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Oh yes. Now I remember. I used to visit the site every day.
I love helping my fellow developers and answering their questions whenever I can.
My reputation there is 29,020, and I've contributed 645 quality answers.
I used to brag about this.
Now I had to think a bit to remember SO still exists.
My last answer was on May 28, 2021, over five years ago.
Obviously it wasn't LLMs that drove me away. And I'm not sure what it was.
Was it the culture, as others here pointed out? Or did I just get busy with other things?
---
Update: Now I think I remember what muted my enthusiasm.
Some of you older programmers may have used jQuery.
There is a common convention to use $ as the first character of a variable name that is a jQuery object:
One of my few claims to fame is that I invented that convention and promoted it on the early jQuery mailing list.Someone asked about this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/205853/why-would-a-javas...
The top-rated answer, with 1542 votes, is a good summary.
The second answer, with 278 votes, is as irrelevant as an answer can be.
I'm in third place with 71 votes. I gave the story behind the naming convention, because I like people to know the "how and why".
It gets better! This question was marked as a duplicate of another one. That other question has a wild variety of answers, but none that does what I tried to do: explain the reason and background for the convention.
Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.
my reputation is 29,459, my last answer October 15, 2021, close enough to be considered the same IMO.
For me, the thing that drove me away, is that you'd spend time on writing good answers, to provider lore, etc, but it was increasingly difficult to find "good" questions to answer. There were increasingly many "homework" questions, and far fewer questions where people _had_ put the effort in.
And, an increasing animosity to the people answering the questions.
The community became toxic, and it wasn't the only the gatekeepers, everyone wanted something for free, and StackOverflow suffered from the "open source burn-out" problem.
Certainly I did.
So I ended up with a large number of "revival" and "necromancer" badges for getting upvotes for answers on old previously unanswered questions. And many of my questions have my own answers posted a couple days later.
IOW, I provided a lot of value to SO. But I got even more value out of them, finding many more answers than I provided, especially since many of my answers were for very obscure questions. A real significant win-win.
I think this would have been a better model for SO -- encouraging more of this sort of drive by helpfulness rather than gamifying/socializing so much to encourage direct helping.
now I have kids, so they get my teaching attention instead. And I don't touch Twitter.
I started it as a way to learn things. Mostly picked questions that were on the edge of my understanding, researched the problem for myself, and then tried to provide clear and detailed answers. So I got a lot out of it too.
My view for when SO started to decline is also similar to yours - being flooded with poor quality questions. And on average people asking questions became more arrogant, put little effort in, and demanded the whole place to change so they can paste their broken code and have someone fix it for an upvote.
So I think I naturally and slowly drifted away from using SO. However, publicly stated reasons for SO's downfall often proclaim there was something wrong with people who answered questions. That they were rude or were "gatekeeping". I always feel alienated reading those, since it's very different from how I experienced the site.
My last answer was December 28, 2015, and corresponds pretty closely with me getting a more interesting and engaging job. That, and the two areas I knew well were maturing and there were a lot fewer easy questions to answer.
Whenever I took the time to make a long answer on a question, I saw some mod close the question as a duplicate of an existing one - even though the question could have some minute detail that was different, or perhaps there was some recent change in the landscape that meant an answer in 2020 would be different from one in 2013. But no: aggressive marking as duplicate even though clearly as a _community_ it would be much better to have a more recent discussion, perhaps more alternative answers and just allowing the near-duplicates.
I would generally classify those as “homework” questions.
I don’t think anyone in the org wanted to face the fact that the underlying assumptions in their model was flawed. The older an upvote the less reliable it becomes.
I feel that people are not getting that is one of the larger issues with AI and pretty much everywhere people interact online.
Many of these places and projects were things we truly poured our energy into. But people change, just as operating systems and commandline executables do. At the same time, places like that, once they are gone, lose their weight... so any site that was really large or particularly represented a version of the zeitgeist of whatever subgroup, once it goes defunct, is kind of written out of any sort of AI historical lookup.
Also, there's so many answers on SO that a lot of people just use the Search function to find answers, if they choose to use SO instead of google or whatever. It is very useful for older and historical answers.
Stuff like this is basically what drove me away as well. The top-rated answer was frequently not the answer. It was "an" answer to "a" question, but not the "the" answer to "the" question.
That, and I'd ask a variation of a question and it would get flagged as a duplicate of an already-answered question, except the original question and none of the scored answers contained the answer.
On topic: thanks for this great summary of the issue. I too miss the prime stackoverflow days. Although the availability of LLMs has allowed me to learn new things and generate some code again, the passion and love for programming that was on (the early) stackoverflow, I do miss. Also the times of just buying a book to learn about a new tool or language (jQuery in Action teached me a lot) feels different from just asking Claude Code to fix or explain something.
Z80 Assembly! Fortran! ENIAC cables!
And the ghost of Alan Turing shows up.
(not even joking)
(In other words, my daddy bought me a C64 in the eighties. ;-))
I also had the thought, I think I independently invented the same convention, but I am getting old and I probably at least somewhere read some code that was written that way and it made sense. Or maybe I read an article about it and started using it.
The thing about StackOverflow was it hit at a moment in time when everyone was excited about this stuff. I remember listening to Joel Spolski's and Jeff Atwood's podcast about building the site, Jeff thought it would take 3 months, Joel thought they needed a real timeline.
There was so much pent up demand for it, that it just immediately took off. But it also seemed to replace the various personal blogs where people would write about some problem they had and how they fixed it.
I don't really have a feeling about Stackoverflows demise one way or the other. I think I initially contributed one maybe two answers, got a couple nitpicks on the precise nature of the answer and kindof lost interest. Which is interesting because I remember Joel and Jeff explicitly wanting to solve for the issue that happened when someone asked a question and were immediately told they were taking the wrong approach, instead of just answering their question. I guess the burden shifted from the questioner to the answerer.
The query in this thread further confirms it, by november 2022 (ChatGPT reveal), usage had already dropped to ~109120 questions/month as compared to peak usage in March 2014 at 207169 questions/month.
The trend continued since but their decline is surely not caused by LLM:s.
Oh let me remind you, it was the expertsexchange that was actually useful!
That happened often enough that I just gave up. I rarely felt the need to ask questions cause I was pretty good at what I did so I quit altogether. For fun, I signed in and noticed about a 2000 uptick in my standing and three "best answer" awards.
Culture or no culture LLMs killed SO for good, there's simply no need for it anymore
There was a lot of blocking and downvoting of questions which was both a good and bad thing.
