- This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale.
- I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO. I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers. Reddit is kind of a dark horse here, as I began seeing answers on Google to more modern technical questions link to a Reddit thread frequently along with SO from 2016 onwards. I also suspect Discord played a part, though this is harder to gauge; I certainly got a number of answers to questions for, e.g., Bun, by asking around in the Bun Discord, etc. The final nail in the coffin is of course LLMs, which can offer a SO-level answer to a decent percentage of questions instantly. (The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top.)
- I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning.
I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this.
The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor that the moderation started taking on a life of its own. Stack Overflow moderator drama felt constant in the later 2010s with endless weird drama spilling across Twitter, Reddit, and the moderator’s personal blogs. That’s about the same time period where it felt like the moderation team was more interested in finding reasons to exercise their moderation power than in maintaining an interesting website.
Since about 2020 every time I click a Stack Overflow link I estimate there’s a 50/50 chance that the question I clicked on would be marked as off topic or closed or something before anyone could answer it. Between the moderator drama and the constant bait-and-switch feeling of clicking on SO links that didn’t go anywhere the site just felt more exhausting than helpful.
There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also...
For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't.
At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore.
...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call.
I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits.
> the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing.
Hi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly in a vacuum (from the outside).
How much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected things? I always got the impression that they tried to scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave of less technical/principled users.
There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama.
OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come.
In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed.
Believe me, I'm full of vision (and hope). But it's hard to write stuff when there's so much to write that I can't find a natural starting point, and when the (lack-of-)network effects are so brutal.
I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies.
The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale.
Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst.
I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.
It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them.
Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall.
Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.
Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.
It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.
But was “today “ that profitable? Stack overflow always struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make money. If the current business makes very little money, it may not be worth the work.
This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is."
Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.
That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.
With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.
But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.
Can you provide an example? The only rude Shog9 posts I can think of were aimed at people abusing the system: known, persistent troublemakers, or overzealous curators exhibiting the kinds of behaviours that people in this thread would criticise, probably far more rudely than Shog ever did.
I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the question)
The moderation definitely got kind of nasty in the last 5 years or so. To the point where you would feel unwelcome for asking a question you had already researched, and felt was perfectly sound to ask. However, that didn't stop millions of people from asking questions every day, it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated).
My feeling was always that the super mods were people who had too much time on their hands... and the site would've been better without them (speaking in the past tense, now). But I don't think that's what killed it. LLMs scraping all its content and recycling it into bite-sized Gemini or GPT answers - that's what killed it.
I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec.
It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so you can't even view the question any more.
I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again.
In case anyone's wondering, I ended up asking on the WhatWG or W3C or something github project (via an issue?). The TLDR was rather eye opening, that basically the spec only codifies points of contention for browsers and old behaviors are generally undocumented. With some pointers I figured out the default size behavior through code diving, and it was complex (as in, hard to use) and very unintuitive.
its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times
I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be posted on Stack Overflow", which was insane to me because Stack Overflow has a "terraform" tag and category. If you visit it, you will see tons of users trying to post valid questions only to have the mods shut them down angrily.
Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good.
Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?
It's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.
One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever taken part in moderating the review queue, you would've seen the insane amount of low-quality questions flowing in. I saw probably ten variants of "how to center my div" daily being closed as duplicates. The asker might be miffed about getting their question closed (but with a link to a solution..), but if you want to actually get answers to the high quality questions, the noise has to be filtered somehow.
Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners figure out their syntax errors or how to apply a general solution to their specific issue. And you may not like SO for it, but to not want to be a site for that is their prerogative.
> Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.
Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? Just Google with site:StackOverflow.com and you won’t have to click through many results to find something closed.
Spending all of the time to log back into the site and try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to have more people try to nit-pick it again hardly sounds attractive.
> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners
The entire point of the story above was that it wasn’t a beginner question.
> Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you?
It is believable. But it being a problem I don't see. If it's off-topic, that's sad for you but no reason to feel angry or it being "hostile" or something. It's just off-topic. Same if I started posting lots of local news from my city to HN. It's simply just off-topic and not what the site should contain. If it's already answered, being pointed to that answer by someone spending the time to digging it up is also not rude. Sure, you may feel bad because you feel someone "reprimanded" you or something. But that's on you.
> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners
This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers.
Self-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward.
Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand.
As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer.
I encourage you to recognize the statements you see as vitriol instead as brand markers as to how SO is known in the world. It's not a small set of folks who feel as if they were treated unfairly first.
If it's so many, surely someone should be able to provide some example of them being treated unfairly soon! But seriously, I'm fine with people not liking SO. I just don't think the discourse on HN around it is very fruitful and mostly emotional. SO have clearly done something wrong to get that kind of widespread reputation, but I'm also allowed to be disappointed in how it's being discussed.
You may think you're making some kind of point by repeatedly asking for examples of vitriol on SO, but all it shows is that you haven't looked, or haven't sincerely reflected on what you saw from the perspective of a regular user.
I think you are seeing emotional response is because SO has really fucked with people’s emotions, it is by far the most toxic place for SWEs to have ever existed and nothing is close 100th to it. expecting a non-emotional responses from SWEs about SO is asking too much (for most)
Hm… as the person was new to SO it’s very possible they don’t understand what a good question looks like and I thought it may be helpful to give feedback on what may have gone wrong… but if you see that as “begging” and you don’t think you need any feedback, you have it all sorted out after all, then yeah it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Thing is, if that's how you are greeted at stackoverflow, then you'll go elsewhere where you're not treated like an idiot. Stackoverflow's decline was inevitable, even without LLMs.
In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help.
But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think of users as a problem and an interruption, even though they were the only reason we were getting paid.
I've been refusing to contribute to SO for so long that I can't even remember the details. But I still recall the feeling I got from their dismissive jackassery. Having their content ripped off by LLMs is the final blow, but they have richly earned their fate.
When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - "what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?" Sometimes they just wanted to talk.
Not every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate.
... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions.
Stack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205
Arguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of "how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer.
It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.
The failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible.
Yes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides.
I would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
The point here is you worked tech support so you were paid to answer user questions.
However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?
> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?
This is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top "Question Answerer" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work.
So this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions.
Nobody, least of all me, is saying people should work for free. But not being paid to do something you don't want to do is a reason to go do something else, not hang around and be a hostile, superior dick about it, alienating the users.
I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully.
Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional.
Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment.
The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere.
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question
I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer.
> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.
My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The over-moderation you described helps people for a short time but then doesn’t help the person who googles much later. I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.
yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the "Top Answer" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by "Recent" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant
> outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.
Okay, but who's going to arbitrate that? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.)
The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though.
Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before.
Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time.
Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.
One thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example.
Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate.
> Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.
The community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced.
However, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation.
The tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the "make the site friendly" by removing comments and banning users.
The "some of the answers should have been deleted" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.
> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.
Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?
That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level.
Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for "quality before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was "quantity and engagement will follow" and then "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all.
> There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.
Yeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow "recommendation" questions. So they know that it's an issue but just ignore it for programming questions.
> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.
Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this:
30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator).
30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP).
5 minutes on implementation.
2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard.
With an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my initial prompt even as a layman. When you’d actually find an answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question that lacked one of your conditions.
> Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers.
Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version, and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers.
No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place.
Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point. It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal.
You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates.
That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.
Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely.
> I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner.
Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.
> When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.
Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy?
There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created.
What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term.
It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site.
The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started.
In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it.
That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding.
However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult.
Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate.
Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back.
This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone. The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude.
Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered.
What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my "users". I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of "dead-ness", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that.
Because from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia. For a scope of "practical matters about writing code", as compared to "any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it".
I am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congregate in public and try to accomplish something. I do not share your goals. The community is not like software, and "serving and adapting to users" does not benefit the people doing the work. We never arranged to have the kind of "users" you describe.
As a former Wikipedia administrator, I think one of the things that Wikipedia has done exactly right is to strongly prioritize readers first, editors second, and administrators third. The unofficial Wikipedia administrator symbol is a mop, because it's much more a position of responsibility than it is a position of power.
I obviously think you and other user-hostile people should be permitted to congregate and accomplish something. What I object to in Stack Overflow's case is the site being taken over by people like that, serving themselves and their own preferences with such vigor that they alienated vast numbers of potential contributors, putting the site on a path of decline from which is unlikely to recover.
Even by your own terms, having a place for some (conveniently unspecified) group to "congregate in public and try to accomplish something" looks certain to be a failure. However much you don't care about deadness or declining revenue, the people paying the bills surely do. Stack Overflow was only a success because it served and adapted to users.
But I give you points for being honest about your hostility to the entire point of the site. It not only makes it clear why it's failing, but it'll keep people from being sorry when it gets closed down.
Deadness is the symptom, not the cause. Users don't avoid SO because it's dead, but rather, SO is dead because users avoid it. It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly.
There's another thread on the front page about IPv6 where someone had a good analogy: IPv4 vs IPv6 is like Python 2 vs 3. The Python 2 diehards continued arguing furiously to an emptier and emptier room. They never felt they were proven wrong, and the intensity of the argument never diminished but the argument was with fewer and fewer people until they were just arguing with themselves as the world moved on without them.
And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026, after the horse is long gone. Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. You might want to reflect on why you hold such fervent beliefs that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now?
> It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly.
No, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years.
What you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care.
The goal was never for the site to be "not dead". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found.
The site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts.
> And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026
This is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over than they should have needed.
But really, the feedback for Stack Overflow is trying to take it in the direction of places that existed long beforehand. If you want forums, you know where to find them. And now you can also find LLMs. Which, as commonly used by people seeking programming help, are basically a grizzled forum guy in a can.
>Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you.
"Everyone actually agrees with [me]" is the polar opposite of what I actually believe and am actually saying. I am well aware that the model is unpopular. My point is that the popularity of the model is irrelevant to me.
> Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now?
I have a lot of reputation points (the site still exists), far more than I ever felt I deserved, and I never really felt like they were worth anything. A huge percentage of them come from an answer to a terrible question (that was still terrible after heroic attempts at editing; this all happened long before there was a common understanding of the purpose of question closure or what would make good standards for questions) that, once I understood things properly, I closed and tried to get deleted. Over the last few years, with that new understanding, I have been trying to give away my superfluous reputation points in bounties, trying to get missing answers written for the few really good questions lacking good answers that I identify, always to no avail (the bounty system promptly became a honeypot for ChatGPT hallucinations as soon as ChatGPT became available).
You do not know me or my motivations in the slightest.
> The goal was never for the site to be "not dead"
ok? fine then. If you think it's fine for the site to be dead then please stop spamming comments defending it. It doesn't need any defence to stay dead and such defence is not useful.
I am only responding to many people trying to explain why I should care about the thing I don't care about. The defense is useful because a) it being "dead" by these metrics is unimportant; b) people are blaming a community for mistreating them, when they came in without any intent of understanding or adapting to that community; c) other sites in this mold exist, and are trying to establish themselves.
You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel, as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One of them also asks about "downmixing" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer.
The point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions.
The orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio.
The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants.
One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q.
I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.
This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first.
The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences.
It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy".
I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience.
> many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.
Yes.
We consider that duplicate.
Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need.
I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude that people get the information they need.
In fact, your latest response is so far out that I've started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta here.
How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? They seem like mutually exclusive goals for 95% of cases.
> Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate
Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use.
Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search.
Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances
I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling process didn’t really work the way it was supposed to, and you keep telling them that they are wrong, and that the site actually works well for its intended purpose—even though its intended purpose was to help users find what they were looking for, and they are telling you that they can’t.
Part of StackOverflow’s decline was inevitable and wouldn’t have been helped by any changes the site administrators could have made; a machine can simply answer questions a lot faster than a collection of human volunteers. But there is a reason people were so eager to leave. So now instead of conforming to what users repeatedly told the administrators that they wanted, StackOverflow can conform to being the repository of questions that the administrators wanted, just without any users or revenue besides selling the contributions made by others to the LLMs that users have demonstrated they actually want to use.
> to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers
I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework".
(My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github.
I think that's a great policy. I don't think anyone wants duplicate questions. The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.
I'd say 9/10 times I find a direct match for my question on SO it's been closed as offtopic with links to one or more questions that are only superficially similar.
There are other problems that they don't even try to address. If 10 people ask the same question, why does only the first person to ask it get to choose the answer? Then lots of "XY" questions where the original asker didn't actually have problem X so selects an answer for Y, leaving the original X unsolved, and now all the duplicates only have an answer for Y too.
> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.
This problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a "duplicate" is inherently subjective, and therefore mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable).
I think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers interpret close votes as signals that they should give up), cultural (there's not much training/feedback/guidelines about what "duplicate" means for those with voting privileges), and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure, and it takes just as many votes to reopen a question as it does to close it (with the same voter reputation requirement)).
> and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure
It's not quite that bad: when the OP edits the question, there is a checkbox to assert that the edit resolves the reason for closure. Checking it off puts the question in a queue for reconsideration.
However, there's the social problem (with possibly a technical solution) that the queue is not as discoverable as it ought to be, and provides no real incentive; the queues generally are useful for curators who work well in a mode of "let's clean up problems of type X with site content today", but not for those (like myself) who work well in a mode of e.g. "let's polish the canonical for problem Y and try to search for and link unrecognized duplicates".
Given the imbalance in attention, I agree that reopening a question should have lesser requirements than closing it. But better yet would be if the questions that don't merit reopening, weren't opened in the first place. Then the emphasis could be on getting them into shape for the initial opening. I think that's a useful frame shift: it's not that the question was rejected; rather, publishing a question basically always requires a collaborative effort.
The Staging Ground was a huge step forward in this direction, but it didn't get nearly the attention or appreciation (or fine-tuning) it deserved.
> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.
The idea was, if there's an answer on the other question that solves your question, your question remains in existence as a signpost pointing to the other one without having to pollute and confuse by having a mixture of similar answers across both with different amounts of votes.
The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution.
If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.
Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed.
I think many would agree that this policy was the single biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would
Have been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high quality answers were better. Management was wrong.
> They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet
This is mostly how I engaged with SO for a long, long time. I think it’s a testament to SO’s curation of answers that I didn’t ask almost any questions for like 5+ years after starting programming
If this were true, then treating any question as an X-Y problem shouldn't be allowed at all. I.e. answers should at least address the question as posed before/instead of proposing an alternative approach.
In reality the opposite is encouraged. For countless times, I've landed on questions with promising titles/search extracts, only to find irrelevant answers because people grabbed onto some detail in the question irrelevant to my case and provided X-Y answers.
This often also causes subsequent useful questions to be marked as dups even though they no longer contain that irrelevant detail. The appeal process is so unfriendly that most would not bother.
I agree with that and I think it was the right decision. There was grousing about overmoderation but I think a lot of people got unreasonably annoyed when their question was closed. And the result was a pretty well-curated and really useful knowledge base.
Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then).
Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time.
The question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.
I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute.
> People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack.
We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot").
As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt.
What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.
Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers.
(As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)
Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches.
Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow for.
It does remove the human touch so it's quite a different dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system.
> Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc.
That might work until an LLM encounters a question it's programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the docs, I asked Google's Gemini (whatever's the current free version) to write a bare bones script for an SMTP conversation.
It flatly refused.
The explanation was along the lines "it could be used for spamming, so I can't do that, Dave." I understand the motivation, and can even sympathize a bit, but what are the options for someone who has a legitimate need for an answer? I know how to get one by other means; what's the end game when it's LLMs all the way down? I certainly don't wish to live in such a world.
I don't know how others use LLMs, but once I find the answer to something I'm stuck on I do not tell the LLM that it's fixed. This was a problem in forums as well but I think even fewer people are going to give that feedback to a chatbot
The problem that you worked out is only really useful if it can be recreated and validated, which in many cases it can be by using an LLM to build the same system and write tests that confirm the failure and the fix. Your response telling the model that its answer worked is more helpful for measuring your level of engagement, not so much for evaluating the solution.
You can also turn off the feature to allow ChatGPT to learn from your interactions. Not many people do but those that do would also starve OpenAI for information assume they respect that setting
No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything.
I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.
this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences.
SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site
It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server, and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid solutions.
There were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the fourth one failed it gave me the first one again.
You can't use the free chat client for questions like that in my experience. Almost guaranteed to waste your time. Try the big-3 thinking models (ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5).
I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer science, programming, geology, and biology.
No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of "you fucking moron" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been carefully considered and revisited over many years and have clear logic behind them, considering the goals of the site.
It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").
I have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But I have seen many examples (and been subjected to one or two myself) of crash-outs resulting from learning that the site is, by design, much more like Wikipedia than like Quora.
Quite a large fraction of questions that get closed boil down to "here's my code that doesn't work; what's wrong"? (Another large fraction doesn't even show that much effort.) The one thing that helped a lot with this was the Staging Ground, which provided a place for explicit workshopping of questions and explanation of the site's standards and purpose, without the temptation to answer. But the site staff didn't understand what they had, not at all.
> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").
This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/
Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.
That is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them.
Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?
The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you.
There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted.
You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here:
> "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them!
> Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR!
I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody explicitly articulating that.
It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri).
I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as duplicates several times, but I always understood this as an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's just normal friction of human interaction.
The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. Far too often, the already-existing answer is years old and either no longer the best answer, or doesn't actually address a major part of the question. Or it simply was never a very good answer to begin with.
What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? If the previous answer really is adequate, it won't attract further responses. If it's not, well, now its shortcomings can be addressed.
Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. It generally means that somebody missed their true calling on an HOA board somewhere.
> The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP.
The purpose of having the answer there is not to solve the OP's problem. It is to have a question answered that contributes to the canon of work. This way, everyone can benefit from it.
> What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions?
Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.
You might as well ask: what would be the harm in putting a comment in your code mentioning the existence of a function that serves your purpose, but then rewriting the code in-line instead of trying to figure out what the parameters should be for the function call?
> Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia.
This analogy makes no sense. The Wikipedia analogue is making page synonyms or redirects or merges, and those are generally useful. "Deletionism" is mainly about what meets the standard for notability.
Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.
So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.
There's really no need for us to rehash SO rules/policy debates that have raged since day one. The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.
> So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.
What? No. The canonical target isn't closed. So go write the new answer there. The answer acceptance mark is basically irrelevant, and the feature ill-conceived.
Except usually there are dozens of answers already; the best possible answer has emerged; and people keep writing redundant nonsense for the street cred of having an answer on a popular Stack Overflow question.
> The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.
We do not care that people don't want to come and ask new questions. There are already way, way too many questions for the site's purpose. The policy is aimed at something that you don't care about. The result is a "verdict" we don't care about.
The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.
How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service.
Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape.
If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.
Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds.
Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention.
As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario.
Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product.
The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a product" where the first step is to search, the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the third step is to delete.
The LLM is capable of answering the question "how to delete the product 'product name'".
To some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic, but still possible for a human to answer if only they read documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an answer A LOT faster.
If the LLM is also writing the documentation, because the developers surely don’t want to, I’m not sure how well this will work out.
I have some co-workers who have tried to use Copilot for their documentation (because they never write any and I’m constantly asking them questions as a result), and the results were so bad they actually spent the time to write proper documentation. It failed successfully, I suppose.
world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs
I believe the parent poster was clearly and specifically talking about software documentation that was strong and LLM consumption-friendly, not "everything"
You SHOULD be making things in a human/LLM-readable format nowadays anyway if you're in tech, it'll do you well with AIs resorting to citing what you write, and content aggregators - like search engines - giving it more preferential scores.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems
The moderation was precisely the reason I stopped using stackoverflow and started looking for answers and asking questions elsewhere. It was nearly impossible to ask anything without someone replying "Why would you even want to do that, do <something completely different that does not solve my problem> instead!". Or someone claiming it's a duplicate and you should use that ancient answer from another question that 1) barely fits and doesnt solve my problem and 2) is so outdated, it's no longer useful.
Whenever I had to ask something, I had to add a justification as to why I have to do it that way and why previous posts do not solve the issue, and that took more space than the question itself.
If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones:
1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions.
2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.
> Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.
This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times than I can count.
I'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git clone the repo and tell it to reference the source.
Apologies for using you as an example, but this is a common theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a specific/complex question with little context and then complain when the answer is wrong.
I’ve specified many of these things and still had it fall on its face. And at some point, I’m providing so much detail that I may as well do it myself, which is ultimately what ends up happening.
Also, it seems assuming the latest version would make much more sense than assuming a random version from 10 years ago. If I was handing work off to another person, I would expect to only need to specify the version if it was down level, or when using the latest stable release.
This is exactly the issue that most people run into and it's literally the GIGO principle that we should all be familiar with by now. If your design spec amounts to "fix it" then don't be surprised at the results. One of the major improvements I've noticed in Claude Code using Opus 4.5 is that it will often read the source of the library we're using so that it fully understands the API as well as the implementation.
You have to treat LLMs like any other developer that you'd delegate work to and provide them with a well thought out specification of the feature they're building or enough details about how to reproduce a bug for them to diagnose and fix it. If you want their code to conform to the style you prefer then you have to give them a style guide and examples or provide a linter and code formatter and let them know how to run it.
They're getting better at making up for these human deficits as more and more of these common failure cases are recorded but you can get much better output now by simply putting some thought into how you use them.
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question
But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers.
I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.
To the extent that moderation ever prevented questions from getting answers, that was by closing them.
When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.
The value proposition is getting an answer to a question that is useful to a reasonably broad audience. That very often means a question that someone else asked, the answer to which is useful to you. It is not getting an "answer" to a "question" where an individual dumps some code trying to figure out what's wrong.
> When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.
One of the bigger problems with the site's moderation systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and unintuitive to new users, 2) the reopen queue was almost useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed questions ever getting reopened, and 3) even if a question did get reopened, it would be buried thousands of posts down the front page and answerers would likely never see it.
There were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system -- better "on hold" UI that would walk users through the process of revising their question, and a revamp of the review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the "triage" queue, which did little to help new users without the several other review queues that were planned to be downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped working on improvements to the site.
Management should have been aggressively chasing metrics like "percentage of closed questions that get reopened" and "number of new users whose first question is well-received and answered". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the outcome is unsurprising.
The "on hold" change got reversed because new users apparently just found it confusing.
Other attempts to communicate have not worked because the company and the community are separate entities (and the company has more recently shown itself to be downright hostile to the community). We cannot communicate this system better because even moderators do not have access to update the documentation. The best we can really do is write posts on the meta site and hope people find them, and operate the "customer service desk" there where people get the bad news.
But a lot of the time people really just don't read anyway. Especially when they get question-banned; they are sent messages that include links explaining the situation, and they ask on the meta site about things that are clearly explained in those links. (And they sometimes come up with strange theories about it that are directly contradicted by the information given to them. E.g. just the other day we had https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437859.)
And that was the core problem with Stack Overflow - they wanted to build a system of core Q&As to be a reference, but everyone treated it as a "fix my very specific problem now".
99% of all the junk that got closed was just dumps of code and 'it doesn't work'. Not useful to anyone.
There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Reddit and HN, which are poorly optimized for answering questions.
Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors.
It was bad enough that many people resorted to asking their questions in Discord instead which is a massive boomerang back to trying to get help in IRC and just praying that someone is online and willing to help you on the spot. Having to possibly ask your question multiple times before you get some spotty help in a real time chat where it's next to impossible to find again seems unimaginably worse than using an online forum but the fact of it remains and tells us there was something driving people away from sites like SO.
You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other questions first, ensure that your account has enough "clout" to overturn stupid closures of questions, and when you have wasted enough time doing that, then you can finally ask your own question. Or you can just go somewhere else that isn't an intellectual charade and circle jerking and figure it out without wasting tons of time chasing clout and hoping a moderator won't just close the question as duplicate. SO was never the best platform, exactly because of its horrendous moderation. It was good, yes. It had the quality assurance, to a degree, yes. But when just asking a question becomes such a monumental task, people will go elsewhere, to better platforms. Which includes other forums, and, LLMs. So no, what you're attributing to LLMs is merely a symptom of the deeper issue.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help.
By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning.
Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have historically done hardly any of it; the site simply didn't scale like that. There have been tens of millions of questions, versus a couple dozen moderators.)
The kinds of questions that people are getting quick, accurate answers for from an LLM are, overwhelmingly, the sort of thing that SO never wanted. Generally because they are specific to the person asking: either that person's issue won't be relevant to other people, or the work hasn't been done to make it recognizable by others.
And then of course you have the duplicates. You would not believe the logic some people put forward to insist that their questions are not duplicate; that they wouldn't be able, in other words, to get a suitable answer (note: the purpose is to answer a question, not solve a problem) from the existing Q&A. It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.
I agree that Reddit played a big role in this. But not just by answering questions; by forming a place where people who objected to the SO content model could congregate.
Insulting other users is and always has been against Stack Overflow Code of Conduct. The large majority of insults, in my experience, come from new users who are upset at being politely asked to follow procedures or told that they aren't actually allowed to use the site the way they're trying to. There have been many duplicate threads on the meta site about why community members (with enough reputation) are permitted to cast close votes on questions without commenting on what is wrong. The consensus: close reasons are usually fairly obvious; there is an established process for people to come to the meta site to ask for more detailed reasoning; and comments aren't anonymous, so it makes oneself a target.
It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality.
> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.
This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new (for example after a library change) and marking it as duplicate of an unanswered answer if a guarantee that the next SEO user won’t see it.
> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.
No, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise.
If you mean "without writing a direct answer to the new question first", that is the exact point of the system. Literally all you have to do is click the link and read the existing answers.
> it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new
Sure. But someone else knew about the old question, found it for you, and directly pointed you at it so that you could get an answer immediately. And did all of this for free.
And, by doing this, now everyone else who thinks of your phrasing for the question, will be immediately able to find the old question, without even having to wait for someone to recognize the duplicate.
I’m sure I’ve had the experience of being told it’s a duplicate, without resolving my problem.
In any case, you may be right, and yet if you search this thread for “horrible” and “obnoxious”, you’ll find dozens of occurrence. Maybe defining the rules of engagement so that the user is wrong every time doesn’t work.
> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.
Multiple times my questions closed as duplicates of question that was answering a different question.
Even when I explicitly linked that QA in my question and described how it differs from mine.
That "Dead Internet" phrase keeps becoming more likely, and this graph shows that. Human-to-human interactions, LLMs using those interactions, less human-to-human interactions because of that, LLMs using... ?
This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms of not having to need to ask redundant questions).
"I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers."
I think at least one other reason is that a lot of the questions were already posted. There are only so many questions of interest, until a popular new technology comes along. And if you look at mathoverflow (which wouldnt have the constant shocks from new technologies) the trend is pretty stable...until right around 2022. And even since then, the dropoff isn't nearly so dramatic.
https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/edit/19272...
I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the response.
The overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where everything collaboratively built falls apart.
The machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and self-righteous.... /okay.
there was always a needy component to Stack Overflow. "I have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this algorithm?" and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be honest, it was the giving of information which forced you to think, and research, and answer correctly, which made systems like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the fucking future.
Things are gonna slide / in all directions / won't be nothin you can measure anymore. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.[0]
Labs are spending billions on data set curation and RL from human experts to fill in the areas where they're currently weak. It's higher quality data than SO, the only issue is that it's not public.
No, I think the reason human expertise on the internet is dying out is because we have a cacophany of voices trying to be heard on the internet, and experts aren't interested in screaming into the void unless they directly need to do it to pay their bills.
I would say that going onto Stack Overflow to answer questions made me a better coder - yeah, even with the cacophony of bullshit and repeats. It's almost more offensive for that job to be taken by "AI" than the job of writing the stupid code I was trying to help people fix.
[edit] because I kind of get what you're saying... I truly don't care what marginal benefits people are trying to get out of popularity in the high school locker room that is the Social Media internet. I still have a weird habit of giving everyone a full answer to their questions, and trying to teach people what I know when I can. Not for kudos or points, but because the best way to learn is by teaching.
> I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after?
I've wondered this too and I wonder if the existing corpus plus new GitHub/doc site scrapes will be enough to keep things current.
There's another significant forum: GitHub, the rise of which coincided with the start of SO's decline. I bet most niche questions went over to GH repos' issue/discussion forums, and SO was left with more general questions that bored contributors.
> - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?
To me this shows just how limited LLMs are. Hopefully more people realize that LLMs aren't as useful as they seem, and in 10 years they're relegated to sending spam and generating marketting websites.
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO.
Plus they might find the answer on SO without asking a new question - You probably would expect the # of new questions to peak or plateau even if the site wasn't dying, due to the accumulation of already-answered questions.
> What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?
That's a great question. I have no idea how things will play out now - do models become generalized enough to handle "out of distrubition" problems or not ? If they don't then I suppose a few years from now we'll get an uptick in Stackoverflow questions; the website will still exist it's not going anywhere.
Too bad stack overflow didn't high-quality-LLM itself early. I assume it had the computer-related brainpower.
with respect to the "moderation is the cause" thing... Although I also don't buy moderation as the cause, I wonder if any sort of friction from the "primary source of data" can cause acceleration.
for example, when I'm doing an interenet search for the definition of a word like buggywhip, some search results from the "primary source" show:
> buggy whip, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary
> Factsheet What does the noun buggy whip mean? There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun buggy whip. See 'Meaning & use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.
which are non-answer to keep their traffic.
but the AI answer is... the answer.
If SO early on had had some clear AI answer + references, I think that would have kept people on their site.
Your first example is a public announcement of an llm assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback on an experiment isn't "sneaking" and the replies are a tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of questions so AI review seems like it should be useful.
The top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this, the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just don't do it.
The second top voted answer says "I was able to do a prompt injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug". So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol.
It seems clear these people started from a belief that ai is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why this specific feature is bad.
It's crazy that you are defending this group all over this HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem. I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in years.
Those replies are embarrassing for the SO community, not AI.
The newer questions that LLMs can't answer will be answered in forums - either SO, reddit, or elsewhere. There will be a much higher percentage of relevant content with far fewer new pages regurgitating questions about solved problems. So the LLMs will be able to keep up.
I think the interesting thing here for those of us who use open source frameworks is that we can ask the LLM to look at the source to find the answer (eg. Pytorch or Phoenix in my case). For closed source libraries I do not know.
Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means.
Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative.
We'll get to the point where we can mass moderate core knowledge eventually. We may need to hand out extra weight for verified experts and some kind of most-votes-win type logic (perhaps even comments?), but live training data updates will be a massive evolution for language models.
> SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions
We will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some details/quirks/gotchas.
Example of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more effective than LLMs.
I don't think "good moderation or not" really touches what was happening with SO.
I joined SO early and it had a "gamified" interface that I actually found fun. Putting in effort and such I able to slowly gain karma.
The problem was as the site scaled, the competition to answer a given question became more and more intense and that made it miserable. I left at that point but I think a lot people stayed with dynamic that was extremely unhealthy. (and the quality of accepted questions declined also).
With all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems
Just to add another personal data point: i started posting in on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting.
Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory.
Moderation was an incredible problem for stack overflow.
> Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory.
99.9% probability the people who made those edits a) were not moderators; b) were acting completely in accordance with established policy (please read: "Why do clear, accurate, appropriately detailed posts still get edited?" https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176)
Why do you think you should be the one who gets to decide whether that's "acceptable"? The site existed before you came to it, and it has goals, purposes and cultural norms established beforehand. It's your responsibility, before using any site on the Internet that accepts user-generated content, to try to understand the site's and community's expectations for that content.
On Stack Overflow, the expectations are:
1. You license the content to the site and to the community, and everyone is allowed to edit it. (This is also explicitly laid out in the TOS.)
2. You are contributing to a collaborative effort to build a useful resource for the programming community: a catalog of questions whose answers can be useful to many people, not just to yourself.
3. Content is intended to be matter-of-fact and right to the point, and explicitly not conversational. You are emphatically not participating in a discussion forum.
What "tone"? Why is it unreasonable to say these sorts of things about Stack Overflow, or about any community? How is "your questions and answers need to meet our standards to be accepted" any different from "your pull requests need to meet our standards to be accepted"?
As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state.
But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute poison.
I'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from Civ4: "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That sums it up exactly. There is a certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up as Reddit mods, for example.
Rules and standards are good up to a point but some people forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselves and having debates about what's a repeated question, how questions and answers should be structured, etc.
This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. And this goes back to the rules and standards being a tool not a goal. My stance was (and is) that shouldn't we solve flame wars when they happen rather than going around and "solving" imaginary problems?
I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider.
Even something that does have a definite answer like "how do I efficiently code a factorial function?" has multiple but different defensible answers. Even in one language you can have multiple implementations that might, say, be compile-time or runtime.
Another commenter here talked about finding the nearest point on an ellipse and came up with a method they're proud of where there are other methods that would also do the job.
Anyway, I'd occasionally login and see a constant churn on my answers from moderators doing pointless busywork as this month they'd decided something needed to be capitalized or not capitalized.
A perfect example of this kind of thing is Bryan Henderson's war on "comprised of" on Wikipedia [2].
Anyway, I think the core issue of SO was that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit and I got a lot of accepted answers on questions that could never be asked today. You'll also read many anecdotes about people having a negative experience asking questions on SO in later years where their question was immediately closed as, say, a duplicate when the question wasn't a duplicate. The moderator just didn't understand the difference. That sort of thing.
But any mature site ultimately ends with an impossible barrier to entry as newcomers don't know all the cultural rules that have been put in place and they tend to have a negative experience as they get yelled at for not knowing that Rule 11.6.2.7 forbids the kind of question they asked.
> This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars.
It's literally a Q&A site. Questions need actual answers, not just opinions or "this worked for me".
> This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars.
Please point at some of these "really good" questions, if you saved any links. (I have privileges to see deleted questions; deletion is normally soft unless there's a legal requirement or something.) I'll be happy to explain why they are not actually what the site wanted and not compatible with the site's goals.
> I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider.
> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
Questions that are fun and slightly outside of the intended domain of the site are manageable ... if there is sufficient moderation to keep those types of questions from sucking up all available resources.
That was the first failing of NotProgrammingRelated.StackExchange ... later Programming.StackExchange ... later SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange.
The fun things, while they were fun took way more moderation resources than was available. People would ask a fun question, get a good bit of rep - but then not help in curating those questions. "What is your favorite book" would get countless answers... and then people would keep posting the same answers rather than reading all of them themselves and voting to cause the "good" content to bubble up to the top.
Stack Overflow kind of had this at its start... but over time the "what is acceptable moderation" was curtailed more and more - especially in the face of more and more questions that should be closed.
While fun questions are fun... the "I have 30 minutes free before my next meeting want to help someone and see a good question" is something that became increasingly difficult. The "Keep all the questions" ideal made that harder and so fewer and fewer of the - lets call them "atwoodians" remained. From where I sit, that change in corporate policy was completely solidified when Jeff left.
As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.
What remained where shells of rules that were the "truce" in the tension between the atwoodians and spolskyites and a few people trying to fight the oncoming tide of poorly asked questions with insufficient and neglected tooling.
As the tide of questions went out and corporate realized that there was necessary moderation that wasn't happening because of the higher standards from the earlier days they tried to make it easier. The golden hammer of duplication was a powerful one - though misused in many cases. The "this question closes now because its poorly asked and similar to that other canonical one that works through the issue" was far easier than "close as {something}" that requires another four people to take note of it before the question gets an answer from the Fastest Gun in the West. Later the number of people needed was changed from needing five people to three, but by then there was tide was in retreat.
Corporate, seeing things there were fewer questions being asked measured this as engagement - and has tried things to increase engagement rather than good questions. However, those "let's increase engagement" efforts were also done with even more of a moderation burden upon the community without the tooling to fix the problems or help the diminishing number of people who were participating in moderating and curating the content of the site.
> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.
Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwood was the one who wanted to keep things strictly on mission and Spolsky was the one more interested in growing a community. Yes? I do get the impression that there was a serious ideological conflict there; between the "library of detailed, high-quality answers" and the, well, "to every question" (without a proper understanding of what should count as a distinct, useful question that can have a high-quality answer). But also, the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out for the "library" goal (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex...). And I suspect they both shared blame in that.
A lot of it was also ignored for too long because of the assumption that a) the site would just die if it clamped down on everything from the start; b) the site would naturally attract experts with good taste in questions (including maybe even the ability to pose good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dixer questions) before the beginners ever cleared the barrier of trying to phrase a proper question instead of using a forum.
(Nowadays, there are still small forums all over the place. And many of them try to maintain some standards for the OP. And they're all plagued with neophytes who try to use the forum as if it were a chat room. The old adage about foolproofing rings true.)
Around 2014 is when the conflict really seems to have boiled over (as new question volume was peaking). Notably, that also seems to be when the dupe-hammer was introduced (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589).
Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for.
And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the Web 2.0 ideals of the time and the hook to keep a person coming back to it. It was part of the question that was to be answered "how do you separate the core group from the general participants on a site?" ... and that brings me to "people need to read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) to understand how it shaped Stack Overflow.
Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes.
Spolsky: Oh...
Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know.
2014 sounds about right for when it peaked... it was also when a lot of things hit the fan one after another. General stress, the decline of community moderation. The dup hammer was a way to try to reduce the amount of close votes needed - but in doing so it became "everything is a nail" when the dup hammer. It was used to close poor questions as dups of other questions ... and rather than making it easier to close questions that didn't fit well, corporate allowed the "everything is a dup" problem to fester.
How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question.
That question now has 10,356 questions linked to it... and that's part of the "why search quality is going down" - because poor questions were getting linked and not deleted. Search went downhill, dupe hammer was over used because regular close votes took too long because community moderation was going down, which in turn caused people to be grumpy about "closed as dup" rather than "your question looks like it is about X, but lacks an MCVE to be able to verify that... so close it as a dup of X rather than needing 5 votes to get an MCVE close.. which would have been more helpful in guiding a user - but would mean people would start doing FGITW to answer it maybe and you'd get it as a dup of something else instead."
Dunno why you are being downvoted - there is a certain type of person who contributes virtually nothing on Wikipedia except peripheral things like categories. BrownHairedGirl was the most toxic person in Wikipedia but she was lauded by her minions - and yet she did virtually no content creation whatsoever. Yet made millions of edits!
Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me.
When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim.
And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it.
It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved.
Perhaps they’ll rely on what was used by people who answered SO questions. So: official docs and maybe source code. Maybe even from experience too, i.e. from human feedback and human written code during agentic coding sessions.
> The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top.
Arguably it does insult even more, just by existing alone.
I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road.
Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix.
This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.
Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.
What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top.
SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit like HN, you learn from watching the back and forth. I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience.
Whatever people's gripes about the site, I learned a hell of a lot from it. I still find solutions there, and think a world without it would be worse.
> What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters.
Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience.
Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.
The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.
The other major benefit of SO being a public forum is that once a question was wrestled with and eventually answered, other engineers could stumble upon and benefit from it. With SO being replaced by LLMs, engineers are asking LLMs the same questions over and over, likely getting a wide range of different answers (some correct and others not) while also being an incredible waste of resources.
Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.
Hey, can you show me the log files?
Sure here you go. Please help!
Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!
Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was time-consuming.
In the time it takes to properly format and ask a question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to the right one.
The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM.
Don't forget, human answers on Stack Overflow were also often wrong or delayed by hours or days.
I think we're romanticizing the quality of the average human response on Stack Overflow.
The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help.
If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs).
StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.
What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO.
There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things.
LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think.
An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0]
The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community.
SO was somewhere people put their hard won experience into words, that an LLM could train on.
That won't be happening anymore, neither on SO or elsewhere. So all this hard won experience, from actually doing real work, will be inaccessible to the LLMs. For modern technologies and problems I suspect it will be a notably worse experience when using an LLM than working with older technologies.
It's already true for example, when using the Godot game engine instead of Unity. LLMs constantly confuse what you're trying to do with Unity problems, offer Unity based code solutions etc.
> Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate?
I think the name "Mixture of Experts" might be one of the most misleading labels in our industry. No, that is not at all what MoE models do.
Think of it rather like, instead of having one giant black box, we now have multiple smaller opaque boxes of various colors, and somehow (we don't really know how) we're able to tell if your question is "yellow" or "purple" and send that to the purple opaque box to get an answer.
The result is that we're able to use less resources to solve any given question (by activating smaller boxes instead of the original huge one). The problem is we don't know in advance which questions are of which color: it's not like one "expert" knows CSS and the other knows car engines.
It's just more floating point black magic, so "How do I center a div" and "what's the difference between a V6 and V12" are both "yellow" questions sent to the same box/expert, while "How do I vertically center a div" is a red question, and "what's the most powerful between a V6 and V12" is a green question which activates a completely different set of weights.
I don't know if this is still the case but back in the day people would often redirect comments to some stackoverflow chat feature, the links to which would always return 404 not found errors.
You can ask an LLM to provide multiple approaches to solutions and explore the pros and cons of each, then you can drill down and elaborate on particular ones. It works very well.
I'm hoping increasing we'll see agents helping with this sort of issue. I would like an agent that would do things like pull the spark repo into the working area and consult the source code/cross reference against what you're trying to do.
Once technique I've used successfully is to do this 'manually' to ensure codex/Claude code can grep around the libraries I'm using
It's flat wrong to suggest SO had the right answer all the time, and in fact in my experience for trickier work it was often wrong or missing entirely.
The example wasn't even finding a right answer so I don't see where you got that..
Searching questions/answers on SO can surface correct paths on situations where the LLMs will keep giving you variants of a few wrong solutions, kind of like the toxic duplicate closers.. Ironically, if SO pruned the history to remove all failures to match its community standards then it would have the same problem.
"But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions."
Yes, it does answer you question, when the site lets it go through.
Note that "answers your question" does not mean "solving your problem". Sometimes the answer to a question is "this is infeasible because XYZ" and that's good feedback to get to help you re-evaluate a problem. Many LLMs still struggle with this and would rather give a wrong answer than a negative one.
That said, the "why don't you use X" response is practically a stereotype for a reason. So it's certainly not always useful feedback. If people could introspect and think "can 'because my job doesn't allow me to install Z' be a valid response to this", we'd be in a true Utopia.
>> Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc
Read carefully and paraphrase to the generous side. The metaphor that follows that is obviously trying to give an example of what might be somehow lost.
For the record I was interpreting that as LLMs are useless (which may have been just as uncharitable), which I categorically deny. I would say they're about just as useful without wading through the mire that SO was.
It entirely depends on the language you were using. The quality of both questions and answers between e.g. Go and JavaScript is incredible. Even as a relative beginner in JS I could not believe the amount of garbage that I came across, something that rarely happened for Go.
That grumpy guy is using an LLM and debugging with it. Solves the problem. AI provider fine tunes their model with this. You now have his input baked into it's response.
How you think these things work? It's either a human direct input it's remembering or a RL enviroment made by a human to solve the problem you are working on.
Nothing in it is "made up" it's just a resolution problem which will only get better over time.
Because what you’re describing is the exception. Almost always with LLM’s I get a better solution, or helpful pointer in the direction of a solution, and I get it much faster. I honestly don’t understand anyone could prefer Google/SO, and in fact that the numbers show that they don’t. You’re in an extreme minority.
> But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.
Which by the way is incredibly ironic to read on the internet after like fifteen years of annoying people left and right about toxic this and toxic that.
Extreme example: Linus Torvalds used to be notoriously toxic.
Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style?
> Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style?
If they answered correctly, yes.
My point is that providing _actual knowledge_ is by itself so much more valuable compared to _simulated knowledge_, in particular when that simulated knowledge is hyper realistic and wrong.
Sadly, an accountable individual representing an organization is different from a community of semi-anonymous users with a bunch of bureaucracy that can't or doesn't care about every semis anonymous user
Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.
The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes.
The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions.
Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.
On the other hand, another week another JavaScript framework, amirite? There continues to be new stuff to ask questions about, but stack overflow failed to be the default location for new stuff. I guess now there's more discussion directly on GitHub and discord.
> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.
This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.
> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.
This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.
I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier".
The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.
I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.
No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute experts, you also need answer often for something trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.
I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced.
I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.
The more experienced I got, the subtler my questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this and that questions, but it is not", only to see my question get closed as duplicate by moderators.
If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?
Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I still pop into SO when in learning a new language or trip into new simple questions (in my case, how to connect and test a local server). But when you're beyond the weeds, SO is as best an oasis in the desert. Half the time a mirage, nice when it does help out. But rare either way.
I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.
Here's my brilliant idea: the longer it takes for an answer to be marked correct, or the more answers there are before one is marked correct, the more points that answer deserves.
The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if you could retroactively years later re-award it to a newer answer. Since the gamification angle was so prominent, that might rob the decade-old author of their points for their then-correctness, so idk if they even allowed it.
I noticed a similar thing for Python 3 questions, closed as a duplicate of a Python 2 response. Why they weren't collated and treated as a living document is beyond me.
How about if people with a higher reputation contribute an exponentially higher score when voting? Like, someone with ten top-rated answers has a 1,000-point vote (more nuanced than that, obviously).
My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as time went on, and they became unanswered, almost always (I often ended up answering my own question, after I figured it out on my own).
I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I encountered, were the types of things that people who ship, encounter; not academic exercises.
Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on there, don't ship.
LLMs may sometimes give pretty sloppy answers, but they are almost always ship-relevant.
That might be true on Stackoverflow but not on other network sites like Cross Validated, which was killed by splitting the community into multiple SE sites and longtime users quitting in protest over various policies and not being replaced.
I think there's a basic problem that the original revenue model for the site just didn't work (I mean, they wouldn't have shut down Stack Overflow Jobs if that actually made them any money) and anything they were able to do to fix that pissed people off.
Stack Overflow Jobs was a superb, uncluttered, direct interface to the hiring manager, with accurate details about a position. So when they canned it (but kept their advertising revenue stream plus started "SO for Teams" in 2018), that was a major canary that the whole revenue model wasn't viable, at least for independent developers.
Maybe there's a key idea for something to replace StackOverflow as a human tech Q&A forum: Having a system which somehow incentivizes asking and answering these sorts of challenging and novel questions. These are the questions which will not easily be answered using LLMs, as they require more thought and research.
There is also github issues discussions now which also helped in asking these niche questions directly to the team responsible. I dont ask questions about a library on SO I just ask it on the github of the library and I get immediate answers
Not automatically. You could add a bounty using your own points if the question didn't get an accepted answer in 2 days.
Which is kinda cool, but also very biased for older contributors. I could drop thousands of points bounty without thinking about it, but new users couldn't afford the attention they needed.
Remember when the R developers would ask and answer their own basic questions about R, essentially building up a beginner tutorial on stack overflow? That was a cool time
Human psychology is fascinating. If I say I'm cool, I'm full of myself. If someone else says that I'm cool, that hits different. So is reverse psychology.
Stack Overflow moderation is very transparent compared to whatever Reddit considers moderation.
For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not quite comparable because the more subjective questions are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the direction of adding many more libraries than most people should).
Same here. I just didn't want to expend energy racing trigger happy mods. It was so odd, to this day remember vividly how they cleanup their arguments once proven wrong on the closing vote. Literally minutes before it would the close threshold.
And you can't delete your post when you realize how awful it was years later! That anti-information sticks around for ages. Even worse when there are bad answers attached to it, too.
If you're talking about deleting questions, that's because deleting the question would delete everyone's answers that they potentially worked very hard on and which others might find useful. If you think the answers are bad you can always post your own competing answer.
Fun story: SO officially states comments are ephemeral and can be deleted whenever, so I deleted some of my comments. I was then banned. After my ban expired I asked on the meta site if it was okay to delete comments. I was banned again for asking that.
create a new account every few weeks and don't forget to mix you you'er writin' style to fakeout stylometrics. its all against the rules but i disagree with HN terms. internet points don't mean crapola to me. but i like dropping in here every now and then to chit caht. i should have the right to be anonymous and non-deidentifiable here and speak freely. of IP address ---are--- tracked here and you can easily be shadowbanned. but i don't say anything awful, but i am naturally an asshat and i just can't seem to change my spots. 90% of the time i'm ok, but 10% i'm just a raving tool.
The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me as a bizarre feature, to put words in other people’s mouths.
I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting.
I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP.
I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes.
Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).
This is called the XY problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378 . You ask for X, I tell you that what you really want is Y, I bully you, and I become more convinced that you and people that ask for X want Y.
To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.
I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.
An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up.
It just goes back to first principles.
The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.
I spent years on IRC, first getting help and later helping others. I found out myself it was very useful to ask such questions when someone I didn't know asked a somewhat unusual question.
The key is that if you're going to probe for Y, you usually need to be fairly experienced yourself so you can detect the edge cases, where the other person has a good reason.
One approach I usually ended up going for when it appeared the other person wasn't a complete newbie was to first explain that I think they're trying to solve the wrong problem or otherwise going against the flow, and that there's probably some other approach that's much better.
Then I'd follow up with something like "but if you really want to proceed down this rrack, this is how I'd go about it", along with my suggestion.
It's great when you're helping people one on one, but it's absolutely terrible for a QA site where questions and answers are expected to be helpful to other people going forward.
I don't think your analogy really helps here, it's not a question. If the question was "How do I get to the top of the mountain" or "How do I want to get to the top of the mountain without hiking" the answer to both would be "Gondola".
> Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.
Except that SO has a crystal clear policy that the answer to questions should be helpful for everybody reaching it through search, not only the person asking it. And that questions should never be asked twice.
So if by chance, after all this dance the person asking the question actually needs the answer to a different question, you'll just answer it with some completely unrelated information and that will the the mandatory correct answer for everybody that has the original problem for any reason.
Yes exactly. The fact that the "XY problem" exists, and that users sometimes ask the wrong question, isn't being argued. The problem is that SO appears to operate at the extreme, taking the default assumption that the asker is always wrong. That toxic level of arrogance (a) pushes users away and (b) ...what you said.
Which is why LLMs are so much more useful than SO and likely always will be. LLMs do this even. Like trying to write my own queue by scratch and I ask an LLM for feedback I think it’s Gemini that often tells me Python’s deque is better. duh! That’s not the point. So I’ve gotten into the habit of prefacing a lot of my prompts with “this is just for practice” or things of that nature. It actually gets annoying but it’s 1,000x more annoying finding a question on SO that is exactly what you want to know but it’s closed and the replies are like “this isn’t the correct way to do this” or “what you actually want to do is Y”
>I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.
Yep. The magic question is "what are you trying to accomplish?". Oftentimes people lacking experience think they know the best way to get the results they're after and aren't aware of the more efficient ways someone with more experience might go about solving their problem.
My heuristic is that if your interlocutor asks follow-up questions like that with no indication of why (like “why do you want to do X?” rather than “why do you want to do X? If the answer is Y, then X is a bad approach because Q, you should try Z instead”) then they are never going to give you a helpful answer.
If someone is paying you to implement a security vulnerability and you've told them and you don't have liability, you just do it. That's how capitalism works. You do whatever people give you money for.
I wasn’t referring to vulnerabilities, I was referring to arbitrary silly security theatre controls. But id hate to deal with you professionally. Gross.
Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community.
Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up.
No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO heavy-handed moderation memes.
Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.
You would be able to see which questions were too long-tail or difficult for the AI to answer, and humans could jump in to patch things up. This could be gamified with points.
This would serve as fantastic LLM training material for local LLMs. The authors of the site could put in a clause saying that "training is allowed as long as you publish your weights + model".
Someone please build this.
Edit: Removed "LLMs did not kill Stack Overflow." first sentence as suggested. Perhaps that wasn't entirely accurate, and the rest of the argument stands better on its own legs.
The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question about best practices, but you can't ask people to share their experiences or recommendations.
They actually added some new question categories a while ago [1]
"Troubleshooting / Debugging" is meant for the traditional questions, "Tooling recommendation", "Best practices", and "General advice / Other" are meant for the soft sort of questions.
I have no clue what the engagement is on these sort of categories, though. It feels like a fix for a problem that started years ago, and by this point, I don't really know if there's much hope in bringing back the community they've worked so hard to scare away. It's pretty telling just how much the people that are left hate this new feature.
- A huge number of developers will want to use such a tool. Many of them are already using AI in a "single player" experience mode.
- 80% of the answers will be correct when one-shot for questions of moderate difficulty.
- The long tail of "corrector" / "wiki gardening" / pedantic types fill fix the errors. Especially if you gamify it.
Just because someone doesn't like AI doesn't mean the majority share the same opinion. AI products are the fastest growing products in history. ChatGPT has over a billion MAUs. It's effectively won over all of humanity.
I'm not some vibe coder. I've been programming since the 90's, including on extremely critical multi-billion dollar daily transaction volume infra, yet I absolutely love AI. The models have lots of flaws and shortcomings, but they're incredibly useful and growing in capability and scope -- I'll stand up and serve as your counter example.
People answer on SO because it's fun. Why should they spend their time fixing AI answers?
It's very tedious as the kind of mistakes LLMs make can be rather subtle and AI can generate a lot of text very fast. It's a sisyphean taks, I doubt enough people would do it.
I just think you could save a lot of money and energy doing all this but skipping the LLM part? Like what is supposed to be gained? The moment/act of actual generation of lines of code or ideas, whether human or not, is a much smaller piece of the pie relative to ongoing correction, curation, etc (like you indicate). Focusing on it and saying it intrinsically must/should come from the LLM mistakes the intrinsically ephemeral utility of the LLMs and the arguably eternal nature of the wiki at the same time. As sibling says, it turns it into work vs the healthy sharing of ideas.
The whole pitch here just feels like putting gold flakes on your pizza: expensive and would not be missed if it wasn't there.
Just to say, I'm maybe not as experienced and wise I guess but this definitely sounds terrible to me. But whatever floats your boat I guess!
The community is not "toxic". The community is overwhelmed by newcomers believing that they should be the ones who get to decide how the site works (more charitably: assuming that they should be able to use the site the same way as other sites, which are not actually at all the same and have entirely different goals).
I don't know why you put "duplicates" in quotation marks. Closing a duplicate question is doing the OP (and future searchers) a service, by directly associating the question with an existing answer.
> Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.
Absolutely 100% this. I've used them on and off throughout the years. The community became toxic, so I took my question to other platforms like Reddit (they became toxic as well) and elsewhere.
Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open source, I've written everything from emulators and game engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc.
The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in documentation, specifically related to undocumented behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO, I received either no response and downvotes, or negative responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back, so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button if folks were super negative and didn't answer the question.
Later on, most of my answers actually have come from Github,and 95% of the time, my issues were legitimate ones that would've been mentioned if a decent number of folks used the framework, library, or language in question.
I think the tl;dr of this is this: If you can't provide a positive contribution on ANY social media platform like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Github, etc. Don't speak. Don't vote. Ignore the question. If you happen to know, help out! Contribute! Write documentation! I've done so on more than one occasion (I even built a website around it and made money in the process due to ignorance elsewhere, until I shut it down due to nearly dying), and in every instance I did so, folks were thankful, and it made me thankful that I was able to help them. (the money wasn't a factor in the website I built, I just wanted to help folks that got stuck in the documentation hole I mentioned)
EDIT: because I know a bunch of you folks read Ars Technica and certain other sites. I'll help you out: If you find yourself saying that you are being "pedantic", you are the problem, not the solution. Nitpicking doesn't solve problems, it just dilutes the problem and makes it bigger. If you can't help, think 3 times and also again don't say anything if your advice isn't helpful.
It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it.
Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did.
And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community.
Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort to salvage what little there was left for themselves.
Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings.
How did Joel sell out? Curious as I’m not aware of any monetary changes. I watched Joel several times support completely brain dead policies in the meta discussions which really set the rules and tone. So my respect there is low.
He and Jeff made it abundantly clear their mission was to destroy the sex change site because that site was immoral for monetizing the benevolence of the community who answered the questions.
"Knowledge should be free" they said. "You shouldn't make money off stuff like this," they said.
Plenty of links and backstory in my other comments.
I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor) contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific issues.
> legitimate questions being closed for no good reason
They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) and well considered, having been exhaustively discussed over many years.
> or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t
I have seen so many people complain about this. It is vanishingly rare that I actually agree with them. In the large majority of cases it is comically obvious to me that the closure was correct. For example, there have been many complaints in the Python tag that were on the level of "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)
> a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.
On the contrary, the top answerers are the ones who will be happy to copy and paste answers to your question and ignore site policy, to the constant vexation of curators like myself trying to keep the site clean and useful (as a searchable resource) for everyone.
> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
I actually completely agree that people who prefer to ask LLMs should ask LLMs. The experience of directly asking (an LLM) and getting personalized help is explicitly the exact thing that Stack Overflow was created to get away from (i.e., the traditional discussion forum experience, where experts eventually get tired of seeing the same common issues all the time and all the same failures to describe a problem clearly, and where third parties struggle to find a useful answer in the middle of along discussion).
You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us".
Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure.
When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here - trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly showing this.
> Often, doing what your users want leads to success.
You misunderstand.
People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users".
Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this.
Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why.
> When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside.
I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care. Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made.
> trying to deny the toxicity and condescension
I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context.
As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish?
> "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)
This is a great example of a question that should not be closed as a duplicate. Lists are not tuples in Python, regardless of how similar potential answers may be.
My memory is there were a spate of SO scraping sites that google would surface above SO and google just would not zap.
It would have been super trivial to fix but google didn’t.
My pet theory was that google were getting doubleclick revenue from the scrapers so had incentives to let them scrape and to promote them in search results.
I remember those too! There were seemingly thousands of them!
Reminds me of my most black-hat project — a Wikipedia proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah, perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.
I think it has more to do with the fact that when you offer zero salary for moderators, you have to take what you can get, and it ain't good. I don't really see a connection to the voting mechanic.
Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? Do we want this?
We’re talking about how communities can become toxic. How we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to be our intentions.
I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be compensated to not let a community deteriorate.
> That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional?
The answer to all of these questions is yes, for the most part. Volunteers are much harder to wrangle than employees and it's much easier for drama and disagreements to flare when there are zero consequences other than losing an unpaid position, particularly if anonymity is in the mix.
Volunteers can be great but on average they're going to be far harder to manage and far more fickle than employees.
Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have. What you seem to suggest is that because building a community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing.
What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to resolve differences productively. I think that if you replace individual responsibility with transactionality you have neither community nor long term viability or scalability.
Then again, we live in times when transactional thinking seems to dominate discourse.
It's because I was involved with a large volunteer-based project that was a literal 24/7/365 operation for several years (dozens of volunteers at any given time and tens of thousands of concurrent users) and can speak first hand as to the differences.
I didn't say it's not worth doing but it will bring challenges that wouldn't exist with employees. Paying people adds a strong motivator to keep toxic behaviour at bay.
Your experiences will heavily depend on the type of project you're running but regardless, you can't hold volunteers, especially online, to the same expectations or standards as employees. The amount of time and effort they can invest will wax and wane and there's nothing you can do about it. Anonymity and lack of repercussions will eventually lead to drama or power struggles when a volunteer steps out of line in a way that they wouldn't in paid employment. There is no fix that'll stop occasional turbulence, it's just the way it is. Not all of your volunteers will be there for the greater good of your community.
Again, that is absolutely not to say that it can't be worth the effort but if you go into it eyes open, you'll have a much better time and be able to do a better job at heading off problems.
I've seen other people express similar opinions to yours and it wasn't until they experienced being in the driver's seat that they understood how difficult it is.
It's also disconnected incentives. SO users get numbers to go up by taking moderation actions so of course they do that. Also you literally get banned from reviewing questions if you don't flag enough of them to be closed. These are incentives put in place by the SO company intentionally.
It's not like only slimy people get to use moderator tools like on Reddit, since you need a lot of reputation points you get by having questions and answers voted up. It's more like (1) you select people who write surface-level-good answers since that's what's upvoted, and they moderate with a similar attitude and (2) once you have access to moderator tools you're forced to conform with (1) or your access is revoked, and (3) the company is completely incompetent and doesn't give a shit about any of this.
That depends on what you mean by "came along". If you mean "once that everyone got around to the idea that LLMs were going to be good at this thing" then sure, but it was not long ago that the majority of people around here were very skeptical of the idea that LLMs would ever be any good at coding.
What you're arguing about is the field completely changing over 3 years; it's nothing, as a time for everyone to change their minds.
LLMs were not productified in a meaningful way before ChatGPT in 2022 (companies had sufficiently strong LLMs, but RLHF didn't exist to make them "PR-safe"). Then we basically just had to wait for LLM companies to copy Perplexity and add search engines everywhere (RAG already existed, but I guess it was not realistic to RAG the whole internet), and they became useful enough to replace StackOverflow.
I dont think this is true. People were skeptical of agi / better than human coding which is not the case. As a matter of fact i think searching docs was one of the first manor uses of llms before code.
That's because there has been rapid improvement by LLMs.
Their tendency to bullshit is still an issue, but if one maintains a healthy skepticism and uses a bit of logic it can be managed. The problematic uses are where they are used without any real supervision.
Enabling human learning is a natural strength for LLMs and works fine since learning tends to be multifaceted and the information received tends to be put to a test as a part of the process.
We can't. I don't think the LLMs themselves can recognize when an answer is stale. They could if contradicting data was available, but their very existence suppresses the contradictory data.
LLMs don't experience the world, so they have no reason a priori to know what is or isn't truthful in the training data.
(Not to mention the confabulation. Making up API method names is natural when your model of the world is that the method names you've seen are examples and you have no reason to consider them an exhaustive listing.)
They will, but model updates and competition help solve the problem. If people find that Claude consistently gives better/more relevant answers over GPT, for example, people will choose the better model.
The worst thing with Q/A sites isn't they don't work. It's that they there are no alternatives to stackoverflow. Some of the most upvoted answers on stackoverflow prove that it can work well in many cases, but too bad most other times it doesn't.
They still use the official documentation/examples, public Github Repos, and your own code which are all more likely to be evergreen. SO was definitely a massive training advantage before LLMs matured though.
But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.
I regularly use Claude and friends where I ask it to use the web to look at specific GitHub repos or documentation to ask about current versions of things. The “LLMs just get their info from stack overflow” trope from the GPT-3 days is long dead - they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web. In some cases I just upload bits and pieces from a library along with my question if it’s particularly obscure or something home grown, and they do quite well with that too. Yes, they do get it wrong sometimes - just like stack overflow did too.
The amount of docs that have a “Copy as markdown” or “Copy for AI” button has been noticeably increasing, and really helps the LLM with proper context.
they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web
Yeah that's a charitable way to phrase "perform distributed denial of service attacks". Browsing github as a human with their draconian rate limits that came about as a result of AI bots is fucking great.
StackOverflow answers are outdated. Every time I end up on that site these days, I find myself reading answers from 12 years ago that are no longer relevant.
There have been many times I have seen someone complain on the meta site about answers being old and outdated, and then they give specific examples, and I go check them out and they're actually still perfectly valid.
not only stackoverflow, but also reddit.com/r/aws reddit.com/r/docker reddit.com/r/postgresql all 3 of them have extremely toxic communities. ask a question and get downvoted instantly! Noo!! your job is to actually upvote the question to maximize exposure for the algorithm unless it is a really really stupid question that a google search could fix
Yep, LLMs are perfect for the "quick buy annoying to answer 500 times" questions about writing a short script, or configuring something, or using the right combination of command line parameters.
Quicker than searching the entirety of Google results and none of the attitude.
You can save an open source + open weights model, which is frozen in time. That’s still very useful for some things but lacks knowledge of current data.
So we’ll end up with a choice of low-performing stale models or high-performing enshittified models which know about more current information.
Really? I thought you could only do that with open source models. Can you teach me how to checkpoint the current version of Claude Code so I can keep it as-is forever?
Indeed. StackOverflow was by far the most unpleasant website that I have regularly interacted with. Sometimes, just seeing how users were treated there (even in Q&A threads that I wasn’t involved in at all) disturbed me so much it was actually interfering with my work. I’m so, so glad that I can now just ask an AI to get the same (or better) answers, without having to wade through the barely restrained hate on that site.
They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.
Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange.
At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on top.
I agree there was some natural slow down as the corpus grew - the obvious questions were answered. But if the community was healthy, that should not have caused growth to stop. New technologies get created all the time, each starting with zero SO questions. (Or Google releases v2.0 which invalidates all answers written about v1.)
SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though.
I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which.
But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior.
I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.
Arstechnica used to have different kinds of upvotes for "funny" vs "insightful" - I forget exactly all of them. But I found it awesome. I wanted to and could read the insightful comments, not the funny ones. A couple years back they redid the discussion system and got rid of it. Since then the quality of discussion has IMHO completely tanked.
People overestimate the impact of toxicity on number of monthly questions. The initial growth was due to missing answers. After some time there is a saturation point where all basic questions are already answered and can be found via Google. If you ask them again they are marked as dups.
> the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.
A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented.
If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that.
Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc.
Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.
The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant to post when they were working from home?
More people spent lot more time learning new tech skills (at every experience level).
The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc) and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.
The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without hesitation and producers just also don't do actual documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which works in the moment, but terrible for future team members to even know what questions to search/ask for.
A huge amount of people were just starting to learn programming, because they were stuck at home and had the time to pick something up.
If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.
I wonder what is the role of moderating duplicate questions. More time passes - more existing data there is and less need for new questions. If you moderate duplicate questions, will they disappear from these charts? Is this decline actually logical?
Many people are pointing out the toxicity, but the biggest thing that drove me away, especially for specific quantitative questions, was that SO was flat out wrong (and confidently so) on many issues.
It was bad enough that I got back in the habit of buying and building a library of serious reference books because they were the only reliable way to answer detailed technical questions.
There is an obvious acceleration of the downwards trend at the time ChatGPT got popular. AI is clearly a part of this, but not the only thing that affects SO activity.
Ironically they could probably do some really useful deduplication/normalization/search across questions and answers using AI/embeddings today, if only they’d actually allowed people to ask the same questions infinite different ways, and treated the result of that as a giant knowledge graph.
I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid moderation.
Toxic community is mostly a meme myth. I have like 30k points and whatever admins were doing was well deserved as 90% of the questions were utterly impossible to help with. Most people wanted free help and couldn't even bother to put in 5 minutes of work.
Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these:
- The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard.
- This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells you of the questions that survived at this point in time, this [0] is the actual graph which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation.
- This is actually a Good Thing™. For years most of the questions went unanswered, non-voted, non-commented, just because there was too many questions happening all the time. So the general trend is not something that the SO community needs to do anything about. Almost 20% of every question asked is marked as duplicate. If people searched... better™ they wouldn't ask as many questions, and so everyone else had more bandwidth to deal with the rest.
- There has been a shift in help desk style of request, where people starting to prefer discord and such to get answers. This is actually a bad thing because that means that the knowledge isn't public nor indexed by the world. So, information becomes harder to find, and you need to break it free from silos.
- The site, or more accurately, the library will never die. All the information is published in complete archives that anyone can replicate and restart if the company goes under or goes evil. So, yeah, such concerns, while appreciated, are easily addressed. At worst, you would be losing a month or two of data.
OP here: I had the same thought, but noticed a very similar trend in both [0]; I think this graph is more interesting because you'd expect the number of new users to be growing [1], but this seems to have very little effect on deleted questions or even answers
The second graph here ([1]) is especially interesting because the total montly number of new users seems completely unrelated to number of posts, until you filter for a rep > 1 which has a close to identical trend
> When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard
This would be true if programming were a static field, but given that new programming languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make sense.
Programming is not a static field in the answers side, but it's in the question side. "How to print characters on a terminal with python?" is the same problem today as it was 25 years ago. The answer changed but the problem remained. That's what people saying that programming isn't static is missing: the problem space grows significantly slower than the solution space.
I guess I'm the only one that was a fan of SO's moderation. I never got too deep into it (answered some TypeScript questions). But the intention to reduce duped questions made a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of a "living document" where energy is focused on updating and improving answers to old versions of the same question. As a user looking for answers it means I can worry less about finding some other variation of the same question that has a more useful answer
I understand some eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette but overall I'd say about 90% of the time I clicked on a SO link I was rewarded with the answer I was looking for.
I think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof that you're right.
No, but it will show, as someone else already responded, that they don't understand SO systems and processes at all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the question. Most questions aren't even closed by moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as community user. The community user gets attributed of all automated actions and whenever the user agrees with closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4]
This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and how long it has been working this way, you will see that cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get resolved once they are known.
The linked answer seems like a valid guess for a relevant dupe. Like I said in my comment, "I understand a few eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette" but I really don't think this was as widespread of a problem as people are making it out to be.
They also have Meta Stack Overflow to appeal if you think your question was unfairly marked as a dupe. From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
> From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes. In my experience, though, the large majority of requests are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking duplicates at all.
That was not closed by a moderator. In fact, it was closed automatically by the system, when you agreed that the question was a duplicate. Because of my privilege level I can see that information in the close dialog:
> A community member has associated this post with a similar question. If you believe that the duplicate closure is incorrect, submit an edit to the question to clarify the difference and recommend the question be reopened.
> Closed 10 years ago by paradite, CommunityBot.
> (List of close voters is only viewable by users with the close/reopen votes privilege)
... Actually, your reputation should be sufficient to show you that, too.
Anyway, it seems to me that the linked duplicate does answer the question. You asked why the unit-less value "stopped working", which presumably means that it was interpreted by newer browsers as having a different unit from what you intended; the linked duplicate is asking for the rules that determine the implicit unit when none is specified.
> The community is reviewing whether to reopen this question as of 36 mins ago.
Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
You went and deleted the question immediately after it was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.
> Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
It’s not asking for documentation, it’s quite literally asking how to do something. There are links to documentation to prove that I read all the documentation I could (to preemptively ward off the question getting closed).
Yes, I deleted it because I solved the question myself, no need for it to exist as a closed question. How can I “Edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. You can edit the question or post a new one.”? The answer is quite literally facts (the message format) and citations which is what I was hoping to get from someone else answering.
I undeleted it so I could give this example.
> So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.
What would looking at it again do? I had no idea it was being voted to close in the first place; I have no way to request a review; and the instructions for what to do to “fix” the questions make absolutely no sense so there’s nothing to change before it gets “looked at again”.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.
Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you
I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I didn't.
> Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise.
completely agree
> But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines.
And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not sure where discord fits in that)
Those saying that StackOverflow became toxic are absolutely correct. But we should not let that be it's legacy. It is IMO still today one of the greatest achievements in terms of open data on the internet. And it's impact on making programming accessible to a large audience cannot be understated.
I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations.
People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time.
It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)
Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.
The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows:
With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?
Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What can come between?
I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project.
To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite.
May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.
Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded.
> Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked.
> I wrote a program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for the next five years curating the content it held. For another five years a collection of people did the same work with love for what was there. But that was the end. A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content suffered.
A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the collective effort of a small group, worked in the mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30 years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place, that I'd like to visit on the web. :(
Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?
This is _not_ at all the same thing. Grok just ripped off Wikipedia as its base and then applied a biased spin to it. Check out the entry on Grok owner Elon Musk; it praises his accomplishments and completely omits or downplays most of his better-known controversies.
Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.
> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably.
I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.
A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable.
Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc).
Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc.
PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem.
You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own questions, too.
And there are more sites like this (see e.g. https://codidact.com — fd: moderator of the Software section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a reason to stop doing it.
StackOverflow is famously obnoxious about questions badly asked, badly categorized, duplicated…
It’s actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit from AI A LOT.
Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and creating public records for them.
