post a question, and posted multiple answers within an hour of that. As far as I can research, it has always been like that. 50 reputation is required to comment, except under your own questions (which is meant to facilitate figuring out what's wrong with a problematic question, so that it can be fixed). Nobody ever got "banned from the site" for asking questions. There are algorithms that implement rate limits on questions and answers, some of which are oppressive (the so-called "Q-ban" limits you to one question per 6 months; and the insiders on meta who are doing all the question closing and downvoting that everyone objects to all hate it and have complained many times). There is in fact no proper facility for banning users available to moderators: they can only "destroy" accounts that were used by spammers or suspend ordinary users for increasing lengths of time (in practice, bans are implemented by suspending for 99999 days, which is about 273 years). These algorithms kick in because of a pattern; I have never been shown evidence of the Q-ban kicking in because of a single question (the details are internal to the company; even actual moderators don't and can't know) and the initial rate limits are honestly pretty gentle (unless you imagine that you're entitled to prompt answers; but you're supposed to get those by searching). Note that self-deleting poorly-received questions is generally believed not to help with this. (The goal was to prevent people from making lazy attempts at asking questions and then disclaiming any interest in fixing them; I think this was a misstep, as people should be lauded for coming to an understanding about how the site works, and for deleting things that aren't actually fixable.) Important references: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164899 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164899 ("the complete rate-limiting guide") https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271542 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271542 (rate-limit implementation) https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 (Q-ban warning) https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/255583 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/255583 (Q-ban implementation)
• znpy 3mo ago
  > but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner. i got stung by exactly this. i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow. and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing. dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like thanks in advance, -- znpy which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site. I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
  • eknkc 3mo ago
    I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago
      There was a gold badge given out if you got 100 edits approved. And another if you got 100 edits reversed.
  • no-name-here 3mo ago
    1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad? 2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being set up like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki of questions and their answers. 3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?
    • znpy 3mo ago
• duchenne 3mo ago
  I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • AStrangeMorrow 3mo ago
    I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary. I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get pointer on how to track that behavior I was seeing. Of course the second I post it I got a -1 plus “can’t reproduce”/“please add minimal example”. An other time, I had a question that was very similar to an existing one, but different setup and the answer did not solve my problem at all. Mentioned all that, linked the other question and specifically wrote that it was NOT addressing my problem. Posted it, soon after tagged as duplicate with that one answer that did NOT solve the problem. After that I rarely asked questions again. Also the points system made it frustrating as a new user: someone 2 years ago asks a basic language question “+50 upvotes”. You asked a similar question, asking extra clarification on an aspect “-2, already answered, read the doc” and so on. And with such a big deal made about reputation it felt like just being born early and being able to be an early adopter meant you got east points. For new users, though luck.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Skill issue to the second paragraph. You can always create a minimal example. I've done it many times. Some of them are quite long. Start by copying your whole file with the problem into a new file. Delete each part. See if the problem occurs. If not, Ctrl-Z and try deleting the next part. Be extremely aggressive in deleting. Also try refactoring things to be simpler if deleting doesn't work. In C++, inline #includes not from the standard library by copy-pasting the file contents. At each step, make sure the problem still occurs. Repeat the iterative deletion process. You should now have a fairly short source file which exhibits the problem. Rename all proprietary identifiers to foo, bar, baz, frob. Submit question to SO.
• globalnode 3mo ago
  as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.
• b112 3mo ago
  You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues. I hope somebody saves it all.
  • danparsonson 3mo ago
    They used to publish a regular torrent of everything, not sure if they still do that? Maybe you could grab yourself a copy for posterity.
    • gs17 3mo ago
      It's still possible to get a dump from the Settings page, just with a checkbox that says "if you use this for AI training we might ban you".
      • inigyou 3mo ago
        You can automate it with browser automation tools.
  • includenotfound 3mo ago
    Perhaps not what you intended, but most of it is stored in various models' weights.
  • qingcharles 3mo ago
    For better or for worse, the contents of Stack Overflow are literally the reason LLM coding has taken over the world.
    • ivankra 3mo ago
      No, that's been mainly due to RLVR.