If you had an expertise on a certain topic, the questions were often very simple and repetitious (e.g. I knew a decent amount at relational databases), but also you'd get people asking for whole system designs which got a bit ridiculous.
It wasn't great for asking about little known products or libraries etc and I often found no one responded to questions on certain js libraries or BI tools. Which was quite annoying, maybe because it appealed more to certain types of developers.
I guess you served your time and most people don't want to be answering questions every day for ever! There was a guy called Tom Kyte from Oracle who ran a question site for over 20 years - it must have taken a lot of his time, but if you're out there Tom it was very much appreciated!
Rather than culture, for me it was the moderation body.
There were a bunch of people that were policing the dumbest minutie, and being assholish about that.
I occasionally would get my answers rewritten to have a completely different tone. My tone was not polemical or controversial in any way. It was just my tone. It was me. And somebody was not okay with that. They would edit MY TEXT and potentially put words in my mouth.
That's absolutely unacceptable.
Ten years on and i'm still salty about that, and i cheerish stackoverflow's death every time it gets brought up.
StackOverflow: Rest in piss, you won't be missed.
Now its legacy is that its prototype pollution is the reason we can't have `contains` and call `includes` instead.
For me, I think I left for a few reasons. All of them are some flavor of "the design is user-hostile".
The first reason is the "traps" they put in the moderation review queue process. These always felt like shit, even if you were right. And for some reason they frequently picked questions where you could reasonably pick multiple reasons to close a question... and they'd yell at you for getting it wrong! Really, this needlessly punitive experience is the heart of why SO was so awful, because everything is like that across the whole site. Some of the network sites aren't like that, but it's rare. And there were just so many Meta questions where the upvoted response was "this would be hard to do right, so instead we're going to do it the way we all know is wrong but it's easy."
The second reason is just how awful the onboarding is. The site constantly had problems with people either not posting code or posting screenshots of code. I don't know why they didn't make a beginner form, similar to what you often see on GitHub issue trackers for large projects (i.e., always include this, always include this, include this if it's relevant, etc. and it's in the textarea box when you start a question). Instead they assume that you know how to ask a question, give you a completely blank form, and then aggressively policy anything where you didn't do it right. I think the one thing to come out of that site is that people do not inherently know how to ask questions. [Which, if anybody has been responsible for responding to IT tickets, oh, boy, do they not know how to ask questions or report problems. "I'm getting errors running my report in the Finance application. I need this report soon! Help!" No mention of which report. No mention of what the report parameters were. No mention of which error message. They don't know what the error message means so, obviously, it must not be useful to anybody.]
The third reason is the site finger-pointing. "This doesn't belong here so I'm locking and closing your question," is possibly the most ridiculous thing ever. Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.
But, I think the final nail in the coffin is just how aggressively awful rpg.stackexchange.com is, which seeks objective, hyperliteral answers to game questions that are, by design, subjective and intentionally meant to be played with interpretation and nuance. The result is a handful of highly active users will nit pick any answer or question they don't like. Really, I think it's the GameFAQs Forum clique problem, to a significant extent. Some people really have nothing better to do except quash the utility of a site they have a small amount of control over, and it largely ruins the whole experience for the majority of other people. And, unlike a subreddit, you can't just go make your own version on the same topic. It doesn't work like that.
They exploit the basic human needs and build whole exploiting platforms on it and then kick you out from the nest like a cuckoo does with other bird chicks. The abnormal modding and other shenanigans also killed my interest quite quickly, but in hindsight I have to say, good riddance. People are naive and gullible, and give out decades of experience on a whim, because they think that everyone is as good and benevolent as them. While in reality there are a lot of truly evil and selfish people out there and at the ned of the day using their knowledge against the good ones.
And now here we are in the AI madness, where a similar exploitation is happening just at a much bigger scale, using the benevolent and naive people's information against them.
> Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0.
Of course stepping past the licensing question - I would have never contributed to SO as I did had I known what was to come.
With SO itself I could at least see the value in having a central store of knowledge for these topics and so, hey, I don’t mind that they got to be the ones to make it happen and profit.
“I noticed $email looked like $('#email')” isn’t exactly an exciting bit of history, even if you spend multiple paragraphs trying to pump yourself up.
1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.
2. AI clearly finished the job.
I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.
SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It dropped off a cliff when, 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow. Even then, it looks like 4 months of ChatGPT speed-ran about a year's worth of traffic decline, and then the slope went back to approximately the pre-AI angle.
I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L
Stack Exchange was built on an implicit social contract people contributed their expertise and thousands of hours of unpaid work because they believed they were building a collectively governed knowledge resource. The company owned the platform, but the community created its value.
After time, management became increasingly centralized and disconnected from contributors. Also the policing of questions based on geeky criteria and not what users wanted. The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone, qmd at least thats why i quit. Quality control gradually became useless gatekeeping.
So there were really more than one problems, corporate management treating contributors as free labor, and established contributors treating their moderation as authority over everyone else, there were bad tools closing questions. The platform had become extremely hard to use for posting questions, finding amswers, moderator work. For me it was useless. Incidentally the closing of “opinion” questions was the worst decision since it was the only thing that could make it distinct from AI produced answers.
For some of the events there is paper here with details https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08884v1
This is wrong. People don't get that SO is moderated almost entirely by users. Users are those that down vote. Users are those who vote to close a question, and when a question reaches consensus it's closed. Users are those watching the review queue. Mods mainly did bigger stuff with additional tools.
So users wanted it how it was. And for good reason. If you actually participated on the site, like watching new questions arriving in a constant stream, it was obvious that most of it was low quality. People here will bemoan they got a question closed or no help, but that's to me mostly entitlement. The rules are clear, it was to create a Q&A site, not solve your specific question for free. To me that's not hostile.
This is exactly what drove me away. It's basically Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy. SO got so overrun with people that were dedicated to Maintaining Order that the site itself stopped being useful. I feel like at least half the time I would go visit, the question that brought me there had been marked as a duplicate or closed. Pointing out that the fire hose is mostly low quality doesn't change this.
All those people fighting to keep SO pristine now preside over a kingdom of nothing.
This. Way before LLMs.
Already when I was writing my master thesis I could get very little out of it.
All of my questions were too specific and went unanswered.
My most voted answer explains how to install header files on debian.
1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.
3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
This was before LLMs or COVID.
> ...
> 3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there. And whenever I did I had to be super-defensive from the get go. It was either people trying their hardest to close it, or "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question).
I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions, but in retrospect they took the wrong approach. They should have let people ask and answer questions freely, even dups. Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.