The company tried this. It fell through immediately. So they went away, and came back with a much improved version. It also fell through immediately. Turns out, this idea is just bad: LLMs can't rephrase questions accurately, when those questions are novel, which is precisely the case that Stack Overflow needs.
This is an excellent piece of information that I didn’t have. If the company with most data can’t succeed, then it seems like a really hard problem. On the side, they can understand why humans couldn’t do it either.
Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I’ve depended on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find a community that was talking about something I needed solved. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder every year. The balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem.
And discord is a terrible tool for knowledge collection imo. Their search is ok, but then I find myself digging through long and disjointed message threads, if replies/threading are even used at all by the participants.
When I grew up shakes fist at clouds I had a half dozen totally independent forums/sites to pull on for any interest or hobby no matter how obscure. I want it back!
It's true though, and the information was so deep and specific. Plus the communities were so legitimate and you could count on certain people appearing in threads and waiting for their input. Now the best you have are subreddits or janky Facebook groups .
Agreed, it’s the discoverability that’s the real problem here at the end of it all. All the veterans are pulling up the drawbridges to protect their communities from trolls, greedy companies, AI scraping, etc. which means new people can’t find them. Which then means these communities eventually whither and stop being helpful resources for us all.
> where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?
The same place people have always discovered problems to work on, for the entire history of human civilization. Industry, trades, academia, public service, newspapers, community organizations. The world is filled with unsolved problems, and places to go to work on them.
This is a perfect example of an element of Q&A forums that is being lost. Another thing that I don't think we'll see as much of anymore is interaction from developers that have extensive internal knowledge on products.
An example I can think of was when Eric Lippert, a developer on the C# compiler at the time, responded to a question about a "gotcha" in the language: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8899347/10470363
Developer interaction like that is going to be completely lost.
Yuck. I don't know if it's just me, but something feels completely off about the GH issue tracker. I don't know if it's the spacing, the formatting, or what, but each time it feels like it's actively trying to shoo me away.
It's whatever the visual language equivalent of "low signal" is.
Still gh issues are better than some random discord server. The fact that forums got replaced by discord for "support" is a net loss for humanity, as discord is not searchable (to my knowledge). So instead of a forum where someone asks a question and you get n answers, you have to visit the discord, and talk to the discord people, and join a wave channel first, hope the people are there, hope the person that knows is online, and so on.
Yeah, I suspect that a lot of the decline represented in the OP's graph (starting around early 2020) is actually discord and that LLMs weren't much of a factor until ChatGPT 3.5 which launched in 2022.
LLMs have definitely accelerated Stackoverflow's demise though. No question about that. Also makes me wonder if discord has a licensing deal with any of the large LLM players. If they don't then I can't imagine that will last for long. It will eventually just become too lucrative for them to say no if it hasn't already.
Discord isn’t just used for tech support forums and discussions. There are loads of completely private communities on there. Discord opening up API access for LLM vendors to train on people’s private conversations is a gross violation of privacy. That would not go down well.
I think most relevant data that provides best answers lives in GitHub. Sometimes in code, sometimes in issues or discussions. Many libs have their docs there as well. But the information is scattered and not easy to find, and often you need multiple sources to come up with a solution to some problem.
I believe the community has seen the benefit of forums like SO and we won’t let the idea go stale. I also believe the current state of SO is not sustainable with the old guard flagging any question and response you post there. The idea can/should/might be re-invented in an LLM context and we’re one good interface away from getting there. That’s at least my hope.
I agree that there will be some degradation here, but I also think that the developers inclined to do this kind of outreach will still find ways to do it.
I used to look at all TensorFlow questions when I was on the TensorFlow team (https://stackoverflow.com/tags/tensorflow/info). Unclear where people go to interact with their users now....Reddit? But the tone on Reddit is kind of negative/complainy
I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing questions when I was just starting to learn programming.
He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles.
He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of programming exist the way they are. I'm still thankful.
If this was repeated today, an LLM would have given a surface level answer, or worse yet would've done the thinking for me obliviating the question in the first place.
Had a similar experience. Asked a question about a new language feature in java 8 (parallell streams), and one of the language designers (Goetz) answered my question about the intention of how to use it.
An LLM couldn't have done the same. Someone would have to ask the question and someone answer it for indexing by the LLM. If we all just ask questions in closed chats, lots of new questions will go unanswered as those with the knowledge have simply not been asked to write the answers down anywhere.
You can prompt the LLM to not just give you the answer. Possibly even ask it to consider the problem from different angles but that may not be helpful when you don't know what you don't know.
You can write a paper, submit the arxiv, and you can also make a blog post.
At any rate, I agree - SO was (is?) a wonderful place for this kind of thing.
I once had a professor mention that they knew me from SO because I posted a few underhanded tricks to prevent an EKF from "going singular" in production. That kind of community is going to be hard to replace, but SO isnt going anywhere, you can still ask a question and answer your own question for permanent, searchable archive.
If only those who voted to close would bother to check whether the dup/close issue was ACTUALLY a duplicate. If only there were (substantial) penalties for incorrectly dup/closing. The vast majority of dup/closes seem to not actually be dup/closes. I really wish they would get rid of that feature. Would also prevent code rot (references to ancient versions of the software or compiler you're interested in that are no longer relevant, or solutions that have much easier fixes in modern versions of the software). Not missing StackOverflow in the least. It did not age well. (And the whole copyright thing was just toxically stupid).
I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource.
Has anyone tried building a modern Stack Overflow that's actually designed for AI-first developers?
The core idea: question gets asked → immediately shows answers from 3 different AI models. Users get instant value. Then humans show up to verify, break it down, or add production context.
But flip the reputation system: instead of reputation for answers, you get it for catching what's wrong or verifying what works. "This breaks with X" or "verified in production" becomes the valuable contribution.
Keep federation in mind from day one (did:web, did:plc) so it's not another closed platform.
Stack Overflow's magic was making experts feel needed. They still do—just differently now.
Oh, so it wasn't bad enough to spot bad human answers as an expert on Stack Overflow... now humans should spend their time spotting bad AI answers? How about a model where you ask a human and no AI input is allowed, to make sure that everyone has everyone else's full attention?
The entire purpose of answering questions as an "expert" on S.O. is/was to help educate people who were trying to learn how to solve problems mostly on their own. The goal isn't to solve the immediate problem, it's to teach people how to think about the problem so that they can solve it themselves the next time. The use of AI to solve problems for you completely undermines that ethos of doing it yourself with the minimum amount of targeted, careful questions possible.
I and many others already go the extra mile to ask multiple LLM's for hard questions or for getting a diversity of AI opinions to then internalize and cross check myself.
All the major AI companies of course do not want to give you the answers from other AI's so this service needs to be a third party.
But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.
I encountered this recently in a niche non-US insurance project and I basically coded together the above as an internal tool. AI suggestions + human collaboration to find the best answer. Of course in this case everyone is getting paid to spend time with this thing so more like AI first Stack Overflow Internal. I have no evidence that an public version would do well when ppl don't get paid to commend and rate.
I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points.
What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake, as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated.
For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on.
>> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.
Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble.
May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.
You're absolutely correct, but the scary thing is this: What happens when a whole generation grows up not knowing how to answer another person's question without consulting AI?
[edit]
It seems to me that this is a lot like the problem which bar trivia nights faced around the inception of the smartphone. Bar trivia nights did, sporadically and unevenly, learn how to evolve questions themselves which couldn't be quickly searched online. But it's still not a well-solved problem.
When people ask "why do I need to remember history lessons - there is an encyclopedia", or "why do I need to learn long division - I have a calculator", I guess my response is: Why do we need you to suck oxygen? Why should I pay for your ignorance? I'm perfectly happy to be lazy in my own right, but at least I serve a purpose. My cat serves a purpose. If you vibe code and you talk to LLMs to answer your questions...I'm sorry, what purpose do you serve?
In 2014, one benefit of Stack Overflow / Exchange is a user searching for work can include that they are a top 10% contributor. It actually had real world value. The equivalent today is users with extensive examples of completed projects on Github that can be cloned and run. OP's solution if contained in Github repositories will eventually get included in a training model. Moreover, the solution will definitely be used for training because it now exists on Hacker News.
I had a conversation with a couple accountants / tax-advisor types about them participating in something like this for their specialty. And the response was actually 100% positive because they know that there is a part of their job that the AI can never take 1) filings requires you to have a human with a government approved license 2) There is a hidden information about what tax optimization is higher or lower risk based on their information from their other clients 3) Humans want another human to make them feel good that their tax situation is taken care of well.
But also many said that it would be better if one wraps this in an agency so the leads that are generated from the AI accounting questions only go to a few people instead of making it fully public stackexchange like.
So +1 point -1 point for the idea of a public version.
LOL. As a top 10% contributor on Stack Overflow, and on FlashKit before that, I can assure you that any real world value attached to that status was always imaginary, or at least highly overrated.
Mainly, it was good at making you feel useful and at honing your own craft - because providing answers forced you to think about other people's questions and problems as if they were little puzzles you could solve in a few minutes. Kept you sharp. It was like a game to play in your spare time. That was the reason to contribute, not the points.
hehe yea this existing of course. like these guys https://yupp.ai/ they have not announced the tokens but there are points and they got all their VC money from web3 VC. I'm sure there are others trying
That seems like a horrible core idea. How is that different from data labeling or model evaluation?
Human beings want to help out other human beings, spread knowledge and might want to get recognition for it. Manually correcting (3 different) automation efforts seems like incredible monotone, unrewarding labour for a race to the bottom. Nobody should spend their time correcting AI models without compensation.
Speaking of evals the other day I found out that most of the people who contributed to Humanities Last Exam https://agi.safe.ai/ got paid >$2k each. So just adding to your point.
I think this could be really cool, but the tricky thing would be knowing when to use it instead of just asking the question directly to whichever AI. It’s hard to know that you’ll benefit from the extra context and some human input unless you already have a pretty good idea about the topic.
Presumably over time said AI could figure out if your question had already been answered and in that case would just redirect you too the old thread instead.
AI is generally setup to return the "best" answer as defined as the most common answer, not the rightest, or most efficient or effective answer, unless the underlying data leans that way.
It's why AI based web search isn't behaving like google based search. People clicking on the best results really was a signal for google on what solution was being sought. Generally, I don't know that LLMs are covering this type of feedback loop.
thanks for sharing that, it was simple, neat, elegant.
this sent me down a rabbit hole -- I asked a few models to solve that same problem, then followed up with a request to optimize it so it runs more efficiently.
chatgpt & gemini's solutions were buggy, but claude solved it, and actually found a solution that is even more efficient. It only needs to compute sqrt once per iteration. It's more complex however.
yours claude
------------------------------
Time (ns/call) 40.5 38.3
sqrt per iter 3 1
Accuracy 4.8e-7 4.8e-7
Claude's trick: instead of calling sin/cos each iteration, it rotates the existing (cos,sin) pair by the small Newton step and renormalizes:
// Rotate (c,s) by angle dt, then renormalize to unit circle
float nc = c + dt*s, ns = s - dt*c;
float len = sqrt(nc*nc + ns*ns);
c = nc/len; s = ns/len;
Thanks for pushing this, I've never gone beyond "zero" shotting the prompt (is it still called zero shot with search?)
As a curiosity, it looks like r and q are only ever used as r/q, and therefore a sqrt could be saved by computing rq = sqrt((rxrx + ryry) / (qxqx + qyqy)). The if q < 1e-10 is also perhaps not necessary, since this would imply that the ellipse is degenerate. My method won't work in that case anyway.
For the other sqrt, maybe try std::hypot
Finally, for your test set, could you had some highly eccentric cases such as a=1 and b=100
Thanks for the investigation:)
Edit: BTW, the sin/cos renormalize trick is the same as what tx,ty are doing. It was pointed out to me by another SO member. My original implementation used trig functions
yours yours+opt claude
---------------------------------------
Time (ns) 40.9 36.4 38.7
sqrt/iter 3 2 1
Instructions 207 187 241
Edit: it looks like the claude algorithm fails at high eccentricities. Gave chatgpt pro more context and it worked for 30min and only made marginal improvement on yours, by doing 2 steps then taking a third local step.
I can relate. I used to have a decent SO profile (10k+ reputation, I know this isnt crazy but it was mostly on non low hanging fruit answers...it was a grind getting there). I used to be proud of my profile and even put it in my resume like people put their Github. Now - who cares? It would make look like a dinosaur sharing that profile, and I never go to SO anymore.
I don't disagree completely by any means, it's an interesting point, but in your SO answer you already point to your blog post explaining it in more detail, so isn't that the answer, you'd just blog about it and not bother with SO?
Then AI finding it (as opposed to already trained well enough on it, I suppose) will still point to it as did your SO answer.
I once wrote this humdinger, that's still on my mostly dead personal website from 2010... one of my proudest bits of code besides my poker hand evaluator ;)
The question was, how do you generate a unique number for any two positive integers, where x!=y, such that f(x,y) = f(y,x) but the resulting combined id would not be generated by any other pair of integers. What I came up with was a way to generate a unique key from any set of positive integers which is valid no matter the order, but which doesn't key to any other set.
My idea was to take the radius of a circle that intersected the integer pair in cartesian space. That alone doesn't guarantee the circle won't intersect any other integer pairs... so I had to add to it the phase multiple of sine and cosine which is the same at those two points on the arc. That works out to:
(x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y)))
And means that it doesn't matter which order you feed x and y in, it will generate a unique float for the pair. It reduces to:
x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )
To add another dimension, just add it to the process and key it to one of the first...
It looks like you have typos?
(x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y)))
reduces to
x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2/y^2 + 1) ) - not the equation given? Tho it's easier to see that this would be symmetrical if you rearrange it to:
x^2+y^2+( (xy) / (x^2+y^2) )
Also, if f(x,y) = x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )
then f(2,1) is 5.2 and f(1,2) is 5.1? - this is how I noticed the mistake. (the other reduction gives the same answer, 5.4, for both, by symmetry, as you suggest)
There's a simpler solution which produces integer ids (though they are large): 2^x & 2^y. Another solution is to multiply the xth and yth primes.
I only looked because I was curious how you proved it unique!
Hhhhmm. Ok. So I invented this solution in 2009 at what you might call a "peak mental moment", by a pool in Palm Springs, CA, after about 6 hours of writing on napkins. I'm not a mathematician. I don't think I'm even a great programmer, since there are probably much better ways of solving the thing I was trying to solve. And also, I'm not sure how I even came up with the reduction; I probably was wrong or made a typo (missing the +1?), and I'm not even certain how I could come up with it again.
2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is that provable?
Primes take too much time.
The thing I was trying to solve was: I had written a bitcoin poker site from scratch, and I wanted to determine whether any players were colluding with each other. There were too many combinations of players on tables to analyze all their hands versus each other rapidly, so I needed to write a nightly cron job that collated their betting patterns 1 vs 1, 1 vs 2, 1 vs 3... any time 2 or 3 or 4 players were at the same table, I wanted to have a unique signature for that combination of players, regardless of which order they sat in at the table or which order they played their hands in. All the data for each player's action was in a SQL table of hand histories, indexed by playerID and tableID, with all the other playerIDs in the hand in a separate table. At the time, at least, I needed a faster way to query that data so that I could get a unique id from a set of playerIDs that would pull just the data from this massive table where all the same players were in a hand, without having to check the primary playerID column for each one. That was the motivation behind it.
It did work. I'm glad you were curious. I think I kept it as the original algorithm, not the reduced version. But I was much smarter 15 years ago... I haven't had an epiphany like that in awhile (mostly have not needed to, unfortunately).
The typo is most likely the extra /, in (x/y)/(x^2+y^2) instead of (xy)/(x^2+y^2).
`2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is that provable?`
Yes, & is bitwise and. It's just treating your players as a bit vector. It's not so much provable as a tautology, it is exactly the property that players x and y are present. It's not _useful_ tho because the field size you'd need to hold the bit vector is enormous.
As for the problem...it sounds bloom-filter adjacent (a bloom filter of players in a hand would give a single id with a low probability of collision for a set of players; you'd use this to accelerate exact checks), but also like an indexed many-to-many table might have done the job, but all depends on what the actual queries you needed to run were, I'm just idly speculating.
At the time, at least, there was no way to index it for all 8 players involved in a hand. Each action taken would be indexed to the player that took it, and I'd need to sweep up adjacent actions for other players in each hand, but only the players who were consistently in lots of hands with that player. I've heard of bloom filters (now, not in 2012)... makes some sense. But the idea was to find some vector that made any set of players unique when running through a linear table, regardless of the order they presented in.
To that extent, I submit my solution as possibly being the best one.
I'm still a bit perplexed by why you say 2^x & 2^y is tautologically sound as a unique way to map f(x,y)==f(y,x), where x and y are nonequal integers. Throwing in the bitwise & makes it seem less safe to me. Why is that provably never replicable between any two pairs of integers?
I'm saying it's a tautology because it's just a binary representation of the set.
Suppose we have 8 players, with x and y being 2 and 4: set the 2nd and 4th bits (ie 2^2 & 2^4) and you have 00001010.
But to lay it out: every positive integer is a sum of powers of 2. (this is obvious, since every number is a sum of 1s, ie 2^0). But also every number is a sum of _distinct_ powers of 2: if there are 2 identical powers 2^a+2^a in the sum, then they are replaced by 2^(a+1), this happens recursively until there are no more duplicated powers of 2.
It remains to show that each number has a unique binary representation, ie that there are no two numbers x=2^x1+2^x2+... and y=2^y1+2^y2+... that have the same sum, x=y, but from different powers. Suppose we have a smallest such number, and x1 y1 are the largest powers in each set. Then x1 != y1 because then we can subtract it from both numbers and get an _even smaller_ number that has distinct representations, a contradiction. Then either x1 < y1 or y1 < x1. Suppose without loss of generality that it's the first (we can just swap labels). then x<=2^(x1+1)-1 (just summing all powers of 2 from 1..x1) but y>=2^y1>=2^(x1+1)>x, a contradiction.
or, tl;dr just dealing with the case of 2 powers:
we want to disprove that there exists a,b,c,d such that
... z = (x+y+1)(x+y)/2 + y - but you have to sort x,y first to get the order independence you wanted. This function is famously used in the argument that the set of integers and the set of rationals have the same cardinality.
mm. I did see this when I was figuring it out. The sorting first was the specific thing I wanted to avoid, because it would've been by far the most expensive part of the operation when looking at a million poker hands and trying to target several players for potential collusion.
Looks like solid code. My only gripe is the shadowing of x. I would prefer to see `for _ in range`. You do redefine it immediately so it's not the most confusing, but it could trip people up especially as it's x and not i or something.
SO in 2013 was a different world from the SO of the 2020's. In the latter world your post would have been moderator classified as 'duplicate' of some basic textbook copy/pasted method posted by a karma grinding CS student and closed.
The question boils down to: can you simulate the bulk outcome of a sequence of priority queue operations (insert and delete-minimum) in linear time, or is O(n log n) necessary. Surprisingly, linear time is possible.
Reddit is my current go-to for human-sourced info. Search for "reddit your question here". Where on reddit? Not sure. I don't post, tbh, but I do search.
Has the added benefit of NOT returning stackoverflow answers, since StackOverflow seems to have rotted out these days, and been taken over by the "rejection police".
Even if LLMs were trained on the answer, that doesn't mean they'll ever recommend it. Regardless of how accurate it may be. LLMs are black box next token predictors and that's part of the issue.
I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too.
Why did SO decide to do that to us? to not invest in ai and then, iirc, claim our contributions their ownership. i sometimes go back to answers i gave, even when answered my own questions.
AFAICT all they did is stop providing dumps. That doesn't change the license.
I was very active, In fact I'm actually upset at myself for spending so much time there. That said, I always thought I was getting fair value. They provided free hosting, I got answers and got to contribute answers for others.
Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.
So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]
I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks.
But it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.
I was an early adopter. Have over 30k reputation because stack overflow and my internship started at the same time. I left because of the toxic culture, and that it's less useful the more advanced you get
Please feel free to cite examples. I'll be happy to explain why I think they're duplicates, assuming I do (in my experience, well over 90% of the time I see this complaint, it's quite clear to me that the question is in fact a duplicate).
But more importantly, use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly. It's there for a reason.
If I had kept a list of such questions I would have posted it (which would be a very long one). But no, I don't have that list.
> use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly.
Respectfully, no. It is meaningless. If you just look at comments in this thread (and 20 other previous HN posts on this topic) you should know how dysfunctional stackoverflow management and moderation is. This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time. Nobody should waste their time and expect anything to be different.
> This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time.
The problem is that people come and say "this question is incorrectly closed", but the question is correctly closed.
Yes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places. That doesn't make them correct. I have been involved in this process for years and what I see is a constant stream of people expecting the site to be something completely different from what it is (and designed and intended to be). People will ask, with a straight face, "why was my question that says 'What is the best...' in the title, closed as 'opinion-based'?" (it's bad enough that I ended up attempting my own explainer on the meta site). Or "how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)
It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.
Once StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers.
I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.”
To their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community.
I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it.
25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat.
Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.
I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. But yeah, that and the swearing culture clash were issues I struggled with, and ultimately meant I stopped contributing.
> Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.
Yes, because doing things that way was explicitly part of the goal, from the beginning. There are countless other places where you can directly respond to people who need help (and if you like doing that, you should stick to those places). Doing things that way has negative consequences in terms of making something that's useful for on-lookers, and causing a lot of experts to burn out or get frustrated. This is stuff that Jeff Atwood was pointing out when explaining the reason for creating SO in the first place.
> I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them.
Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.
There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention.
Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now.
If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.
Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.
I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system.
> Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.
I have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately.
But, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions.
> If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.
No, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no "force"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more "force" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is "working", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena.
There's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about "the site being in a death spiral". Because that is an assessment based on popularity. Popular != good; more importantly, valuing popularity is about valuing the ability of the site to make money for its owners, but none of the people curating it see a dime of that. They (myself included) are really only intrinsically motivated to create the thing.
The thing is demonstrably useful. Just not in the mode of interaction that people wanted from it.
The meta site constantly gets people conspiracy theorizing about this. Often they end up asserting things about the reputation system that are the exact opposite of how it actually works. For example, you can gain a maximum of 1000 reputation, ever, from editing posts, and it only applies to people whose edits require approval. The unilateral edits are being done by someone who sees zero incentive beyond the edited text appearing for others. They're done because of a sincere belief that a world where third parties see the edited text is better than a world where third parties see the original text.
> Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.
You're talking about people who, in almost every case, as an objective matter of fact, are not moderators. The overwhelming majority of "moderation actions" of every stripe are done by the community, except for the few that actually require a moderator (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658).
The graph is scary, but I think it's conflating two things:
1. Newbies asking badly written basic questions, barely allowed to stay, and answered by hungry users trying to farm points, never to be re-read again. This used to be the vast majority of SO questions by number.
2. Experiencied users facing a novel problem, asking questions that will be the primary search result for years to come.
It's #1 that's being canibalized by LLM's, and I think that's good for users. But #2 really has nowhere else to go; ChatGPT won't help you when all you have is a confusing error message caused by the confluence of three different bugs between your code, the platform, and an outdated dependency. And LLMs will need training data for the new tools and bugs that are coming out.
The newbies vastly outnumber the experienced people (in every discipline), and have more to ask per-capita, and are worse at asking it. Category 2 is much smaller. The volume of Stack Overflow was never going to be sustainable and was not reasonably reflective of its goals.
We are talking about a site that has accumulated more than three times as many questions as there are articles on Wikipedia. Even though the scope is "programming languages" as compared to "literally anything that is notable".
I’m going to argue the opposite. LLMs are fantastic at answering well posed questions. They are like chess machines evaluating a tonne of scenarios. But they aren’t that good at guessing what you actually have on your mind. So if you are a novice, you have to be very careful about framing your questions. Sometimes, it’s just easier to ask a human to point you in the right direction. But SO, despite being human, has always been awful to novices.
On the other hand, if you are experienced, it’s really not that difficult to get what you need from an LLM, and unlike on SO, you don’t need to worry about offending an overly sensitive user or a moderator. LLMs never get angry at you, they never complain about incorrect formatting or being too lax in your wording. They have infinite patience for you. This is why SO is destined to be reduced to a database of well structured questions and answers that are gradually going to become more and more irrelevant as time goes by.
And that is exactly why so many people gripe about SO being "toxic". They didn't present a well posed question. They thought it was for private tutoring, or socializing like on reddit.
All I can say to these is: Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my comments. Is deleting comments allowed?"
For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain how that's not toxic?
Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then?
Yes, LLMs are great at answering questions, but providing reasonable answers is another matter.
Can you really not think of anything that hasn't already been asked and isn't in any documentation anywhere? I can only assume you haven't been doing this very long. Fairly recently I was confronted with a Postgres problem, LLMs had no idea, it wasn't in the manual, it needed someone with years of experience. I took them IRC and someone actually helped me figure it out.
Until "AI" gets to the point it has run software for years and gained experience, or it can figure out everything just by reading the source code of something like Postgres, it won't be useful for stuff that hasn't been asked before.
The first actually insightful comment under the OP. I agree all of it.
If SO manages to stay online, it'll still be there for #2 people to present their problems. Don't underestimate the number of bored people still scouring the site for puzzles to solve.
SE Inc, the company, are trying all kinds of things to revitalize the site, in the service of ad revenue. They even introduced types of questions that are entirely exempt from moderation. Those posts feel literally like reddit or any other forum. Threaded discussions, no negative scores, ...
If SE Inc decides to call it quits and shut the place down and freeze it into a dataset, or sell it to some SEO company, that would be a loss.
I think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a recreational journal or BB.
The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.
While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding.
So some possible reasons:
- Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.
- Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users.
- Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam
- Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn.
- Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented
Some non-reasons:
- Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).
> - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.
I think this is one major factor that is not getting enough consideration in this comment thread. By 2018-2020, it felt like the number of times that someone else had already asked the question had increased to the point that there was no reason to bother asking it. Google also continued to do a better and better job of surfacing the right StackOverflow thread, even if the SO search didn't.
In 2012 you might search Google, not find what you needed, go to StackOverflow, search and have no better luck, then make a post (and get flamed for it being a frequently-asked question but you were phrasing yours in a different / incorrect way and didn't find the "real" answer).
In 2017, you would search Google and the relevant StackOverflow thread would be in the top few results, so you wouldn't need to post and ask.
In 2020, Google's "rich snippets" were showing you the quick answers in the screen real estate that is now used by the AI Overview answers, and those often times had surfaced some info taken from StackOverflow.
And then, at the very end of 2022, ChatGPT came along and effectively acted as the StackOverflow search that you always wanted - you could phrase your question as poorly as you want, no one would flame you, and you'd get some semblance of the correct answer (at least for simple questions).
I think StackOverflow was ultimately a victim of it's own success. Most of the questions that would be asked by your normal "question asker" type of user were eventually "solved" and it was just a matter of how easy it was to find them. Google, ChatGPT, "AI Overviews", Claude Code, etc have simply made finding those long-answered questions much easier, as well as answering all of the "new" questions that could be posed - and without all of the drama and hassle of dealing with a human-moderated site.
Not sure. As software becomes a commodity I can see the "old school" like tech slowing down (e.g. programming languages, frameworks frontend and backend, etc). The need for a better programming language is less now since LLM's are the ones writing code anyway more so these days - the pain isn't felt necessarily by the writer of the code to be more concise/expressive. The ones that do come out will probably have more specific communities for them (e.g. AI)
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, reading some of these comments.
It looks like a pretty clear divide between the people that wanted to ask questions to get solutions for their own specific problems; and those who were aware of what the site wanted to be and how it actually operated, and were willing to put in the time and answer questions, etc.
The sheer amount of garbage that used to get posted every day required some pretty heavy moderation. Most of it was not by actual moderators, it was by high-reputation users.
(I have 25K reputation on StackOverflow, and was most active between 2011 and 2018.)
And half the garbage is from people "moderating"! You are literally rewarded points for doing moderating activities, so of course every post is flooded with BS edits, votes to close, etc.. Cobra effect and whatnot.
The obvious culprit here are the LLMs, but I do wonder whether Github's social features, despite its flaws, have given developers fewer reasons to ask questions on SO?
Speaking from experience, every time I hit a wall with my projects, I would instinctively visit the project's repo first, and check on the issues / discussions page. More often than not, I was able to find someone with an adjacent problem and get close enough to a solution just by looking at the resolution. If it all failed, I would fall back to asking questions on the discussion forum first before even considering to visit SO.
Another plausible explanation is that the new owners didn’t develop the community in a good way. Instead of fixing the myriad of issues that were obvious to almost all contributors they instead basically let it die?
The new owners (well, not really new any more) are focused on adding AI to SO because it's the current hotness, and making other changes to try to extract more money that they're completely ignoring the community's issues and objections to their changes, which tend to be half-assed and full of bugs.
Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe in which the Stackoverflow community was so friendly, welcoming, helpful, and knowledgeable that this seems like a tragedy and motivates people to try to save it.
But in this universe, most people's reaction is just "lol".
As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0].
I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a discussion site, rather than the Q&A site that it was set out to be.
I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile or that they unfairly closed questions without bringing the citations required. I'm not saying at all that SO was without it's flaws in leadership, moderators, community or anything else that made the site what it was. But if you're going to complain, at least bring examples, especially when you have someone here you could hold somewhat accountable.
The problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Discord chats, StackOverflow or GitHub issues. People still don't know how to ask questions:
Lots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same decline [1].
A similar but not as strong decline. Taking the one but last datapoint for both (stackoverflow/tex respectively): 4436 and 394. If you compare this to how it looked like between 2015-2020 you get (my guess from scanning): 160,000 and 1700. So Stackoverflow as a whole went from 160K -> ~4.4K. That's like a 35x drop, compared to tex, where it's a 1700 -> 394, 4x drop.
Hate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX site.
I would ascribe that to these communities evolving differently. There is no reason to assume that the popularity of LaTeX tracks the popularity of programming languages. It's a type setting system. And that doesn't even take into account communities that exist parallel to SO/SE. Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.
I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off.
What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed.
Unfortunately it happens to every online technical community once they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN.
HN has full time staff that provides moderation and does an excellent job. Nonetheless there are numerous users who take it upon themselves to determine what content should be available to the rest of us, as if they were heroes in their own mind.
It’s a form of narcissism. While they think of themselves as community saviors everyone else thinks they are censoring assholes. Just let the moderators do their job. Unwanted content will naturally fall off either by downvoting or it will be ignored.
All the rest of ask for is just don’t be an asshole.
Given the fact that when I need a question answered I usually refer to S.O., but more recently have taken suggestions from LLM models that were obviously trained on S.O. data...
And given the fact that all other web results for "how do you change the scroll behavior on..." or "SCSS for media query on..." all lead to a hundred fake websites with pages generated by LLMs based on old answers.
Destroying S.O. as a question/answer source leaves only the LLMs to answer questions. That's why it's horrific.
As someone that spent a fair bit of time answering questions on StackOverflow, what stood out years ago was how much the same thing would be asked every day. Countless duplicates. That has all but ceased with LLMs taking all that volume. Honestly, I don't think that's a huge loss for the knowledge base.
The other thing I've noticed lately is a strong push to get non-programming questions off StackOverflow, and on to other sites like SuperUser, ServerFault, DevOps, etc.
Unfortunately, what's left is so small I don't think there's enough to sustain a community. Without questions to answer, contributors providing the answers disappear, leaving the few questions there often unanswered.
I joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards .NET and I’ve been working with Microsoft web technologies since the mid 90’s.
My SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through it, I also thoroughly enjoyed helping others. I also started to publish articles on CodeProject and it kicked off my long tech blogging “career”, and I still enjoy writing and sharing knowledge with others.
I have visited the site maybe once a year since 2017. It got to the point that trying to post questions was intolerable, since they always got closed. At this point I have given up on it as a resource, even though it helped me tremendously to both learn (to answer questions) and solve challenging problems, and get help for edge cases, especially on niche topics. For me it is a part of my legacy as a developer for over 30 years.
I find it deeply saddening to see what it has become. However I think Joel and his team can be proud of what they built and what they gave to the developer community for so many years.
As a side note it used to state that was in the top 2% of users on SO, but this metric seems to have been removed. Maybe it’s just because I’m on mobile that I can’t see it any more.
LLM’s can easily solve those easy problems that have high commonality across many codebases, but I am dubious that they will be able to solve the niche challenging problems that have not been solved before nor written about. I do wonder how those problems get solved in the future.
Apparently it was removed to reduce the load on the database see [0], [1].
The top voted response points out that SO are [2]:
> destroying a valuable feature for users.
Kinda wild they allowed it. As that answer also suggests, perhaps rather than remove it entirely, they could just compute those stats at a lesser frequency to reduce load.
i've been using SO for 17 years as well but ultimately gave up out of frustration, and a lot of comments here are correctly pointing at the toxicity but the real-time chats were on a next level, it was absolutely maddening how toxic and aggressive these moderators were.
I do use Claude a lot, but I still regularly ask questions on https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/. It's often just too niche, LLMs hallucinate stuff like an entire non-existent benchmarking feature in Snakemake, or can't explain how I should get transcriptome aligners to give me correct quantifications for a transcript. I guess it's too niche. And as a lonely Bioinformatician it can be nice to get confirmation from other bioinformaticians.
Looking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any LLM.
Interestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched!
It’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower?
StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.
Instead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This killed the pub and with it the business.
The most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old timers took when they joined. And duplicates allow anyone with a grudge to take revenge. After all, there are no new questions, and you will always find a duplicate if you want to.
To create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by itself.
Another exemple being "Comments are not for extended discussion ! if you want to actively bring value by adding information, later updates, history, or just fun that cultivates a community, please leave and go do that somewhere else like our chat that doesn't follow at all the async functionnality of this platform and is limited to the regular userbase while scaring the newcomers."
"comments are not for extended discussion" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided "yeah, let's kill this".
The people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes just letting a community do what it wants (within reasonable boundaries, of course) leads to a better and more successful product than actively trying to steer things in a certain direction.
Oh absolutely - when it becomes clear you have high engagement somewhere, adapt that feature to facilitate the engagement! They could have made comments threaded or embedded ways to expand it into the right forum, but instead they literally shut down engagement. Bonkers.
A lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of accountability for everyone that influences the product, it eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with common sense stepped in to put an end to it.
The decline is not surprising. I am sure AI is replacing Stackoverflow for a lot of people. And my experience with asking questions was pretty bad. I asked a few very specific questions about some deep detail in Windows and every time I got only some smug comments about my stupid question or the question got rejected outright. That while a ton of beginner questions were approved. Definitely not a very inviting club. I found i got better responses on Reddit.
I was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but got stuck in one particular function.
It was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I couldn't find anything on Google.
Had no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time. (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I didn't understand the documentation)
In the past people asked questions of real people who gave answers rooted in real use. And all this was documented and available for future learning. There was also a beautiful human element to think that some other human cared about the problem.
Now people ask questions of LLMs. They churn out answers from the void, sometimes correct but not rooted in real life use and thought. The answers are then lost to the world. The learning is not shared.
LLMs have been feeding on all this human interaction and simultaneously destroying it.
One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..?
Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it).
Some commenters suggest it's not the moderation. I think it is the key problem, and the alternative communities were the accumulated effect. Bad questions and tough answer competition is part of it, but moderation was more important, I think. Because in the end what kept SO relevant was that people made their own questions on up to date topics.
Up until mid-2010s you could make a seriously vague question, and it would be answered, satisfactory or not. (2018 was when I made the last such question. YMMV) After that, almost everything, that hadn't snap-on code answer, was labelled as offtopic or duplicate, and closed, no matter what. (Couple of times I got very rude moderators' comments on the tickets.)
I think this lead some communities to avoid this moderator hell and start their own forums, where you could afford civilized discussion. Discourse is actually very handy for this (Ironically, it was made by the same devs that created SO). Forums of the earlier generation, have too many bells and whistles, and outdated UI. Discourse has much less friction.