  • 3eb7988a1663 3mo ago
    Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.
• brap 3mo ago
  I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother. Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
  • smallmancontrov 3mo ago
    Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful. That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
  • Dragas 3mo ago
    During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author. I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
    • tayo42 3mo ago
      It felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the same
    • unreal37 3mo ago
      I just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed. And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.
• nottorp 3mo ago
  > making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened: 1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer. 2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers. This was long before LLMs.
  • suzzer99 3mo ago
    At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"
    • puchatek 3mo ago
      I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.
    • nottorp 3mo ago
      Because the person who asked the question has accepted the first answer that looked decent enough and moved on. Usually the most superficial, not that it's always a bad thing. Oh, also on SO there's this kind of exchange: Q: "I want to do X because of this and that - or because I simply fucking want to". A: You should never do X, do Y or Z instead.
      • badc0ffee 3mo ago
        The "that's a XY problem" guys always seem to think they're the smartest in the room.
        • blt 3mo ago
          imo this was the single worst problem with SO, people always searching for the XY problem in every question instead of taking it at face value
• chuckadams 3mo ago
  > StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site. Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    The community arrived at, drafted and enforce policy forbidding AI-generated content; this usually meant answers because that was the obvious use case for LLMs. (We were getting absolutely flooded from day 1 with really obviously LLM-generated crap, which represented absolutely zero value add over the OP going to chatgpt dot com and copy-pasting the question there instead. Often this came from users who came back to the site after years of hiatus, who had an established track record in previous answers of being barely able to communicate in English at all; and then they would come to the meta site and insist that they hadn't used an LLM, apparently completely unable to understand how blatantly obvious they were being about it.) The company repeatedly attempt to force shitty AI-powered features on the community, and also tried to intervene with enforcement of that policy, complaining that false positives would be too damaging. These features got roundly rejected again and again, but this was ignored. Again, much of this represented zero value-add over going to chatgpt dot com directly. Some examples: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438910 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438910 The intervention against moderator enforcement of policy (an actual moderator action! Ordinary community members can't just delete an answer for being LLM-generated, although they do take almost all the other actions people complain about offsite) got so bad that it led to an actual strike.
• fenomas 3mo ago
  I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help? Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered. Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
  • unreal37 3mo ago
    I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation. Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions. LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
    • bombcar 3mo ago
      Without Quora we can’t get masterpieces like this: https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg
  • fabian2k 3mo ago
    The vast majority of duplicate closures use already answered questions as duplicates. So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. In my observation this is usually the case, though the answer might be more generic. I have also seen bad duplicate closures that weren't actually exact duplicates. But people talk like this is the only kind of duplicate closure that actually happens. I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, or if people are missing that their question is actually answered in the duplicate.
    • 3mo ago
• brador 3mo ago
  The math subreddit is awful. Accusing everyone of asking homework questions if they weren’t formatted in perfect math notation. Then there’s the godot subreddit. Asked 2 questions? That’s a ban. Imagine a child learning math or game dev coming up against that. I’d quit. Curiosity extinguished. The godot github has one of those characters now too. Really anti new user. I worry, I worry.
  • hrnnnnnn 3mo ago
    It's ok, the kids learning this stuff these days are on YouTube and Discord.
    • freedomben 3mo ago
      It's pretty sad that they had to shift to a non-interactive medium to avoid getting smashed. Sad place the world is now in that respect :-(
  • lynndotpy 3mo ago
    FWIW I haven't had bad experiences on the Godot subreddit, but I haven't tried in three years since the API change. And AI seems laughably bad at Godot for any non-trivial questions, and for those trivial questions, it's better just to peruse the docs.
• DrewADesign 3mo ago
  Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable. Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago. Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started. ::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!
  • Chris_Newton 3mo ago
    Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes. On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well. On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences. I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
• timcobb 3mo ago
  The worst stack overflow in this regard was meta. Most pathological corner of the internet I've ever encountered, up there with 4chan if you ask me.
• raincole 3mo ago
  When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.
• elgertam 3mo ago
  There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it. I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.
• AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
  >StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions This is significantly under selling it. Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess. I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors. His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.” At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one
• wisemanwillhear 3mo ago
  Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.