It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.
The one thing that always struck me, was that most (not some) of the high-score individuals had 1-digit question counts (with that digit frequently being "0"). It was clear that asking questions was a "demerit." These were folks judging questions, that had no idea how to ask a question, themselves.
Also, I found that many were not ones that worked on shipping software. It seemed that their vocation was SO. That's very much like the kid that spends all his time, playing Counterstrike, and giving advice to soldiers in theater.
I'm really big on apprenticeships. We become masters, by moving through being juniors. It gives us an extremely solid base, and elicits acknowledgment from others.
Journeymen can often be demanding and irascible, but they command respect, by demonstrating that they have been in your shoes, and that's really important. You suffer the slings and arrows, because you know that there's a clear path to where they are at.
I have friends that are former US Marines, and they all have Boot Camp stories. These stories all feature downright abusive Drill Sergeants. But they also all profess immense respect for these dudes, because they came from years of experience, and they often showed boots how to do something, by demonstrating it, themselves, at a high degree of skill.
> "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves."
-Brendan Behan
> I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions
I think both of these are true, but I'm not sure that many of the contributors (or even many of the moderators?) _really_ cared too much about building the "curated list of questions".
I'd posit that part of the problem was also its competitiveness – contributors wanted to earn rep, so they ignored constraints or answered the question they really wanted to answer. Some of the tags I used to frequent had a few contributors who seemed to do nothing but answer SO questions, so there were never any good questions left for a mere mortal with other commitments in their day.
I am generally unconvinced that reputation-based systems like SO's are actually useful. Contrast SO with a project mailing list or issue tracker – where I've had some of the best support – where there's nobody tracking rep or keeping a tally, and everyone is there to simply help and share their knowledge.
> Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
I did plenty of free moderation over time on the review queues. I have no idea today why I invested so much time in that, for it was a thankless task and ultimately didn't feel I could move the needle on the bigger problems.
However, when you spend an hour looking at low-quality answers, questions that have he's been asked like ten times already, etc, I get the sense that the people doing the moderating were trying their best - some of them, at least. No doubt there are mods there who just enjoy the miniature lower trip a la overzealous reddit mods, and I can't imagine the stress of trying to handle the amount of traffic some of the exchanges got.
Also a lot of communities do their own QA on discord where they can modererate themselves.
In reading the site rules and meta discussions, SO always seemed to have been explicitly designed to invite, cater to, and directly nurture them.
Have seen this every where, even in case of people. If people are dreading to even approach you for something, its over for you. You can't get just the good things to pass through a filter. No such thing exists.
In many ways you need to be open for everything(apart from outright wrong things, like abuse) including stupid things, to get the good things.
The ridiculously strict "no duplicates" policy guaranteed that the old, increasingly outdated answers would remain the only answers forever. In retrospect, I believe a site like SO wants to encourage some rate of duplicates, to ensure that answers remain fresh.
Just yesterday I looked something up on SO and the answer was 14 years old. Would've been a pretty relevant answer back when I first started using SO, but not now.
They really killed themselves through strict moderation. It's incredibly sad, it was a good resource while it lasted.
The one time I tried, I couldn't answer directly because I had no reputation, and I couldn't comment either, but I could edit the question (!) which someone else had already done, answering the question in the question. It was an incomplete answer, so I added another edit with a complete answer. Then the mod who approved my edit also added a newline to it, so it was them and not me who was credited (unless you went to the 'history' page).
I gave up after that.
Totally. There were so many safeguards in place, for a newcomer it is quite hard to contribute.
They also never understood a core principle of such platforms. The noise is not noise but what carries such platforms. They even had it quantified, some of their most upvoted questions are off topic because they are opinion based. Bad and good questions (and answers) come hand in hand.
Well, they were the backbone of professional IT/SWE, so of course they did a lot of things right obviously.
But it's also what wrecks such platforms.
SO didn't arise in a vacuum; it was explicitly a reaction to how shitty ExpertSexchange had gotten by then with an anything-goes moderation policy.
They should have accepted a certain level of mess instead of being so strict. After all, even good popular answers become outdated sooner or later.
First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.
The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.
Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].
I was glad when S.O. put an end to them.
The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about. Asking was terrible because otherwise you get the other forms of crap. That's what everyone knew going in and it was a common observation that specifically motivated creating the site in the first place.
I used to end the questions with "It's not a duplicate of AAA because BBB is different. It's also not a duplicate of CCC because DDD". It DID force you to check for already answered questions, but the automated hints while you typed was often good enough to spot duplicates.
In the end, imagine wasting half an hour to post a four-lines issue... No thanks.
And even if I find the right existing question, the accepted answer might not be the one I need. Sometimes the question asked accepts the wrong question. Sometimes the current right answer didn't exist at the time of the answer acceptance.
SO was a good first approximation of a good Q&A site. It didn't evolve with the times.
Good riddance.
I feel this is the critical bit. People are quick to dismiss this problem as a moderation problem, but I don't agree. I believe it was a query problem, and the absolute lack of support for tying both questions and answers to specific software versions, or range of software versions. So you'd see answers from ages ago marked as the right answer to a question, even though it was using some deprecated version.
Questions on how to address the same issue when new versions were out where closed as duplicates because literally the question was asked before and answered as well. But the answer nowadays would not be applicable.
Then to sidestep this problem you see the phenomenon where ancient questions end up having multiple answers, with newer answers even out voting the accepted answer. And even those would be deprecated as well.
So SO was designed as a system where a single question can only possibly have a single accepted answer. Ever. And anyone asking similar questions would by design be routed to he question that was asked and answered. But the system was designed over the concept of static information and static notion of truth. Which the world definitely doesn't follow.
So, the place was a shit hole.
For the Javascript ecosystem in particular... it also massively helped that projects finally started to work on their documentation. The churn rate was insane and documentation or working examples took an afterthought for far too long, that is what drove so many people to SO in the first place.
This was single-handedly the work of arrogant self-righteous moderators who would close random useful questions as not useful just to prove they were doing something. A lot of us long timers got annoyed at selective enforcement of rules and never looked back. It's sad because it was actually a fun place to hangout. Too much moderation always kills the vibe.
I enjoyed answering algorithm questions. Unfortunately, every so often, people who weren't into algorithms would show up. And somehow summoned each other. To close good questions.
It was clear that they didn't understand the topic. They couldn't recognize what a good question, or a good answer, was. I wound up going away, coming back every few years, go until my next bad experience, and leave again.
Each time, the population answering those questions was smaller.