Then, as more quality material was accumulated elsewhere, newbies stopped seeing SO on top of search, and gradually language/library communities churned off one by one. (AI and other summaries, probably did contribute, but I don't think they were the primary cause.)
Don't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses?
It should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible.
SO has lost against LLMs because it has insistently positioned itself as a knowledge base rather than a community. The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it.
They basically made a bet because they wanted to be the full anti-thesis of ad-ridden garbage-looking forums. Pure information, zero tolerance for humanity, sterile looking design.
They achieved that goal, but in the end, they dug their own grave too.
LLMs didn’t admonish us to write our questions better, or simply because we asked for an opinion. They didn’t flag, remove our post with no advance notice. They didn’t forbid to say hello or thanks, they welcomed it. They didn’t complain when we asked something that was asked many times. They didn’t prevent us from deleting our own content.
Oh yeah, no wonder nobody bothers with SO anymore.
LLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing.
The steep decline in the early months of 2023 actually started with the release of ChatGPT, which is 2022-11-30, and its gradually widening availability to (and awareness of) the public from that date. The plot clearly shows that cliff.
The gentle decline since 2016 does not invalidate this. Were it not for LLMs, the site's post rate would now probably be at around 5000 posts/day, not 300.
LLMs are to "blame" for eating all the trivial questions that would have gotten some nearly copy-pasted answer by some eager reputation points collector, or closed as a duplicate, which nets nobody any rep.
Stack Overflow is not a site for socializing. Do not mistake it for reddit. The "karma" does not mean "I hate you", it means "you haven't put the absolute minimum conceivable amount of effort into your question". This includes at least googling the question before you ask. If you haven't done that, you can't expect to impose on the free time of others.
SO has a learning curve. The site expects more from you than just to show up and start yapping. That is its nature. It is "different" because it must be. All other places don't have this expectation of quality. That is its value proposition.
I recall when they disabled the data export a few years ago [0], March 2023. Almost certainly did this in response to the metrics they were seeing, but it accelerated the decline [1].
Reddit is a forum morphed into social media. I usually use "question + reddit" on Google to confirm my suspicions about a subject. It is a place to discuss things rather than find answers. It is extremely politicized (leftist/liberal), but that's a whole other story.
Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem.
All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders.
SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them.
SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls.
So, I reviewed the questions list again but this time, since the time I did view it about 9 hours ago [1]. 10 were negative scored, 5 positive scored, 15 0 scored, 4 has received answers. This is better than normal for those ~30. Usually it's 80% without votes, without answers, without comments. So, this is a significan improvement... which I suspect is due the time of the day, as the US and most of Europe were asleep.
So, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in the positive direction.
It is not "karma". It is not to be taken personally. It represents the objective usefulness of the question, not the personal worth of the person asking it.
It's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now for confirmation.
I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_.
The last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun. If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small difference is probably due to the turn of the year.
It's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going to train the AI for free.
SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.
So the question for me is how important was SO to training LLMs? Because now that the SO is basically no longer being updated, we've lost the new material to train on? Instead, we need to train on documentation and other LLM output. I'm no expert on this subject but it seems like the quality of LLMs will degrade over time.
Why publish anything for free on the internet if it's going to be scanned into some corporation's machine for their free use? I know artists who have stopped putting anything online. I imagine some programmers are questioning whether or not to continue with open source work too.
It has often been claimed, and even shown, that training LLMs on their own outputs will degrade the quality over time. I myself find it likely that on well-measurable domains, RLVR improvements will dominate "slop" decreases in capability when training new models.
Here’s how SO could still be useful in the LLM era:
User asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation to add additional insights and correct mistakes.
If you’re a user that asks a duplicate question, it’ll just direct you to the good conversation that already happened.
A symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS human generated content that dives deeper and provides reassurances in correctness
Users could upvote whether Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT provided the best answer. The best of three is surfaced, the others are hidden behind a "show alternatives."
However, I can see how this would be labelled "shoving AI into everything" and "I'm not on SO for AI."
As everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI, and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before looks similar
Also not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?) but that's definitely one of the things that made me default reach for other links instead of SO.
Those popups were a big contributor for me to stop using SO. I stopped updating my uBlock origin rules when LLMs became good enough. I am now using the free Kimi K2 model via Groq over CLI, which is much faster.
One thing you won’t get with in an LLM is genuine research. I once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code of vim to see how the poster’s question could be resolved. [0]
Stackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck.
It's surprisingly tame still given it interests tens (hundreds?) of millions of people at varying age and background and mostly when the mind is occupied by a problem. I always found it surprising there's not more defacing and toxicity.
For this occasion, I just logged in to my SO profile; I've been a member for 9 years now.
To me, back when I started out learning web dev, as a junior with no experience and barely knowing anything, SO seemed like a paradise for programmers. I could go on there and get unblocked for the complex (but trivial for experts) issues I was facing. Most of the questions I initially posted, which were either closed as duplicates or "not good enough," really did me a lot of discouragement. I wasn't learning anything by being told, "You did it wrong, but we're also not telling you how you could do it better." I agree with the first part; I probably sucked at writing good questions and searching properly. I think it's just a part of the process to make mistakes but SO did not make it better for juniors, at least on the part of giving proper guidance to those who "sucked".
AI is a vampire. Coming to your corner of the world, to suck your economic blood, eventually. It’s hard to ignore the accelerated decline that started in late 2022/early 2023.
LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls
If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure.
In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.
What should worry everyone is what system will come after LLMs. Data is being centralized and hoarded by giant corporations, and not shared publicly. And the data that is shared is generated by LLMs. We're poisoning the well of information with no fallback mechanism.
> If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure.
You know that's not what they meant, but why bring up the license here? If they were over the top compliant, attributing every SO answer under every chat, and licensing the LLM output as CC BY-SA, I think we'd still have seen the same shift.
> In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.
Best case it gives you the same level of content, but more customized, and faster.
SO being wrong and wasting your time is also common.
Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge?
A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources.
However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb.
LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO.
Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?
it is indeed a shame. if you are doing anything remotely new and novel, which is essential if you want to make a difference in an increasingly competitive field, LLMs confidently leave you with non-working solutions, or sometimes worse they set you on the wrong path.
I had similar worries in the past about indexable forums being replaced by discord servers. the current situation is even worse.
Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more.
I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board.
With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September).
I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed.
Man after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard, but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I, as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM instead of being able to peruse great answers from different perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.
I used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?
Good riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any alternative.
And that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking questions because they didn't want to run the moderation gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing.
LLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will oblige.
Looking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve.
Game over. I didn’t notice all the toxicity mentioned in the other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe. It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its name is part of web history, and there’s no denying that.
This is concerning on two fronts. The questions are no longer open (SO is CC-BY-SA) and if Q&A content dies then this herds even more people towards LLM use.
It's basically draining the commons.
Yup. This, to me, provides another explanation for why the social contract is being used as toilet paper by the owner class. They literally see the writing on the wall.
For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM"
StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me.
Actually I think it never did.
It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account.
And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile.
I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities.
Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.
AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).
SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?
I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.
Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse?
The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.
Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood:
> Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!
> Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn’t always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive.
> All the content on the site must exist to serve the mission of learning over entertainment – even if that means making difficult calls about removing some questions and answers that fail to meet those goals, plus or minus 10 percent.
I think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to "get to the bottom" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism.
All of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered.
I remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/discussion board, which feels more appropriate for the current state of the industry.
Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to. LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact.
And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder.
I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.
I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.
Now imagine what happens when a new programming language comes along. When we have a question, we will no longer be able to Google it and find answers to it on Stack Overflow. We will ask the LLMs. They will work it out. From that moment, the LLM we used has the knowledge for solving this particular problem. Over time, this produces huge moat for the largest providers. I believe it is one of the subtler reasons why the AI race is so fierce.
Where will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration.
Ideally, you'd train them on the core documentation of the language or tool itself.
Hopefully, LLMs lead to more thorough documentation at the start of a new language, framework, or tool. Perhaps to the point of the documentation being specifically tailored to read well for the LLM that will parse and internalize it.
Most of what StackOverflow was was just a regurgitation of knowledge that people could acquire from documentation or research papers. It obviously became easier to ask on SO than dig through documentation. LLMs (in theory) should be able to do that digging for you at lightning speed.
What ended up happening was people would turn to the internet and Stack Overflow to get a quick answer and string those answers together to develop a solution, never reading or internalizing documentation. I was definitely guilty of this many times. I think in the long run it's probably good that Stack Overflow dies.
I still would like to get other humans' experiences and perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO doesn't go away entirely.
With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that, but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".
When you see AI giving you back various coding snippets almost verbatim from SO, it really makes you wonder what will happen in the future with AI when it can't depend on actual humans doing the work first.
Before writing the comment I had in my head I did a CTRL+F search for "toxic" in the comment section here. 42 occurences. It says everything about what's happening to SO.
I certainly use it less now that I get a CloudFlare check every time I go and sometimes it fails or loads forever.
I usually just go back to search results and look elsewhere after a second or two.
SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now.
Good times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show proof, etc.)
Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting questions and making snark comments.
People are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also don’t forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push his personal political agenda.
Interesting timing. I just analyzed TabNews (Brazilian dev community) and ~50% of 2025 posts mention AI/LLMs. The shift is real.
The 2014 peak is telling. That's before LLMs, before the worst toxicity complaints. Feels like natural saturation, most common questions were already answered. My bet, LLMs accelerated the decline but didn't cause it. They just made finding those existing answers frictionless.
It's unfortunate that SO hasn't found a way to leverage LLMs. Lots of questions benefit from some initial search, which is hard enough that moderators likely felt frustrated with actual duplicates, or close enough duplicates, and LLMs seem able to assist. However I hope we don't lose the rare gem answers that SO also had, those expert responses that share not just a programming solution but deeper insight.
I think that SO leveraging LLMs implicitly. Like I'll always ask LLM first, that's the easiest option. And I'll only come to SO if LLM fails to answer.
I am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me as much over the last ten years.
It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I for one will mourn its loss.
I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to be shared.
Someone needs to archive the entirety of StackOverflow and make it available over torrent so that it can be preserved when the site shuts down. Urgently.
> As of (and including) the 2025-06-30 data dump, Stack Exchange has started including watermarking/data poisoning in the data. At the time of writing, this does not appear to apply to the 2025-09-30 data dump. The format(s), the dates for affected data dumps, and by extension how the garbage data can be filtered out, are described in this community-compiled list: https://github.com/LunarWatcher/se-data-dump-transformer/blo.... If the 2025-09-30 data dump turns out to be poisoned as well, that's where an update will be added. For obvious reasons, the torrent cannot be updated once created.
There's no doubt that generally LLMs are better. In addition SO had its issues. That being said I can't help but worry about losing humans asking questions and humans answering questions. The sentimentality aside, if humans aren't posing questions and if humans aren't recommending answers, what are the models going to use?
Wonder if this is a good proxy for '# of Google Searches'. Or perhaps a forward indicator (sign of things to come), since LLMs are adopted by the tech-savvy first, then the general public a little later, so Stack Overflow was among the first casualties.
While I generally agree with the narrative of the negative arc that stack overflow took, I found (and have as recently as a few months ago) that I could have enjoyable interactions on the math, Ux, written language, and aviation exchanges. The OS ones in the middle (always found the difference between Linux and superuser confusing).
For me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose. Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me.
But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?
> Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?
I don't think such generic place exists. I just do my own research or abandon the topic. I think that in big companies you probably could use some internal chats or just ask some smart guy directly? I don't have that kind of connections and all online communities are full of people whose skill is below mine, so it makes little sense to ask something. I still do sometimes, but rarely receive competent answer.
If you have some focused topic like a question about small program, of course you can just use github issues or email author directly. But if you have some open question, probably SO is the only generic platform out there.
To put it differently, find some experts and ask which online place to the visit to help strangers. Most likely they just don't do it.
So for me, personally, LLMs are the saviour. With enough forth and back I can research any topic that doesn't require very deep expertise. Sure, access to an actual expert willing to guide me would be better, but I just don't have that luxury.
I think the bigger point we should realize is LLMs offer the EXACT same thing in a better way. Many people are still sharing answers to problems but they do it through an AI which then fine tunes on it and now that problem solution is shared with EVERYONE.
There are still airgapped places in the world where transferring information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they’re not worth using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for engineering teams working in these environments.
Stack overflow was useful with a fairly sanitized search like “mysql error 1095”. Agentic LLMs do there best work when able to access your entire repository or network environment for context, which is impossible to sanitize. For a season, private environments will continue to be able to use SO. But as LLMs capture all the good questions and keep them private, public SO will become less and less relevant. It’s sad to see a resource of this class go.
I imagine at least some of the leveling off could be due to question saturation. If duplicates are culled (earnestly or overzealously) then there will be a point where most of the low hanging fruit is picked.
I'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often at one time. These days I don't even think about it.
This is a great example of how free content was exploited by LLMs and used against oneself to an ultimate destruction.
Every content creator should be terrified of leaving their content out for free and I think it will bring on a new age of permanent paywalls and licensing agreements to Google and others, with particular ways of forcing page clicks to the original content creators.
I suspect a lot of the traffic shift is from Google replacing the top search result, which used to be Stack Overflow for programming questions, with a Gemini answer.
Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity.
Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their practical value and original intent.
Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing products. As a result, answers from genuine users that recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience were frequently removed altogether.
Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction and discourages broader user participation.
TFMs are not a thing anymore. Most of them are merely collections of sparse random dots one might join by sheer luck only, granted no other knowledge of the system being attempted to document.
The result is not surprising! Many people are now turning to LLMs with their questions instead. This explains the decline in the number of questions asked.
I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.
Are you sure? You can post questions even with a completely new blank account. It's comments that require some reputation, maybe you were thinking about those?
StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs.
Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of course, but I wanted to do so out of principle.
GitHub Issues and Disscussions + searching the code base, fetching the docs and some reasoning on top. Maybe even firing up a sandbox VM and testing some solutions.
They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion".
Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.
They would just use documentation. I know there is some synthesis they would lose in the training process but I’m often sending Claude through the context7 MCP to learn documentation for packages that didn’t exist, and it nearly always solves the problem for me.
The brilliance of StackOverflow was in being the place to find out how to do tricky workarounds for functionality that either wasn't documented or was buggy such that workarounds were needed to make it actually work.
Software quality is now generally a bit better than it was in 2010, but that need is ultimately still there.
And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - "too broad".
I mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds?
Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well.
It makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time as people google questions and get results. It would be interesting to look at the number of comments and views of questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have driven declining engagement and discussion.
Good riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost never being asked on Stack overflow).
The most annoying example I can think of (but can’t link to, alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question, and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn’t answer the question, telling the person to just Google the answer.
Not surprising. It's very often a toxic, unhelpful, stubborn community. I think maybe once or twice in years of use did I ever find it genuinely welcoming and helpful. Frequently instead I thought "Why should I even bother to post this? It'll just get either downvoted, deleted, or ignored."
Why did SO traffic halve from it's maximum till the ChatGPT release date? Also, for a long time after initial release, ChatGPT was pretty much useless for coding questions. It only became more or less useful ~2 years ago. So there's about 4x decline from peak to explain with reasons that do not involve LLMs. What these could be?
LLMs are dogshit in many ways but when it comes to programming they are faster than people, respond instantaneously to further information, and can iterate until they understand the problem fully.
Bonus is that you don’t get some dipshit being snarky.
I ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000.
I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated.
This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people using R, this seemed like something completely new. So, they just downvoted the question and told me I was wrong.
I ended up answering my own question… but was also told that was wrong and that all points must have the same error interval.
Instead of answering a programming question, people just went around denying experimental physics.
I think that was the beginning of the end of SO for me.
This entire thread is fantastic. I felt nostalgic, angry and then concerned all at once.
I love LLMs. But I miss SO. I miss being able to have that community. How do we bring it back?
If anyone from the Stack Overflow team is reading this (I assume you are): what’s the plan?
My take: stop optimizing for raw question volume and start optimizing for producing and maintaining “known good” public knowledge. The thing SO still has that Discord and LLMs don’t is durable, linkable, reviewable answers with accountable humans behind them. But the workflow needs to match how devs work now.
A concrete idea: make “asking” a guided flow that’s more like opening a good GitHub issue. Let me paste my error output, environment, minimal repro, what I tried, and what I think is happening. Then use tooling (including an LLM if you want) to pre check duplicates, suggest missing details, and auto format. Crucially: don’t punish me for being imperfect. Route borderline questions into a sandbox or draft mode where they can be improved instead of just slammed shut.
Second idea: invest hard in keeping answers current. A ton of SO is correct but stale. Add obvious “this is old” signaling and make it rewarding to post updates, not just brand new answers.
Last thing that I don’t see an easy answer to: LLMs are feasting on old SO content today. But LLMs still need fresh, high quality, real world edge cases tomorrow. They need the complexity and problem solving that humans provide. A lot of the answers I get are recycled. No net new thinking. If fewer people ask publicly, where does that new ground truth come from? What’s the mechanism that keeps the commons replenished?
So… TLDR…my question to this group of incredibly intelligent people: how does SO save itself?
This is incredible.
Anyone who claims LLMs aren't useful will need to explain how come almost every programmer can solve 95% of his problems with an LLM without needing anything else. This is real usefulness right here.
EDIT: I'm not saying I'm loving what happened and what is becoming of our roles and careers, I'm just saying things have changed forever; there's still a (shrinking) minority of people who seem to not be convinced.
Maybe we had too many programmers who weren’t capable of actually solving their own problems. Maybe only one in twenty programmers were ever actually any good at their jobs.
Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again.
AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with.
When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer.
This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.
For those who have historically wondered about or objected to "moderation" (people usually mean curation here; as the overwhelming majority of the actions they're talking about are not performed by moderators) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-picked list of important discussions from the meta site explaining some policy basics:
Note that IDs are in chronological order. The rate of new meta.stackoverflow.com posts fell off dramatically at some point because of the formation of a network-wide meta.stackexchange.com. The earliest entries listed here are from 2014.
Some of the comments in these links are hilariously elitist. They are actively embracing a hostile environment, especially towards newcomers, but how do they expect to grow and maintain a community when they are scaring users away?
Seems like there are "blocked by cloudflare" number of questions per month.
Their blocking of everyone not using chrome/etc from accessing their website probably contributed quite a bit to the implied downturn I'm reading in other comments.
Stackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom. Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is mainly about asking and answering questions.
Since the trend must go on, we expect StackExchange to now offer answers, and the user responses need to be questions. We could even make a quiz game show out of that! /s
Some comments:
- This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale.
- I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO. I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers. Reddit is kind of a dark horse here, as I began seeing answers on Google to more modern technical questions link to a Reddit thread frequently along with SO from 2016 onwards. I also suspect Discord played a part, though this is harder to gauge; I certainly got a number of answers to questions for, e.g., Bun, by asking around in the Bun Discord, etc. The final nail in the coffin is of course LLMs, which can offer a SO-level answer to a decent percentage of questions instantly. (The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top.)
- I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning.
I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this.
The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor that the moderation started taking on a life of its own. Stack Overflow moderator drama felt constant in the later 2010s with endless weird drama spilling across Twitter, Reddit, and the moderator’s personal blogs. That’s about the same time period where it felt like the moderation team was more interested in finding reasons to exercise their moderation power than in maintaining an interesting website.
Since about 2020 every time I click a Stack Overflow link I estimate there’s a 50/50 chance that the question I clicked on would be marked as off topic or closed or something before anyone could answer it. Between the moderator drama and the constant bait-and-switch feeling of clicking on SO links that didn’t go anywhere the site just felt more exhausting than helpful.
There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also...
For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't.
At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore.
...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call.
I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits.
[0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
> the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing.
Hi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly in a vacuum (from the outside).
How much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected things? I always got the impression that they tried to scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave of less technical/principled users.
There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama.
OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come.
In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed.
Oh, hey, Shog, good to see you doing well. It was a heck of a ride, hmm?
Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at least after Facebook implodes.
Believe me, I'm full of vision (and hope). But it's hard to write stuff when there's so much to write that I can't find a natural starting point, and when the (lack-of-)network effects are so brutal.
Best answer so far, too bad way down here.
It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?
I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies.
The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale.
Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst.
I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.
Agreed, think we're getting warmer.
It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them.
I swear that about 3 of your replies look like LLM content or at best "LLM-massaged" messages :-(
I was writing like a robot before robots could write, dammit!
Lots of moderation issues are also UI issues.
I suspect it’s the same issue for whatever is the “meta” in a competitive video game.
Optimization based on the available affordances ?
Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall.
Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.
Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.
It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.
Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.
This always cracks me up. I've seen it so many times, and so many books cover this...
Classic statement is "never take your eye off the ball".
Sure, you need to plan ahead. You need to move down a path. But take your eye off of today, and you won't get to tomorrow.
Maybe they'll SCO it, and spend the next 10 years suing everyone and their LLM dog.
You know, I wonder how the board and execs made out suing Linux related... things. End users were threatened too, compelled to pay...
SO could be spun off into a neat tiger, nipping at everyone's toes.
But was “today “ that profitable? Stack overflow always struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make money. If the current business makes very little money, it may not be worth the work.
His tone was extremely passive aggressive and rude. I don’t think he made the site better - he contributed to the downfall
This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is."
Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.
That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.
With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.
But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.
Can you provide an example? The only rude Shog9 posts I can think of were aimed at people abusing the system: known, persistent troublemakers, or overzealous curators exhibiting the kinds of behaviours that people in this thread would criticise, probably far more rudely than Shog ever did.
I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the question)
The moderation definitely got kind of nasty in the last 5 years or so. To the point where you would feel unwelcome for asking a question you had already researched, and felt was perfectly sound to ask. However, that didn't stop millions of people from asking questions every day, it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated).
My feeling was always that the super mods were people who had too much time on their hands... and the site would've been better without them (speaking in the past tense, now). But I don't think that's what killed it. LLMs scraping all its content and recycling it into bite-sized Gemini or GPT answers - that's what killed it.
I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec.
It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so you can't even view the question any more.
I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again.
In case anyone's wondering, I ended up asking on the WhatWG or W3C or something github project (via an issue?). The TLDR was rather eye opening, that basically the spec only codifies points of contention for browsers and old behaviors are generally undocumented. With some pointers I figured out the default size behavior through code diving, and it was complex (as in, hard to use) and very unintuitive.
its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times
I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be posted on Stack Overflow", which was insane to me because Stack Overflow has a "terraform" tag and category. If you visit it, you will see tons of users trying to post valid questions only to have the mods shut them down angrily.
Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good.
Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?
It's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.
One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever taken part in moderating the review queue, you would've seen the insane amount of low-quality questions flowing in. I saw probably ten variants of "how to center my div" daily being closed as duplicates. The asker might be miffed about getting their question closed (but with a link to a solution..), but if you want to actually get answers to the high quality questions, the noise has to be filtered somehow.
Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners figure out their syntax errors or how to apply a general solution to their specific issue. And you may not like SO for it, but to not want to be a site for that is their prerogative.
> Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.
Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? Just Google with site:StackOverflow.com and you won’t have to click through many results to find something closed.
Spending all of the time to log back into the site and try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to have more people try to nit-pick it again hardly sounds attractive.
> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners
The entire point of the story above was that it wasn’t a beginner question.
> Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you?
It is believable. But it being a problem I don't see. If it's off-topic, that's sad for you but no reason to feel angry or it being "hostile" or something. It's just off-topic. Same if I started posting lots of local news from my city to HN. It's simply just off-topic and not what the site should contain. If it's already answered, being pointed to that answer by someone spending the time to digging it up is also not rude. Sure, you may feel bad because you feel someone "reprimanded" you or something. But that's on you.
> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners
This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers.
Self-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward.
Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand.
As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer.
I encourage you to recognize the statements you see as vitriol instead as brand markers as to how SO is known in the world. It's not a small set of folks who feel as if they were treated unfairly first.
If it's so many, surely someone should be able to provide some example of them being treated unfairly soon! But seriously, I'm fine with people not liking SO. I just don't think the discourse on HN around it is very fruitful and mostly emotional. SO have clearly done something wrong to get that kind of widespread reputation, but I'm also allowed to be disappointed in how it's being discussed.
You may think you're making some kind of point by repeatedly asking for examples of vitriol on SO, but all it shows is that you haven't looked, or haven't sincerely reflected on what you saw from the perspective of a regular user.
I think you are seeing emotional response is because SO has really fucked with people’s emotions, it is by far the most toxic place for SWEs to have ever existed and nothing is close 100th to it. expecting a non-emotional responses from SWEs about SO is asking too much (for most)
Hm… as the person was new to SO it’s very possible they don’t understand what a good question looks like and I thought it may be helpful to give feedback on what may have gone wrong… but if you see that as “begging” and you don’t think you need any feedback, you have it all sorted out after all, then yeah it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Thing is, if that's how you are greeted at stackoverflow, then you'll go elsewhere where you're not treated like an idiot. Stackoverflow's decline was inevitable, even without LLMs.
And thus SO dies as people will go somewhere they can actually get their question answered.
This comment sums up everything wrong with Stack Overflow.
I strongly suggest you re-read your comments here and self-reflect.
Right? It's a perfect example of the problem.
In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help.
But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think of users as a problem and an interruption, even though they were the only reason we were getting paid.
I've been refusing to contribute to SO for so long that I can't even remember the details. But I still recall the feeling I got from their dismissive jackassery. Having their content ripped off by LLMs is the final blow, but they have richly earned their fate.
When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - "what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?" Sometimes they just wanted to talk.
Not every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate.
... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions.
Stack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205
Arguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of "how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer.
It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.
The failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible.
Yes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides.
I would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
The point here is you worked tech support so you were paid to answer user questions.
However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?
> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?
This is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top "Question Answerer" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work.
So this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions.
Nobody, least of all me, is saying people should work for free. But not being paid to do something you don't want to do is a reason to go do something else, not hang around and be a hostile, superior dick about it, alienating the users.
I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully.
They clearly aren't asking for the question to be resurrected.
Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional.
Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment.
The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere.
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question
I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer.
Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie.
> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.
My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The over-moderation you described helps people for a short time but then doesn’t help the person who googles much later. I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.
yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the "Top Answer" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by "Recent" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant
> outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.
Okay, but who's going to arbitrate that? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.)
The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though.
Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before.
Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time.
Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.
One thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example.
Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate.
> Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.
The community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced.
However, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...
Note the "Questions closed" and "Questions reopened".
Compare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-...
The tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the "make the site friendly" by removing comments and banning users.
The "some of the answers should have been deleted" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.
> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.
Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?
That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level.
Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for "quality before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was "quantity and engagement will follow" and then "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all.
They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago.
Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation.
> There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.
Yeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow "recommendation" questions. So they know that it's an issue but just ignore it for programming questions.
> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.
Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this:
30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator).
30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP).
5 minutes on implementation.
2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard.
With an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my initial prompt even as a layman. When you’d actually find an answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question that lacked one of your conditions.
> Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers.
Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version, and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers.
Yes but that only works if the questions are identical. Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless.
No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place.
Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point. It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal.
You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates.
That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.
> That's not the case.
Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely.
> I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner.
Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.
> When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.
That is generally irrelevant.
Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy?
There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created.
What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term.
It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site.
The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started.
In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it.
That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding.
However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult.
Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate.
Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back.
This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone. The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude.
Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered.
What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my "users". I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of "dead-ness", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that.
Because from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia. For a scope of "practical matters about writing code", as compared to "any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it".
I am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congregate in public and try to accomplish something. I do not share your goals. The community is not like software, and "serving and adapting to users" does not benefit the people doing the work. We never arranged to have the kind of "users" you describe.
As a former Wikipedia administrator, I think one of the things that Wikipedia has done exactly right is to strongly prioritize readers first, editors second, and administrators third. The unofficial Wikipedia administrator symbol is a mop, because it's much more a position of responsibility than it is a position of power.
I obviously think you and other user-hostile people should be permitted to congregate and accomplish something. What I object to in Stack Overflow's case is the site being taken over by people like that, serving themselves and their own preferences with such vigor that they alienated vast numbers of potential contributors, putting the site on a path of decline from which is unlikely to recover.
Even by your own terms, having a place for some (conveniently unspecified) group to "congregate in public and try to accomplish something" looks certain to be a failure. However much you don't care about deadness or declining revenue, the people paying the bills surely do. Stack Overflow was only a success because it served and adapted to users.
But I give you points for being honest about your hostility to the entire point of the site. It not only makes it clear why it's failing, but it'll keep people from being sorry when it gets closed down.
Deadness is the symptom, not the cause. Users don't avoid SO because it's dead, but rather, SO is dead because users avoid it. It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly.
There's another thread on the front page about IPv6 where someone had a good analogy: IPv4 vs IPv6 is like Python 2 vs 3. The Python 2 diehards continued arguing furiously to an emptier and emptier room. They never felt they were proven wrong, and the intensity of the argument never diminished but the argument was with fewer and fewer people until they were just arguing with themselves as the world moved on without them.
And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026, after the horse is long gone. Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. You might want to reflect on why you hold such fervent beliefs that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now?
The referenced comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477920
> It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly.
No, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years.
What you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care.
The goal was never for the site to be "not dead". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found.
The site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts.
> And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026
This is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over than they should have needed.
But really, the feedback for Stack Overflow is trying to take it in the direction of places that existed long beforehand. If you want forums, you know where to find them. And now you can also find LLMs. Which, as commonly used by people seeking programming help, are basically a grizzled forum guy in a can.
>Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you.
"Everyone actually agrees with [me]" is the polar opposite of what I actually believe and am actually saying. I am well aware that the model is unpopular. My point is that the popularity of the model is irrelevant to me.
> Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now?
I have a lot of reputation points (the site still exists), far more than I ever felt I deserved, and I never really felt like they were worth anything. A huge percentage of them come from an answer to a terrible question (that was still terrible after heroic attempts at editing; this all happened long before there was a common understanding of the purpose of question closure or what would make good standards for questions) that, once I understood things properly, I closed and tried to get deleted. Over the last few years, with that new understanding, I have been trying to give away my superfluous reputation points in bounties, trying to get missing answers written for the few really good questions lacking good answers that I identify, always to no avail (the bounty system promptly became a honeypot for ChatGPT hallucinations as soon as ChatGPT became available).
You do not know me or my motivations in the slightest.
> The goal was never for the site to be "not dead"
ok? fine then. If you think it's fine for the site to be dead then please stop spamming comments defending it. It doesn't need any defence to stay dead and such defence is not useful.
I am only responding to many people trying to explain why I should care about the thing I don't care about. The defense is useful because a) it being "dead" by these metrics is unimportant; b) people are blaming a community for mistreating them, when they came in without any intent of understanding or adapting to that community; c) other sites in this mold exist, and are trying to establish themselves.
> Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.
How do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a certain tag?
"[tag] is:question duplicate:yes"
But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page.
> But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page.
I answer Qs on this topic, not post them.
----
Here's an example I found:
https://superuser.com/questions/1929615/ (the canonical q is about extracting as mono, the closed q is about muting one channel)
You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel, as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One of them also asks about "downmixing" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer.
The point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions.
The dupe is what I linked. The orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972
The orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio.
The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants.
One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q.
> The dupe is what I linked. The orig is
Ah, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me.
> The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe
IDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert.
I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.
This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first.
The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences.
It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy".
I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience.
> many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.
Yes.
We consider that duplicate.
Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need.
I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude that people get the information they need.
In fact, your latest response is so far out that I've started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta here.
How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? They seem like mutually exclusive goals for 95% of cases.
> How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"?
The same way that a K-12 education does.
The "nuh uh" attitude also helps explain the usage graph drop. "The users simply wanted the wrong thing than what the site is for" is also something
> Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate
Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use.
Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search.
Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances
I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling process didn’t really work the way it was supposed to, and you keep telling them that they are wrong, and that the site actually works well for its intended purpose—even though its intended purpose was to help users find what they were looking for, and they are telling you that they can’t.
Part of StackOverflow’s decline was inevitable and wouldn’t have been helped by any changes the site administrators could have made; a machine can simply answer questions a lot faster than a collection of human volunteers. But there is a reason people were so eager to leave. So now instead of conforming to what users repeatedly told the administrators that they wanted, StackOverflow can conform to being the repository of questions that the administrators wanted, just without any users or revenue besides selling the contributions made by others to the LLMs that users have demonstrated they actually want to use.
> to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers
I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework".
(My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github.
I think that's a great policy. I don't think anyone wants duplicate questions. The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.
I'd say 9/10 times I find a direct match for my question on SO it's been closed as offtopic with links to one or more questions that are only superficially similar.
There are other problems that they don't even try to address. If 10 people ask the same question, why does only the first person to ask it get to choose the answer? Then lots of "XY" questions where the original asker didn't actually have problem X so selects an answer for Y, leaving the original X unsolved, and now all the duplicates only have an answer for Y too.
> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.
This problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a "duplicate" is inherently subjective, and therefore mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable).
I think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers interpret close votes as signals that they should give up), cultural (there's not much training/feedback/guidelines about what "duplicate" means for those with voting privileges), and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure, and it takes just as many votes to reopen a question as it does to close it (with the same voter reputation requirement)).
> and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure
It's not quite that bad: when the OP edits the question, there is a checkbox to assert that the edit resolves the reason for closure. Checking it off puts the question in a queue for reconsideration.
However, there's the social problem (with possibly a technical solution) that the queue is not as discoverable as it ought to be, and provides no real incentive; the queues generally are useful for curators who work well in a mode of "let's clean up problems of type X with site content today", but not for those (like myself) who work well in a mode of e.g. "let's polish the canonical for problem Y and try to search for and link unrecognized duplicates".
Given the imbalance in attention, I agree that reopening a question should have lesser requirements than closing it. But better yet would be if the questions that don't merit reopening, weren't opened in the first place. Then the emphasis could be on getting them into shape for the initial opening. I think that's a useful frame shift: it's not that the question was rejected; rather, publishing a question basically always requires a collaborative effort.
The Staging Ground was a huge step forward in this direction, but it didn't get nearly the attention or appreciation (or fine-tuning) it deserved.
> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.
The idea was, if there's an answer on the other question that solves your question, your question remains in existence as a signpost pointing to the other one without having to pollute and confuse by having a mixture of similar answers across both with different amounts of votes.
The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution.
If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.
Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed.
I think many would agree that this policy was the single biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would Have been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high quality answers were better. Management was wrong.
This is because the real goal was SEO.
> They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet
This is mostly how I engaged with SO for a long, long time. I think it’s a testament to SO’s curation of answers that I didn’t ask almost any questions for like 5+ years after starting programming
If this were true, then treating any question as an X-Y problem shouldn't be allowed at all. I.e. answers should at least address the question as posed before/instead of proposing an alternative approach.
In reality the opposite is encouraged. For countless times, I've landed on questions with promising titles/search extracts, only to find irrelevant answers because people grabbed onto some detail in the question irrelevant to my case and provided X-Y answers.
This often also causes subsequent useful questions to be marked as dups even though they no longer contain that irrelevant detail. The appeal process is so unfriendly that most would not bother.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068243
LLMs also search Google for answers. Hence the knowledge may be not lost even for those who only supervises machines that write code.
I agree with that and I think it was the right decision. There was grousing about overmoderation but I think a lot of people got unreasonably annoyed when their question was closed. And the result was a pretty well-curated and really useful knowledge base.
> Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie.
By regenerating an answer on command and never caring about the redundancy, yeah.
The DRY advocate within me weeps.
Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then).
Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time.
The question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.
I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute.
> People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack.
We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot").
As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt.
What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.
Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers.
