Summarizer

There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't. At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore. ...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call. I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits. [0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

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.

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.

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 fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer. Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie.

> Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content. The community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced. However, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-... Note the "Questions closed" and "Questions reopened". Compare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-... The tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the "make the site friendly" by removing comments and banning users. The "some of the answers should have been deleted" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.

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

Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation.

No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place. Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point . It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal.

> That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. > When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. That is generally irrelevant.

What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my "users" . I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of "dead-ness", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that. Because from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia . For a scope of "practical matters about writing code", as compared to "any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it". I am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congregate in public and try to accomplish something. I do not share your goals. The community is not like software, and "serving and adapting to users" does not benefit the people doing the work. We never arranged to have the kind of "users" you describe.

> It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. No, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years. What you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care. The goal was never for the site to be "not dead". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found. The site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts. > And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026 This is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over than they should have needed. But really, the feedback for Stack Overflow is trying to take it in the direction of places that existed long beforehand. If you want forums, you know where to find them. And now you can also find LLMs. Which, as commonly used by people seeking programming help, are basically a grizzled forum guy in a can. >Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. "Everyone actually agrees with [me]" is the polar opposite of what I actually believe and am actually saying. I am well aware that the model is unpopular. My point is that the popularity of the model is irrelevant to me. > Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now? I have a lot of reputation points (the site still exists), far more than I ever felt I deserved, and I never really felt like they were worth anything. A huge percentage of them come from an answer to a terrible question (that was still terrible after heroic attempts at editing; this all happened long before there was a common understanding of the purpose of question closure or what would make good standards for questions) that, once I understood things properly, I closed and tried to get deleted. Over the last few years, with that new understanding, I have been trying to give away my superfluous reputation points in bounties, trying to get missing answers written for the few really good questions lacking good answers that I identify, always to no avail (the bounty system promptly became a honeypot for ChatGPT hallucinations as soon as ChatGPT became available). You do not know me or my motivations in the slightest.

I am only responding to many people trying to explain why I should care about the thing I don't care about. The defense is useful because a) it being "dead" by these metrics is unimportant; b) people are blaming a community for mistreating them, when they came in without any intent of understanding or adapting to that community; c) other sites in this mold exist, and are trying to establish themselves.

You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel , as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One of them also asks about "downmixing" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer. The point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions.

> many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. Yes. We consider that duplicate. Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need .

How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? They seem like mutually exclusive goals for 95% of cases.

> How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? The same way that a K-12 education does.

> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. The idea was, if there's an answer on the other question that solves your question, your question remains in existence as a signpost pointing to the other one without having to pollute and confuse by having a mixture of similar answers across both with different amounts of votes.

The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution. If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.

This is because the real goal was SEO.

> They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet This is mostly how I engaged with SO for a long, long time. I think it’s a testament to SO’s curation of answers that I didn’t ask almost any questions for like 5+ years after starting programming

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.

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.

Yahoo answers died a lot faster and heavily formed SO policy.

No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of "you fucking moron" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been carefully considered and revisited over many years and have clear logic behind them, considering the goals of the site. It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work"). I have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But I have seen many examples (and been subjected to one or two myself) of crash-outs resulting from learning that the site is, by design, much more like Wikipedia than like Quora. Quite a large fraction of questions that get closed boil down to "here's my code that doesn't work; what's wrong"? (Another large fraction doesn't even show that much effort.) The one thing that helped a lot with this was the Staging Ground, which provided a place for explicit workshopping of questions and explanation of the site's standards and purpose, without the temptation to answer. But the site staff didn't understand what they had, not at all.

> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work"). This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/

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

There is nothing "passive-aggressive" about closing a question as a duplicate. It is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the OP: an already-existing answer to a common question is provided instantly .

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

Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer. So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago. There's really no need for us to rehash SO rules/policy debates that have raged since day one. The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.

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

As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario. Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product. The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a product" where the first step is to search, the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the third step is to delete. The LLM is capable of answering the question "how to delete the product 'product name'". To some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic, but still possible for a human to answer if only they read documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an answer A LOT faster.

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.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have historically done hardly any of it; the site simply didn't scale like that. There have been tens of millions of questions, versus a couple dozen moderators.) The kinds of questions that people are getting quick, accurate answers for from an LLM are, overwhelmingly, the sort of thing that SO never wanted. Generally because they are specific to the person asking: either that person's issue won't be relevant to other people, or the work hasn't been done to make it recognizable by others. And then of course you have the duplicates. You would not believe the logic some people put forward to insist that their questions are not duplicate; that they wouldn't be able, in other words, to get a suitable answer (note: the purpose is to answer a question, not solve a problem) from the existing Q&A. It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers. I agree that Reddit played a big role in this. But not just by answering questions; by forming a place where people who objected to the SO content model could congregate. Insulting other users is and always has been against Stack Overflow Code of Conduct. The large majority of insults, in my experience, come from new users who are upset at being politely asked to follow procedures or told that they aren't actually allowed to use the site the way they're trying to. There have been many duplicate threads on the meta site about why community members (with enough reputation) are permitted to cast close votes on questions without commenting on what is wrong. The consensus: close reasons are usually fairly obvious; there is an established process for people to come to the meta site to ask for more detailed reasoning; and comments aren't anonymous, so it makes oneself a target.

> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. No, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise. If you mean "without writing a direct answer to the new question first", that is the exact point of the system . Literally all you have to do is click the link and read the existing answers. > it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new Sure. But someone else knew about the old question, found it for you , and directly pointed you at it so that you could get an answer immediately . And did all of this for free . And , by doing this, now everyone else who thinks of your phrasing for the question, will be immediately able to find the old question, without even having to wait for someone to recognize the duplicate.

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

> This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. Please point at some of these "really good" questions, if you saved any links. (I have privileges to see deleted questions; deletion is normally soft unless there's a legal requirement or something.) I'll be happy to explain why they are not actually what the site wanted and not compatible with the site's goals. The idea that the question "should have provable answers" wasn't some invention of moderators or the community; it came directly from Atwood ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-an... ). > I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider. Please read "Understanding the standard for "opinion-based" questions" ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434806 ) and "What types of questions should I avoid asking?" ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask ).

I believe that this tension about what type of questions was baked into the very foundation of StackOverflow. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling. vs https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. (the emphasis on "good" is in the original) And this can be seen in the revision history of https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (take note of revision 1 and the moderation actions 2011) --- Questions that are fun and slightly outside of the intended domain of the site are manageable ... if there is sufficient moderation to keep those types of questions from sucking up all available resources. That was the first failing of NotProgrammingRelated.StackExchange ... later Programming.StackExchange ... later SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange. The fun things, while they were fun took way more moderation resources than was available. People would ask a fun question, get a good bit of rep - but then not help in curating those questions. "What is your favorite book" would get countless answers... and then people would keep posting the same answers rather than reading all of them themselves and voting to cause the "good" content to bubble up to the top. That's why TeX can have https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun and MathOverflow can have https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/soft-question and https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list -- there is a very high ratio for the active in moderation to active users. Stack Overflow kind of had this at its start... but over time the "what is acceptable moderation" was curtailed more and more - especially in the face of more and more questions that should be closed. While fun questions are fun... the "I have 30 minutes free before my next meeting want to help someone and see a good question" is something that became increasingly difficult. The "Keep all the questions" ideal made that harder and so fewer and fewer of the - lets call them "atwoodians" remained. From where I sit, that change in corporate policy was completely solidified when Jeff left. As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left. What remained where shells of rules that were the "truce" in the tension between the atwoodians and spolskyites and a few people trying to fight the oncoming tide of poorly asked questions with insufficient and neglected tooling. As the tide of questions went out and corporate realized that there was necessary moderation that wasn't happening because of the higher standards from the earlier days they tried to make it easier. The golden hammer of duplication was a powerful one - though misused in many cases. The "this question closes now because its poorly asked and similar to that other canonical one that works through the issue" was far easier than "close as {something}" that requires another four people to take note of it before the question gets an answer from the Fastest Gun in the West. Later the number of people needed was changed from needing five people to three, but by then there was tide was in retreat. Corporate, seeing things there were fewer questions being asked measured this as engagement - and has tried things to increase engagement rather than good questions. However, those "let's increase engagement" efforts were also done with even more of a moderation burden upon the community without the tooling to fix the problems or help the diminishing number of people who were participating in moderating and curating the content of the site.

> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left. Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwood was the one who wanted to keep things strictly on mission and Spolsky was the one more interested in growing a community. Yes? I do get the impression that there was a serious ideological conflict there; between the "library of detailed, high-quality answers" and the, well, "to every question" (without a proper understanding of what should count as a distinct, useful question that can have a high-quality answer). But also, the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out for the "library" goal ( https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex... ). And I suspect they both shared blame in that. A lot of it was also ignored for too long because of the assumption that a) the site would just die if it clamped down on everything from the start; b) the site would naturally attract experts with good taste in questions (including maybe even the ability to pose good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dixer questions) before the beginners ever cleared the barrier of trying to phrase a proper question instead of using a forum. (Nowadays, there are still small forums all over the place. And many of them try to maintain some standards for the OP. And they're all plagued with neophytes who try to use the forum as if it were a chat room . The old adage about foolproofing rings true.) Around 2014 is when the conflict really seems to have boiled over (as new question volume was peaking). Notably, that also seems to be when the dupe-hammer was introduced ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589 ).