I believe that a lot of good people left like I did. Then just didn't come back.
Asking questions was difficult and any difficulty questions I might ask would not get a response anyway.
Answering questions was a gamble, sometimes you would get rewarded, most of the time you would not.
Asking questions did become painful later on. But it was the default site to choose whenever you googled a programming issue for years after.
One way that stackoverflow does stand out from the other stackexchange sites is that its half life appears far shorter. On a log scale plot it has a steeper descent than the other stackexchange sites. I'm not sure what to make of that. Another interesting thing is that the math stackexchange initially declines more slowly than the others for a year or two and then decays pretty similarly. You can also see examples in some of the other sites of their decay beginning before chatgpt releases (e.g. drupal). You can also see some sites decaying a decade earlier (e.g. expressionengine). I think those outliers are from their subject being too specific and going out of style.
I got the cross-site data from data.stackexchange.com with this vibe-coded query:
And, StackExchange has adjusted stale/inactive question deletion scripts as a result of this change: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/419988/we-ve-rework...
The declining number of questions is hence not a side-effect or a mistake, but just means that they reach their end-goal. It's actual a measure of success. (Now you can disagree, whether that philosophy was reasonable or sustainable in the first place, but given there choice, this is the logical conclusion and end goal.)
AI replaced Google Search in many ways more directly on arrival than those.
SO to me was weak as it had outdated answers to outdated questions (yet related to search queries) that nobody maintained well.. and the community more focused on patronising to push their point of view than being essentially objective in many ways.
that was a total killer to me and I started preferring to come back to books, manuals and researching topics myself than short cuts like SO.. and that research is heavily optimised during AI/LLM era, yes, but that's just one of many nails to SO's coffin.
Tangental, but I tried plotting number of questions by month including deleted questions. It shows similar trends to questions by month (so nothing particularly interesting): https://imgur.com/a/NLLB3OK
Query: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1969...
It's kind of sad: I bet there was some excitement around the SO office. Is this it? Are we on the way back? Have people remembered that we're here and now they're returning? Alas, no, they weren't, and they weren't. That must've been rough.
Maybe it was more consolidation of tech and better docs over time.
I'm fairly certain this early decline came from the fact that many common questions had already been answered, and therefore were available via Google, so hardly anybody asked them again. In the beginning there were just way more unanswered questions.
The first was how they would repeatedly mark my posts as dupes when in reality they weren't. Sure, my questions had large overlaps with existing questions. But mine had sufficient nuanced differences that my questions warranted being open.
The second is how they would repeatedly rewrite my posts. And extensively so! It no longer sounded like it was written by me. And any sense of warmth or humanity of my posts were entirely stripped away! So sterile and cold. I have to tell you, having a post that you spend time composing, only to have some moderators a-hole rewrite it is a very negative feeling. And to see a message posted publicly to the web with my username next to it, as though I'm the one that wrote it, is wrong.
Stack Overflow brought their death to themselves.
And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.
It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.
It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.
I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
The moderation style in the latter years was very different than at the beginning.
It was always heavily moderated, but after some point it felt like there were more layers of moderation and rules and cultural expectations added every year.
Moderation went from being a background cleanup operation that quietly kept the site in line to being the primary thing I expected to see when following a StackOverflow link from Google. In the later years it felt like every other StackOverflow search result was going to be the question I had followed by a moderator shutting it down for some reason before anyone could answer.
The moderation wore me out and I wasn’t even posting questions, just trying to find answers!
Actually, talking to ChatGpt, I found this article: “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.” ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...) and that actually shows what the SO admins didn't get (imo obviously).
They thought the problem was people not being nice. But that actual problem was that SO was "gamified" and it's gamified interface made it impossible to win unless someone was ultra-competitive (and I'd those types burned-out over time as well). People not being nice was real but it was side-effect of the situation (questions answered instantly so a would-be question answered had to be constantly racing).
It's easy to imagine how the admins didn't see the situation. Each up of intensity seemed to up the engagement and so seemed a good thing. The question of whether the process was sustainable didn't appear and when there were problems it was attributed to something else.
I think
No, it absolutely very much was not. Even granting that you mean actions of the community (what we call "curation") rather than the small and extremely strained moderation team, way too much stuff historically got through, while people yelled at the OP in the comments and argued over downvotes instead of taking the action that actually matters: voting or flagging to close the question. Worse, people would post answers that acknowledge the problem with the question and asking OP in the answer text to fix things.
I know because I was part of that mess back then, because I didn't know better. That, in turn, was mostly because the entire set of ground expectations was poorly communicated, and the community wasn't given the tools to improve that communication (e.g. couldn't edit the help pages, had their feedback about the discoverability of site documentation ignored, etc.). But it was also because Atwood and Spolsky hadn't refined their intuition about why beginners' bad questions are bad. (Hint: it is not because most of their problems are easy to solve, or "beneath" experts.)
> when following a StackOverflow link from Google
Google got worse at search over the years, so you ended up seeing low-quality versions of the question more often. And the site got way too big (there is no reason why there should be more than three times as many publicly visible questions on Stack Overflow, as publicly visible articles on Wikipedia), such that search results could get diluted with irrelevant low-quality questions that happened to have a lot of keyword overlap with what you wanted. And misleading questions didn't get cleaned up, so you would search for X and find a question where the OP hadn't tried to analyze the situation at all and ended up asking about X when the problem was actually Y, and got the question closed as a duplicate of the main Y "canonical". (I know because I used to lose considerable amounts of hair trying to find the X canonical that I knew was there but stubbornly refused to turn up in searches.)
If "moderation" had actually "always" been "heavy" then you wouldn't have had this problem because this stuff would have gotten hidden from public view, one way or another.
> a moderator shutting it down
Again, these actions are overwhelmingly not taken by moderators, and phrasing things this way reflects a refusal to interact with the community on its own terms and understand its policies. Those who hold an outsider mindset are bound to end up feeling like outsiders.
You know that users are going to call anything that happens to their posts on any website “moderation” right, and after decades of that being the norm that’s what the word means
Huh. I had the opposite experience. The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
I stopped bothering, after a number of questions went answered only by me (after I found the solution on my own).
It did reduce the insults, but that seemed to be the only gain that I got, for carefully articulating my questions.
LLMs aren't perfect, but they don't imply that I'm being lazy, for not already having the answer, and they do give me an answer, instantly (and, like SO, the answer is not always the best one).
I have engaged with some younger devs who don't even bother turning the thought into a question. They make statements and expect you to do the work of inferring the question. Which I feel like they got from chatbots since it's faster and LLMs don't care if you make them jump through hoops.