(As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)
I’m sad SO died, even if they deserved it.
Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches.
Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow for.
It does remove the human touch so it's quite a different dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system.
> Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc.
That might work until an LLM encounters a question it's programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the docs, I asked Google's Gemini (whatever's the current free version) to write a bare bones script for an SMTP conversation.
It flatly refused.
The explanation was along the lines "it could be used for spamming, so I can't do that, Dave." I understand the motivation, and can even sympathize a bit, but what are the options for someone who has a legitimate need for an answer? I know how to get one by other means; what's the end game when it's LLMs all the way down? I certainly don't wish to live in such a world.
1.5 years ago Gemini (the same brand!) refused to provide C++ help to minors because C++ is dangerous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39632959
I don't know how others use LLMs, but once I find the answer to something I'm stuck on I do not tell the LLM that it's fixed. This was a problem in forums as well but I think even fewer people are going to give that feedback to a chatbot
The problem that you worked out is only really useful if it can be recreated and validated, which in many cases it can be by using an LLM to build the same system and write tests that confirm the failure and the fix. Your response telling the model that its answer worked is more helpful for measuring your level of engagement, not so much for evaluating the solution.
You can also turn off the feature to allow ChatGPT to learn from your interactions. Not many people do but those that do would also starve OpenAI for information assume they respect that setting
Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape?
No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
Y'know how "users" of modern tech are the product? And how the developers were completely fine with creating such systems?
Well, turns out developers are now the product too. Good job everyone.
I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO, and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite improvement in QoL for me.
Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything.
I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.
this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences.
SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site
this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...
Yahoo answers died a lot faster and heavily formed SO policy.
It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server, and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid solutions.
There were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the fourth one failed it gave me the first one again.
You can't use the free chat client for questions like that in my experience. Almost guaranteed to waste your time. Try the big-3 thinking models (ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5).
> this nails it
I assume you’re taking about the ending where gippity tells you how awesome you are and then spits out a wrong answer?
I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer science, programming, geology, and biology.
The "human touch" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the "robot touch," thanks very much.
Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"
No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of "you fucking moron" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been carefully considered and revisited over many years and have clear logic behind them, considering the goals of the site.
It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").
I have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But I have seen many examples (and been subjected to one or two myself) of crash-outs resulting from learning that the site is, by design, much more like Wikipedia than like Quora.
Quite a large fraction of questions that get closed boil down to "here's my code that doesn't work; what's wrong"? (Another large fraction doesn't even show that much effort.) The one thing that helped a lot with this was the Staging Ground, which provided a place for explicit workshopping of questions and explanation of the site's standards and purpose, without the temptation to answer. But the site staff didn't understand what they had, not at all.
> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").
This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/
Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.
That is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them.
Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?
Here is one fine example. [1]
The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you. There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/
You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here:
> "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them!
> Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR!
I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody explicitly articulating that.
It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri).
There is nothing "passive-aggressive" about closing a question as a duplicate.
It is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the OP: an already-existing answer to a common question is provided instantly.
I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as duplicates several times, but I always understood this as an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's just normal friction of human interaction.
The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. Far too often, the already-existing answer is years old and either no longer the best answer, or doesn't actually address a major part of the question. Or it simply was never a very good answer to begin with.
What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? If the previous answer really is adequate, it won't attract further responses. If it's not, well, now its shortcomings can be addressed.
Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. It generally means that somebody missed their true calling on an HOA board somewhere.
> The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP.
The purpose of having the answer there is not to solve the OP's problem. It is to have a question answered that contributes to the canon of work. This way, everyone can benefit from it.
> What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions?
Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.
You might as well ask: what would be the harm in putting a comment in your code mentioning the existence of a function that serves your purpose, but then rewriting the code in-line instead of trying to figure out what the parameters should be for the function call?
> Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia.
This analogy makes no sense. The Wikipedia analogue is making page synonyms or redirects or merges, and those are generally useful. "Deletionism" is mainly about what meets the standard for notability.
Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.
So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.
There's really no need for us to rehash SO rules/policy debates that have raged since day one. The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.
> So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.
What? No. The canonical target isn't closed. So go write the new answer there. The answer acceptance mark is basically irrelevant, and the feature ill-conceived.
Except usually there are dozens of answers already; the best possible answer has emerged; and people keep writing redundant nonsense for the street cred of having an answer on a popular Stack Overflow question.
> The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.
We do not care that people don't want to come and ask new questions. There are already way, way too many questions for the site's purpose. The policy is aimed at something that you don't care about. The result is a "verdict" we don't care about.
The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow.
The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.
Where in the process of "ask question" -> "closed as duplicate" are you interacting with another human?
Most of SO didn't seem to consist of people talking to each other so much as talking past each other.
One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other services and spaces before the widespread use of AI doesn’t sound very compelling to me.
Be more creative than AI.
How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service.
Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape.
If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.
Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds.
Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention.
As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario.
Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product.
The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a product" where the first step is to search, the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the third step is to delete.
The LLM is capable of answering the question "how to delete the product 'product name'".
To some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic, but still possible for a human to answer if only they read documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an answer A LOT faster.
If the LLM is also writing the documentation, because the developers surely don’t want to, I’m not sure how well this will work out.
I have some co-workers who have tried to use Copilot for their documentation (because they never write any and I’m constantly asking them questions as a result), and the results were so bad they actually spent the time to write proper documentation. It failed successfully, I suppose.
"In this imaginary world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs, LLMs are the best tool for the job".
Yeah, old news? It's how it is today with humans.
You SHOULD be making things in a human/LLM-readable format nowadays anyway if you're in tech, it'll do you well with AIs resorting to citing what you write, and content aggregators - like search engines - giving it more preferential scores.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems
The moderation was precisely the reason I stopped using stackoverflow and started looking for answers and asking questions elsewhere. It was nearly impossible to ask anything without someone replying "Why would you even want to do that, do <something completely different that does not solve my problem> instead!". Or someone claiming it's a duplicate and you should use that ancient answer from another question that 1) barely fits and doesnt solve my problem and 2) is so outdated, it's no longer useful.
Whenever I had to ask something, I had to add a justification as to why I have to do it that way and why previous posts do not solve the issue, and that took more space than the question itself.
I certainly won't miss SO.
If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones:
1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions.
2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.
> Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.
This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times than I can count.
Then you're doing it wrong?
I'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git clone the repo and tell it to reference the source.
Apologies for using you as an example, but this is a common theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a specific/complex question with little context and then complain when the answer is wrong.
I’ve specified many of these things and still had it fall on its face. And at some point, I’m providing so much detail that I may as well do it myself, which is ultimately what ends up happening.
Also, it seems assuming the latest version would make much more sense than assuming a random version from 10 years ago. If I was handing work off to another person, I would expect to only need to specify the version if it was down level, or when using the latest stable release.
This is exactly the issue that most people run into and it's literally the GIGO principle that we should all be familiar with by now. If your design spec amounts to "fix it" then don't be surprised at the results. One of the major improvements I've noticed in Claude Code using Opus 4.5 is that it will often read the source of the library we're using so that it fully understands the API as well as the implementation.
You have to treat LLMs like any other developer that you'd delegate work to and provide them with a well thought out specification of the feature they're building or enough details about how to reproduce a bug for them to diagnose and fix it. If you want their code to conform to the style you prefer then you have to give them a style guide and examples or provide a linter and code formatter and let them know how to run it.
They're getting better at making up for these human deficits as more and more of these common failure cases are recorded but you can get much better output now by simply putting some thought into how you use them.
Have you tried using context7 or a similar MCP to have the agent automatically fetch up to date documentation?
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question
But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers.
I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.
To the extent that moderation ever prevented questions from getting answers, that was by closing them.
When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.
The value proposition is getting an answer to a question that is useful to a reasonably broad audience. That very often means a question that someone else asked, the answer to which is useful to you. It is not getting an "answer" to a "question" where an individual dumps some code trying to figure out what's wrong.
> When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.
One of the bigger problems with the site's moderation systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and unintuitive to new users, 2) the reopen queue was almost useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed questions ever getting reopened, and 3) even if a question did get reopened, it would be buried thousands of posts down the front page and answerers would likely never see it.
There were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system -- better "on hold" UI that would walk users through the process of revising their question, and a revamp of the review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the "triage" queue, which did little to help new users without the several other review queues that were planned to be downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped working on improvements to the site.
Management should have been aggressively chasing metrics like "percentage of closed questions that get reopened" and "number of new users whose first question is well-received and answered". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the outcome is unsurprising.
Yes.
The "on hold" change got reversed because new users apparently just found it confusing.
Other attempts to communicate have not worked because the company and the community are separate entities (and the company has more recently shown itself to be downright hostile to the community). We cannot communicate this system better because even moderators do not have access to update the documentation. The best we can really do is write posts on the meta site and hope people find them, and operate the "customer service desk" there where people get the bad news.
But a lot of the time people really just don't read anyway. Especially when they get question-banned; they are sent messages that include links explaining the situation, and they ask on the meta site about things that are clearly explained in those links. (And they sometimes come up with strange theories about it that are directly contradicted by the information given to them. E.g. just the other day we had https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437859.)
And that was the core problem with Stack Overflow - they wanted to build a system of core Q&As to be a reference, but everyone treated it as a "fix my very specific problem now".
99% of all the junk that got closed was just dumps of code and 'it doesn't work'. Not useful to anyone.
And 99% of the other stuff, that wasn't just a code dump and "it doesn't work", was also closed.
There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Reddit and HN, which are poorly optimized for answering questions.
Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors.
The decline was much slower, not the following exponential decline that can only have been caused by LLMs.
It was bad enough that many people resorted to asking their questions in Discord instead which is a massive boomerang back to trying to get help in IRC and just praying that someone is online and willing to help you on the spot. Having to possibly ask your question multiple times before you get some spotty help in a real time chat where it's next to impossible to find again seems unimaginably worse than using an online forum but the fact of it remains and tells us there was something driving people away from sites like SO.
You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other questions first, ensure that your account has enough "clout" to overturn stupid closures of questions, and when you have wasted enough time doing that, then you can finally ask your own question. Or you can just go somewhere else that isn't an intellectual charade and circle jerking and figure it out without wasting tons of time chasing clout and hoping a moderator won't just close the question as duplicate. SO was never the best platform, exactly because of its horrendous moderation. It was good, yes. It had the quality assurance, to a degree, yes. But when just asking a question becomes such a monumental task, people will go elsewhere, to better platforms. Which includes other forums, and, LLMs. So no, what you're attributing to LLMs is merely a symptom of the deeper issue.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help.
By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning.
Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have historically done hardly any of it; the site simply didn't scale like that. There have been tens of millions of questions, versus a couple dozen moderators.)
The kinds of questions that people are getting quick, accurate answers for from an LLM are, overwhelmingly, the sort of thing that SO never wanted. Generally because they are specific to the person asking: either that person's issue won't be relevant to other people, or the work hasn't been done to make it recognizable by others.
And then of course you have the duplicates. You would not believe the logic some people put forward to insist that their questions are not duplicate; that they wouldn't be able, in other words, to get a suitable answer (note: the purpose is to answer a question, not solve a problem) from the existing Q&A. It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.
I agree that Reddit played a big role in this. But not just by answering questions; by forming a place where people who objected to the SO content model could congregate.
Insulting other users is and always has been against Stack Overflow Code of Conduct. The large majority of insults, in my experience, come from new users who are upset at being politely asked to follow procedures or told that they aren't actually allowed to use the site the way they're trying to. There have been many duplicate threads on the meta site about why community members (with enough reputation) are permitted to cast close votes on questions without commenting on what is wrong. The consensus: close reasons are usually fairly obvious; there is an established process for people to come to the meta site to ask for more detailed reasoning; and comments aren't anonymous, so it makes oneself a target.
It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality.
> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.
This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new (for example after a library change) and marking it as duplicate of an unanswered answer if a guarantee that the next SEO user won’t see it.
> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.
No, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise.
If you mean "without writing a direct answer to the new question first", that is the exact point of the system. Literally all you have to do is click the link and read the existing answers.
> it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new
Sure. But someone else knew about the old question, found it for you, and directly pointed you at it so that you could get an answer immediately. And did all of this for free.
And, by doing this, now everyone else who thinks of your phrasing for the question, will be immediately able to find the old question, without even having to wait for someone to recognize the duplicate.
I’m sure I’ve had the experience of being told it’s a duplicate, without resolving my problem.
In any case, you may be right, and yet if you search this thread for “horrible” and “obnoxious”, you’ll find dozens of occurrence. Maybe defining the rules of engagement so that the user is wrong every time doesn’t work.
>> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.
> No, they literally cannot.
You missed that people repeatedly closed question as duplicate when it was not a duplicate.
So it had answer, just to a different mildly related question.
LLM are having problems but they gaslight me in say 3% of cases, not 60% of cases like SO mods.
Please feel free to show examples.
> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.
Multiple times my questions closed as duplicates of question that was answering a different question.
Even when I explicitly linked that QA in my question and described how it differs from mine.
That "Dead Internet" phrase keeps becoming more likely, and this graph shows that. Human-to-human interactions, LLMs using those interactions, less human-to-human interactions because of that, LLMs using... ?
This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms of not having to need to ask redundant questions).
"I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers."
I think at least one other reason is that a lot of the questions were already posted. There are only so many questions of interest, until a popular new technology comes along. And if you look at mathoverflow (which wouldnt have the constant shocks from new technologies) the trend is pretty stable...until right around 2022. And even since then, the dropoff isn't nearly so dramatic. https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/edit/19272...
>>what happens now?
I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the response.
The overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where everything collaboratively built falls apart.
The machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and self-righteous.... /okay.
there was always a needy component to Stack Overflow. "I have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this algorithm?" and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be honest, it was the giving of information which forced you to think, and research, and answer correctly, which made systems like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the fucking future.
Things are gonna slide / in all directions / won't be nothin you can measure anymore. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WlbQRoz3o4
Labs are spending billions on data set curation and RL from human experts to fill in the areas where they're currently weak. It's higher quality data than SO, the only issue is that it's not public.
Can you explain what you're saying in greater depth?
Are you saying that the reason there is no human expertise on the internet anymore is that everyone with knowledge is now under contract to train AIs?
No, I think the reason human expertise on the internet is dying out is because we have a cacophany of voices trying to be heard on the internet, and experts aren't interested in screaming into the void unless they directly need to do it to pay their bills.
I would say that going onto Stack Overflow to answer questions made me a better coder - yeah, even with the cacophony of bullshit and repeats. It's almost more offensive for that job to be taken by "AI" than the job of writing the stupid code I was trying to help people fix.
[edit] because I kind of get what you're saying... I truly don't care what marginal benefits people are trying to get out of popularity in the high school locker room that is the Social Media internet. I still have a weird habit of giving everyone a full answer to their questions, and trying to teach people what I know when I can. Not for kudos or points, but because the best way to learn is by teaching.
> I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after?
I've wondered this too and I wonder if the existing corpus plus new GitHub/doc site scrapes will be enough to keep things current.
Widespread internet adoption created “eternal September”, widespread LLM deployment will create “eternal 2018”
The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question
For me, the value was writing answers on topics I was interested in…and internet points as feedback on their quality.
When SE abandoned their app, it broke my habit.
There's another significant forum: GitHub, the rise of which coincided with the start of SO's decline. I bet most niche questions went over to GH repos' issue/discussion forums, and SO was left with more general questions that bored contributors.
> - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?
To me this shows just how limited LLMs are. Hopefully more people realize that LLMs aren't as useful as they seem, and in 10 years they're relegated to sending spam and generating marketting websites.
Or we just stagnate, as tech no longer can afford to change.
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO.
Plus they might find the answer on SO without asking a new question - You probably would expect the # of new questions to peak or plateau even if the site wasn't dying, due to the accumulation of already-answered questions.
> What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?
That's a great question. I have no idea how things will play out now - do models become generalized enough to handle "out of distrubition" problems or not ? If they don't then I suppose a few years from now we'll get an uptick in Stackoverflow questions; the website will still exist it's not going anywhere.
Too bad stack overflow didn't high-quality-LLM itself early. I assume it had the computer-related brainpower.
with respect to the "moderation is the cause" thing... Although I also don't buy moderation as the cause, I wonder if any sort of friction from the "primary source of data" can cause acceleration.
for example, when I'm doing an interenet search for the definition of a word like buggywhip, some search results from the "primary source" show:
> buggy whip, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary
> Factsheet What does the noun buggy whip mean? There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun buggy whip. See 'Meaning & use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.
which are non-answer to keep their traffic.
but the AI answer is... the answer.
If SO early on had had some clear AI answer + references, I think that would have kept people on their site.
The meta post describing the policy of banning AI-generated answers from the site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831) is the most popular of all time. Company interference with moderator attempts to enforce that policy lead to a moderator strike. The community is vehemently against the company's current repeated attempts to sneak AI into the system, which have repeatedly produced embarrassing results (see for example https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427807 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 etc.).
What you propose is a complete non-starter.
Your first example is a public announcement of an llm assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback on an experiment isn't "sneaking" and the replies are a tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of questions so AI review seems like it should be useful.
The top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this, the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just don't do it.
The second top voted answer says "I was able to do a prompt injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug". So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol.
It seems clear these people started from a belief that ai is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why this specific feature is bad.
It's crazy that you are defending this group all over this HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem. I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in years. Those replies are embarrassing for the SO community, not AI.
The newer questions that LLMs can't answer will be answered in forums - either SO, reddit, or elsewhere. There will be a much higher percentage of relevant content with far fewer new pages regurgitating questions about solved problems. So the LLMs will be able to keep up.
I think the interesting thing here for those of us who use open source frameworks is that we can ask the LLM to look at the source to find the answer (eg. Pytorch or Phoenix in my case). For closed source libraries I do not know.
Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means.
Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative.
> will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?
I honestly don't think they need to. As we've seen so far, for most jobs in this world, answers that sound correct are good enough.
Is chasing more accuracy a good use of resources if your audience can't tell the difference anyway?
We'll get to the point where we can mass moderate core knowledge eventually. We may need to hand out extra weight for verified experts and some kind of most-votes-win type logic (perhaps even comments?), but live training data updates will be a massive evolution for language models.
> SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions
We will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some details/quirks/gotchas.
Example of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more effective than LLMs.
I don't think "good moderation or not" really touches what was happening with SO.
I joined SO early and it had a "gamified" interface that I actually found fun. Putting in effort and such I able to slowly gain karma.
The problem was as the site scaled, the competition to answer a given question became more and more intense and that made it miserable. I left at that point but I think a lot people stayed with dynamic that was extremely unhealthy. (and the quality of accepted questions declined also).
With all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening.
Agreed. The reputation system was extremely ill considered and never revisited. You may be interested in https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 .
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems
Just to add another personal data point: i started posting in on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting.
Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory.
Moderation was an incredible problem for stack overflow.
> Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory.
99.9% probability the people who made those edits a) were not moderators; b) were acting completely in accordance with established policy (please read: "Why do clear, accurate, appropriately detailed posts still get edited?" https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176)
Why do you think you should be the one who gets to decide whether that's "acceptable"? The site existed before you came to it, and it has goals, purposes and cultural norms established beforehand. It's your responsibility, before using any site on the Internet that accepts user-generated content, to try to understand the site's and community's expectations for that content.
On Stack Overflow, the expectations are:
1. You license the content to the site and to the community, and everyone is allowed to edit it. (This is also explicitly laid out in the TOS.)
2. You are contributing to a collaborative effort to build a useful resource for the programming community: a catalog of questions whose answers can be useful to many people, not just to yourself.
3. Content is intended to be matter-of-fact and right to the point, and explicitly not conversational. You are emphatically not participating in a discussion forum.
The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could.
What "tone"? Why is it unreasonable to say these sorts of things about Stack Overflow, or about any community? How is "your questions and answers need to meet our standards to be accepted" any different from "your pull requests need to meet our standards to be accepted"?
Thank you for being the voice of reason in this comment section!
I stopped because of moderators. They literally killed the site for me.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems
Questions asked on SO that got downvoted by the heavy handed moderation would have been answered by LLMs without any of the flak whatsoever.
Those who had downvoted other's questions on SO for not being good enough, must be asking a lot of such not good enough questions to an LLM today.
Sure, the SO system worked, but it was user hostile and I'm glad we all don't have to deal with it anymore.
As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state.
But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute poison.
I'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from Civ4: "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That sums it up exactly. There is a certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up as Reddit mods, for example.
Rules and standards are good up to a point but some people forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselves and having debates about what's a repeated question, how questions and answers should be structured, etc.
This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. And this goes back to the rules and standards being a tool not a goal. My stance was (and is) that shouldn't we solve flame wars when they happen rather than going around and "solving" imaginary problems?
I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider.
Even something that does have a definite answer like "how do I efficiently code a factorial function?" has multiple but different defensible answers. Even in one language you can have multiple implementations that might, say, be compile-time or runtime.
Another commenter here talked about finding the nearest point on an ellipse and came up with a method they're proud of where there are other methods that would also do the job.
Anyway, I'd occasionally login and see a constant churn on my answers from moderators doing pointless busywork as this month they'd decided something needed to be capitalized or not capitalized.
A perfect example of this kind of thing is Bryan Henderson's war on "comprised of" on Wikipedia [2].
Anyway, I think the core issue of SO was that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit and I got a lot of accepted answers on questions that could never be asked today. You'll also read many anecdotes about people having a negative experience asking questions on SO in later years where their question was immediately closed as, say, a duplicate when the question wasn't a duplicate. The moderator just didn't understand the difference. That sort of thing.
But any mature site ultimately ends with an impossible barrier to entry as newcomers don't know all the cultural rules that have been put in place and they tend to have a negative experience as they get yelled at for not knowing that Rule 11.6.2.7 forbids the kind of question they asked.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-c...
> This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars.
It's literally a Q&A site. Questions need actual answers, not just opinions or "this worked for me".
> This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars.
Please point at some of these "really good" questions, if you saved any links. (I have privileges to see deleted questions; deletion is normally soft unless there's a legal requirement or something.) I'll be happy to explain why they are not actually what the site wanted and not compatible with the site's goals.
The idea that the question "should have provable answers" wasn't some invention of moderators or the community; it came directly from Atwood (https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-an...).
> I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider.
Please read "Understanding the standard for "opinion-based" questions" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434806) and "What types of questions should I avoid asking?" (https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask).
I believe that this tension about what type of questions was baked into the very foundation of StackOverflow.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...
> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
vs
https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
(the emphasis on "good" is in the original)
And this can be seen in the revision history of https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (take note of revision 1 and the moderation actions 2011)
---
Questions that are fun and slightly outside of the intended domain of the site are manageable ... if there is sufficient moderation to keep those types of questions from sucking up all available resources.
That was the first failing of NotProgrammingRelated.StackExchange ... later Programming.StackExchange ... later SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange.
The fun things, while they were fun took way more moderation resources than was available. People would ask a fun question, get a good bit of rep - but then not help in curating those questions. "What is your favorite book" would get countless answers... and then people would keep posting the same answers rather than reading all of them themselves and voting to cause the "good" content to bubble up to the top.
That's why TeX can have https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun and MathOverflow can have https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/soft-question and https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list -- there is a very high ratio for the active in moderation to active users.
Stack Overflow kind of had this at its start... but over time the "what is acceptable moderation" was curtailed more and more - especially in the face of more and more questions that should be closed.
While fun questions are fun... the "I have 30 minutes free before my next meeting want to help someone and see a good question" is something that became increasingly difficult. The "Keep all the questions" ideal made that harder and so fewer and fewer of the - lets call them "atwoodians" remained. From where I sit, that change in corporate policy was completely solidified when Jeff left.
As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.
What remained where shells of rules that were the "truce" in the tension between the atwoodians and spolskyites and a few people trying to fight the oncoming tide of poorly asked questions with insufficient and neglected tooling.
As the tide of questions went out and corporate realized that there was necessary moderation that wasn't happening because of the higher standards from the earlier days they tried to make it easier. The golden hammer of duplication was a powerful one - though misused in many cases. The "this question closes now because its poorly asked and similar to that other canonical one that works through the issue" was far easier than "close as {something}" that requires another four people to take note of it before the question gets an answer from the Fastest Gun in the West. Later the number of people needed was changed from needing five people to three, but by then there was tide was in retreat.
Corporate, seeing things there were fewer questions being asked measured this as engagement - and has tried things to increase engagement rather than good questions. However, those "let's increase engagement" efforts were also done with even more of a moderation burden upon the community without the tooling to fix the problems or help the diminishing number of people who were participating in moderating and curating the content of the site.
> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.
Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwood was the one who wanted to keep things strictly on mission and Spolsky was the one more interested in growing a community. Yes? I do get the impression that there was a serious ideological conflict there; between the "library of detailed, high-quality answers" and the, well, "to every question" (without a proper understanding of what should count as a distinct, useful question that can have a high-quality answer). But also, the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out for the "library" goal (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex...). And I suspect they both shared blame in that.
A lot of it was also ignored for too long because of the assumption that a) the site would just die if it clamped down on everything from the start; b) the site would naturally attract experts with good taste in questions (including maybe even the ability to pose good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dixer questions) before the beginners ever cleared the barrier of trying to phrase a proper question instead of using a forum.
(Nowadays, there are still small forums all over the place. And many of them try to maintain some standards for the OP. And they're all plagued with neophytes who try to use the forum as if it were a chat room. The old adage about foolproofing rings true.)
Around 2014 is when the conflict really seems to have boiled over (as new question volume was peaking). Notably, that also seems to be when the dupe-hammer was introduced (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589).
Jeff was the author of https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and was more focused on quality than community - his vision was the library.
Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for.
And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the Web 2.0 ideals of the time and the hook to keep a person coming back to it. It was part of the question that was to be answered "how do you separate the core group from the general participants on a site?" ... and that brings me to "people need to read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) to understand how it shaped Stack Overflow.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/its-clay-shirkys-internet-we-j... (2008)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110827205048/https://stackover... (Podcast #23 from 2011)
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105232/clay-shirkys... (2011)2014 sounds about right for when it peaked... it was also when a lot of things hit the fan one after another. General stress, the decline of community moderation. The dup hammer was a way to try to reduce the amount of close votes needed - but in doing so it became "everything is a nail" when the dup hammer. It was used to close poor questions as dups of other questions ... and rather than making it easier to close questions that didn't fit well, corporate allowed the "everything is a dup" problem to fester.
That also then made Stack Overflow's search become worse. Consider https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080 which provides itself as a timestamp of 2014...
That question now has 10,356 questions linked to it... and that's part of the "why search quality is going down" - because poor questions were getting linked and not deleted. Search went downhill, dupe hammer was over used because regular close votes took too long because community moderation was going down, which in turn caused people to be grumpy about "closed as dup" rather than "your question looks like it is about X, but lacks an MCVE to be able to verify that... so close it as a dup of X rather than needing 5 votes to get an MCVE close.. which would have been more helpful in guiding a user - but would mean people would start doing FGITW to answer it maybe and you'd get it as a dup of something else instead."All sorts of problems around that time.
Dunno why you are being downvoted - there is a certain type of person who contributes virtually nothing on Wikipedia except peripheral things like categories. BrownHairedGirl was the most toxic person in Wikipedia but she was lauded by her minions - and yet she did virtually no content creation whatsoever. Yet made millions of edits!
Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me.
When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim.
And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it.
It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved.
Moderation got worse over time
> What do LLMs train off of now?
Perhaps they’ll rely on what was used by people who answered SO questions. So: official docs and maybe source code. Maybe even from experience too, i.e. from human feedback and human written code during agentic coding sessions.
> The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top.
Arguably it does insult even more, just by existing alone.
I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road.
Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix.
This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.
Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.
What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top.
SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit like HN, you learn from watching the back and forth. I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience.
Whatever people's gripes about the site, I learned a hell of a lot from it. I still find solutions there, and think a world without it would be worse.
> What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters.
Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience.
Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.
Heh, OK, dialogue wasn't the right word. I am a better informed person by the power of internet pedantry.
The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.
The other major benefit of SO being a public forum is that once a question was wrestled with and eventually answered, other engineers could stumble upon and benefit from it. With SO being replaced by LLMs, engineers are asking LLMs the same questions over and over, likely getting a wide range of different answers (some correct and others not) while also being an incredible waste of resources.
Surely the fundamental difference is one asks actual humans who know what's right vs statistical models that are right by accident.
Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.
Hey, can you show me the log files?
Sure here you go. Please help!
Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!
Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was time-consuming.
In the time it takes to properly format and ask a question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to the right one.
The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM.
Don't forget, human answers on Stack Overflow were also often wrong or delayed by hours or days.
I think we're romanticizing the quality of the average human response on Stack Overflow.
The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help.
If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs).
StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.
That's only because of LLMs consuming pre-existing discussions on SO. They aren't creating novel solutions.
What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO.
There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things.
LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think.
An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0]
The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community.
[^0]: He comes, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
SO also isn't afraid to tell you that your question is stupid and you should do it a better way.
Some people take that as a personal attack, but it can be more helpful than a detailed response to the wrong question.
The problem is the people who decide which questions are stupid are misaligned with the site's audience.
> I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience
Interesting question - the result is just words so surely a LLM can simulate an ego. Feed it the Linux kernel mailing list?
Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate?
And if they don’t have the experience that is just a question of tokens?
SO was somewhere people put their hard won experience into words, that an LLM could train on.
That won't be happening anymore, neither on SO or elsewhere. So all this hard won experience, from actually doing real work, will be inaccessible to the LLMs. For modern technologies and problems I suspect it will be a notably worse experience when using an LLM than working with older technologies.
It's already true for example, when using the Godot game engine instead of Unity. LLMs constantly confuse what you're trying to do with Unity problems, offer Unity based code solutions etc.
> Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate?
I think the name "Mixture of Experts" might be one of the most misleading labels in our industry. No, that is not at all what MoE models do.
Think of it rather like, instead of having one giant black box, we now have multiple smaller opaque boxes of various colors, and somehow (we don't really know how) we're able to tell if your question is "yellow" or "purple" and send that to the purple opaque box to get an answer.
The result is that we're able to use less resources to solve any given question (by activating smaller boxes instead of the original huge one). The problem is we don't know in advance which questions are of which color: it's not like one "expert" knows CSS and the other knows car engines.
It's just more floating point black magic, so "How do I center a div" and "what's the difference between a V6 and V12" are both "yellow" questions sent to the same box/expert, while "How do I vertically center a div" is a red question, and "what's the most powerful between a V6 and V12" is a green question which activates a completely different set of weights.
I don't know if this is still the case but back in the day people would often redirect comments to some stackoverflow chat feature, the links to which would always return 404 not found errors.
You can ask an LLM to provide multiple approaches to solutions and explore the pros and cons of each, then you can drill down and elaborate on particular ones. It works very well.
There are so many "great" answers on StackOverflow. Giving the why and not just the answer.
I'm hoping increasing we'll see agents helping with this sort of issue. I would like an agent that would do things like pull the spark repo into the working area and consult the source code/cross reference against what you're trying to do.
Once technique I've used successfully is to do this 'manually' to ensure codex/Claude code can grep around the libraries I'm using
It's flat wrong to suggest SO had the right answer all the time, and in fact in my experience for trickier work it was often wrong or missing entirely.
LLMs have a better hit rate with me.
The example wasn't even finding a right answer so I don't see where you got that..
Searching questions/answers on SO can surface correct paths on situations where the LLMs will keep giving you variants of a few wrong solutions, kind of like the toxic duplicate closers.. Ironically, if SO pruned the history to remove all failures to match its community standards then it would have the same problem.
"But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions."
> "actually answered our questions."
Read carefully.
Yes, it does answer you question, when the site lets it go through.
Note that "answers your question" does not mean "solving your problem". Sometimes the answer to a question is "this is infeasible because XYZ" and that's good feedback to get to help you re-evaluate a problem. Many LLMs still struggle with this and would rather give a wrong answer than a negative one.
That said, the "why don't you use X" response is practically a stereotype for a reason. So it's certainly not always useful feedback. If people could introspect and think "can 'because my job doesn't allow me to install Z' be a valid response to this", we'd be in a true Utopia.
>> Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc
Read carefully and paraphrase to the generous side. The metaphor that follows that is obviously trying to give an example of what might be somehow lost.
This is a fair critique. I am often not generous enough with people.
Interpreting that claim as "SO users always, 100% of the time answer questions correctly" is uncharitable to the point of being unreasonable.
Most people would interpret the claim as concisely expressing that you get better accuracy from grumpy SO users than friendly LLMs.
For the record I was interpreting that as LLMs are useless (which may have been just as uncharitable), which I categorically deny. I would say they're about just as useful without wading through the mire that SO was.
It entirely depends on the language you were using. The quality of both questions and answers between e.g. Go and JavaScript is incredible. Even as a relative beginner in JS I could not believe the amount of garbage that I came across, something that rarely happened for Go.
No point in arguing with people who bring a snowball into Congress to disprove global warming.
You still get the same thing though?
That grumpy guy is using an LLM and debugging with it. Solves the problem. AI provider fine tunes their model with this. You now have his input baked into it's response.
How you think these things work? It's either a human direct input it's remembering or a RL enviroment made by a human to solve the problem you are working on.
Nothing in it is "made up" it's just a resolution problem which will only get better over time.
How does that work if there's no new data for them to train on, only AI slurry?
Because what you’re describing is the exception. Almost always with LLM’s I get a better solution, or helpful pointer in the direction of a solution, and I get it much faster. I honestly don’t understand anyone could prefer Google/SO, and in fact that the numbers show that they don’t. You’re in an extreme minority.
> But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.
Which by the way is incredibly ironic to read on the internet after like fifteen years of annoying people left and right about toxic this and toxic that.
Extreme example: Linus Torvalds used to be notoriously toxic.
Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style?
> Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style?
If they answered correctly, yes.
My point is that providing _actual knowledge_ is by itself so much more valuable compared to _simulated knowledge_, in particular when that simulated knowledge is hyper realistic and wrong.
Sadly, an accountable individual representing an organization is different from a community of semi-anonymous users with a bunch of bureaucracy that can't or doesn't care about every semis anonymous user
Q&A isn't going away. There's still GitHub Discussions.
Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation.
Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.
The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes.
The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions.
Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.
Also: the bigger the corpus of already answered questions, it’s more likely that you can just look up an answer instead of asking.
Eventually SO becomes a site exclusively for lurkers instead of a platform for active participation
On the other hand, another week another JavaScript framework, amirite? There continues to be new stuff to ask questions about, but stack overflow failed to be the default location for new stuff. I guess now there's more discussion directly on GitHub and discord.
The JavaScript ecosystem has mostly stabilised. React is 12 years old for example.
> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.
This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.
> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.
This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.
I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier".
The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.
I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.
> I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself
I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in the way. So I stopped.
No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute experts, you also need answer often for something trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.
> No, you don't.
When someone says "I feel like" and you answer "No, you don't", you're most certainly wrong :-).
I do feel like the parent.
I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced.
I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.
The more experienced I got, the subtler my questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this and that questions, but it is not", only to see my question get closed as duplicate by moderators.
If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?
Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I still pop into SO when in learning a new language or trip into new simple questions (in my case, how to connect and test a local server). But when you're beyond the weeds, SO is as best an oasis in the desert. Half the time a mirage, nice when it does help out. But rare either way.
I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.
Here's my brilliant idea: the longer it takes for an answer to be marked correct, or the more answers there are before one is marked correct, the more points that answer deserves.
The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if you could retroactively years later re-award it to a newer answer. Since the gamification angle was so prominent, that might rob the decade-old author of their points for their then-correctness, so idk if they even allowed it.
I noticed a similar thing for Python 3 questions, closed as a duplicate of a Python 2 response. Why they weren't collated and treated as a living document is beyond me.