Jeff was the author of https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and was more focused on quality than community - his vision was the library. Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for. And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the Web 2.0 ideals of the time and the hook to keep a person coming back to it. It was part of the question that was to be answered "how do you separate the core group from the general participants on a site?" ... and that brings me to "people need to read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) to understand how it shaped Stack Overflow. https://blog.codinghorror.com/its-clay-shirkys-internet-we-j... (2008) https://web.archive.org/web/20110827205048/https://stackover... (Podcast #23 from 2011) Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes. Spolsky: Oh... Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105232/clay-shirkys... (2011) 2014 sounds about right for when it peaked... it was also when a lot of things hit the fan one after another. General stress, the decline of community moderation. The dup hammer was a way to try to reduce the amount of close votes needed - but in doing so it became "everything is a nail" when the dup hammer. It was used to close poor questions as dups of other questions ... and rather than making it easier to close questions that didn't fit well, corporate allowed the "everything is a dup" problem to fester. That also then made Stack Overflow's search become worse. Consider https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080 which provides itself as a timestamp of 2014... How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. That question now has 10,356 questions linked to it... and that's part of the "why search quality is going down" - because poor questions were getting linked and not deleted. Search went downhill, dupe hammer was over used because regular close votes took too long because community moderation was going down, which in turn caused people to be grumpy about "closed as dup" rather than "your question looks like it is about X, but lacks an MCVE to be able to verify that... so close it as a dup of X rather than needing 5 votes to get an MCVE close.. which would have been more helpful in guiding a user - but would mean people would start doing FGITW to answer it maybe and you'd get it as a dup of something else instead." All sorts of problems around that time.

What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top. SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit like HN, you learn from watching the back and forth. I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience. Whatever people's gripes about the site, I learned a hell of a lot from it. I still find solutions there, and think a world without it would be worse.

> What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience. Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.

The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help. If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs). StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.

Yes, it does answer you question, when the site lets it go through. Note that "answers your question" does not mean "solving your problem". Sometimes the answer to a question is "this is infeasible because XYZ" and that's good feedback to get to help you re-evaluate a problem. Many LLMs still struggle with this and would rather give a wrong answer than a negative one. That said, the "why don't you use X" response is practically a stereotype for a reason. So it's certainly not always useful feedback. If people could introspect and think "can 'because my job doesn't allow me to install Z' be a valid response to this", we'd be in a true Utopia.

I noticed a similar thing for Python 3 questions, closed as a duplicate of a Python 2 response. Why they weren't collated and treated as a living document is beyond me.

Remember when the R developers would ask and answer their own basic questions about R, essentially building up a beginner tutorial on stack overflow? That was a cool time

And you can't delete your post when you realize how awful it was years later! That anti-information sticks around for ages. Even worse when there are bad answers attached to it, too.

If you're talking about deleting questions, that's because deleting the question would delete everyone's answers that they potentially worked very hard on and which others might find useful. If you think the answers are bad you can always post your own competing answer.

To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced. I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down. An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up. It just goes back to first principles. The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.

It's great when you're helping people one on one, but it's absolutely terrible for a QA site where questions and answers are expected to be helpful to other people going forward. I don't think your analogy really helps here, it's not a question. If the question was "How do I get to the top of the mountain" or "How do I want to get to the top of the mountain without hiking" the answer to both would be "Gondola".

> Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced. Except that SO has a crystal clear policy that the answer to questions should be helpful for everybody reaching it through search, not only the person asking it. And that questions should never be asked twice. So if by chance, after all this dance the person asking the question actually needs the answer to a different question, you'll just answer it with some completely unrelated information and that will the the mandatory correct answer for everybody that has the original problem for any reason.

To avoid going insane the mindset should be to produce something useful for future readers.

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

They actually added some new question categories a while ago [1] "Troubleshooting / Debugging" is meant for the traditional questions, "Tooling recommendation", "Best practices", and "General advice / Other" are meant for the soft sort of questions. I have no clue what the engagement is on these sort of categories, though. It feels like a fix for a problem that started years ago, and by this point, I don't really know if there's much hope in bringing back the community they've worked so hard to scare away. It's pretty telling just how much the people that are left hate this new feature. [1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/435293/opinion-base...

> 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).

> 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?

SO had answers that you couldn't find in the documentation and were you can't look in the source code. If everything would be well documentated SO wouldn't have being as big as it was in the first place.

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

> 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.

> the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented. If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that. Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc. Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.

I felt it became easier with slack. The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without hesitation and producers just also don't do actual documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which works in the moment, but terrible for future team members to even know what questions to search/ask for.