> The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
There is a sweet spot of providing just enough detail but not too much in asking a good question. And even the best only “bat 300”. I've posted answers to my own questions plenty of times when I got no response.
I hear you on the hostility. Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow. The first time I tried asking a question on IRC I got mocked so bad I logged out and never tried again. Most forums were like that.
I gravitated to Ruby back then because it was one of the only forums people would be patient and empathetic with me.
The “answer my own question” feature was meant for exactly that. Had quite a few like that, and sometimes I still got better answers than I found
I have repeatedly had this experience in trying to craft The perfect question for a consultant who was also a mathematics professor, in finding the essence of the question the answer becomes clear and I never even have to send the email
Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.
Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.
Yes, that was part of the point. I hope you posted anyway (after checking for a duplicate, and assuming the underlying problem wasn't just a typo), and provided your own answer for it. That is an explicit part of how the site is supposed to work (but an incredibly poorly communicated one).
> Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow.
SO actually considerably improved on that axis over time. It's just that tons of people erroneously think that being expected to meet certain standards in asking a question (in particular, doing the necessary debugging work to locate and reproduce a problem, or the necessary contemplation to properly specify a task), is the same thing as yelling at people for not knowing answers to easy things. That goes both ways: people get upset when their question is closed, and people think they're helping by excluding easily answered questions because they're easily answered. In reality, the main problem is questions that are easy but complex, i.e. which really break down into multiple separate easy questions or require digging through a code dump to find a trivial error.
60000 rep btw
or just a great form of your question if someone genuinely wanted to answer it, not pump their score, dopamine etc?
From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between "broadly applicable" and "too specific". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my homework by posting pictures of my WIP and citing Youtube videos I'm trying to follow but, apparently, this is already toeing the line. I honestly don't know what the mods expect of a good question there. Of course, there will be an appreciable degree of case-specificity in my questions because if the YT tutorials could already answer my problem, I would have no need to ask for help and advice!
Then we have sites like Literature SE which has been languishing in their sandbox since literally forever. Like most SE sites, the guidelines bid you to "avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussions" and "be specific" but I find that untenable in a Literature site. Notably, sister site SF&F is comparably thriving but there is a fair amount of open-ended speculation going on in there.
Lastly, IMO, it just suffers because at its core its problem is human and social, not technical. In an effort for better curation we ended up with Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Science. For some posters, finding the right SE site already introduces a huge wall to overcome for posting. This hampers a lot of the out group: students who might be seeking homework guidance or looking to supplement their own readings and lectures, amateurs who are just curious about something in the field. I've had a question in one of the Science SEs outside my field that was well-received by the community but one mod kept "tagging to delete" (I forgot the exact term) almost every year. This mod action has a prescriptive period and, boy, he kept at it. Honestly, I don't care in the end. I asked the question out of sheer curiosity and got a satisfactory answer. Yet I wonder how exactly they expect to foster a community this way.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
And _then_ it became so much more hostile to users - and lost a lot of what made it so wonderful. It became very common that asking a new, good question would be marked as a duplicate because there was something it wasn't a duplicate of.
What amazes me is that an LLM can actually make sense out of all this crappy training data and often produces meaningful answers. (maybe that's a sign that we already have AGI)
That's exactly what it turned into, though.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320536/what-is-the-...
I detested it but quickly realized that I needed to put in work and learn and only when I understand can I ask valid questions to real problems…not just asking for someone to spoon feed me an answer.
I really appreciate that experience…
If StackOverflow is being considered hostile now it's big ... well, Google the three stages of enshittification I suppose.
To be fair not really but it’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time and all it took was to scroll down to the end of the page to get your answer.
Real 20 year ago internet there.
Really? Because I only ever asked three things, technically two I suppose, and the only significant interaction I got from there was a guy saying they thought the third question was a duplicate but they only didn't mark it that way because they saw it was me asking again.
This dude straight up admitted to be on the hunt for marking things as duplicate and only put brainpower into doing not-that because something felt off in is gut.
Then someone else did.
No, he didn't actually answer my question. No one did.
Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.
Now we have a new guy in town, who offers "robotized copy-paste the solution to YOUR specific programming problem, no reading required! we can even control your computer for you, so you can do something you actually enjoy and stop wasting time on this complicated computery thingy for boring nerds", which serves the aforementioned audience much better.
"Target audience" connotes people that the site wanted to be there. That's just who showed up, because that's who will always show up basically anywhere that looks like it might be helpful to them, by default.
The biggest suckers were the people who were genuinely putting it effort there. So, in the end, did they make the world a better place? One would like to hope they did, but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.
you sound exactly like the mfs that ruined that forum.
But also, we were not "mods". We were just members of the community who did absolutely nothing to gain power over you except to participate by asking and answering questions. The actual moderators of the site, with a diamond next to their names, were almost literally one-in-a-million users. But it only took 3,000 reputation to cast a close vote, and 15 to flag to close a question (prioritizing it for consideration by the first group).
Posts like yours are made, IMX, because people had a bad experience asking a question. If that describes you, feel free to provide a link to the question and I'll be happy to give a detailed explanation of why things went as they did and what the site wanted you to do better in asking it.
The one thing I really liked was how it tried to find existing questions and answers that were like yours during the question input phase, but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter
We weren't going to be a huge contract (~100k/yr) but the tone was very much "conform or fuck off". I think the sticking point was that we were offered 1x permanent careers ad in North America and 2 in Oceana, and we wanted 3 in Oceana instead.
I've had a similar experience the couple of times I've asked or attempted to respond to questions (about software I wrote lol) - grammar and framing seemed more important than technical information/a solution.
N=1 anecdata ofc, but I'm not surprised at their demise
That and [redacted] mods who delete your question “because its a duplicate” but its not, you just assume it is and lock it. Lots of this when .NET Core came out and it drove me up a wall. Wouldnt surprise me if a lot of “hallucination” type answers come from bad Stack Overflow data being interpreted as “fact” in earlier models.
My extensive experience has been that the overwhelming majority of the time that people complain "this isn't a duplicate", it actually quite obviously is. (And there were even more irritating complaints on the meta site at times; all the way up to the level of "you shouldn't ever close duplicates at all because I think you shouldn't", demonstrating no interest in even trying to understand the reasons for doing so.) Of course, people do make mistakes; there was an entire process for fixing this, but most people could not be bothered to engage with it productively (or even civilly). But feel free to give examples of things that you feel were wrongly closed from your own experience.