How about if people with a higher reputation contribute an exponentially higher score when voting? Like, someone with ten top-rated answers has a 1,000-point vote (more nuanced than that, obviously).
This has been my experience.
My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as time went on, and they became unanswered, almost always (I often ended up answering my own question, after I figured it out on my own).
I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I encountered, were the types of things that people who ship, encounter; not academic exercises.
Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on there, don't ship.
LLMs may sometimes give pretty sloppy answers, but they are almost always ship-relevant.
That might be true on Stackoverflow but not on other network sites like Cross Validated, which was killed by splitting the community into multiple SE sites and longtime users quitting in protest over various policies and not being replaced.
I think there's a basic problem that the original revenue model for the site just didn't work (I mean, they wouldn't have shut down Stack Overflow Jobs if that actually made them any money) and anything they were able to do to fix that pissed people off.
Stack Overflow Jobs was a superb, uncluttered, direct interface to the hiring manager, with accurate details about a position. So when they canned it (but kept their advertising revenue stream plus started "SO for Teams" in 2018), that was a major canary that the whole revenue model wasn't viable, at least for independent developers.
Maybe there's a key idea for something to replace StackOverflow as a human tech Q&A forum: Having a system which somehow incentivizes asking and answering these sorts of challenging and novel questions. These are the questions which will not easily be answered using LLMs, as they require more thought and research.
There is also github issues discussions now which also helped in asking these niche questions directly to the team responsible. I dont ask questions about a library on SO I just ask it on the github of the library and I get immediate answers
Wasn't there a "bounty" program where if it had a lot of views but no answers, the answer rewarded more internet ego points?
Not automatically. You could add a bounty using your own points if the question didn't get an accepted answer in 2 days.
Which is kinda cool, but also very biased for older contributors. I could drop thousands of points bounty without thinking about it, but new users couldn't afford the attention they needed.
Remember when the R developers would ask and answer their own basic questions about R, essentially building up a beginner tutorial on stack overflow? That was a cool time
Human psychology is fascinating. If I say I'm cool, I'm full of myself. If someone else says that I'm cool, that hits different. So is reverse psychology.
Hey fragmede, you are cool.
> the more experienced you become, the less useful it is
This is killer feature of LLMs - you will not became more experienced.
>toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes
>zombie community
Like Reddit post 2015.
Stack Overflow moderation is very transparent compared to whatever Reddit considers moderation.
For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not quite comparable because the more subjective questions are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the direction of adding many more libraries than most people should).
Same here. I just didn't want to expend energy racing trigger happy mods. It was so odd, to this day remember vividly how they cleanup their arguments once proven wrong on the closing vote. Literally minutes before it would the close threshold.
And you can't delete your post when you realize how awful it was years later! That anti-information sticks around for ages. Even worse when there are bad answers attached to it, too.
If you're talking about deleting questions, that's because deleting the question would delete everyone's answers that they potentially worked very hard on and which others might find useful. If you think the answers are bad you can always post your own competing answer.
"A Human commented at ##:##pm" "An AI Bot commented at..." "A suspected AI Bot commented at..." "An unconfirmed Human commented at..."
ya but you assume someone worked hard on the answer. there are alot of times when you get garbage top to bottom.
Fun story: SO officially states comments are ephemeral and can be deleted whenever, so I deleted some of my comments. I was then banned. After my ban expired I asked on the meta site if it was okay to delete comments. I was banned again for asking that.
You can’t delete anything here either… so make sure you don’t say anything awful.
create a new account every few weeks and don't forget to mix you you'er writin' style to fakeout stylometrics. its all against the rules but i disagree with HN terms. internet points don't mean crapola to me. but i like dropping in here every now and then to chit caht. i should have the right to be anonymous and non-deidentifiable here and speak freely. of IP address ---are--- tracked here and you can easily be shadowbanned. but i don't say anything awful, but i am naturally an asshat and i just can't seem to change my spots. 90% of the time i'm ok, but 10% i'm just a raving tool.
The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me as a bizarre feature, to put words in other people’s mouths.
I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting.
I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP.
> took gamification way too far
I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes.
Gen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996)
Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008)
Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)
Yahoo answers
Google answers
And the horrific Quora
None of those worked as programming tools. I really miss Google Answers though, with the bounties.
Random example:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/762357.html
It's remarkable how similar in style the answers are to what we all know from e.g. chatgpt.
It's remarkable only in the sense that you can see where the LLMs were trained from.
That would be such a useful service today
>Gen 0: expertsexchange.com
No way.
It was a more innocent time.
Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...
The same is true for reddit imo, it became impossible to post anything to a subreddit way before LLMs
Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).
This is called the XY problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378 . You ask for X, I tell you that what you really want is Y, I bully you, and I become more convinced that you and people that ask for X want Y.
Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game)
You ask how to do X.
Member M asks why you want to do X.
Because you want to do Y.
Well!? why do you want to do Y??
Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z
Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended!
Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment.
...
Can you help me?
...
I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. Do you have any help?
...(crickets)
To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.
I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.
An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up.
It just goes back to first principles.
The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.
The well known XY problem[1].
I spent years on IRC, first getting help and later helping others. I found out myself it was very useful to ask such questions when someone I didn't know asked a somewhat unusual question.
The key is that if you're going to probe for Y, you usually need to be fairly experienced yourself so you can detect the edge cases, where the other person has a good reason.
One approach I usually ended up going for when it appeared the other person wasn't a complete newbie was to first explain that I think they're trying to solve the wrong problem or otherwise going against the flow, and that there's probably some other approach that's much better.
Then I'd follow up with something like "but if you really want to proceed down this rrack, this is how I'd go about it", along with my suggestion.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
It's great when you're helping people one on one, but it's absolutely terrible for a QA site where questions and answers are expected to be helpful to other people going forward.
I don't think your analogy really helps here, it's not a question. If the question was "How do I get to the top of the mountain" or "How do I want to get to the top of the mountain without hiking" the answer to both would be "Gondola".
> Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.
Except that SO has a crystal clear policy that the answer to questions should be helpful for everybody reaching it through search, not only the person asking it. And that questions should never be asked twice.
So if by chance, after all this dance the person asking the question actually needs the answer to a different question, you'll just answer it with some completely unrelated information and that will the the mandatory correct answer for everybody that has the original problem for any reason.
Yes exactly. The fact that the "XY problem" exists, and that users sometimes ask the wrong question, isn't being argued. The problem is that SO appears to operate at the extreme, taking the default assumption that the asker is always wrong. That toxic level of arrogance (a) pushes users away and (b) ...what you said.
Which is why LLMs are so much more useful than SO and likely always will be. LLMs do this even. Like trying to write my own queue by scratch and I ask an LLM for feedback I think it’s Gemini that often tells me Python’s deque is better. duh! That’s not the point. So I’ve gotten into the habit of prefacing a lot of my prompts with “this is just for practice” or things of that nature. It actually gets annoying but it’s 1,000x more annoying finding a question on SO that is exactly what you want to know but it’s closed and the replies are like “this isn’t the correct way to do this” or “what you actually want to do is Y”
>I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.
Yep. The magic question is "what are you trying to accomplish?". Oftentimes people lacking experience think they know the best way to get the results they're after and aren't aware of the more efficient ways someone with more experience might go about solving their problem.
My heuristic is that if your interlocutor asks follow-up questions like that with no indication of why (like “why do you want to do X?” rather than “why do you want to do X? If the answer is Y, then X is a bad approach because Q, you should try Z instead”) then they are never going to give you a helpful answer.
How do I add a second spout to this can?
...
Well, the pump at the gas station doesn't fit in my car, but they sold me a can with a spout that fits in my car.
...
It's tedious to fill the can a dozen times when I just want to fill up my gas tank. Can you help me or not?
...
I understand, but I already bought the can. I don't need the "perfect" way to fill a gas tank, I just want to go home.
My favourite is this disclaimer in the question. lol
> Is there any way to force install a pip python package ignoring all its dependencies that cannot be satisfied?
> (I don't care how "wrong" it is to do so, I just need to do it, any logic and reasoning aside...)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12759761/pip-force-insta...
Tbf the problem there is probably FIPS more than anything else.
If someone is paying you to implement a security vulnerability and you've told them and you don't have liability, you just do it. That's how capitalism works. You do whatever people give you money for.
I wasn’t referring to vulnerabilities, I was referring to arbitrary silly security theatre controls. But id hate to deal with you professionally. Gross.
To avoid going insane the mindset should be to produce something useful for future readers.
Long before LLMs. Setting aside peak-COVID as a weird aberration, question volume has been in decline since 2014 or maybe 2016.
Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community.
Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up.
No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO heavy-handed moderation memes.
Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.
You would be able to see which questions were too long-tail or difficult for the AI to answer, and humans could jump in to patch things up. This could be gamified with points.
This would serve as fantastic LLM training material for local LLMs. The authors of the site could put in a clause saying that "training is allowed as long as you publish your weights + model".
Someone please build this.
Edit: Removed "LLMs did not kill Stack Overflow." first sentence as suggested. Perhaps that wasn't entirely accurate, and the rest of the argument stands better on its own legs.
The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question about best practices, but you can't ask people to share their experiences or recommendations.
They actually added some new question categories a while ago [1]
"Troubleshooting / Debugging" is meant for the traditional questions, "Tooling recommendation", "Best practices", and "General advice / Other" are meant for the soft sort of questions.
I have no clue what the engagement is on these sort of categories, though. It feels like a fix for a problem that started years ago, and by this point, I don't really know if there's much hope in bringing back the community they've worked so hard to scare away. It's pretty telling just how much the people that are left hate this new feature.
[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/435293/opinion-base...
Oh, that's good that they added them. I stopped being active in on the sites a long time ago, so I missed that.
Fixing loads of LLM-generated content is neither easy nor fun. You'll have a very hard time getting people to do that.
Hardly.
- A huge number of developers will want to use such a tool. Many of them are already using AI in a "single player" experience mode.
- 80% of the answers will be correct when one-shot for questions of moderate difficulty.
- The long tail of "corrector" / "wiki gardening" / pedantic types fill fix the errors. Especially if you gamify it.
Just because someone doesn't like AI doesn't mean the majority share the same opinion. AI products are the fastest growing products in history. ChatGPT has over a billion MAUs. It's effectively won over all of humanity.
I'm not some vibe coder. I've been programming since the 90's, including on extremely critical multi-billion dollar daily transaction volume infra, yet I absolutely love AI. The models have lots of flaws and shortcomings, but they're incredibly useful and growing in capability and scope -- I'll stand up and serve as your counter example.
People answer on SO because it's fun. Why should they spend their time fixing AI answers?
It's very tedious as the kind of mistakes LLMs make can be rather subtle and AI can generate a lot of text very fast. It's a sisyphean taks, I doubt enough people would do it.
I just think you could save a lot of money and energy doing all this but skipping the LLM part? Like what is supposed to be gained? The moment/act of actual generation of lines of code or ideas, whether human or not, is a much smaller piece of the pie relative to ongoing correction, curation, etc (like you indicate). Focusing on it and saying it intrinsically must/should come from the LLM mistakes the intrinsically ephemeral utility of the LLMs and the arguably eternal nature of the wiki at the same time. As sibling says, it turns it into work vs the healthy sharing of ideas.
The whole pitch here just feels like putting gold flakes on your pizza: expensive and would not be missed if it wasn't there.
Just to say, I'm maybe not as experienced and wise I guess but this definitely sounds terrible to me. But whatever floats your boat I guess!
The community is not "toxic". The community is overwhelmed by newcomers believing that they should be the ones who get to decide how the site works (more charitably: assuming that they should be able to use the site the same way as other sites, which are not actually at all the same and have entirely different goals).
I don't know why you put "duplicates" in quotation marks. Closing a duplicate question is doing the OP (and future searchers) a service, by directly associating the question with an existing answer.
> Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.
Isn't this how Quora is supposed to operate?
Maybe my experience is unique - but Quora seems to be largely filled with adverts-posing-as-answers.
Quora, sadly, is a good example of enshittification.
Absolutely 100% this. I've used them on and off throughout the years. The community became toxic, so I took my question to other platforms like Reddit (they became toxic as well) and elsewhere.
Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open source, I've written everything from emulators and game engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc.
The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in documentation, specifically related to undocumented behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO, I received either no response and downvotes, or negative responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back, so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button if folks were super negative and didn't answer the question.
Later on, most of my answers actually have come from Github,and 95% of the time, my issues were legitimate ones that would've been mentioned if a decent number of folks used the framework, library, or language in question.
I think the tl;dr of this is this: If you can't provide a positive contribution on ANY social media platform like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Github, etc. Don't speak. Don't vote. Ignore the question. If you happen to know, help out! Contribute! Write documentation! I've done so on more than one occasion (I even built a website around it and made money in the process due to ignorance elsewhere, until I shut it down due to nearly dying), and in every instance I did so, folks were thankful, and it made me thankful that I was able to help them. (the money wasn't a factor in the website I built, I just wanted to help folks that got stuck in the documentation hole I mentioned)
EDIT: because I know a bunch of you folks read Ars Technica and certain other sites. I'll help you out: If you find yourself saying that you are being "pedantic", you are the problem, not the solution. Nitpicking doesn't solve problems, it just dilutes the problem and makes it bigger. If you can't help, think 3 times and also again don't say anything if your advice isn't helpful.
It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it.
Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did.
And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community.
Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort to salvage what little there was left for themselves.
Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings.
How did Joel sell out? Curious as I’m not aware of any monetary changes. I watched Joel several times support completely brain dead policies in the meta discussions which really set the rules and tone. So my respect there is low.
He and Jeff made it abundantly clear their mission was to destroy the sex change site because that site was immoral for monetizing the benevolence of the community who answered the questions.
"Knowledge should be free" they said. "You shouldn't make money off stuff like this," they said.
Plenty of links and backstory in my other comments.
They literally sold: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-...
I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor) contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific issues.
The timeline also matches:
https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...
https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...
Do we have any stats for the number of GitHub discussions created each month to compare to this?
> legitimate questions being closed for no good reason
They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) and well considered, having been exhaustively discussed over many years.
> or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t
I have seen so many people complain about this. It is vanishingly rare that I actually agree with them. In the large majority of cases it is comically obvious to me that the closure was correct. For example, there have been many complaints in the Python tag that were on the level of "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)
> a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.
On the contrary, the top answerers are the ones who will be happy to copy and paste answers to your question and ignore site policy, to the constant vexation of curators like myself trying to keep the site clean and useful (as a searchable resource) for everyone.
> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
I actually completely agree that people who prefer to ask LLMs should ask LLMs. The experience of directly asking (an LLM) and getting personalized help is explicitly the exact thing that Stack Overflow was created to get away from (i.e., the traditional discussion forum experience, where experts eventually get tired of seeing the same common issues all the time and all the same failures to describe a problem clearly, and where third parties struggle to find a useful answer in the middle of along discussion).
You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us".
Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure.
When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here - trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly showing this.
> Often, doing what your users want leads to success.
You misunderstand.
People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users".
Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this.
Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why.
> When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside.
I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care. Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made.
> trying to deny the toxicity and condescension
I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context.
As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish?
> "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)
This is a great example of a question that should not be closed as a duplicate. Lists are not tuples in Python, regardless of how similar potential answers may be.
It seemed to me that pre-llm, google had stopped surfacing stackoverflow answers in search results.
My memory is there were a spate of SO scraping sites that google would surface above SO and google just would not zap.
It would have been super trivial to fix but google didn’t.
My pet theory was that google were getting doubleclick revenue from the scrapers so had incentives to let them scrape and to promote them in search results.
I remember those too! There were seemingly thousands of them!
Reminds me of my most black-hat project — a Wikipedia proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah, perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.
I'm actually surprised it was only ~$20 a month.
Because nobody was clicking on them
Oh yeah.
My favorite feature of LLMs, is the only dumb question, is the one I don't ask.
I guess someone could train an LLM to be spiteful and nasty, but that would only be for entertainment.
If you say the wrong thing to grok, it will go off on you. It's quite entertaining!
I suppose all sites that have a voting component run the risk of becoming unpleasant.
Hacker News, and we who frequent it, ought to have that in mind.
dang and the other HN moderators do a heroic job to set the tone, which has second- and third-order effects on behavior.
I think it has more to do with the fact that when you offer zero salary for moderators, you have to take what you can get, and it ain't good. I don't really see a connection to the voting mechanic.
Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? Do we want this?
We’re talking about how communities can become toxic. How we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to be our intentions.
I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be compensated to not let a community deteriorate.
> That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional?
The answer to all of these questions is yes, for the most part. Volunteers are much harder to wrangle than employees and it's much easier for drama and disagreements to flare when there are zero consequences other than losing an unpaid position, particularly if anonymity is in the mix.
Volunteers can be great but on average they're going to be far harder to manage and far more fickle than employees.
Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have. What you seem to suggest is that because building a community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing.
What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to resolve differences productively. I think that if you replace individual responsibility with transactionality you have neither community nor long term viability or scalability.
Then again, we live in times when transactional thinking seems to dominate discourse.
It's because I was involved with a large volunteer-based project that was a literal 24/7/365 operation for several years (dozens of volunteers at any given time and tens of thousands of concurrent users) and can speak first hand as to the differences.
I didn't say it's not worth doing but it will bring challenges that wouldn't exist with employees. Paying people adds a strong motivator to keep toxic behaviour at bay.
Your experiences will heavily depend on the type of project you're running but regardless, you can't hold volunteers, especially online, to the same expectations or standards as employees. The amount of time and effort they can invest will wax and wane and there's nothing you can do about it. Anonymity and lack of repercussions will eventually lead to drama or power struggles when a volunteer steps out of line in a way that they wouldn't in paid employment. There is no fix that'll stop occasional turbulence, it's just the way it is. Not all of your volunteers will be there for the greater good of your community.
Again, that is absolutely not to say that it can't be worth the effort but if you go into it eyes open, you'll have a much better time and be able to do a better job at heading off problems.
I've seen other people express similar opinions to yours and it wasn't until they experienced being in the driver's seat that they understood how difficult it is.
It's also disconnected incentives. SO users get numbers to go up by taking moderation actions so of course they do that. Also you literally get banned from reviewing questions if you don't flag enough of them to be closed. These are incentives put in place by the SO company intentionally.
It's not like only slimy people get to use moderator tools like on Reddit, since you need a lot of reputation points you get by having questions and answers voted up. It's more like (1) you select people who write surface-level-good answers since that's what's upvoted, and they moderate with a similar attitude and (2) once you have access to moderator tools you're forced to conform with (1) or your access is revoked, and (3) the company is completely incompetent and doesn't give a shit about any of this.
That depends on what you mean by "came along". If you mean "once that everyone got around to the idea that LLMs were going to be good at this thing" then sure, but it was not long ago that the majority of people around here were very skeptical of the idea that LLMs would ever be any good at coding.
What you're arguing about is the field completely changing over 3 years; it's nothing, as a time for everyone to change their minds.
LLMs were not productified in a meaningful way before ChatGPT in 2022 (companies had sufficiently strong LLMs, but RLHF didn't exist to make them "PR-safe"). Then we basically just had to wait for LLM companies to copy Perplexity and add search engines everywhere (RAG already existed, but I guess it was not realistic to RAG the whole internet), and they became useful enough to replace StackOverflow.
I dont think this is true. People were skeptical of agi / better than human coding which is not the case. As a matter of fact i think searching docs was one of the first manor uses of llms before code.
That's because there has been rapid improvement by LLMs.
Their tendency to bullshit is still an issue, but if one maintains a healthy skepticism and uses a bit of logic it can be managed. The problematic uses are where they are used without any real supervision.
Enabling human learning is a natural strength for LLMs and works fine since learning tends to be multifaceted and the information received tends to be put to a test as a part of the process.
all true, but i still find myself ask questions there after llm gave wrong answers and wasted my time
The irony is that the LLMs are trained on stack overflow and should inherit a lot of those traits and errors.
Yeah, but they don't inherit their rules and attitude.
Really, if we could apply some RLHF to the Stack Overflow community, it would be doing a lot better.
How can we be sure that LLMs won't start giving stale answers?
We can't. I don't think the LLMs themselves can recognize when an answer is stale. They could if contradicting data was available, but their very existence suppresses the contradictory data.
LLMs don't experience the world, so they have no reason a priori to know what is or isn't truthful in the training data.
(Not to mention the confabulation. Making up API method names is natural when your model of the world is that the method names you've seen are examples and you have no reason to consider them an exhaustive listing.)
They will, but model updates and competition help solve the problem. If people find that Claude consistently gives better/more relevant answers over GPT, for example, people will choose the better model.
The worst thing with Q/A sites isn't they don't work. It's that they there are no alternatives to stackoverflow. Some of the most upvoted answers on stackoverflow prove that it can work well in many cases, but too bad most other times it doesn't.
They still use the official documentation/examples, public Github Repos, and your own code which are all more likely to be evergreen. SO was definitely a massive training advantage before LLMs matured though.
LLMs are just statistics, eventually they kill themselves with feedback loop by consuming their own farts (literally)
>For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better
But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.
I regularly use Claude and friends where I ask it to use the web to look at specific GitHub repos or documentation to ask about current versions of things. The “LLMs just get their info from stack overflow” trope from the GPT-3 days is long dead - they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web. In some cases I just upload bits and pieces from a library along with my question if it’s particularly obscure or something home grown, and they do quite well with that too. Yes, they do get it wrong sometimes - just like stack overflow did too.
The amount of docs that have a “Copy as markdown” or “Copy for AI” button has been noticeably increasing, and really helps the LLM with proper context.
You know DDoS attacks are illegal, right? If you have proof that OpenAI is DDoSing your site, go sue them for millions of dollars.
StackOverflow answers are outdated. Every time I end up on that site these days, I find myself reading answers from 12 years ago that are no longer relevant.
I see plenty of old answers that are still very relevant. Suppose it depends on what language/tech tags you follow.
There have been many times I have seen someone complain on the meta site about answers being old and outdated, and then they give specific examples, and I go check them out and they're actually still perfectly valid.
Now they can read the documentation and code in the repo directly and answer based on that.
SO had answers that you couldn't find in the documentation and were you can't look in the source code.
If everything would be well documentated SO wouldn't have being as big as it was in the first place.
I think the industry is quickly moving to syntheticly derived knowledge, or custom/systematic knowledge production from humans.
not only stackoverflow, but also reddit.com/r/aws reddit.com/r/docker reddit.com/r/postgresql all 3 of them have extremely toxic communities. ask a question and get downvoted instantly! Noo!! your job is to actually upvote the question to maximize exposure for the algorithm unless it is a really really stupid question that a google search could fix
Yep, LLMs are perfect for the "quick buy annoying to answer 500 times" questions about writing a short script, or configuring something, or using the right combination of command line parameters.
Quicker than searching the entirety of Google results and none of the attitude.
> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
For now. They still need to be enshitted.
Models are check-pointed. You can save one you like and use it forever.
You can save an open source + open weights model, which is frozen in time. That’s still very useful for some things but lacks knowledge of current data.
So we’ll end up with a choice of low-performing stale models or high-performing enshittified models which know about more current information.
Open source models get updated all the time. You'd only be a few months behind.
Direct enshittification is intentional and wouldn’t affect open models.
Indirect pollution via AI slop in the input and the same content manipulation mechanisms as SEO hacking is still a threat for open models.
Doesn't help when the ads are a layer above the model.
There are open source models you yourself or a trusted third party can run. No ads.
Yup. Like Claude 3 Opus.
Really? I thought you could only do that with open source models. Can you teach me how to checkpoint the current version of Claude Code so I can keep it as-is forever?
Yeah just wait for the ads
Indeed. StackOverflow was by far the most unpleasant website that I have regularly interacted with. Sometimes, just seeing how users were treated there (even in Q&A threads that I wasn’t involved in at all) disturbed me so much it was actually interfering with my work. I’m so, so glad that I can now just ask an AI to get the same (or better) answers, without having to wade through the barely restrained hate on that site.
This change was happening well before LLMs. People were tired of being yelled at and treated poorly.
A cautionary tale for many of these types of tech platforms, this one included.
They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.
PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620
Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange.
At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on top.
> I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are.
They are not "threads" and are not supposed to be "threads". Thinking about them as if they were, is what leads to the perception of toxicity.
It's funny that people blame the site for this.
That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture. It's everywhere.
Its karma farming. Number must go up regardless of the human cost. Thats why the same problem is seen here, to a lesser extent.
Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement.
Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter.
I agree there was some natural slow down as the corpus grew - the obvious questions were answered. But if the community was healthy, that should not have caused growth to stop. New technologies get created all the time, each starting with zero SO questions. (Or Google releases v2.0 which invalidates all answers written about v1.)
SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though.
I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which.
But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior.
I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.
Arstechnica used to have different kinds of upvotes for "funny" vs "insightful" - I forget exactly all of them. But I found it awesome. I wanted to and could read the insightful comments, not the funny ones. A couple years back they redid the discussion system and got rid of it. Since then the quality of discussion has IMHO completely tanked.
People overestimate the impact of toxicity on number of monthly questions. The initial growth was due to missing answers. After some time there is a saturation point where all basic questions are already answered and can be found via Google. If you ask them again they are marked as dups.
That would be true if no new technologies were created every year (even more often).
There are new technologies, but if you look at the most viewed questions, they will be about Python, JS, Java, C, and C++ without libraries.
You do not find the 2009 jQuery answer satisfying?
> the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.
A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented.
If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that.
Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc.
Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.
The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant to post when they were working from home?
More people spent lot more time learning new tech skills (at every experience level).
The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc) and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.
I’d guess it’s also because it’s not as easy to ask your random question to a coworker when they’re not sitting next to you in the office.
I felt it became easier with slack.
The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without hesitation and producers just also don't do actual documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which works in the moment, but terrible for future team members to even know what questions to search/ask for.
A huge amount of people were just starting to learn programming, because they were stuck at home and had the time to pick something up.
If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.
If you ignore the early pandemic bump, it even looks like the decline started in late 2017, though it's more variable than after the bump
I wonder what is the role of moderating duplicate questions. More time passes - more existing data there is and less need for new questions. If you moderate duplicate questions, will they disappear from these charts? Is this decline actually logical?
2020 there was new CEO and moderator council was formed: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-o...
Many people are pointing out the toxicity, but the biggest thing that drove me away, especially for specific quantitative questions, was that SO was flat out wrong (and confidently so) on many issues.
It was bad enough that I got back in the habit of buying and building a library of serious reference books because they were the only reliable way to answer detailed technical questions.
There is an obvious acceleration of the downwards trend at the time ChatGPT got popular. AI is clearly a part of this, but not the only thing that affects SO activity.
I wonder if we can attribute some $billion of the investment in LLMs directly to the toxicity on StackOverflow.
Ironically they could probably do some really useful deduplication/normalization/search across questions and answers using AI/embeddings today, if only they’d actually allowed people to ask the same questions infinite different ways, and treated the result of that as a giant knowledge graph.
I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid moderation.
Toxic community is mostly a meme myth. I have like 30k points and whatever admins were doing was well deserved as 90% of the questions were utterly impossible to help with. Most people wanted free help and couldn't even bother to put in 5 minutes of work.
Use of GPT3 among programmers started 2021 with GitHub Copilot which preceded ChatGPT.
I agree the toxic moderation (and tone-deaf ownership!) initiated the slower decline earlier that then turned into the LLM landslide.
Tbf SO also suffered from its own success as a knowledgebase where the easy pickings were long gone by then.
It is sort of because of AI - it provided a way of escaping StackOverflow's toxicity!
Could view it as push/pull dynamics: pushed away by toxicity, pulled to good answers from AI.
Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these:
- The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard. - This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells you of the questions that survived at this point in time, this [0] is the actual graph which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation. - This is actually a Good Thing™. For years most of the questions went unanswered, non-voted, non-commented, just because there was too many questions happening all the time. So the general trend is not something that the SO community needs to do anything about. Almost 20% of every question asked is marked as duplicate. If people searched... better™ they wouldn't ask as many questions, and so everyone else had more bandwidth to deal with the rest. - There has been a shift in help desk style of request, where people starting to prefer discord and such to get answers. This is actually a bad thing because that means that the knowledge isn't public nor indexed by the world. So, information becomes harder to find, and you need to break it free from silos. - The site, or more accurately, the library will never die. All the information is published in complete archives that anyone can replicate and restart if the company goes under or goes evil. So, yeah, such concerns, while appreciated, are easily addressed. At worst, you would be losing a month or two of data.
[0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...
OP here: I had the same thought, but noticed a very similar trend in both [0]; I think this graph is more interesting because you'd expect the number of new users to be growing [1], but this seems to have very little effect on deleted questions or even answers
[0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927371#g...
[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927375#g...
The second graph here ([1]) is especially interesting because the total montly number of new users seems completely unrelated to number of posts, until you filter for a rep > 1 which has a close to identical trend
> When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard
This would be true if programming were a static field, but given that new programming languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make sense.
Programming is not a static field in the answers side, but it's in the question side. "How to print characters on a terminal with python?" is the same problem today as it was 25 years ago. The answer changed but the problem remained. That's what people saying that programming isn't static is missing: the problem space grows significantly slower than the solution space.
But you’re supposed to replace Python with a new language that hasn’t been asked about.
> which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation.
I would say that this graph looks a lot more extreme, actually!
At my place of work we use an indexing service for discord that creates an index of searchable static pages for all discord interactions.
So while I agree the help desk style system isn’t really better it also doesn’t necessarily mean that it is lost forever in a silo.
Before you ask, we use https://www.linen.dev/ but I’m sure there are other similar solutions by now
Your post formatting is making this very difficult to read
I am aware, I tried to do some kind of bullet point as I've seen other posts, but I don't understand how to "activate it"
there is no special list rendering in HN markdown. You just have to put extra spaces between each list item so that they are separate paragraphs
What exactly do you mean by "asymptomatic"? The proper meaning of the word does not fit into what you wrote.
"Asymptomatic" means you have a cold but you show none of the symptoms, hence a-symptom-atic, no symptoms.
parent is meaning asymptote as in maths where a line is approaching to a value but never touching it. maybe it was a typo or auto correct...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote
I guess I'm the only one that was a fan of SO's moderation. I never got too deep into it (answered some TypeScript questions). But the intention to reduce duped questions made a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of a "living document" where energy is focused on updating and improving answers to old versions of the same question. As a user looking for answers it means I can worry less about finding some other variation of the same question that has a more useful answer
I understand some eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette but overall I'd say about 90% of the time I clicked on a SO link I was rewarded with the answer I was looking for.
Just my two cents
The problem with duplicate questions is that they weren't duplicates at all, and mods weren't competent enough to tell a difference.
Show me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I will tell you exactly what happened.
I think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof that you're right.
No, but it will show, as someone else already responded, that they don't understand SO systems and processes at all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the question. Most questions aren't even closed by moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as community user. The community user gets attributed of all automated actions and whenever the user agrees with closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4]
This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and how long it has been working this way, you will see that cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get resolved once they are known.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...
[2]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...
[3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250922/can-we-clari...
[4]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/213575
I logged into my old account and found an old question I asked:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...
The linked answer seems like a valid guess for a relevant dupe. Like I said in my comment, "I understand a few eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette" but I really don't think this was as widespread of a problem as people are making it out to be.
They also have Meta Stack Overflow to appeal if you think your question was unfairly marked as a dupe. From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
> From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes. In my experience, though, the large majority of requests are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking duplicates at all.
That was not closed by a moderator. In fact, it was closed automatically by the system, when you agreed that the question was a duplicate. Because of my privilege level I can see that information in the close dialog:
> A community member has associated this post with a similar question. If you believe that the duplicate closure is incorrect, submit an edit to the question to clarify the difference and recommend the question be reopened.
> Closed 10 years ago by paradite, CommunityBot.
> (List of close voters is only viewable by users with the close/reopen votes privilege)
... Actually, your reputation should be sufficient to show you that, too.
Anyway, it seems to me that the linked duplicate does answer the question. You asked why the unit-less value "stopped working", which presumably means that it was interpreted by newer browsers as having a different unit from what you intended; the linked duplicate is asking for the rules that determine the implicit unit when none is specified.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79530539/how-is-an-ssh-c...
Question: How is an SSH certificate added using the SSH agent protocol?
> Closed. This question is seeking recommendations for software libraries, tutorials, tools, books, or other off-site resources
> The community is reviewing whether to reopen this question as of 36 mins ago.
Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
You went and deleted the question immediately after it was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/79530539/timeline
> Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
It’s not asking for documentation, it’s quite literally asking how to do something. There are links to documentation to prove that I read all the documentation I could (to preemptively ward off the question getting closed).
Yes, I deleted it because I solved the question myself, no need for it to exist as a closed question. How can I “Edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. You can edit the question or post a new one.”? The answer is quite literally facts (the message format) and citations which is what I was hoping to get from someone else answering.
I undeleted it so I could give this example.
> So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.
What would looking at it again do? I had no idea it was being voted to close in the first place; I have no way to request a review; and the instructions for what to do to “fix” the questions make absolutely no sense so there’s nothing to change before it gets “looked at again”.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
You had me looking through my history. Here is an example from 12 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-my...
Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.
Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you
That is a specific question.
Any more specific and I suspect it would have been closed as too specific to their environment / setup instead.
I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I didn't.
> Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise.
completely agree
> But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines.
And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not sure where discord fits in that)
> Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.
I don't understand how there is supposedly any hostility on display there.
I also agreed with this vision. It was meant to be more like Wikipedia rather than Reddit.
Those saying that StackOverflow became toxic are absolutely correct. But we should not let that be it's legacy. It is IMO still today one of the greatest achievements in terms of open data on the internet. And it's impact on making programming accessible to a large audience cannot be understated.
I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g...
I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations.
People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time.
It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)
Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.
The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows:
With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?
> The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request
They also completely missed the fact that 0xfaded did write a blog post and it’s linked in the second sentence of the SO post.
> There is a relatively simple numerical method with better convergence than Newtons Method. I have a blog post about why it works http://wet-robots.ghost.io/simple-method-for-distance-to-ell...
Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What can come between?
I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project.
To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite.
May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.
Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded.
> Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked. > I wrote a program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for the next five years curating the content it held. For another five years a collection of people did the same work with love for what was there. But that was the end. A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content suffered.
A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the collective effort of a small group, worked in the mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30 years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place, that I'd like to visit on the web. :(
[0] https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/issues/51#issue...
Great idea! https://paste.voklen.com/wiki/Main_Page If people start using it I'll get a proper domain name for it.
An algolwiki is a great idea, but I just wanted to say I got a good chuckle from this, thanks :)
> May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.
> To some extent that was Stack Overflow
Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?
There is https://grokipedia.com which encourages you to suggest an article and you may submit improvements to an existing article.
This is _not_ at all the same thing. Grok just ripped off Wikipedia as its base and then applied a biased spin to it. Check out the entry on Grok owner Elon Musk; it praises his accomplishments and completely omits or downplays most of his better-known controversies.
And everything is “fact checked” by the Grok LLM. Which… Yeah…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_(chatbot)#Controversies
Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.
There is https://www.wikifunctions.org/
> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably.
I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.
A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable.
Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc).
Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc.
PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem.
(See the thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315)
There is the Journal of Open Source Software perhaps:
https://joss.theoj.org/
You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own questions, too.
And there are more sites like this (see e.g. https://codidact.com — fd: moderator of the Software section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a reason to stop doing it.
StackOverflow is famously obnoxious about questions badly asked, badly categorized, duplicated…
It’s actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit from AI A LOT.
Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and creating public records for them.
And famously obnoxious about rejecting questions that are properly asked, properly categorized, and not actually duplicated.
SO is not obnoxious because the users are wrong!