  • Esophagus4 3mo ago
    This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.
    • bananamogul 3mo ago
      Having experienced the SO culture, I like to think the culture caused it - schadenfreude - but it was probably inevitable given AI. Even if SO was the most wonderful friendly place in the galaxy, would you rather post a question and wait hours for a response, or get one instantly?
      • inigyou 3mo ago
        If the answers were better, you might. They weren't. The most common answer was a hyperlink to an unrelated question followed by everyone being banned from answering your question
        • Esophagus4 3mo ago
          I could see SO being helpful for more niche questions where one guy somewhere knows the answer from experience or he wrote the framework. But then over time, those will be absorbed into LLMs anyway, so…
      • democracy 3mo ago
• formerly_proven 3mo ago
  You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.
• cs02rm0 3mo ago
  > StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone. Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
  • xeromal 3mo ago
    Now that's a name I haven't heard about in a long time. haha
  • rcxdude 3mo ago
    The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    Would you be willing to show questions you attempted to ask? I'd be happy to help explain how policy works/worked there.
    • feoren 3mo ago
      I love the implication that thousands of people, from a broad spectrum, who all had the same negative experiences with what was obviously a serious endemic problem with the site, all just needed to understand the policy better. That was clearly the issue.
      • zahlman 3mo ago
        If thousands of Americans travelled to a tiny country where cars drive on the left, and all tried to drive on the right as they do at home, would that make the country in the wrong? Would it be a "serious endemic problem" with the country?
• rdiddly 3mo ago
  I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.
  • xeromal 3mo ago
    As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.
    • cogman10 3mo ago
      One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions. Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library". SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I think is a big part of why everyone stopped using it. And people stopping using it meant that when a question did actually make it through the gauntlet, it was likely to go unanswered because everyone who knew anything had left the platform.
      • xeromal 3mo ago
        Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol. Do you remember how power users would edit your question just for the gamification of it. Drove me nuts
        • dmboyd 3mo ago
          That’s my only experience. Asking a direct technical question, only for it to be modified to a totally different question filled with essays of non-answers by folks who liked to answer their own questions I guess
• astockwell 3mo ago
  > I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me Damn. Doesn’t that just sum up so many interactions (and sadly, relationships) in life.
• benrutter 3mo ago
  I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site). AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord. SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.
• warumdarum 3mo ago
  It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.
• dfabulich 3mo ago
  The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation. Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish. It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior! But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic. (The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)
  • firesteelrain 3mo ago
    You aren’t downvoted on Wikipedia. And people have been complaining about heavy handed editors and mods there for a long time. Same with SO. It’s pretty much a meme now.
    • dannyw 3mo ago
      Wikipedia at least has a culture where (most of the time) if you’re objectively rude or mean, especially to newbies, you’re at least shunned a bit. Strict moderation etc isn’t a bad thing, but the environment and culture you mould is what matters.
  • pygy_ 3mo ago
    > The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated [citation needed] Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat. The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months. StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit. SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.
• godwinson__4-8 3mo ago
  In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort. I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form. These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine. In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead? Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.
  • chuckadams 3mo ago
    > Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. I did get over it when I stopped bothering with SO. Sorry, but a community whose ethos is "you need a thick skin to belong" is not one most people even want to belong to.
• totalizator 3mo ago
  My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most. May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.
  • cogman10 3mo ago
    I did, and it wasn't much better on the other side. And funnily enough, the questions that I answered that most contributed to getting me through the gauntlet years later were closed at duplicates (they weren't).
• maerF0x0 3mo ago
  If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit. I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes 1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching) 2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use" 3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.
  • kaoD 3mo ago
    > If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit. And why do you think most people (and LLMs) just Google "<what they are looking for> reddit" ??
  • jambalaya8 3mo ago
    These were all good things about stackexchange (and a precious few other places), yeah. Especially the latter two. Whenever I see people using stuff like linkedin to 'vet' things, I think of this. Reddit is much more cliquey and free-for-all, and has a lot more emotional fighting than the egoistic sort of arguments that sometimes took/take place on SO. I still prefer SO.