Fair, I got my wording wrong, its been a while since I've landed on the site... Sadly, I used to love reading SO for fun and to learn random tidbits.
I've run into way too many "this is a duplicate of" and its referencing something from 2003 in 2025 where the runtime has changed, and a similar looking issue was confused for the actual issue, the resolution in the linked "duplicate" doesn't apply or work. In my opinion, if you're going to call something a duplicate, prove that the solution there works before you lock it down.
Q: How do Python's dict preserve insertion order?
A: [duplicate of "Why does a Python dict's keys have a different ordering each run?"]
It was clear that the mod/curator/whatever spent no time attempting to understand what was actually being asked, and linked it to something that was completely incorrect as an answer to the real question.
I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics. If you asked me "when did you last eat a fruit bat", I can tell you the month and year because that stood out. If you asked me "when did you last eat spaghetti", I'd have a hard time saying.
You must be new to IT. Software businesses rarely truly die off (unless they're really small one person operations). Even Expertsexchange is still around: https://go.experts-exchange.com/
Uh, no.
StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.
Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.
I hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.
But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was specifically intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to avoid chatter because that gets in the way of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.
Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.
Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.
It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.
Before AI people would still try asking questions on SO despite the hostility because it was the only/main place to get answers. Over this time, SO popularity was deteriorating.
After AI people who had bad experiences with asking questions on SO would ask the AI instead. This is because the AI wouldn't mark your question as a duplicate, wouldn't question its validity [1], etc. It would just answer your question. You could even ask it follow-up questions if the answer wasn't quite what you were looking for. All of this in real time, not waiting to get an answer.
[1] Unless the question triggered the safety gates that the AI companies have in place.
AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.
People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.
If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.
AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.
--------
[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay
[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!
It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.
A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)
While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.
LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.
Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.
StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".
Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.
After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.
THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.
The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.
The same thing that happened to perl.
Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.
(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)
I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.
Damn sad how quickly that habit changed for me.
Never asked a question, but got some good info from people who had asked questions and the people who replied.
Most of the easy questions have been asked. I stopped using it because I was asking questions that weren’t trivial to answer, and I guess it is easier to earn internet points through mod actions than through writing answers.
As my career progressed I took on deep problems with complex issues and complex answers. Not much sense in asking as no one ever managed to help me with them. I’d just end up answering my own question a week or a month later perhaps.
And of course the moderation and karma farming - I oh so ‘fondly’ remember the one user that would take your question and run some auto-formatter on it so that it would fit his personal style guide and then get a percentage of the points as your now “co-author.” What fun!
I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.
When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)
Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.
Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.
Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.
Same. And DBA.se. I was a top contributor of both for the first few years at least, even got sent some free swag a couple of times, not because I cared about the points and being in the first page of people ordered by them, but because I felt genuinely useful and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.
I never really did the social side though, I have problems with distance friendships including online communities (I just don't connect well with people that way) which is one reason that I'm hating tech work more and more these days (being on a remote team is not good for my mental health, while I'm not a huge people person it turns out I absolutely need some in my life, and really in my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).
The real life examples and synergies were a plus. I got so much work from that ServerFault presence.
Can't say I formed any connections there though. Just a few negative interactions.
For me, the crazy everything-is-a-dupe drove me away. Same as so many others mentioning here.
But a lot of other things were also wrong and they are worth listing too:
I stopped looking at the answers as they aged. So many of the top or accepted answers were quickly out of date (but you couldn’t ask again because or the dupe mods).
A lot of the accepted or top answers had always been wrong even when written. If you knew more about something you could spot this but it was pointless to engage and try and change it. Popularity is not about being correct.
There was no need for all the other sites. It would have been better with one inclusive site. So often a good question would be asked and mods would comment it should be asked on some niche site with no traction and so died the question.
The gamification point system favoured the early people like me. I probably got most of my points long after I had actually moved on because my top answers were still racking up votes. There was no hope for a more recent joiner (even joining 10 years ago) to ever catch up.
And the hardest most interesting questions got no answers. If you were truly stumped on a difficult algorithm then it really wasn’t the place to ask.
That’s some of what I remember being wrong with SO long before LLMs were mainstream.
I shudder to think that LLMs learn from SO answers. It would explain so much of the worst vibe coding though :)
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
It's got pretty good coverage of most things related to my country and interests, but if you go too far afield/niche theres not many users on many topics
I tried to post on r/showerthoughts several times over the past 10 years. And every time it deleted my post saying my thought wasn't original. I was wow how they would even know that, and this was pre-AI.
But how will you design it to survive in this age of malicious actors and persona farms?
When I read old.reddit.com was disabled for non-logged-in users, to be sure I'd never hit this site again even by mistake, I put a rule in my router's DNS resolver to lie and pretend an NXDOMAIN.
We're increasingly pushed into different groups and sides with little to no toleration of each other. It's been progressing more over the past 10-15 years in the UK, US, and possibly elsewhere.
Something most people don't know is that Reddit now has a kind of AI partnership with moderators of the larger subreddits. If those mods ban a user from their sub, the AI can suspend or ban a user for "breaking the terms of service." Given the state of Reddit, and the kind of people who moderate the large subreddits, it's creating a fairly violent and polarised community.
Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.
Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.
I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.
Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.
Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.
One thing is that there are lots of bots on the site, another is that the site now seems to be specifically designed for bots.
The trick is to delete your browser cache (not just things related to reddit, everything), then wait a week to a month before creating the next account.
In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).
Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.
A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing
When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.
I suppose I was never their target market anyway.
Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.
Reddit took action in March 5, 2026 to stop that practice.
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1rllqrw/ban_bot_po...
There is a policy of ideological gatekeeping by certain Moderators.
no it bans you for not having a conservative viewpoint, that's completely different from wanting you
My account was banned back around 2021. I had a separate account on mobile, which got subsequently banned for 'evading a ban'. Have been unable to create an account since then, even on entirely new machines, different OS, renewed IP. Whatever tracking techniques they use are downright scary.
The worst part is that all of this started because a mod in a right-leaning sub silenced my account, then decided to turn it into a permanent ban for no reason.
Nowadays, I'd still like to visit r/programming for a change, and share some of my work, but otherwise it's such a cesspool of AI-generated content and bots that the appeal has almost entirely faded.
But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.
One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.
I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.
You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.
Meanwhile bots are running rampant and I can't scroll through the site for 10 minutes without seeing an obvious bot post or comment. Dead internet is real.
And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.
You purge some Nazis, then run out of Nazis to purge, but you've got a good purge system going...