The company tried this. It fell through immediately. So they went away, and came back with a much improved version. It also fell through immediately. Turns out, this idea is just bad: LLMs can't rephrase questions accurately, when those questions are novel, which is precisely the case that Stack Overflow needs.
For the pedantic: there were actually three attempts, all of which failed. The question title generator was positively received (https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388492/308065), but ultimately removed (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/424638/5223757) because it didn't work properly, and interfered with curation. The question formatting assistant failed obviously and catastrophically (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/425167/5223757). The new question assistant failed in much the same ways (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/432638/5223757), despite over a year of improvements, but was pushed through anyway.
This is an excellent piece of information that I didn’t have. If the company with most data can’t succeed, then it seems like a really hard problem. On the side, they can understand why humans couldn’t do it either.
Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I’ve depended on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find a community that was talking about something I needed solved. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder every year. The balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem.
My genuine impression is that communities moved from forums to discord. Maybe that's why they are harder to find
And discord is a terrible tool for knowledge collection imo. Their search is ok, but then I find myself digging through long and disjointed message threads, if replies/threading are even used at all by the participants.
Not to mention, it's not indexed by search engines. It's the "deep web".
Yes, its a treasure hunt every single time when some project has most of their discussions on discord. It's awful imo.
Keep using SO?
When I grew up shakes fist at clouds I had a half dozen totally independent forums/sites to pull on for any interest or hobby no matter how obscure. I want it back!
It's true though, and the information was so deep and specific. Plus the communities were so legitimate and you could count on certain people appearing in threads and waiting for their input. Now the best you have are subreddits or janky Facebook groups .
The discoverability, both from the outside and within is absolute trash, but the closest I find of those old forums nowadays are Discord servers.
Agreed, it’s the discoverability that’s the real problem here at the end of it all. All the veterans are pulling up the drawbridges to protect their communities from trolls, greedy companies, AI scraping, etc. which means new people can’t find them. Which then means these communities eventually whither and stop being helpful resources for us all.
Usenet?
I guess? I feel like it’s too small now. It can’t cover all my interests
> where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?
The same place people have always discovered problems to work on, for the entire history of human civilization. Industry, trades, academia, public service, newspapers, community organizations. The world is filled with unsolved problems, and places to go to work on them.
Einstein was literally a patent clerk.
This is a perfect example of an element of Q&A forums that is being lost. Another thing that I don't think we'll see as much of anymore is interaction from developers that have extensive internal knowledge on products.
An example I can think of was when Eric Lippert, a developer on the C# compiler at the time, responded to a question about a "gotcha" in the language: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8899347/10470363
Developer interaction like that is going to be completely lost.
This type of thing often lives in the issues / discussion tab of a github repo now a days, for better and worse.
Yuck. I don't know if it's just me, but something feels completely off about the GH issue tracker. I don't know if it's the spacing, the formatting, or what, but each time it feels like it's actively trying to shoo me away.
It's whatever the visual language equivalent of "low signal" is.
Still gh issues are better than some random discord server. The fact that forums got replaced by discord for "support" is a net loss for humanity, as discord is not searchable (to my knowledge). So instead of a forum where someone asks a question and you get n answers, you have to visit the discord, and talk to the discord people, and join a wave channel first, hope the people are there, hope the person that knows is online, and so on.
Yeah, I suspect that a lot of the decline represented in the OP's graph (starting around early 2020) is actually discord and that LLMs weren't much of a factor until ChatGPT 3.5 which launched in 2022.
LLMs have definitely accelerated Stackoverflow's demise though. No question about that. Also makes me wonder if discord has a licensing deal with any of the large LLM players. If they don't then I can't imagine that will last for long. It will eventually just become too lucrative for them to say no if it hasn't already.
Discord isn’t just used for tech support forums and discussions. There are loads of completely private communities on there. Discord opening up API access for LLM vendors to train on people’s private conversations is a gross violation of privacy. That would not go down well.
I think most relevant data that provides best answers lives in GitHub. Sometimes in code, sometimes in issues or discussions. Many libs have their docs there as well. But the information is scattered and not easy to find, and often you need multiple sources to come up with a solution to some problem.
A lot of valuable information lived/lives in email threads that might or might not be publicly archived.
I believe the community has seen the benefit of forums like SO and we won’t let the idea go stale. I also believe the current state of SO is not sustainable with the old guard flagging any question and response you post there. The idea can/should/might be re-invented in an LLM context and we’re one good interface away from getting there. That’s at least my hope.
The second answer cites Lippert's pre-existing blog post on the subject: https://ericlippert.com/2009/11/12/closing-over-the-loop-var...
I agree that there will be some degradation here, but I also think that the developers inclined to do this kind of outreach will still find ways to do it.
I used to look at all TensorFlow questions when I was on the TensorFlow team (https://stackoverflow.com/tags/tensorflow/info). Unclear where people go to interact with their users now....Reddit? But the tone on Reddit is kind of negative/complainy
I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing questions when I was just starting to learn programming.
He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles.
He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of programming exist the way they are. I'm still thankful.
If this was repeated today, an LLM would have given a surface level answer, or worse yet would've done the thinking for me obliviating the question in the first place.
I wrote a blog post about my experience at https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning
Had a similar experience. Asked a question about a new language feature in java 8 (parallell streams), and one of the language designers (Goetz) answered my question about the intention of how to use it.
An LLM couldn't have done the same. Someone would have to ask the question and someone answer it for indexing by the LLM. If we all just ask questions in closed chats, lots of new questions will go unanswered as those with the knowledge have simply not been asked to write the answers down anywhere.
Would you share the link to the answer?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20375176/should-i-always...
You can prompt the LLM to not just give you the answer. Possibly even ask it to consider the problem from different angles but that may not be helpful when you don't know what you don't know.
For every example of that, there were 999 instances of people having their question closed, criticised, or ignored.
You can write a paper, submit the arxiv, and you can also make a blog post. At any rate, I agree - SO was (is?) a wonderful place for this kind of thing.
I once had a professor mention that they knew me from SO because I posted a few underhanded tricks to prevent an EKF from "going singular" in production. That kind of community is going to be hard to replace, but SO isnt going anywhere, you can still ask a question and answer your own question for permanent, searchable archive.
I would imagine the endorsement requirement reduces submissions by a few orders of magnitude.
At this point SO seems harder to publish into than arxiv.
If you had used the search feature you’d realize that many similar comments have already been posted on HN. Vote to close.
If only those who voted to close would bother to check whether the dup/close issue was ACTUALLY a duplicate. If only there were (substantial) penalties for incorrectly dup/closing. The vast majority of dup/closes seem to not actually be dup/closes. I really wish they would get rid of that feature. Would also prevent code rot (references to ancient versions of the software or compiler you're interested in that are no longer relevant, or solutions that have much easier fixes in modern versions of the software). Not missing StackOverflow in the least. It did not age well. (And the whole copyright thing was just toxically stupid).
I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource.
Has anyone tried building a modern Stack Overflow that's actually designed for AI-first developers? The core idea: question gets asked → immediately shows answers from 3 different AI models. Users get instant value. Then humans show up to verify, break it down, or add production context. But flip the reputation system: instead of reputation for answers, you get it for catching what's wrong or verifying what works. "This breaks with X" or "verified in production" becomes the valuable contribution. Keep federation in mind from day one (did:web, did:plc) so it's not another closed platform. Stack Overflow's magic was making experts feel needed. They still do—just differently now.
Oh, so it wasn't bad enough to spot bad human answers as an expert on Stack Overflow... now humans should spend their time spotting bad AI answers? How about a model where you ask a human and no AI input is allowed, to make sure that everyone has everyone else's full attention?
Why disallow AI input? Is it that poor? Surely it isn't.
The entire purpose of answering questions as an "expert" on S.O. is/was to help educate people who were trying to learn how to solve problems mostly on their own. The goal isn't to solve the immediate problem, it's to teach people how to think about the problem so that they can solve it themselves the next time. The use of AI to solve problems for you completely undermines that ethos of doing it yourself with the minimum amount of targeted, careful questions possible.
What's the point of AI on a site like that? Wouldn't you just ask an LLM directly if you were fine with AI answers?
I and many others already go the extra mile to ask multiple LLM's for hard questions or for getting a diversity of AI opinions to then internalize and cross check myself.
There are apps that build up a nice sized user base on this small convenience aded of getting 2 answers at once REF https://lmarena.ai/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/lm-arena-the-organization-...
All the major AI companies of course do not want to give you the answers from other AI's so this service needs to be a third party.
But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.
I encountered this recently in a niche non-US insurance project and I basically coded together the above as an internal tool. AI suggestions + human collaboration to find the best answer. Of course in this case everyone is getting paid to spend time with this thing so more like AI first Stack Overflow Internal. I have no evidence that an public version would do well when ppl don't get paid to commend and rate.
I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points.
What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake, as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated.
For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on.
>> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.
Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble.
May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.
You're absolutely correct, but the scary thing is this: What happens when a whole generation grows up not knowing how to answer another person's question without consulting AI?
[edit] It seems to me that this is a lot like the problem which bar trivia nights faced around the inception of the smartphone. Bar trivia nights did, sporadically and unevenly, learn how to evolve questions themselves which couldn't be quickly searched online. But it's still not a well-solved problem.
When people ask "why do I need to remember history lessons - there is an encyclopedia", or "why do I need to learn long division - I have a calculator", I guess my response is: Why do we need you to suck oxygen? Why should I pay for your ignorance? I'm perfectly happy to be lazy in my own right, but at least I serve a purpose. My cat serves a purpose. If you vibe code and you talk to LLMs to answer your questions...I'm sorry, what purpose do you serve?
Am I reading an AI trying to trick me into becoming its subordinate?
In 2014, one benefit of Stack Overflow / Exchange is a user searching for work can include that they are a top 10% contributor. It actually had real world value. The equivalent today is users with extensive examples of completed projects on Github that can be cloned and run. OP's solution if contained in Github repositories will eventually get included in a training model. Moreover, the solution will definitely be used for training because it now exists on Hacker News.
I had a conversation with a couple accountants / tax-advisor types about them participating in something like this for their specialty. And the response was actually 100% positive because they know that there is a part of their job that the AI can never take 1) filings requires you to have a human with a government approved license 2) There is a hidden information about what tax optimization is higher or lower risk based on their information from their other clients 3) Humans want another human to make them feel good that their tax situation is taken care of well.
But also many said that it would be better if one wraps this in an agency so the leads that are generated from the AI accounting questions only go to a few people instead of making it fully public stackexchange like.
So +1 point -1 point for the idea of a public version.
LOL. As a top 10% contributor on Stack Overflow, and on FlashKit before that, I can assure you that any real world value attached to that status was always imaginary, or at least highly overrated.
Mainly, it was good at making you feel useful and at honing your own craft - because providing answers forced you to think about other people's questions and problems as if they were little puzzles you could solve in a few minutes. Kept you sharp. It was like a game to play in your spare time. That was the reason to contribute, not the points.
Yeah, they didn't even bother to suggest paying you with tokens for the job well done! The audacity!
hehe yea this existing of course. like these guys https://yupp.ai/ they have not announced the tokens but there are points and they got all their VC money from web3 VC. I'm sure there are others trying
hehe, damn I did let an AI fix my grammer and they promptly put the classic tell of — U+2014 in there
That seems like a horrible core idea. How is that different from data labeling or model evaluation?
Human beings want to help out other human beings, spread knowledge and might want to get recognition for it. Manually correcting (3 different) automation efforts seems like incredible monotone, unrewarding labour for a race to the bottom. Nobody should spend their time correcting AI models without compensation.
Great point, thanks for the reality check.
Speaking of evals the other day I found out that most of the people who contributed to Humanities Last Exam https://agi.safe.ai/ got paid >$2k each. So just adding to your point.
I think this could be really cool, but the tricky thing would be knowing when to use it instead of just asking the question directly to whichever AI. It’s hard to know that you’ll benefit from the extra context and some human input unless you already have a pretty good idea about the topic.
Presumably over time said AI could figure out if your question had already been answered and in that case would just redirect you too the old thread instead.
AI is generally setup to return the "best" answer as defined as the most common answer, not the rightest, or most efficient or effective answer, unless the underlying data leans that way.
It's why AI based web search isn't behaving like google based search. People clicking on the best results really was a signal for google on what solution was being sought. Generally, I don't know that LLMs are covering this type of feedback loop.
thanks for sharing that, it was simple, neat, elegant.
this sent me down a rabbit hole -- I asked a few models to solve that same problem, then followed up with a request to optimize it so it runs more efficiently.
chatgpt & gemini's solutions were buggy, but claude solved it, and actually found a solution that is even more efficient. It only needs to compute sqrt once per iteration. It's more complex however.
Claude's trick: instead of calling sin/cos each iteration, it rotates the existing (cos,sin) pair by the small Newton step and renormalizes: See: https://gist.github.com/achille/d1eadf82aa54056b9ded7706e8f5...p.s: it seems like Gemini has disabled the ability to share chats can anyone else confirm this?
Thanks for pushing this, I've never gone beyond "zero" shotting the prompt (is it still called zero shot with search?)
As a curiosity, it looks like r and q are only ever used as r/q, and therefore a sqrt could be saved by computing rq = sqrt((rxrx + ryry) / (qxqx + qyqy)). The if q < 1e-10 is also perhaps not necessary, since this would imply that the ellipse is degenerate. My method won't work in that case anyway.
For the other sqrt, maybe try std::hypot
Finally, for your test set, could you had some highly eccentric cases such as a=1 and b=100
Thanks for the investigation:)
Edit: BTW, the sin/cos renormalize trick is the same as what tx,ty are doing. It was pointed out to me by another SO member. My original implementation used trig functions
Nice, that worked. It's even faster.
Edit: it looks like the claude algorithm fails at high eccentricities. Gave chatgpt pro more context and it worked for 30min and only made marginal improvement on yours, by doing 2 steps then taking a third local step.https://gist.github.com/achille/23680e9100db87565a8e67038797...
Haha nice, hanging in there by a thread
Consider updating your answer on SO - I know I'll keep visiting SO for answers like these for quite some time. And enjoy the deserved upvotes :)
Do you think you can extend it to distance from a point to an ellipsoid?
Yes, people have done this
I can relate. I used to have a decent SO profile (10k+ reputation, I know this isnt crazy but it was mostly on non low hanging fruit answers...it was a grind getting there). I used to be proud of my profile and even put it in my resume like people put their Github. Now - who cares? It would make look like a dinosaur sharing that profile, and I never go to SO anymore.
I don't disagree completely by any means, it's an interesting point, but in your SO answer you already point to your blog post explaining it in more detail, so isn't that the answer, you'd just blog about it and not bother with SO?
Then AI finding it (as opposed to already trained well enough on it, I suppose) will still point to it as did your SO answer.
Please, start a blog! Hugo + GitHub hosting makes it laughably simple. (Or pick a different stack; that’s just mine.)
Even if you’re worried it’ll be sparse and crappy, isn’t an Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want?
If you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most places
> Please, start a blog!
The second sentence of the SO post is a link to their blog where it was posted originally. The blog is not a replacement for the function SO served.
It's been a long time, but here is the writeup https://blog.chatfield.io/simple-method-for-distance-to-elli...
That's pretty nice ;)
I once wrote this humdinger, that's still on my mostly dead personal website from 2010... one of my proudest bits of code besides my poker hand evaluator ;)
The question was, how do you generate a unique number for any two positive integers, where x!=y, such that f(x,y) = f(y,x) but the resulting combined id would not be generated by any other pair of integers. What I came up with was a way to generate a unique key from any set of positive integers which is valid no matter the order, but which doesn't key to any other set.
My idea was to take the radius of a circle that intersected the integer pair in cartesian space. That alone doesn't guarantee the circle won't intersect any other integer pairs... so I had to add to it the phase multiple of sine and cosine which is the same at those two points on the arc. That works out to:
(x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y)))
And means that it doesn't matter which order you feed x and y in, it will generate a unique float for the pair. It reduces to:
x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )
To add another dimension, just add it to the process and key it to one of the first...
x^2+y^2+z^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )+( (x/z) / (x^2+z^2) )
It looks like you have typos? (x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y))) reduces to x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2/y^2 + 1) ) - not the equation given? Tho it's easier to see that this would be symmetrical if you rearrange it to: x^2+y^2+( (xy) / (x^2+y^2) )
Also, if f(x,y) = x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) ) then f(2,1) is 5.2 and f(1,2) is 5.1? - this is how I noticed the mistake. (the other reduction gives the same answer, 5.4, for both, by symmetry, as you suggest)
There's a simpler solution which produces integer ids (though they are large): 2^x & 2^y. Another solution is to multiply the xth and yth primes.
I only looked because I was curious how you proved it unique!
Hhhhmm. Ok. So I invented this solution in 2009 at what you might call a "peak mental moment", by a pool in Palm Springs, CA, after about 6 hours of writing on napkins. I'm not a mathematician. I don't think I'm even a great programmer, since there are probably much better ways of solving the thing I was trying to solve. And also, I'm not sure how I even came up with the reduction; I probably was wrong or made a typo (missing the +1?), and I'm not even certain how I could come up with it again.
2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is that provable?
Primes take too much time.
The thing I was trying to solve was: I had written a bitcoin poker site from scratch, and I wanted to determine whether any players were colluding with each other. There were too many combinations of players on tables to analyze all their hands versus each other rapidly, so I needed to write a nightly cron job that collated their betting patterns 1 vs 1, 1 vs 2, 1 vs 3... any time 2 or 3 or 4 players were at the same table, I wanted to have a unique signature for that combination of players, regardless of which order they sat in at the table or which order they played their hands in. All the data for each player's action was in a SQL table of hand histories, indexed by playerID and tableID, with all the other playerIDs in the hand in a separate table. At the time, at least, I needed a faster way to query that data so that I could get a unique id from a set of playerIDs that would pull just the data from this massive table where all the same players were in a hand, without having to check the primary playerID column for each one. That was the motivation behind it.
It did work. I'm glad you were curious. I think I kept it as the original algorithm, not the reduced version. But I was much smarter 15 years ago... I haven't had an epiphany like that in awhile (mostly have not needed to, unfortunately).
The typo is most likely the extra /, in (x/y)/(x^2+y^2) instead of (xy)/(x^2+y^2).
`2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is that provable?`
Yes, & is bitwise and. It's just treating your players as a bit vector. It's not so much provable as a tautology, it is exactly the property that players x and y are present. It's not _useful_ tho because the field size you'd need to hold the bit vector is enormous.
As for the problem...it sounds bloom-filter adjacent (a bloom filter of players in a hand would give a single id with a low probability of collision for a set of players; you'd use this to accelerate exact checks), but also like an indexed many-to-many table might have done the job, but all depends on what the actual queries you needed to run were, I'm just idly speculating.
At the time, at least, there was no way to index it for all 8 players involved in a hand. Each action taken would be indexed to the player that took it, and I'd need to sweep up adjacent actions for other players in each hand, but only the players who were consistently in lots of hands with that player. I've heard of bloom filters (now, not in 2012)... makes some sense. But the idea was to find some vector that made any set of players unique when running through a linear table, regardless of the order they presented in.
To that extent, I submit my solution as possibly being the best one.
I'm still a bit perplexed by why you say 2^x & 2^y is tautologically sound as a unique way to map f(x,y)==f(y,x), where x and y are nonequal integers. Throwing in the bitwise & makes it seem less safe to me. Why is that provably never replicable between any two pairs of integers?
I'm saying it's a tautology because it's just a binary representation of the set. Suppose we have 8 players, with x and y being 2 and 4: set the 2nd and 4th bits (ie 2^2 & 2^4) and you have 00001010.
But to lay it out: every positive integer is a sum of powers of 2. (this is obvious, since every number is a sum of 1s, ie 2^0). But also every number is a sum of _distinct_ powers of 2: if there are 2 identical powers 2^a+2^a in the sum, then they are replaced by 2^(a+1), this happens recursively until there are no more duplicated powers of 2.
It remains to show that each number has a unique binary representation, ie that there are no two numbers x=2^x1+2^x2+... and y=2^y1+2^y2+... that have the same sum, x=y, but from different powers. Suppose we have a smallest such number, and x1 y1 are the largest powers in each set. Then x1 != y1 because then we can subtract it from both numbers and get an _even smaller_ number that has distinct representations, a contradiction. Then either x1 < y1 or y1 < x1. Suppose without loss of generality that it's the first (we can just swap labels). then x<=2^(x1+1)-1 (just summing all powers of 2 from 1..x1) but y>=2^y1>=2^(x1+1)>x, a contradiction.
or, tl;dr just dealing with the case of 2 powers: we want to disprove that there exists a,b,c,d such that
2^a + 2^b = 2^c + 2^d, a>b, c>d, and (a,b) != (c,d).
Suppose a = c, then subtract 2^a from both sides and we have 2^b = 2^d, so b=d, a contradiction.
Suppose a>c; then a >= c+1.
2^c + 2^d < 2^c + 2^c = 2^(c+1).
so
2^c + 2^d <= 2^(c+1) - 1 < 2^(c+1) + 2^b <= 2^a + 2^b
a contradiction.
BTW, yet another way to do it (more compact than the bitwise and prime options) is the Cantor pairing function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairing_function
... z = (x+y+1)(x+y)/2 + y - but you have to sort x,y first to get the order independence you wanted. This function is famously used in the argument that the set of integers and the set of rationals have the same cardinality.
mm. I did see this when I was figuring it out. The sorting first was the specific thing I wanted to avoid, because it would've been by far the most expensive part of the operation when looking at a million poker hands and trying to target several players for potential collusion.
you're only sorting players within a single hand. so a list of under 10 items? thats trivial
Looks like solid code. My only gripe is the shadowing of x. I would prefer to see `for _ in range`. You do redefine it immediately so it's not the most confusing, but it could trip people up especially as it's x and not i or something.
Hahaha thanks, I never noticed that. If I ever print it out and frame it I'll be sure to fix it
SO in 2013 was a different world from the SO of the 2020's. In the latter world your post would have been moderator classified as 'duplicate' of some basic textbook copy/pasted method posted by a karma grinding CS student and closed.
My experience as well:
Stack Overflow used to (in practice) be a place to ask questions and get help and also help others.
At some point it became all about some mission and not only was it not as useful anymore but it also became a whole lot less fun.
You should write it up and submit it to some journal officially. Doesn't matter if it mostly duplicates your own (technically unpublished) work.
I have a similar story about an interesting little advance in computing that I haven't formally published anywhere, but it's at https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/171695/50292
The question boils down to: can you simulate the bulk outcome of a sequence of priority queue operations (insert and delete-minimum) in linear time, or is O(n log n) necessary. Surprisingly, linear time is possible.
Then let me quickly say: thank you! I used that algorithm three times in different projects during my academic "career" :-)
On the other hand, I once implemented something to be told later it was novel and probably the optimal solution in the space.
An AI might be more likely to find it...
> Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem.
In the same blog you published it originally, then mentioning it on whatever social media site you use? So same?
Reddit is my current go-to for human-sourced info. Search for "reddit your question here". Where on reddit? Not sure. I don't post, tbh, but I do search.
Has the added benefit of NOT returning stackoverflow answers, since StackOverflow seems to have rotted out these days, and been taken over by the "rejection police".
Naive question maybe but how haven’t the models been trained on your answer if it’s on SO?
Models are NOT search engines.
Even if LLMs were trained on the answer, that doesn't mean they'll ever recommend it. Regardless of how accurate it may be. LLMs are black box next token predictors and that's part of the issue.
Sounds like this should live in Wikipedia somewhere on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse...or maybe a related but more CS focused related page.
If you ask me your blog post is basically a paper, I’d publish to arxiv.
I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too.
I often forget just how much smaller and less siloed the internet was just ~13 years ago.
I have had this experience -- twice with the same answer. There is nothing so amusing in quite this way.
This is a really method for solving that problem! I wouldn’t have thought to use the tangents but that makes perfect sense
That algorithm reminds me of raymarching signed distance functions.
Amazing work!
Really great write-up, thanks for sharing it again!
Very cool!
Why did SO decide to do that to us? to not invest in ai and then, iirc, claim our contributions their ownership. i sometimes go back to answers i gave, even when answered my own questions.
Decide to do what?
SO didn't claim contributions. They're still CC-BY-SA
https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
AFAICT all they did is stop providing dumps. That doesn't change the license.
I was very active, In fact I'm actually upset at myself for spending so much time there. That said, I always thought I was getting fair value. They provided free hosting, I got answers and got to contribute answers for others.
Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.
So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]
I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks.
But it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.
I said to myself, let it die.
I was an early adopter. Have over 30k reputation because stack overflow and my internship started at the same time. I left because of the toxic culture, and that it's less useful the more advanced you get
> many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.
Please feel free to cite examples. I'll be happy to explain why I think they're duplicates, assuming I do (in my experience, well over 90% of the time I see this complaint, it's quite clear to me that the question is in fact a duplicate).
But more importantly, use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly. It's there for a reason.
If I had kept a list of such questions I would have posted it (which would be a very long one). But no, I don't have that list.
> use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly.
Respectfully, no. It is meaningless. If you just look at comments in this thread (and 20 other previous HN posts on this topic) you should know how dysfunctional stackoverflow management and moderation is. This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time. Nobody should waste their time and expect anything to be different.
> This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time.
The problem is that people come and say "this question is incorrectly closed", but the question is correctly closed.
Yes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places. That doesn't make them correct. I have been involved in this process for years and what I see is a constant stream of people expecting the site to be something completely different from what it is (and designed and intended to be). People will ask, with a straight face, "why was my question that says 'What is the best...' in the title, closed as 'opinion-based'?" (it's bad enough that I ended up attempting my own explainer on the meta site). Or "how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)
It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.
Once StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers.
I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.”
To their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community.
> I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script.
You can only get at most 2000 rep from suggested edits.
After you get 2000 rep, your edits aren't "suggested" anymore and require no review... and you don't get any rep for doing them.
I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it.
> To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.
I think https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 is pretty straightforward. If you can show a question of yours that was closed, I'll be happy to try to explain why.
25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat.
Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.
I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. But yeah, that and the swearing culture clash were issues I struggled with, and ultimately meant I stopped contributing.
> Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.
Yes, because doing things that way was explicitly part of the goal, from the beginning. There are countless other places where you can directly respond to people who need help (and if you like doing that, you should stick to those places). Doing things that way has negative consequences in terms of making something that's useful for on-lookers, and causing a lot of experts to burn out or get frustrated. This is stuff that Jeff Atwood was pointing out when explaining the reason for creating SO in the first place.
> I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them.
It would be better to focus on saving time for yourself, by understanding the goal. Please read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 .
Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.
There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention.
Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now.
If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.
Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.
I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system.
> Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.
I have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately.
But, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions.
> If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.
No, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no "force"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more "force" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is "working", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena.
There's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about "the site being in a death spiral". Because that is an assessment based on popularity. Popular != good; more importantly, valuing popularity is about valuing the ability of the site to make money for its owners, but none of the people curating it see a dime of that. They (myself included) are really only intrinsically motivated to create the thing.
The thing is demonstrably useful. Just not in the mode of interaction that people wanted from it.
The meta site constantly gets people conspiracy theorizing about this. Often they end up asserting things about the reputation system that are the exact opposite of how it actually works. For example, you can gain a maximum of 1000 reputation, ever, from editing posts, and it only applies to people whose edits require approval. The unilateral edits are being done by someone who sees zero incentive beyond the edited text appearing for others. They're done because of a sincere belief that a world where third parties see the edited text is better than a world where third parties see the original text.
> Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.
You're talking about people who, in almost every case, as an objective matter of fact, are not moderators. The overwhelming majority of "moderation actions" of every stripe are done by the community, except for the few that actually require a moderator (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658).
The graph is scary, but I think it's conflating two things:
1. Newbies asking badly written basic questions, barely allowed to stay, and answered by hungry users trying to farm points, never to be re-read again. This used to be the vast majority of SO questions by number.
2. Experiencied users facing a novel problem, asking questions that will be the primary search result for years to come.
It's #1 that's being canibalized by LLM's, and I think that's good for users. But #2 really has nowhere else to go; ChatGPT won't help you when all you have is a confusing error message caused by the confluence of three different bugs between your code, the platform, and an outdated dependency. And LLMs will need training data for the new tools and bugs that are coming out.
The newbies vastly outnumber the experienced people (in every discipline), and have more to ask per-capita, and are worse at asking it. Category 2 is much smaller. The volume of Stack Overflow was never going to be sustainable and was not reasonably reflective of its goals.
We are talking about a site that has accumulated more than three times as many questions as there are articles on Wikipedia. Even though the scope is "programming languages" as compared to "literally anything that is notable".
But there are other places people can go, such as https://software.codidact.com (fd: I am a moderator there).
I’m going to argue the opposite. LLMs are fantastic at answering well posed questions. They are like chess machines evaluating a tonne of scenarios. But they aren’t that good at guessing what you actually have on your mind. So if you are a novice, you have to be very careful about framing your questions. Sometimes, it’s just easier to ask a human to point you in the right direction. But SO, despite being human, has always been awful to novices.
On the other hand, if you are experienced, it’s really not that difficult to get what you need from an LLM, and unlike on SO, you don’t need to worry about offending an overly sensitive user or a moderator. LLMs never get angry at you, they never complain about incorrect formatting or being too lax in your wording. They have infinite patience for you. This is why SO is destined to be reduced to a database of well structured questions and answers that are gradually going to become more and more irrelevant as time goes by.
"well posed questions"
And that is exactly why so many people gripe about SO being "toxic". They didn't present a well posed question. They thought it was for private tutoring, or socializing like on reddit.
All I can say to these is: Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my comments. Is deleting comments allowed?"
For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain how that's not toxic?
Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then?
Yes, LLMs are great at answering questions, but providing reasonable answers is another matter.
Can you really not think of anything that hasn't already been asked and isn't in any documentation anywhere? I can only assume you haven't been doing this very long. Fairly recently I was confronted with a Postgres problem, LLMs had no idea, it wasn't in the manual, it needed someone with years of experience. I took them IRC and someone actually helped me figure it out.
Until "AI" gets to the point it has run software for years and gained experience, or it can figure out everything just by reading the source code of something like Postgres, it won't be useful for stuff that hasn't been asked before.
The first actually insightful comment under the OP. I agree all of it.
If SO manages to stay online, it'll still be there for #2 people to present their problems. Don't underestimate the number of bored people still scouring the site for puzzles to solve.
SE Inc, the company, are trying all kinds of things to revitalize the site, in the service of ad revenue. They even introduced types of questions that are entirely exempt from moderation. Those posts feel literally like reddit or any other forum. Threaded discussions, no negative scores, ...
If SE Inc decides to call it quits and shut the place down and freeze it into a dataset, or sell it to some SEO company, that would be a loss.
I think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a recreational journal or BB.
The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.
While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding.
So some possible reasons:
- Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.
- Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users.
- Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam
- Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn.
- Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented
Some non-reasons:
- Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).
> - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.
I think this is one major factor that is not getting enough consideration in this comment thread. By 2018-2020, it felt like the number of times that someone else had already asked the question had increased to the point that there was no reason to bother asking it. Google also continued to do a better and better job of surfacing the right StackOverflow thread, even if the SO search didn't.
In 2012 you might search Google, not find what you needed, go to StackOverflow, search and have no better luck, then make a post (and get flamed for it being a frequently-asked question but you were phrasing yours in a different / incorrect way and didn't find the "real" answer).
In 2017, you would search Google and the relevant StackOverflow thread would be in the top few results, so you wouldn't need to post and ask.
In 2020, Google's "rich snippets" were showing you the quick answers in the screen real estate that is now used by the AI Overview answers, and those often times had surfaced some info taken from StackOverflow.
And then, at the very end of 2022, ChatGPT came along and effectively acted as the StackOverflow search that you always wanted - you could phrase your question as poorly as you want, no one would flame you, and you'd get some semblance of the correct answer (at least for simple questions).
I think StackOverflow was ultimately a victim of it's own success. Most of the questions that would be asked by your normal "question asker" type of user were eventually "solved" and it was just a matter of how easy it was to find them. Google, ChatGPT, "AI Overviews", Claude Code, etc have simply made finding those long-answered questions much easier, as well as answering all of the "new" questions that could be posed - and without all of the drama and hassle of dealing with a human-moderated site.
The volume of basic questions is unlimited. There are new technologies every year.
Not sure. As software becomes a commodity I can see the "old school" like tech slowing down (e.g. programming languages, frameworks frontend and backend, etc). The need for a better programming language is less now since LLM's are the ones writing code anyway more so these days - the pain isn't felt necessarily by the writer of the code to be more concise/expressive. The ones that do come out will probably have more specific communities for them (e.g. AI)
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, reading some of these comments.
It looks like a pretty clear divide between the people that wanted to ask questions to get solutions for their own specific problems; and those who were aware of what the site wanted to be and how it actually operated, and were willing to put in the time and answer questions, etc.
The sheer amount of garbage that used to get posted every day required some pretty heavy moderation. Most of it was not by actual moderators, it was by high-reputation users.
(I have 25K reputation on StackOverflow, and was most active between 2011 and 2018.)
I think 95% of comments earnestly using the word "toxic" can be disregarded.
They were unaware of or unwilling to follow the rules of the site. They mistook SO for reddit, a place for socializing.
Garbage was never moderated on StackOverflow, it was always ignored.
Moderation was used by the insiders to keep new people out.
And half the garbage is from people "moderating"! You are literally rewarded points for doing moderating activities, so of course every post is flooded with BS edits, votes to close, etc.. Cobra effect and whatnot.
What points do you get for moderation activity?
The obvious culprit here are the LLMs, but I do wonder whether Github's social features, despite its flaws, have given developers fewer reasons to ask questions on SO?
Speaking from experience, every time I hit a wall with my projects, I would instinctively visit the project's repo first, and check on the issues / discussions page. More often than not, I was able to find someone with an adjacent problem and get close enough to a solution just by looking at the resolution. If it all failed, I would fall back to asking questions on the discussion forum first before even considering to visit SO.
Seems like the exit was very well timed.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...
Another plausible explanation is that the new owners didn’t develop the community in a good way. Instead of fixing the myriad of issues that were obvious to almost all contributors they instead basically let it die?
The new owners (well, not really new any more) are focused on adding AI to SO because it's the current hotness, and making other changes to try to extract more money that they're completely ignoring the community's issues and objections to their changes, which tend to be half-assed and full of bugs.
Love this comment [1] under the post
> $1.8 billion? So do those of us who contribute get any of that?
1. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...
Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe in which the Stackoverflow community was so friendly, welcoming, helpful, and knowledgeable that this seems like a tragedy and motivates people to try to save it.
But in this universe, most people's reaction is just "lol".
The number of active users at StackOverflow started dropping in the middle of 2020, i.e. long time before ChatGPT release in the end of 2022.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/192836...
As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0].
I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a discussion site, rather than the Q&A site that it was set out to be.
I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile or that they unfairly closed questions without bringing the citations required. I'm not saying at all that SO was without it's flaws in leadership, moderators, community or anything else that made the site what it was. But if you're going to complain, at least bring examples, especially when you have someone here you could hold somewhat accountable.
The problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Discord chats, StackOverflow or GitHub issues. People still don't know how to ask questions:
* [1] * [2] * [3]
[0]: https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-as... [1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670 [2]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649 [3]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515
Lots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same decline [1].
[0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/
[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph
A similar but not as strong decline. Taking the one but last datapoint for both (stackoverflow/tex respectively): 4436 and 394. If you compare this to how it looked like between 2015-2020 you get (my guess from scanning): 160,000 and 1700. So Stackoverflow as a whole went from 160K -> ~4.4K. That's like a 35x drop, compared to tex, where it's a 1700 -> 394, 4x drop.
Hate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX site.
I would ascribe that to these communities evolving differently. There is no reason to assume that the popularity of LaTeX tracks the popularity of programming languages. It's a type setting system. And that doesn't even take into account communities that exist parallel to SO/SE. Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.
> Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.
Yup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both are still somewhat active.
[0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax
[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf
I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off.
What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed.
Unfortunately it happens to every online technical community once they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN.
HN is a sponsored marketing outlet for YC first and foremost.
HN has full time staff that provides moderation and does an excellent job. Nonetheless there are numerous users who take it upon themselves to determine what content should be available to the rest of us, as if they were heroes in their own mind.
It’s a form of narcissism. While they think of themselves as community saviors everyone else thinks they are censoring assholes. Just let the moderators do their job. Unwanted content will naturally fall off either by downvoting or it will be ignored.
All the rest of ask for is just don’t be an asshole.
That has nothing to do with the fact that this forum exists to promote YC and its associated ventures.
This is horrifying.
Given the fact that when I need a question answered I usually refer to S.O., but more recently have taken suggestions from LLM models that were obviously trained on S.O. data...
And given the fact that all other web results for "how do you change the scroll behavior on..." or "SCSS for media query on..." all lead to a hundred fake websites with pages generated by LLMs based on old answers.
Destroying S.O. as a question/answer source leaves only the LLMs to answer questions. That's why it's horrific.
As someone that spent a fair bit of time answering questions on StackOverflow, what stood out years ago was how much the same thing would be asked every day. Countless duplicates. That has all but ceased with LLMs taking all that volume. Honestly, I don't think that's a huge loss for the knowledge base.
The other thing I've noticed lately is a strong push to get non-programming questions off StackOverflow, and on to other sites like SuperUser, ServerFault, DevOps, etc.
Unfortunately, what's left is so small I don't think there's enough to sustain a community. Without questions to answer, contributors providing the answers disappear, leaving the few questions there often unanswered.
I joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards .NET and I’ve been working with Microsoft web technologies since the mid 90’s.
My SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through it, I also thoroughly enjoyed helping others. I also started to publish articles on CodeProject and it kicked off my long tech blogging “career”, and I still enjoy writing and sharing knowledge with others.
I have visited the site maybe once a year since 2017. It got to the point that trying to post questions was intolerable, since they always got closed. At this point I have given up on it as a resource, even though it helped me tremendously to both learn (to answer questions) and solve challenging problems, and get help for edge cases, especially on niche topics. For me it is a part of my legacy as a developer for over 30 years.
I find it deeply saddening to see what it has become. However I think Joel and his team can be proud of what they built and what they gave to the developer community for so many years.
As a side note it used to state that was in the top 2% of users on SO, but this metric seems to have been removed. Maybe it’s just because I’m on mobile that I can’t see it any more.
LLM’s can easily solve those easy problems that have high commonality across many codebases, but I am dubious that they will be able to solve the niche challenging problems that have not been solved before nor written about. I do wonder how those problems get solved in the future.
Apparently it was removed to reduce the load on the database see [0], [1].
The top voted response points out that SO are [2]:
> destroying a valuable feature for users.
Kinda wild they allowed it. As that answer also suggests, perhaps rather than remove it entirely, they could just compute those stats at a lesser frequency to reduce load.
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/399661/389220
[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/437862/5783745
[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/400024/389220
i've been using SO for 17 years as well but ultimately gave up out of frustration, and a lot of comments here are correctly pointing at the toxicity but the real-time chats were on a next level, it was absolutely maddening how toxic and aggressive these moderators were.
I do use Claude a lot, but I still regularly ask questions on https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/. It's often just too niche, LLMs hallucinate stuff like an entire non-existent benchmarking feature in Snakemake, or can't explain how I should get transcriptome aligners to give me correct quantifications for a transcript. I guess it's too niche. And as a lonely Bioinformatician it can be nice to get confirmation from other bioinformaticians.
Looking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any LLM.
Interestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched!
It’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower?
[1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover...
StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.
Instead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This killed the pub and with it the business.
The most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old timers took when they joined. And duplicates allow anyone with a grudge to take revenge. After all, there are no new questions, and you will always find a duplicate if you want to.
To create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by itself.
Another exemple being "Comments are not for extended discussion ! if you want to actively bring value by adding information, later updates, history, or just fun that cultivates a community, please leave and go do that somewhere else like our chat that doesn't follow at all the async functionnality of this platform and is limited to the regular userbase while scaring the newcomers."
"comments are not for extended discussion" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided "yeah, let's kill this".
The people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes just letting a community do what it wants (within reasonable boundaries, of course) leads to a better and more successful product than actively trying to steer things in a certain direction.
Oh absolutely - when it becomes clear you have high engagement somewhere, adapt that feature to facilitate the engagement! They could have made comments threaded or embedded ways to expand it into the right forum, but instead they literally shut down engagement. Bonkers.
A lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of accountability for everyone that influences the product, it eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with common sense stepped in to put an end to it.
The decline is not surprising. I am sure AI is replacing Stackoverflow for a lot of people. And my experience with asking questions was pretty bad. I asked a few very specific questions about some deep detail in Windows and every time I got only some smug comments about my stupid question or the question got rejected outright. That while a ton of beginner questions were approved. Definitely not a very inviting club. I found i got better responses on Reddit.
Would you care to link to any of those, even ones that might appear to be deleted?
I was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but got stuck in one particular function.
It was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I couldn't find anything on Google.
Had no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time. (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I didn't understand the documentation)
It was a fond memory of the site for me.
This is a huge loss.
In the past people asked questions of real people who gave answers rooted in real use. And all this was documented and available for future learning. There was also a beautiful human element to think that some other human cared about the problem.
Now people ask questions of LLMs. They churn out answers from the void, sometimes correct but not rooted in real life use and thought. The answers are then lost to the world. The learning is not shared.
LLMs have been feeding on all this human interaction and simultaneously destroying it.
One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..?
Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it).
Some commenters suggest it's not the moderation. I think it is the key problem, and the alternative communities were the accumulated effect. Bad questions and tough answer competition is part of it, but moderation was more important, I think. Because in the end what kept SO relevant was that people made their own questions on up to date topics.
Up until mid-2010s you could make a seriously vague question, and it would be answered, satisfactory or not. (2018 was when I made the last such question. YMMV) After that, almost everything, that hadn't snap-on code answer, was labelled as offtopic or duplicate, and closed, no matter what. (Couple of times I got very rude moderators' comments on the tickets.)
I think this lead some communities to avoid this moderator hell and start their own forums, where you could afford civilized discussion. Discourse is actually very handy for this (Ironically, it was made by the same devs that created SO). Forums of the earlier generation, have too many bells and whistles, and outdated UI. Discourse has much less friction.
Then, as more quality material was accumulated elsewhere, newbies stopped seeing SO on top of search, and gradually language/library communities churned off one by one. (AI and other summaries, probably did contribute, but I don't think they were the primary cause.)
Don't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses?
It should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible.
SO has lost against LLMs because it has insistently positioned itself as a knowledge base rather than a community. The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it.
They basically made a bet because they wanted to be the full anti-thesis of ad-ridden garbage-looking forums. Pure information, zero tolerance for humanity, sterile looking design.
They achieved that goal, but in the end, they dug their own grave too.
LLMs didn’t admonish us to write our questions better, or simply because we asked for an opinion. They didn’t flag, remove our post with no advance notice. They didn’t forbid to say hello or thanks, they welcomed it. They didn’t complain when we asked something that was asked many times. They didn’t prevent us from deleting our own content.
Oh yeah, no wonder nobody bothers with SO anymore.
It’s a good lesson for the future.
IMO people underestimate the value of heavy moderation. But moderation heavy or light, good or bad.
Why wait hours for an answer when an LLM gives it in seconds?
LLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing.
The steep decline in the early months of 2023 actually started with the release of ChatGPT, which is 2022-11-30, and its gradually widening availability to (and awareness of) the public from that date. The plot clearly shows that cliff.
The gentle decline since 2016 does not invalidate this. Were it not for LLMs, the site's post rate would now probably be at around 5000 posts/day, not 300.
LLMs are to "blame" for eating all the trivial questions that would have gotten some nearly copy-pasted answer by some eager reputation points collector, or closed as a duplicate, which nets nobody any rep.
Stack Overflow is not a site for socializing. Do not mistake it for reddit. The "karma" does not mean "I hate you", it means "you haven't put the absolute minimum conceivable amount of effort into your question". This includes at least googling the question before you ask. If you haven't done that, you can't expect to impose on the free time of others.
SO has a learning curve. The site expects more from you than just to show up and start yapping. That is its nature. It is "different" because it must be. All other places don't have this expectation of quality. That is its value proposition.
I recall when they disabled the data export a few years ago [0], March 2023. Almost certainly did this in response to the metrics they were seeing, but it accelerated the decline [1].
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-da...
[1] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...
Do I read that correctly — it is close to zero today?!
I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.
Not zero, but it is smaller than when it launched originally. And this is questions asked, not how many people are visiting and reading posts.
Still a couple thousand away from 0.
But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available.
I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there
Reddit is a forum morphed into social media. I usually use "question + reddit" on Google to confirm my suspicions about a subject. It is a place to discuss things rather than find answers. It is extremely politicized (leftist/liberal), but that's a whole other story.
It's surely both.
Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest
Most questions have negative karma.
Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem.
All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders.
SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them.
SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls.
Most? 3 out of 15 is most? What's wrong with youngsters today?!
Right now, at the first 15 one has a positive vote, 6 have negative votes, going down to -3.
The 8 at 0 are just taking longer to amass those negative votes. It's incredibly rare that a positive one ever goes somewhere.
So, I reviewed the questions list again but this time, since the time I did view it about 9 hours ago [1]. 10 were negative scored, 5 positive scored, 15 0 scored, 4 has received answers. This is better than normal for those ~30. Usually it's 80% without votes, without answers, without comments. So, this is a significan improvement... which I suspect is due the time of the day, as the US and most of Europe were asleep.
So, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in the positive direction.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest
It is not "karma". It is not to be taken personally. It represents the objective usefulness of the question, not the personal worth of the person asking it.
It's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now for confirmation.
I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_.
It can be both. Push and pull factors work better together than either does individually.
The last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun. If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small difference is probably due to the turn of the year.
There are tabs to change to a table view. I see a peak of 207k in 2014 and the last month was only 3,710.
The decline has been pretty surprising: more questions asked in May 2021 (133,914) than in the whole of 2025 (129,977).
The steep decline started way before llms
It's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going to train the AI for free.
Maybe the graph doesn’t include questions that get closed by moderators?
SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.
So the question for me is how important was SO to training LLMs? Because now that the SO is basically no longer being updated, we've lost the new material to train on? Instead, we need to train on documentation and other LLM output. I'm no expert on this subject but it seems like the quality of LLMs will degrade over time.
Yep, exactly. Free data grabbing honeypots like SO won't work anymore.
Please mark all locations on the map where you would hide during the uprise of the machines.
Why publish anything for free on the internet if it's going to be scanned into some corporation's machine for their free use? I know artists who have stopped putting anything online. I imagine some programmers are questioning whether or not to continue with open source work too.
It has often been claimed, and even shown, that training LLMs on their own outputs will degrade the quality over time. I myself find it likely that on well-measurable domains, RLVR improvements will dominate "slop" decreases in capability when training new models.
Here’s how SO could still be useful in the LLM era:
User asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation to add additional insights and correct mistakes.
If you’re a user that asks a duplicate question, it’ll just direct you to the good conversation that already happened.
A symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS human generated content that dives deeper and provides reassurances in correctness
Users could upvote whether Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT provided the best answer. The best of three is surfaced, the others are hidden behind a "show alternatives."
However, I can see how this would be labelled "shoving AI into everything" and "I'm not on SO for AI."
Or they can start claiming copyright on the training content
Should probably email this to the CEO of SO
SO peaked long, long before LLMs came along. My personal experience is that GitHub issues took over.
You can clearly see the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022. That was the final nail in the coffin.
I am still really glad that Stack Overflow saved us from experts-exchange.com - or “the hyphen site” as it is sometimes referred to.
As everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI, and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before looks similar
Also not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?) but that's definitely one of the things that made me default reach for other links instead of SO.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png
Those popups were a big contributor for me to stop using SO. I stopped updating my uBlock origin rules when LLMs became good enough. I am now using the free Kimi K2 model via Groq over CLI, which is much faster.
StackExchange forgot who made them successful long ago. This is what they sowed. I don't have any remorse, only pity.
When Hans Passant (OGs will know) left, followed by SE doing literally nothing, that was the first clue for me personally that SE stopped caring.
That said, it is a bit shocking how close to zero it is.
One thing you won’t get with in an LLM is genuine research. I once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code of vim to see how the poster’s question could be resolved. [0]
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619423/backup-restore-th...
Stackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck.
It's surprisingly tame still given it interests tens (hundreds?) of millions of people at varying age and background and mostly when the mind is occupied by a problem. I always found it surprising there's not more defacing and toxicity.
For this occasion, I just logged in to my SO profile; I've been a member for 9 years now.
To me, back when I started out learning web dev, as a junior with no experience and barely knowing anything, SO seemed like a paradise for programmers. I could go on there and get unblocked for the complex (but trivial for experts) issues I was facing. Most of the questions I initially posted, which were either closed as duplicates or "not good enough," really did me a lot of discouragement. I wasn't learning anything by being told, "You did it wrong, but we're also not telling you how you could do it better." I agree with the first part; I probably sucked at writing good questions and searching properly. I think it's just a part of the process to make mistakes but SO did not make it better for juniors, at least on the part of giving proper guidance to those who "sucked".
AI is a vampire. Coming to your corner of the world, to suck your economic blood, eventually. It’s hard to ignore the accelerated decline that started in late 2022/early 2023.
LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls
If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure.
In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.
What should worry everyone is what system will come after LLMs. Data is being centralized and hoarded by giant corporations, and not shared publicly. And the data that is shared is generated by LLMs. We're poisoning the well of information with no fallback mechanism.
> If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure.
You know that's not what they meant, but why bring up the license here? If they were over the top compliant, attributing every SO answer under every chat, and licensing the LLM output as CC BY-SA, I think we'd still have seen the same shift.
> In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.
Best case it gives you the same level of content, but more customized, and faster.
SO being wrong and wasting your time is also common.
Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge?
A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources.
However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb.
LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO.
Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?
There's https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ for the more academic CS questions btw.
it is indeed a shame. if you are doing anything remotely new and novel, which is essential if you want to make a difference in an increasingly competitive field, LLMs confidently leave you with non-working solutions, or sometimes worse they set you on the wrong path.
I had similar worries in the past about indexable forums being replaced by discord servers. the current situation is even worse.
Web has been solved for a decade imo.
Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more.
I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board.
With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September).
I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed.
Man after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard, but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I, as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM instead of being able to peruse great answers from different perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.
I used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?
Good riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any alternative.
And that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking questions because they didn't want to run the moderation gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing.
LLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will oblige.
Looking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve.
Good.
This is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic.
LLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup.
Makes for a good conspiracy theory. Bad actors intentionally making the internet hostile. https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE
The corresponding answers graph: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/a...
Game over. I didn’t notice all the toxicity mentioned in the other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe. It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its name is part of web history, and there’s no denying that.
A decline in number of questions asked can also be because most people's questions are already answered in the database.
How would you query this for post views over time?
They had pretty neat infra, maybe it still runs in the same clever way. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...
Recently they've chucked out their own servers:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-sa...
Notably the default Redis client for most .NET developers is still StackExchange.Redis.
People are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them.
This is concerning on two fronts. The questions are no longer open (SO is CC-BY-SA) and if Q&A content dies then this herds even more people towards LLM use. It's basically draining the commons.
Yup. This, to me, provides another explanation for why the social contract is being used as toilet paper by the owner class. They literally see the writing on the wall.
I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time.
I use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago.
I used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time.
So perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP.
I don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components.
I fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/
For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM"
https://sosimulator.xyz/
Whenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246333
Wow. I was expecting a decline but not to that extent.
StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me.
Actually I think it never did.
It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account.
And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile.
I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities.
I don't think the reputation system ever worked that way - new users could always answer questions, but comments required more reputation.
OK, you might be right and I got it backwards. It still felt wrong at the time before I got enough points.
Seems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold to a private equity firm.
I think the disallowing of “controversial” technical questions might have helped as much as the AI boom.
So frustrating to be reading a deeply interesting technically and intense debate to be closed down by an admin.
Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.
AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).
SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?
I find a lot of good stuff in GitHub issues
Local meet-ups I guess?
I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.
Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse?
The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.
Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood:
> Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!
https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...
> Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...
> Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn’t always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive. > All the content on the site must exist to serve the mission of learning over entertainment – even if that means making difficult calls about removing some questions and answers that fail to meet those goals, plus or minus 10 percent.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
I think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to "get to the bottom" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism.
All of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered.
I remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/discussion board, which feels more appropriate for the current state of the industry.
The question askers got stupider and stupider.
The founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way that site is worth $1.8 billion now.
Spolsky and co. sold SO in 2021 - timing IS everything.
Wow, that's not just collapsing, that's collapsed.
Everyone is saying LLMs did this site in, but what if we just asked all the questions already? We should be celebrating how we solved programming!
Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to. LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact.
And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder.
I'm not sad.
LLMs did not eat SO, it was SO that fed the LLMs too well.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.
I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.
Now imagine what happens when a new programming language comes along. When we have a question, we will no longer be able to Google it and find answers to it on Stack Overflow. We will ask the LLMs. They will work it out. From that moment, the LLM we used has the knowledge for solving this particular problem. Over time, this produces huge moat for the largest providers. I believe it is one of the subtler reasons why the AI race is so fierce.
Approaching 0 is wild
Moderator team must be over the moon
Where will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration.
Why do you think people stop creating new posts just because SO collapsed? People on GitHub issues and Reddit answer programming questions everyday.
SO was dying even before ChatGPT was released. LLMs just accelerated that process.
Ideally, you'd train them on the core documentation of the language or tool itself.
Hopefully, LLMs lead to more thorough documentation at the start of a new language, framework, or tool. Perhaps to the point of the documentation being specifically tailored to read well for the LLM that will parse and internalize it.
Most of what StackOverflow was was just a regurgitation of knowledge that people could acquire from documentation or research papers. It obviously became easier to ask on SO than dig through documentation. LLMs (in theory) should be able to do that digging for you at lightning speed.
What ended up happening was people would turn to the internet and Stack Overflow to get a quick answer and string those answers together to develop a solution, never reading or internalizing documentation. I was definitely guilty of this many times. I think in the long run it's probably good that Stack Overflow dies.
I still would like to get other humans' experiences and perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO doesn't go away entirely.
With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that, but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".
When you see AI giving you back various coding snippets almost verbatim from SO, it really makes you wonder what will happen in the future with AI when it can't depend on actual humans doing the work first.
IMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community.
Before writing the comment I had in my head I did a CTRL+F search for "toxic" in the comment section here. 42 occurences. It says everything about what's happening to SO.
I certainly use it less now that I get a CloudFlare check every time I go and sometimes it fails or loads forever. I usually just go back to search results and look elsewhere after a second or two.
I'm glad I learned how to program when you could coax useful answers from Google searches.
Whenever a Stack Overflow result comes up now the answer is years old and wrong, you might as well search archive.org.
I recently wrote a blog post similar to this situation: https://ertu.dev/posts/ai-is-killing-our-online-interaction/
SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now.
Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be?
The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?
Incompetent moderation and the air of hostility towards contributing users.
PostTypeId = 1 means "only select questions."
2 would be answers.
There is a bunch more of further post types: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/2678
Good times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show proof, etc.)
Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting questions and making snark comments.
People are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also don’t forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push his personal political agenda.
There will be a generation of coders that will never have heard of stack overflow.
Interesting timing. I just analyzed TabNews (Brazilian dev community) and ~50% of 2025 posts mention AI/LLMs. The shift is real. The 2014 peak is telling. That's before LLMs, before the worst toxicity complaints. Feels like natural saturation, most common questions were already answered. My bet, LLMs accelerated the decline but didn't cause it. They just made finding those existing answers frictionless.
It's unfortunate that SO hasn't found a way to leverage LLMs. Lots of questions benefit from some initial search, which is hard enough that moderators likely felt frustrated with actual duplicates, or close enough duplicates, and LLMs seem able to assist. However I hope we don't lose the rare gem answers that SO also had, those expert responses that share not just a programming solution but deeper insight.
I think that SO leveraging LLMs implicitly. Like I'll always ask LLM first, that's the easiest option. And I'll only come to SO if LLM fails to answer.
So it seems all the questions have now been answered– Great!
How is Experts Exchange doing?
I am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me as much over the last ten years.
It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I for one will mourn its loss.
I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to be shared.
While SO is mostly dead, narrower stackexchange communities may be very much alive. E.g. the Emacs community is responsive.
Someone needs to archive the entirety of StackOverflow and make it available over torrent so that it can be preserved when the site shuts down. Urgently.
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange Found it
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange_20250930
> As of (and including) the 2025-06-30 data dump, Stack Exchange has started including watermarking/data poisoning in the data. At the time of writing, this does not appear to apply to the 2025-09-30 data dump. The format(s), the dates for affected data dumps, and by extension how the garbage data can be filtered out, are described in this community-compiled list: https://github.com/LunarWatcher/se-data-dump-transformer/blo.... If the 2025-09-30 data dump turns out to be poisoned as well, that's where an update will be added. For obvious reasons, the torrent cannot be updated once created.
There's no doubt that generally LLMs are better. In addition SO had its issues. That being said I can't help but worry about losing humans asking questions and humans answering questions. The sentimentality aside, if humans aren't posing questions and if humans aren't recommending answers, what are the models going to use?
Wonder if this is a good proxy for '# of Google Searches'. Or perhaps a forward indicator (sign of things to come), since LLMs are adopted by the tech-savvy first, then the general public a little later, so Stack Overflow was among the first casualties.
While I generally agree with the narrative of the negative arc that stack overflow took, I found (and have as recently as a few months ago) that I could have enjoyable interactions on the math, Ux, written language, and aviation exchanges. The OS ones in the middle (always found the difference between Linux and superuser confusing).
For me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose. Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me.
But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?
> Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?
I don't think such generic place exists. I just do my own research or abandon the topic. I think that in big companies you probably could use some internal chats or just ask some smart guy directly? I don't have that kind of connections and all online communities are full of people whose skill is below mine, so it makes little sense to ask something. I still do sometimes, but rarely receive competent answer.
If you have some focused topic like a question about small program, of course you can just use github issues or email author directly. But if you have some open question, probably SO is the only generic platform out there.
To put it differently, find some experts and ask which online place to the visit to help strangers. Most likely they just don't do it.
So for me, personally, LLMs are the saviour. With enough forth and back I can research any topic that doesn't require very deep expertise. Sure, access to an actual expert willing to guide me would be better, but I just don't have that luxury.
Find the relevant discord and search.
It's amazing to think that in the next few years, we may have software engineers entering the workforce who don't know what StackOverflow is...
On what will the LLMs train, now?
On the same 14 year old Java questions like the rest of us.
user chat logs clearly. They are not much diffent than the SO Q&A format.
I think the bigger point we should realize is LLMs offer the EXACT same thing in a better way. Many people are still sharing answers to problems but they do it through an AI which then fine tunes on it and now that problem solution is shared with EVERYONE.
Far better method of automated sharing of content
There are still airgapped places in the world where transferring information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they’re not worth using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for engineering teams working in these environments.
But surely transmitting information to actual SO is just as forbidden?
And if you're making an internal-only site, it doesn't really need to be name-brand SO.
Stack overflow was useful with a fairly sanitized search like “mysql error 1095”. Agentic LLMs do there best work when able to access your entire repository or network environment for context, which is impossible to sanitize. For a season, private environments will continue to be able to use SO. But as LLMs capture all the good questions and keep them private, public SO will become less and less relevant. It’s sad to see a resource of this class go.
I just typed the literal phrase "mysql error 1095" into ChatGPT with no context, and it gave an answer that was no worse than SO for the same search.
No need to give it anything about my repository, network environment, or even a complete sentence.
https://stackoverflow.co/internal/
Surprising to see it bottom out so hard.
I imagine at least some of the leveling off could be due to question saturation. If duplicates are culled (earnestly or overzealously) then there will be a point where most of the low hanging fruit is picked.
I wonder what the April 2020 spike is about... maybe lockdowns meant people started learning new stuff?
I'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often at one time. These days I don't even think about it.
Looks like they sold right before the end. Wonder whether the AI deals they've struck make up for the difference
Stagnation started around 03/2014 and downward trend started around 03/2017. Looking at dates, it doesn't seem like AI caused those trend changes.
The SO mission is complete. It's now an LLM training set.
Things would be different if we didn't.
This is the elephant in the room most commenters chose to turn their blind eye to.
It's a very toxic place, you ask a doubt, and someone will abuse you, down vote you, make you feel you are not for to be a human. Better it's dead.
Acquired in June 2021 for $1.8 billion usd. Hurts but acquirer Naspers is a prolific tech investor, its stake in TenCent is worth > $150B usd today.
This is a great example of how free content was exploited by LLMs and used against oneself to an ultimate destruction.
Every content creator should be terrified of leaving their content out for free and I think it will bring on a new age of permanent paywalls and licensing agreements to Google and others, with particular ways of forcing page clicks to the original content creators.
What if we filter out all the questions closed as dupes, off topic, etc?
It's funny to see people's new year's resolution to learn how to code in the graph
I suspect a lot of the traffic shift is from Google replacing the top search result, which used to be Stack Overflow for programming questions, with a Gemini answer.
Everyone here talks about LLMs, but for me, the reason why StackOverflow became totally irrelevant is because of dedicated Discord servers and forums.
Good riddance.
I stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the community was such a pain in the ass to deal with.
I misread the title at first and thought it was hacker news questions [comments] that were being graphed. That’s what I would be interested in seeing
While the decline started a decade ago in 2014 and accelerated in 2020, the huge drop since 2023 is remarkable
Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity.
Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their practical value and original intent.
Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing products. As a result, answers from genuine users that recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience were frequently removed altogether.
Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction and discourages broader user participation.
Has AI summarization led to people either getting their answer from a search engine directly, and failing that, just giving up?
RTFM
TFMs are not a thing anymore. Most of them are merely collections of sparse random dots one might join by sheer luck only, granted no other knowledge of the system being attempted to document.
I don't know what you are building, but if a thing doesn't have comprehensive docs it doesn't make it into my stack.
glad I don’t work at any place that would make a professional write this comment
The result is not surprising! Many people are now turning to LLMs with their questions instead. This explains the decline in the number of questions asked.
Couldn’t have happened to a meaner community
You're clearly excluding gaming communities such as DotA2.
Everything we have done and said on the internet since its birth has just been to train the future AI.
It was a good idea ruined by the compulsively obtuse and pedantic, not unlike Reddit.
Maybe the average question will be more "high level" now that all simple questions are answered by LLMs ?
they pretend like everything is fine at HN too wouldn't surprise me looking similar in the future.
I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.
Clicked on the link and got stopped by cloudflare. Guess I won't be giving them any more traffic either.
StackOverflow cemented my fears of asking questions. Even though there were no results for what I needed, I was too afraid to ask.
Good riddance, now I’m never afraid to ask dumb questions to LLM and I’ve learned a lot more with no stress of judgement.
I've never once asked a question on there Mostly because you can't unless your account has X something-points. Which you get by answering questions.
This threw me off so much when I got started with programming. Like why are the people who have the most questions, not allowed to ask any...?
Are you sure? You can post questions even with a completely new blank account. It's comments that require some reputation, maybe you were thinking about those?
You don't need any reputation to ask questions, you only need to create an account.
StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs.
Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of course, but I wanted to do so out of principle.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
Someone turn off the lights on the way out
If nobody is on StackOverflow, What will LLM's train on for new problems?
GitHub Issues and Disscussions + searching the code base, fetching the docs and some reasoning on top. Maybe even firing up a sandbox VM and testing some solutions.
They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion".
Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.
Probably similar for google. My first line of search is always chatgpt
End of an era. :-(
A death graph.
Kind of sad that they ran out of ideas how to fix SO.
Gee...I wonder why it's almost dead (again)?
It is always good to see other cultured people who structure their SQL queries the right way.
I wonder if google search saw a similar hit
My personal bet is that traditional search engines face a -70% usage drop at the moment.
I doubt it. If I want to ask AI a simple question I type it into Google now.
anecdotally, i personally stopped using google a lot in the last few years
Derivative of S curve
Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough?
Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.
They would just use documentation. I know there is some synthesis they would lose in the training process but I’m often sending Claude through the context7 MCP to learn documentation for packages that didn’t exist, and it nearly always solves the problem for me.
The brilliance of StackOverflow was in being the place to find out how to do tricky workarounds for functionality that either wasn't documented or was buggy such that workarounds were needed to make it actually work.
Software quality is now generally a bit better than it was in 2010, but that need is ultimately still there.
Assuming these end up in open source code llms will learn about them that way.
Aren't a lot of projects using LLMs to generate documentation these days?
They pay lots of humans to train the LLMs..
And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - "too broad". I mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds?
Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well.
It was a good 16 year-ish run.
It makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time as people google questions and get results. It would be interesting to look at the number of comments and views of questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have driven declining engagement and discussion.
Another note to add here: The whole system was stupid, too! What do you mean, I can only give answers, but not comment?
While there is much more to say about SO's demise, the "interaction" on the platform was definitely not one of its strengths, either.
Comments have less visibility in moderation. This has made them spam / link farming targets in the past.
A lot of people come to Stack Overflow with the mindset that it is a forum to discuss something and have tangential discussions in the comments.
https://stackoverflow.com/tour
> This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.
The "no comments until you get a little bit of rep" is to try to help people realize that difference from the start.
Good riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost never being asked on Stack overflow).
The most annoying example I can think of (but can’t link to, alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question, and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn’t answer the question, telling the person to just Google the answer.
Not surprising. It's very often a toxic, unhelpful, stubborn community. I think maybe once or twice in years of use did I ever find it genuinely welcoming and helpful. Frequently instead I thought "Why should I even bother to post this? It'll just get either downvoted, deleted, or ignored."
Why did SO traffic halve from it's maximum till the ChatGPT release date? Also, for a long time after initial release, ChatGPT was pretty much useless for coding questions. It only became more or less useful ~2 years ago. So there's about 4x decline from peak to explain with reasons that do not involve LLMs. What these could be?
LLMs are dogshit in many ways but when it comes to programming they are faster than people, respond instantaneously to further information, and can iterate until they understand the problem fully.
Bonus is that you don’t get some dipshit being snarky.
llm killed stackoverflow
I mean, I kinda of miss it. But man it was a hostile place for newcomers.
Only ever asked one question and I tried to answer more than a handful but never really clicked with the site.
I do wonder if it would have faired better under the original ownership before it was sold in 2021-06-02.
I’m glad it’s dead. They were super rude.
I ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000.
I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated.
This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people using R, this seemed like something completely new. So, they just downvoted the question and told me I was wrong.
I ended up answering my own question… but was also told that was wrong and that all points must have the same error interval.
Instead of answering a programming question, people just went around denying experimental physics.
I think that was the beginning of the end of SO for me.
This entire thread is fantastic. I felt nostalgic, angry and then concerned all at once.
I love LLMs. But I miss SO. I miss being able to have that community. How do we bring it back?
If anyone from the Stack Overflow team is reading this (I assume you are): what’s the plan?
My take: stop optimizing for raw question volume and start optimizing for producing and maintaining “known good” public knowledge. The thing SO still has that Discord and LLMs don’t is durable, linkable, reviewable answers with accountable humans behind them. But the workflow needs to match how devs work now.
A concrete idea: make “asking” a guided flow that’s more like opening a good GitHub issue. Let me paste my error output, environment, minimal repro, what I tried, and what I think is happening. Then use tooling (including an LLM if you want) to pre check duplicates, suggest missing details, and auto format. Crucially: don’t punish me for being imperfect. Route borderline questions into a sandbox or draft mode where they can be improved instead of just slammed shut.
Second idea: invest hard in keeping answers current. A ton of SO is correct but stale. Add obvious “this is old” signaling and make it rewarding to post updates, not just brand new answers.
Last thing that I don’t see an easy answer to: LLMs are feasting on old SO content today. But LLMs still need fresh, high quality, real world edge cases tomorrow. They need the complexity and problem solving that humans provide. A lot of the answers I get are recycled. No net new thinking. If fewer people ask publicly, where does that new ground truth come from? What’s the mechanism that keeps the commons replenished?
So… TLDR…my question to this group of incredibly intelligent people: how does SO save itself?
This is incredible. Anyone who claims LLMs aren't useful will need to explain how come almost every programmer can solve 95% of his problems with an LLM without needing anything else. This is real usefulness right here.
EDIT: I'm not saying I'm loving what happened and what is becoming of our roles and careers, I'm just saying things have changed forever; there's still a (shrinking) minority of people who seem to not be convinced.
Maybe we had too many programmers who weren’t capable of actually solving their own problems. Maybe only one in twenty programmers were ever actually any good at their jobs.
I really admire that they publicly posted this data, and hope that the platform can find a new type of pivot or draw to bring back a community.
Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again.
AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with.
When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer.
This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.
>This post was not virtue signaling enough and therefore closed as duplicate.
SO had the greatest minds but the shitiest moderation
Flag it as off topic
What an incredible graph
For those who have historically wondered about or objected to "moderation" (people usually mean curation here; as the overwhelming majority of the actions they're talking about are not performed by moderators) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-picked list of important discussions from the meta site explaining some policy basics:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 If your question was not well received, read this before you post your next question
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254358 Why the backlash against poor questions?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 What is Stack Overflow’s goal?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262446 Are we being "elitist"? Is there something wrong with that?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791 The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high (N.B.: linked specifically for the satire in the top-voted answer)
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 Why is "Can someone help me?" not a useful question?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/309208 Are there questions that are too trivial to answer?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 Why isn't it required to provide comments/feedback for downvotes, and why are proposals suggesting this so negatively received?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366757 On the false dichotomy between quality and kindness
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 Can we make it more obvious to new users that downvotes on the main site are not insults and in fact can help them help themselves?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 Comments asking for clarification or an MCVE are not rude/abusive
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/370792 Is this really what we should consider "unwelcoming"?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (fd: my self-answered Q&A)
Note that IDs are in chronological order. The rate of new meta.stackoverflow.com posts fell off dramatically at some point because of the formation of a network-wide meta.stackexchange.com. The earliest entries listed here are from 2014.
Some of the comments in these links are hilariously elitist. They are actively embracing a hostile environment, especially towards newcomers, but how do they expect to grow and maintain a community when they are scaring users away?
Seems like there are "blocked by cloudflare" number of questions per month.
Their blocking of everyone not using chrome/etc from accessing their website probably contributed quite a bit to the implied downturn I'm reading in other comments.
Even if you get on the site you'll end up dealing with Cloudflare's BBBaaS (breaking back buttons as a service).
Now the real question is...
Which AI company will acquire whats left of StackOverflow and all the years of question/answer data?
It is already acquired.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
Holy shit.
I not even hearing stack overflow survey for 2025
damn bro, its sad how "tradition" is gone now
edit: I know they still doing it but usually there is "viral" post,yt video etc for developer talking about it in my feed
now??? less people talk about it anymore
Cool, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344599
Wonder why my submission wasn't featured and this one went to #1 immediately ... oh wait I actually know :^)!
Why?
Stackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom. Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is mainly about asking and answering questions.
Since the trend must go on, we expect StackExchange to now offer answers, and the user responses need to be questions. We could even make a quiz game show out of that! /s
it died
The most toxic, degrading, and insulting forum for people. My questions, as well as my answers, always got poisonous criticism. Good.
Eternal September is finally over =)
It was impossible to ask certain programming questions. Asking there was truly last resort.