  • democracy 3mo ago
    They chose being controlled and not being Reddit - I can imagine lots of ways to do both - still they chose the toxic way and now they are dead, goal achieved.
    • theendisney 3mo ago
      Early o. On some irc channels, forums and usenet groups the greatest trolls, clowns and crazy users were also the most knowlegable and the most helpful. They had to earn the right to misbehave. The secret sause was that anything goes but if something on topic comes along that is the only topic. Also a wonderful formula was to promote your own website in a signature on blogs and forums. If your comment isnt worth having it is just deleted. You had to work for it and the reward was good. If your sig is a giant banner more effort is expected. Also oddly interesting was moderation depending on how much money you sunk into the product.
• senderista 3mo ago
  I tried to answer an SO question exactly once, around 15 years ago. Someone asked a question which was covered perfectly by some OSS code I had already published, so I linked to that in my answer (while explaining how the linked code was relevant). My answer was promptly deleted, of course, for linking to code. After that I lost all desire to contribute.
• mancerayder 3mo ago
  One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed. The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.
  • lovich 3mo ago
    I really enjoyed asking questions where I linked a similar answered question, went through the details that caused my problem to be mechanically different or rendered the other answer as not possible, and then having a moderator close it as a duplicate and link the answer half my post had been dedicated to explaining the difference.
  • frollogaston 3mo ago
    So it's not just me. The "duplicate" thing alone made it hard to use a lot of the time. Other stuff like people just being arrogant didn't bother me so much.
• eudamoniac 3mo ago
  No online community can maintain quality unless there are systems in place to prevent mentally ill internet addicts from gaining power over it. This should have a name. We can can call it Eudaimoniac's Law. Anything that gives power on a basis of seniority, activity, volunteering, is guaranteed to suck very soon. There are just way too many mentally ill authoritarians permanently online for normal people to stave them off with naive good faith.
• CM30 3mo ago
  Yeah, I think the issue with Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange is one of how too much gatekeeping and elitism tends to eventually be the death knell for a community. True, you might want people who are more articulate or thoughtful than the majority, but if you go too hard on that, you end up putting a time limit on how long the community will probably last. People won't stick around a community that treats them like crap, and that's a problem because at least some of those amateurs/newbies will become your future experts and power users. The people scared away by bullies like the one mentioned here didn't come back to Stack Exchange once they became the type of expert the site needed. They just shared their knowledge elsewhere.
• TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  > That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity. The biggest problem was highlighted from day one: StackOverflow was bound to become "DeadOverflow". It couldn't possibly work because the entire notion of having one correct answer to a question in a domain that constantly evolves was broken. What killed the site was "Ever relevant question" showing up in a Google search (pick other search engine) and pointing to a "Correct and accepted answer" that was wrong with then another answer with more upvotes but which was... Already outdated. That's why people coined the term "DeadOverflow": the very way the site was conceived would inevitably lead to dead answers. And people pointed that out early on. Nobody listened, many of the OGs who created that company made a nice exit. But SO was destined to eventually fail. The entire karma/gamification/clique of users gate-keeping was bad but the issue of dead answers / DeadOverflow simply couldn't be solved, so it doesn't even matter. Losing 99.41% of its activity is brutal but it's honestly surprising that a concept that couldn't possibly work even survived that long.
• matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content. They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    > overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. The site has more than three times as many publicly-visible questions as Wikipedia has articles. And that's with the scope restricted to just programming.
    • matheusmoreira 3mo ago
      Is that supposed to somehow excuse the deletionism?
      • zahlman 3mo ago
        No excuse is required, because there's nothing wrong with it.
    • witrak 3mo ago
      You dare to compare a Wikipedia article (even a short one) to an SE "article," which is, according to SE's own rules, narrowly and up-to-the-point concentrated on an equally narrow formulated question?
      • zahlman 3mo ago
        Yes, because there's no reason not to. A Wikipedia article (even a long one) is "narrowly and up-to-the-point concentrated" on a single concept. There maybe a lot to say about dogs, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog only covers things common to all of them, and individual dog breeds get their own pages (as does the concept of a "dog breed"). Similarly, SO has good, valid questions about general concepts, which are narrowly scoped about the concept despite the broad applicability of that concept. For example, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26337003 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26337003 .