Sure you can. (But it is a significant problem that they start at the bottom of the score-based answer sort and don’t get attention.)
I'm not pouring one out for SO's death. Because I already did years ago.
I'm not disagreeing at all, but I'd like to add that the moderation issues did not come from a vacuum: they were a reaction to SO reputation becoming so much of a CV optimisation metric that SO must have felt a lot of pressure to do something. Turns out that something wasn't good, but I'm not sure that other paths taken would have been much less bad. Some success just aren't set up to last.
I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.
They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...
So there's a clear difference in expected utility.
Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.
The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?
I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.
People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.
I'm not saying that's the problem you had, not at all. I do see why some of the answerers were quick to jump to it though.
StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.
Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.
The new owners either did not understand this arrangement or did not value it enough. I now have my kwix backups and my open weight LLM. This should be more than enough to hold me over until a stack exchange substitute pops up.
Search engines no longer surfacing useful results didn't help the web in general. Outside of a handful of sites everyone knows the Internet seems to have become a ghost town over the past decade.
But to be honest I expect that would have just delayed its death. AI is so good now I think I'd use it even if Stackoverflow was really friendly.
My attempts at discussing AI related questions with AI itself have been pretty frustrating, especially in the early years, since they are either just uninformed about what's currently going on in the AI space or recite random blog posts of questionable value, often they couldn't even tell what they themselves are capable of.
We are losing communities and human communication to LLM chats.
And what's even worse than that is when they don't know what they're talking about, and launder their ignorance through an LLM. Then you get vapor laundered to look like a thoughtful and considered response.
Basically the equivalent of shouting out some highly specific technical query down a dark alleyway and hoping against all odds for a better response than models trained on all of stack overflow already.
1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and
2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
This does four things simultaneously:
1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model
2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)
3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.
4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?
With LLMs around, I no longer use it as much. And its a shame because I am worried in general that we might be losing communities like these
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19712903/reverse-content...
Also questions now have a "staging area" that has to be passed before the question is posted for everyone. In the staging area moderators have to approve the question.
But at least we had fun who can forget stacksort.
Some months ago I posted a question there after a long time, something that the LLMs could not give me a satisfactory response. It got deleted for being unsuitable for the site.
I'm not particularly a new user of SO. been using for 15 years and 5.5k reputation, which does not say much more that I know how to ask questions there, or I used to know.
Desperate, I take the question to a meeting with the language team. The guy gets excited: "this kind of question is why we keep holding these sessions"
SO became what it was by setting rules that worked extremely well. They even occasionally let some QnAs slip by, like the famous Jon Skeet Chuck Norris facts[1]. Now those same rules don't work well for a vibrant community, and at the same time they are being followed pedantically.
[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...
I don't particularly care for e-points and that sort of things, but SO had whole entire way of telling you you are wrong why did you even dare answering, then creating "classes" of user (I apparently made MORE ranking points after I stopped using it than before ? Giving me more moderation power), then seeing "your" answers being edited left and right by people who add a comma or whatever
The whole joy for me was in answering people. It's just fun, I think many hackers get it, bad questions notwithstanding. But as some point they made that ... Less fun, for a lack of a better description. So I just stopped answering.
I love it for what it brought and the great times I had on it for years, but I've stopped actively using it (as opposed to just finding the answer through a google search) for a while and it was way before the rise of LLMs.
In my niche, we also had an absolute dictator of a moderator who was a condescending jerk online. Open belittling of people asking questions, connecting new questions to those which had been asked years ago in a different part of the stack and then closing the question, etc. Real tin pot tyrant nonsense, and frankly, a bully.
There was a day where I saw they had been denied a role they interviewed for since they posted about it. I already knew they were in my city. It was a role I had advertised and was the chair for. Im still not sure exactly which candidate, but have my suspicions. In any case, bullet dodged.
But... I also came across some real jacka*es. Those were on my questions, but also reading the responses from other peoples questions.
You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data
It's less efficient than being able to point to a canonical answer on a widely respected forum, yes. And it sucks immensely to have to rely on these horrible AI companies to replace the real human interactions that getting work done used to require, yes. But realistically, we are not looking at some kind of model collapse anytime soon due to lack of SO threads.
Losing Reddit and blogs and other forums is going to be a bigger problem. In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use? How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice? if the web becomes a ghost town and nobody is talking about anything anymore, there's no form thread it can uncover and say "that's the one everyone uses". Losing the library of technical Q&A is nothing close to the catastrophe of losing actual conversations between humans.
My guess is, you won't care.
How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice?
My guess is, it will make a good choice.
For who?
How many times have you found a random forum post solving your problem? How many countless people has that post likely helped?
Now every single person facing the same problem will regenerate from scratch the entire thought process and result. What a waste.
There needs to be some way to close the feedback loop from the work that LLMs do.
It is a site about helping people where no one seemed interested in helping people.
[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Stack%20overflow&date=to...
Sources of information like StackOverflow have come and gone, since the dawn of computer networking with online forums on BBSes and similar dial up systems.
Many sites like StackOverflow have predated it, and others will follow, or maybe not give AI, nonetheless no developer questions site lasts forever.
If you had enough reputation, you'd be invited to these review queues, like the Close Vote queue.
You got a point toward a new badge if you voted to Close. You get nothing if you chose to keep it open. There was always a perverse incentive there to act, to make a question "better," to nitpick a perfectly fine answer.
Which begs a more interesting question, perhaps; if a SO was recreated in a more forgiving fashion today, would it stance a chance competing against AI?
Today they are vibe coders and no longer need stack overflow.
It was also deleted, die already stack overflow
1) If you already have enough programming experience to understand algorithms and abstract concepts in programming you can find the answer by doing research.
2) More often than not the answers were citing answers that already exist elsewhere.
3) A lot of the trivial answers were marked as low quality, dupes and so on when these were the people who could benefit from SO the most.
Eventually I stopped visiting the site around 2 years after getting into programming since it rarely provided anything of value.
--
Serverfault was great and I will miss it.
https://techstackups.com/articles/stackoverflow-graphs-prove...
I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.
AI came at the right moment to save the knowledge from the knowledge keeper.
I can only hope that some other technology will save the knowledge once again, before the AI companies go completely rogue and hostile towards their end-users.
(I can't tell from PostTypeId = 1)
I love you stack exchange and all related sites.
All yall need to keep learning
It transitioned to emphasize "less toxic" and in the process minimized signal.
The result has no purpose.
