Summarizer

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Why do you continue to ask for examples if you're just going to downplay them or explain them away like you did here?

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)

This comment sums up everything wrong with Stack Overflow. I strongly suggest you re-read your comments here and self-reflect.

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 think this "first opportunity to be the bully" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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. Response to child comment: no, you are not replying to people telling you why you need to care about a thing. You are mostly replying randomly throughout the thread and telling people why they are wrong.

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.

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.

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

^ this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO: It was like seeing a movie trailer about a remake of some nearly forgotten B- horror film one was unfortunately allowed to watch when far too young. Spoiler warning for those who havent seen this movie before: Callous disregard for the utility and purpose of both the 'Q' and 'A' users; thinly veiled in a 'you don't get to tell me what i care about', wrapped in a 'my concept of how to moderate is just the way it is; if you don't like it, go F* yourself' package, trimmed with a ribbon of 'who do these Lusers that pay the bills think they are' directed at both the site owners (who write the checks to pay the bills) and all three relevant types of visitors, Q's, A's and those who neither ask, nor answer questions, but do see Advertisements and indirectly generate the income which the site owners use to write checks. But who cares?!, since Mods are not being paid (or paid well enough) to adjust a maladjusted concept of 'the way things are' into 'giving a shit' for anyone. Closed with some more vitriol declaring the site still exists and continues to be useful (as nipples on a chicken). WASH, RINSE, REPEAT... That was so last decade; I just stopped giving a damn, removed my browser bookmarks and learned to skim past less frequent and less relevant links to useless and meaningless SO pages when they appear in search results. The funniest outcome is that LLMs will continue to ingest the diminishingly accurate content of sites like this and continue to degrade the utility of even the most broadly defensible LLM use case scenario. phew, haven't thought that deeply about SO in at least 4 ... wait its 2026, make that 5 years. Good riddance to the the Whole Lot of you.

> 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.

> 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)).

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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...?

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.

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.

Where in the process of "ask question" -> "closed as duplicate" are you interacting with another human?

> 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.

> 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.

> 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 99% of the other stuff, that wasn't just a code dump and "it doesn't work", was also closed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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"?

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...

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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?

>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.

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.

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The problem with duplicate questions is that they weren't duplicates at all, and mods weren't competent enough to tell a difference.

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

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.

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!

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.

For every example of that, there were 999 instances of people having their question closed, criticised, or ignored.

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.

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".

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 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

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.

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.

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.

"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?

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 .

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 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".

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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

It can be both. Push and pull factors work better together than either does individually.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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/

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.

Moderator team must be over the moon

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.

Incompetent moderation and the air of hostility towards contributing users.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

It was a good idea ruined by the compulsively obtuse and pedantic, not unlike Reddit.

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.

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.

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."

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.

>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

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.

The most toxic, degrading, and insulting forum for people. My questions, as well as my answers, always got poisonous criticism. Good.