• iwontberude 3mo ago
  So I guess Wikipedia will eventually face the same fate
  • hungryhobbit 3mo ago
    Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference. SO was supposed to help programmers program. The former continues to succeed, with hiccups, because they remember their goal. The latter is dead, and it failed because it tried to be the former, forgetting their goal.
• zurtri 3mo ago
  You have much more eloquently put the same feeling I had about the site. It was a good resource but absolutely toxic to newcomers. Good Riddance to SO.
• dannyw 3mo ago
  [dead]
• zahlman 3mo ago
  > StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example. > making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale. > They slowly killed the site in this manner. It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy. > knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question. It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question. > I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program. Reading through, for example, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433897 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433897 and understanding what is written there is literally all that is required.
  • hungryhobbit 3mo ago
    I disagree. Stack Overflow was made to succeed, not fail ... originally. Then the founders left, and meta basically chronicles the echo chamber of mistakes made. It's not the intent: that was to help coders code. Meta was dominated by people who lost the intent, and wanted to build a library.
    • zahlman 3mo ago
      Atwood and Spolsky were quite explicit, on multiple occasions, about what they wanted the site to be. That vision was not compatible with having a site with millions of users and millions of questions, because the masses simply aren't interested in the kind of interaction that the vision required. They may not have understood this at the time. But it's clear that the early community attempted a lot of gatekeeping, much of it misguided in the details (you want lots of questions that address beginner-level problems, because most people in a field are beginners at any given time for any given field, so that's what's most useful) but directionally correct (most of the time, you don't want the question that a beginner asks, because the beginner is not adept at asking useful questions and lacks the perspective needed for a proper Q that allows for presenting a useful A). The intent was very much to build a library. It's literally on the tour page at the top: > Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming. That is not something inserted by people on the meta site. We literally did not have access to make that kind of change. Believe me, there are so many other things we would have fixed if it had been made possible. Most of the important policy was established around 2013 or 2014 and those are the dates of the most important posts on meta that get brought up again and again (and used as duplicate targets, and cited in arguments). That was also right around when site activity was peaking. Atwood and Spolsky didn't leave until the acquisition in 2019.
• NetOpWibby 3mo ago
  I say this every time the topic of SO/AI comes up. LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response. There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes to close my question) before I gave up.
  • zmmmmm 3mo ago
    this for me was one of the truly liberating parts of LLMs for me: simply being able to ask a question and get a straight answer without having to run the gauntlet of why I shouldn't be doing what I am trying to do in the first place. The friction of trying to explain why I still wanted to do it that way deterred me from asking so many questions.
    • NetOpWibby 3mo ago
      I also had to deal with a concerted effort by an ex-employer to downvote all of my questions for several months. I’m not shedding tears over SO. It had a good run.
• t0mpr1c3 3mo ago
  It seems to me that AI did SO in, not its moderation culture. SO is not a place to ask where to get your homework assignment done, that's for sure. The gamification does not necessarily reward the best content, but I didn't experience hostility myself. (I do find this site fairly hostile. And Wikipedia is the lowest possible hell, I've never in my life experienced anything comparable to the ferocity with which people prosecute their grudges, all the way to IRL doxxing. German language Wikipedia is another whole level of self-appointed officialdom.)
• cataphract 3mo ago
  Yes, yes, the usual narrative. They were not welcoming. I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website: * Most questions were low effort crap * Users were mostly divided between only asking questions and only answering questions * The reputation system favored: 1) easy questions (understood by a larger audience -> more people upvoting), 2) fast answers (before the question dropped from the front page; also answers with more votes got more visibility). So, contrary to the usual narrative, the incentives and most activity was directed to answering newbie questions. That made up most of the volume, and it was what the reputation system rewarded. Even if a question got closed as a duplicated, by that time there usually were already answers to most easy questions. And deletion could only happen after some time (two days IIRC). The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system. The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.
• moralestapia 3mo ago
  >making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site Fancy wording but inaccurate. Plenty of long-time users (me included) left when the mods became insane.