But there's a need to talk to human experts, learn their opinions, personal experience, non-obvious bits. E.g. I enjoyed asking certain questions at Software Engineering and Emacs SE sites. Sometimes I just ended up talking with a maintainer of a specific package I had questions about. This is something Claude and ChatGPT cannot easily replace, and maybe something that may keep certain SO communities alive. (Unless Reddit eats the remnants of their lunch.)
It made Mark Cuban very wealthy and was worth pennies within a few years.
A lot of the answers are factually useful and it would a massive loss if it ever just disappear into the ether.
I know exactly when I permanently stopped contributing to the site: it had been a few years since I happen to have something worth posting a question about, but for once I had a niche question about a popular-enough framework it was worth a shot.
A guy replied with a generic wall of text that had nothing to do with what I had asked, merely contained some of the keywords I also used.
When I politely pointed out it's not what I asked and reformulated in case he merely misunderstood, he got mad that I had refused to just give him the points.
He got extra mad when I figured out the answer on my own and posted it as answer in case others stumbled on the same issue, so he tried to edit my answer to make it look irrelevant.
Unfortunately for him, he didn't realize I also have enough points to edit it back, so he gave up and deleted all his comments to make it look like I'm talking to nobody, then went to downvote a bunch of my older posts.
And the sad part is that guy initially seemed well regarded in our small community, kinda killed my motivation to contribute to the site again after that. Plus I usually always find answers on my own, and anything I can't figure out on my own is so niche it would be pointless to ask.
Getting second hand sadness
1. AI allows you to ask stupid questions or the same question without (typically) ridiculing or demeaning you for doing so.
2. Context changes as time rolls by. A question that was asked some period ago might just need to be re-asked, continuously and ongoing.
Now, SO had already suffered its demise prior to AI. But good riddance, from my point of view. StackOverflow was great in its day, essential even. But it fell victim to its own success, I guess.
A better metric would be visits per month… which probably doesn't look very pretty too. I used to visit SO every day several times a day for like 15 years: ask a technical question on google, click on the first SO result, get the solution I was looking for. Now I still ask google but I just have to read the AI Overview to get the solution I'm looking for…
https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...
I admit that my first few questions earned me a lot of downvotes due to their poor quality. But it humbled me and taught me the importance to create minimal reproducible examples.
After that, some of my questions were answered in depth by experts. I was blown away and very grateful that some random stranger would take the time to answer such a niche question I had.
Besides, I've seen colleagues of mine whom I consider brilliant but whose questions on public forums were bad... They give too many details, leave out part of the context, don't make it easy to reproduce their error, ask vague questions, and so on. I wonder if it's for the same reasons that HN has trouble with SO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange
1. LLMs don’t blame you when you ask for book recommendations or say “you must use Superuser instead of Stackoverflow or Linux…”. But it also gave as a bit of community and entertainment. 2. LLMs are useless with the data input from Gitlab, GitHub and Stackoverflow. Especially Stackoverflow, because the snippets, good comments and ratings are invaluable. 3. Removal of job adds. That was the obvious and non disturbing money source.
Stackoverflow is also one of the last platforms allowing you to downvote and put a “price tag” on downvotes. This is incredible helpful in preventing hostile voting. And still allow counter-measures against bad answers.
Please. Cannot the original founders take a data dump and let use re-launch it? Or we just do it.
The toxicity was too much for me. On HN, when a toxic entity points their sting at me, at least their comment gets flagged within 24 hours. No such thing on SO. The moderators themselves are toxic as batshit.
I enjoyed reading his articles but it feels eons ago.
And 215 of them probably got closed for being "off-topic"
After such a long time user, here I was, finally interacting with the community. My first question. I spent at least an hour composing it. Something about Django and Celery. Then came the mods. Crushed my dreams. I tried editing the question. Crushed again.
And I remember thinking, wtf? I’m just trying to ask for some help. Why is this so damn hard? Never tried again.
No wonder no ones uses it anymore, its environment is actively hostile to new users.
StackOverflow had the most toxic community didn't it?
In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave easy questions to be answered by new answerers. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.
In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.
Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:
* 1 trip to mars
* 10 trips to the Moon
* Converted water to wine
The worst system until you can finally help others.
Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.
A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.
But let me address the "toxic" moderation. They needed something like appeals courts. SO should have installed a layers above the community mods that could review and rebuke the decisions of the "lower" mods to steer things.
Oops, all assholes.
Yes all the bureaucracy was annoying. But when I asked on Stack Overflow, the same question is there 5 7 10 years later, queryable by everyone. Ironically by LLMs too.
While when I ask LLMs - as I do now, of course, nobody has time for SO nowadays - nothing is left, everything is ephemeral, LLM forgets, the world doesn't learn.
Oh well. They will surely bolt LLM to SO one day as Quora did already.
LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:
Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?
A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]
I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.
Preferred books at the library.
I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
I think it's good that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.
I hated how the site clutters every page with hundreds of shiny tokens whose only purpose was gamification.
I now read the answers to my technical questions in an Emacs buffer consisting solely of plain text.
Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.
It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.
Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.
Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.
I created an account, specifically cause I found a few questions that I knew the answers to, and could cite properly.
So, I answered 2. All is good...
Next day, 1 is marked as dupe (?!) and there's literally no other answers. So, duping what? Nope, not permitted to know that.
The other answer, some braindead idiot mod decided to change my answer to wrong garbage. No request to change. No verification. No nothing.
Shortly thereafter, those 2 responses were downmodded, leaving my karma negative. So basically, can't do anything. So I left. I'll spend my time on communities that actually give a fuck, cause SO didn't.
Yeah, no shit nobody uses Motif for new development, but if you haven't guessed, I was working on a legacy enterprise system.
Just rubbed me the wrong way and still kinda annoys me to this day. Not everyone is dicking around for fun or works at startups where you can light other people's money on fire. Some of us have paying clients, I'm not using Motif because I want to.
I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.
I stopped contributing.
I remember that I once asked a question about dual-licencing MIT and GPL 2.0 in the same project. Within an hour or two, it was downvoted to -7. Now this alone is already quite concerning (it was a genuine question), but what was even more annoying was that not a single person who downvoted this, explained as to why. So, if my time investment here for asking a question, gets negative karma without any explanation, and then subsequently no useful answer at all: what is the point of SO? I still answered a few questions here or there, but the whole karma system just discourages contributions and I stopped using it with regards to both asking anything or giving answers.
SO is not useless since some answers still hold useful answers, but they really should have started to fix SO early on. Instead they just gave up.
That was that for that site.
I've never seen an online community incentives vandalism rather than contributions.
edit - fixed .com to .org