Summarizer

I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies. The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale. Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst. I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.

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.

It's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented. One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever taken part in moderating the review queue, you would've seen the insane amount of low-quality questions flowing in. I saw probably ten variants of "how to center my div" daily being closed as duplicates. The asker might be miffed about getting their question closed (but with a link to a solution..), but if you want to actually get answers to the high quality questions, the noise has to be filtered somehow. Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners figure out their syntax errors or how to apply a general solution to their specific issue. And you may not like SO for it, but to not want to be a site for that is their prerogative.

> Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented. Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? Just Google with site:StackOverflow.com and you won’t have to click through many results to find something closed. Spending all of the time to log back into the site and try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to have more people try to nit-pick it again hardly sounds attractive. > Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners The entire point of the story above was that it wasn’t a beginner question.

> Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? It is believable. But it being a problem I don't see. If it's off-topic, that's sad for you but no reason to feel angry or it being "hostile" or something. It's just off-topic. Same if I started posting lots of local news from my city to HN. It's simply just off-topic and not what the site should contain. If it's already answered, being pointed to that answer by someone spending the time to digging it up is also not rude. Sure, you may feel bad because you feel someone "reprimanded" you or something. But that's on you.

Hm… as the person was new to SO it’s very possible they don’t understand what a good question looks like and I thought it may be helpful to give feedback on what may have gone wrong… but if you see that as “begging” and you don’t think you need any feedback, you have it all sorted out after all, then yeah it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - "what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?" Sometimes they just wanted to talk. Not every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate. ... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions. Stack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 Arguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of "how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer. It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them. The failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible. Yes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides. I would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

The point here is you worked tech support so you were paid to answer user questions. However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?

> 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.

> outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one. Okay, but who's going to arbitrate that ? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.) The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though.

> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain. Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?

That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level. Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for "quality before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was "quantity and engagement will follow" and then "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all.

> There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. Yeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow "recommendation" questions. So they know that it's an issue but just ignore it for programming questions.

> Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use. Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search. Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling process didn’t really work the way it was supposed to, and you keep telling them that they are wrong, and that the site actually works well for its intended purpose—even though its intended purpose was to help users find what they were looking for, and they are telling you that they can’t. Part of StackOverflow’s decline was inevitable and wouldn’t have been helped by any changes the site administrators could have made; a machine can simply answer questions a lot faster than a collection of human volunteers. But there is a reason people were so eager to leave. So now instead of conforming to what users repeatedly told the administrators that they wanted, StackOverflow can conform to being the repository of questions that the administrators wanted, just without any users or revenue besides selling the contributions made by others to the LLMs that users have demonstrated they actually want to use.

> to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework". (My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github.

I think 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.

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.

Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish. That is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them.

> The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. The purpose of having the answer there is not to solve the OP's problem . It is to have a question answered that contributes to the canon of work. This way, everyone can benefit from it. > What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer. You might as well ask: what would be the harm in putting a comment in your code mentioning the existence of a function that serves your purpose, but then rewriting the code in-line instead of trying to figure out what the parameters should be for the function call? > Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. This analogy makes no sense. The Wikipedia analogue is making page synonyms or redirects or merges, and those are generally useful. "Deletionism" is mainly about what meets the standard for notability.

> So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago. What? No. The canonical target isn't closed. So go write the new answer there . The answer acceptance mark is basically irrelevant, and the feature ill-conceived. Except usually there are dozens of answers already; the best possible answer has emerged; and people keep writing redundant nonsense for the street cred of having an answer on a popular Stack Overflow question. > The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself. We do not care that people don't want to come and ask new questions. There are already way, way too many questions for the site's purpose. The policy is aimed at something that you don't care about. The result is a "verdict" we don't care about.

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.

To the extent that moderation ever prevented questions from getting answers, that was by closing them. When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system. The value proposition is getting an answer to a question that is useful to a reasonably broad audience . That very often means a question that someone else asked, the answer to which is useful to you. It is not getting an "answer" to a "question" where an individual dumps some code trying to figure out what's wrong.

And that was the core problem with Stack Overflow - they wanted to build a system of core Q&As to be a reference, but everyone treated it as a "fix my very specific problem now". 99% of all the junk that got closed was just dumps of code and 'it doesn't work'. Not useful to anyone.

This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms of not having to need to ask redundant questions).

We'll get to the point where we can mass moderate core knowledge eventually. We may need to hand out extra weight for verified experts and some kind of most-votes-win type logic (perhaps even comments?), but live training data updates will be a massive evolution for language models.

I don't think "good moderation or not" really touches what was happening with SO. I joined SO early and it had a "gamified" interface that I actually found fun. Putting in effort and such I able to slowly gain karma. The problem was as the site scaled, the competition to answer a given question became more and more intense and that made it miserable. I left at that point but I think a lot people stayed with dynamic that was extremely unhealthy. (and the quality of accepted questions declined also). With all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening.

> Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. 99.9% probability the people who made those edits a) were not moderators ; b) were acting completely in accordance with established policy (please read: "Why do clear, accurate, appropriately detailed posts still get edited?" https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 ) Why do you think you should be the one who gets to decide whether that's "acceptable"? The site existed before you came to it, and it has goals, purposes and cultural norms established beforehand. It's your responsibility, before using any site on the Internet that accepts user-generated content, to try to understand the site's and community's expectations for that content. On Stack Overflow, the expectations are: 1. You license the content to the site and to the community, and everyone is allowed to edit it. (This is also explicitly laid out in the TOS.) 2. You are contributing to a collaborative effort to build a useful resource for the programming community: a catalog of questions whose answers can be useful to many people, not just to yourself. 3. Content is intended to be matter-of-fact and right to the point, and explicitly not conversational. You are emphatically not participating in a discussion forum.

What "tone"? Why is it unreasonable to say these sorts of things about Stack Overflow, or about any community? How is "your questions and answers need to meet our standards to be accepted" any different from "your pull requests need to meet our standards to be accepted"?

> This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. It's literally a Q&A site. Questions need actual answers, not just opinions or "this worked for me".

Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was time-consuming. In the time it takes to properly format and ask a question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to the right one. The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM. Don't forget, human answers on Stack Overflow were also often wrong or delayed by hours or days. I think we're romanticizing the quality of the average human response on Stack Overflow.

SO also isn't afraid to tell you that your question is stupid and you should do it a better way. Some people take that as a personal attack, but it can be more helpful than a detailed response to the wrong question.

There are so many "great" answers on StackOverflow. Giving the why and not just the answer.

"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.

It entirely depends on the language you were using. The quality of both questions and answers between e.g. Go and JavaScript is incredible. Even as a relative beginner in JS I could not believe the amount of garbage that I came across, something that rarely happened for Go.

No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute experts, you also need answer often for something trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.

ya but you assume someone worked hard on the answer. there are alot of times when you get garbage top to bottom.

My favourite is this disclaimer in the question. lol > Is there any way to force install a pip python package ignoring all its dependencies that cannot be satisfied? > (I don't care how "wrong" it is to do so, I just need to do it, any logic and reasoning aside...) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12759761/pip-force-insta...

The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question about best practices, but you can't ask people to share their experiences or recommendations.

> legitimate questions being closed for no good reason They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 ) and well considered, having been exhaustively discussed over many years. > or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t I have seen so many people complain about this. It is vanishingly rare that I actually agree with them. In the large majority of cases it is comically obvious to me that the closure was correct. For example, there have been many complaints in the Python tag that were on the level of "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.) > a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. On the contrary, the top answerers are the ones who will be happy to copy and paste answers to your question and ignore site policy, to the constant vexation of curators like myself trying to keep the site clean and useful (as a searchable resource) for everyone. > For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better. I actually completely agree that people who prefer to ask LLMs should ask LLMs. The experience of directly asking (an LLM) and getting personalized help is explicitly the exact thing that Stack Overflow was created to get away from (i.e., the traditional discussion forum experience, where experts eventually get tired of seeing the same common issues all the time and all the same failures to describe a problem clearly, and where third parties struggle to find a useful answer in the middle of along discussion).

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.

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.

I guess I'm the only one that was a fan of SO's moderation. I never got too deep into it (answered some TypeScript questions). But the intention to reduce duped questions made a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of a "living document" where energy is focused on updating and improving answers to old versions of the same question. As a user looking for answers it means I can worry less about finding some other variation of the same question that has a more useful answer I understand some eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette but overall I'd say about 90% of the time I clicked on a SO link I was rewarded with the answer I was looking for. Just my two cents

> From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes. In my experience, though, the large majority of requests are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking duplicates at all.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79530539/how-is-an-ssh-c... Question: How is an SSH certificate added using the SSH agent protocol? > Closed. This question is seeking recommendations for software libraries, tutorials, tools, books, or other off-site resources

> The community is reviewing whether to reopen this question as of 36 mins ago. Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also... You went and deleted the question immediately after it was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again . [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/79530539/timeline

> Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also... It’s not asking for documentation, it’s quite literally asking how to do something. There are links to documentation to prove that I read all the documentation I could (to preemptively ward off the question getting closed). Yes, I deleted it because I solved the question myself, no need for it to exist as a closed question. How can I “Edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. You can edit the question or post a new one.”? The answer is quite literally facts (the message format) and citations which is what I was hoping to get from someone else answering. I undeleted it so I could give this example. > So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again. What would looking at it again do? I had no idea it was being voted to close in the first place; I have no way to request a review; and the instructions for what to do to “fix” the questions make absolutely no sense so there’s nothing to change before it gets “looked at again”. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

That is a specific question. Any more specific and I suspect it would have been closed as too specific to their environment / setup instead.

> Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. completely agree > But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not sure where discord fits in that)

And famously obnoxious about rejecting questions that are properly asked, properly categorized, and not actually duplicated.

I would imagine the endorsement requirement reduces submissions by a few orders of magnitude.

At this point SO seems harder to publish into than arxiv.

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]

> This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time. The problem is that people come and say "this question is incorrectly closed", but the question is correctly closed. Yes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places. That doesn't make them correct. I have been involved in this process for years and what I see is a constant stream of people expecting the site to be something completely different from what it is (and designed and intended to be). People will ask, with a straight face, "why was my question that says 'What is the best...' in the title, closed as 'opinion-based'?" (it's bad enough that I ended up attempting my own explainer on the meta site). Or "how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)

I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it.

> To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow. I think https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 is pretty straightforward. If you can show a question of yours that was closed, I'll be happy to try to explain why.

I’m going to argue the opposite. LLMs are fantastic at answering well posed questions. They are like chess machines evaluating a tonne of scenarios. But they aren’t that good at guessing what you actually have on your mind. So if you are a novice, you have to be very careful about framing your questions. Sometimes, it’s just easier to ask a human to point you in the right direction. But SO, despite being human, has always been awful to novices. On the other hand, if you are experienced, it’s really not that difficult to get what you need from an LLM, and unlike on SO, you don’t need to worry about offending an overly sensitive user or a moderator. LLMs never get angry at you, they never complain about incorrect formatting or being too lax in your wording. They have infinite patience for you. This is why SO is destined to be reduced to a database of well structured questions and answers that are gradually going to become more and more irrelevant as time goes by.

"well posed questions" And that is exactly why so many people gripe about SO being "toxic". They didn't present a well posed question. They thought it was for private tutoring, or socializing like on reddit. All I can say to these is: Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.

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 .

As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0]. I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a discussion site, rather than the Q&A site that it was set out to be. I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile or that they unfairly closed questions without bringing the citations required. I'm not saying at all that SO was without it's flaws in leadership, moderators, community or anything else that made the site what it was. But if you're going to complain, at least bring examples, especially when you have someone here you could hold somewhat accountable. The problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Discord chats, StackOverflow or GitHub issues. People still don't know how to ask questions: * [1] * [2] * [3] [0]: https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-as... [1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670 [2]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649 [3]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515

It is not "karma". It is not to be taken personally. It represents the objective usefulness of the question, not the personal worth of the person asking it.

LLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing. The steep decline in the early months of 2023 actually started with the release of ChatGPT, which is 2022-11-30, and its gradually widening availability to (and awareness of) the public from that date. The plot clearly shows that cliff. The gentle decline since 2016 does not invalidate this. Were it not for LLMs, the site's post rate would now probably be at around 5000 posts/day, not 300. LLMs are to "blame" for eating all the trivial questions that would have gotten some nearly copy-pasted answer by some eager reputation points collector, or closed as a duplicate, which nets nobody any rep. Stack Overflow is not a site for socializing . Do not mistake it for reddit. The "karma" does not mean "I hate you", it means "you haven't put the absolute minimum conceivable amount of effort into your question". This includes at least googling the question before you ask. If you haven't done that, you can't expect to impose on the free time of others. SO has a learning curve. The site expects more from you than just to show up and start yapping. That is its nature. It is "different" because it must be. All other places don't have this expectation of quality. That is its value proposition.

Good. This is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic. LLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup.

The question askers got stupider and stupider.

What if we filter out all the questions closed as dupes, off topic, etc?

And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - "too broad". I mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds? Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well.

Maybe we had too many programmers who weren’t capable of actually solving their own problems. Maybe only one in twenty programmers were ever actually any good at their jobs.

For those who have historically wondered about or objected to "moderation" (people usually mean curation here; as the overwhelming majority of the actions they're talking about are not performed by moderators ) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-picked list of important discussions from the meta site explaining some policy basics: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 If your question was not well received, read this before you post your next question https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254358 Why the backlash against poor questions? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 What is Stack Overflow’s goal? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262446 Are we being "elitist"? Is there something wrong with that? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791 The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high (N.B.: linked specifically for the satire in the top-voted answer) https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 Why is "Can someone help me?" not a useful question? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/309208 Are there questions that are too trivial to answer? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 Why isn't it required to provide comments/feedback for downvotes, and why are proposals suggesting this so negatively received? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366757 On the false dichotomy between quality and kindness https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 Can we make it more obvious to new users that downvotes on the main site are not insults and in fact can help them help themselves? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 Comments asking for clarification or an MCVE are not rude/abusive https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/370792 Is this really what we should consider "unwelcoming"? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (fd: my self-answered Q&A) Note that IDs are in chronological order. The rate of new meta.stackoverflow.com posts fell off dramatically at some point because of the formation of a network-wide meta.stackexchange.com. The earliest entries listed here are from 2014.