At my place of work we use an indexing service for discord that creates an index of searchable static pages for all discord interactions. So while I agree the help desk style system isn’t really better it also doesn’t necessarily mean that it is lost forever in a silo. Before you ask, we use https://www.linen.dev/ but I’m sure there are other similar solutions by now

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

Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you

> 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)

I also agreed with this vision. It was meant to be more like Wikipedia rather than Reddit.

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time. It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.) Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.

Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What can come between?

I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project. To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite. May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

Great idea! https://paste.voklen.com/wiki/Main_Page If people start using it I'll get a proper domain name for it.

An algolwiki is a great idea, but I just wanted to say I got a good chuckle from this, thanks :) > May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

> To some extent that was Stack Overflow Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?

There is https://grokipedia.com which encourages you to suggest an article and you may submit improvements to an existing article.

This is _not_ at all the same thing. Grok just ripped off Wikipedia as its base and then applied a biased spin to it. Check out the entry on Grok owner Elon Musk; it praises his accomplishments and completely omits or downplays most of his better-known controversies.

Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.

There is https://www.wikifunctions.org/

Still gh issues are better than some random discord server. The fact that forums got replaced by discord for "support" is a net loss for humanity, as discord is not searchable (to my knowledge). So instead of a forum where someone asks a question and you get n answers, you have to visit the discord, and talk to the discord people, and join a wave channel first, hope the people are there, hope the person that knows is online, and so on.

The entire purpose of answering questions as an "expert" on S.O. is/was to help educate people who were trying to learn how to solve problems mostly on their own. The goal isn't to solve the immediate problem, it's to teach people how to think about the problem so that they can solve it themselves the next time. The use of AI to solve problems for you completely undermines that ethos of doing it yourself with the minimum amount of targeted, careful questions possible .

I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points. What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake , as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated. For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on. >> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination. Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble. May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.

> Please, start a blog! The second sentence of the SO post is a link to their blog where it was posted originally. The blog is not a replacement for the function SO served.

My experience as well: Stack Overflow used to (in practice) be a place to ask questions and get help and also help others. At some point it became all about some mission and not only was it not as useful anymore but it also became a whole lot less fun.

> 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)

25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat. Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset. I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. But yeah, that and the swearing culture clash were issues I struggled with, and ultimately meant I stopped contributing.

> Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset. Yes, because doing things that way was explicitly part of the goal, from the beginning. There are countless other places where you can directly respond to people who need help (and if you like doing that, you should stick to those places). Doing things that way has negative consequences in terms of making something that's useful for on-lookers, and causing a lot of experts to burn out or get frustrated. This is stuff that Jeff Atwood was pointing out when explaining the reason for creating SO in the first place. > I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. It would be better to focus on saving time for yourself, by understanding the goal. Please read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 .

> Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here. I have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately. But, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions. > If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it. No, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no "force"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more "force" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is "working", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena. There's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about "the site being in a death spiral". Because that is an assessment based on popularity. Popular != good; more importantly, valuing popularity is about valuing the ability of the site to make money for its owners, but none of the people curating it see a dime of that. They (myself included) are really only intrinsically motivated to create the thing. The thing is demonstrably useful. Just not in the mode of interaction that people wanted from it. The meta site constantly gets people conspiracy theorizing about this. Often they end up asserting things about the reputation system that are the exact opposite of how it actually works. For example, you can gain a maximum of 1000 reputation, ever, from editing posts, and it only applies to people whose edits require approval. The unilateral edits are being done by someone who sees zero incentive beyond the edited text appearing for others. They're done because of a sincere belief that a world where third parties see the edited text is better than a world where third parties see the original text. > Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts. You're talking about people who, in almost every case, as an objective matter of fact, are not moderators. The overwhelming majority of "moderation actions" of every stripe are done by the community, except for the few that actually require a moderator ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658 ).

"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 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.)

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

StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable. Instead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This killed the pub and with it the business. The most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old timers took when they joined. And duplicates allow anyone with a grudge to take revenge. After all, there are no new questions, and you will always find a duplicate if you want to. To create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by itself.

Another exemple being "Comments are not for extended discussion ! if you want to actively bring value by adding information, later updates, history, or just fun that cultivates a community, please leave and go do that somewhere else like our chat that doesn't follow at all the async functionnality of this platform and is limited to the regular userbase while scaring the newcomers."

"comments are not for extended discussion" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided "yeah, let's kill this". The people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes just letting a community do what it wants (within reasonable boundaries, of course) leads to a better and more successful product than actively trying to steer things in a certain direction.

Oh absolutely - when it becomes clear you have high engagement somewhere, adapt that feature to facilitate the engagement! They could have made comments threaded or embedded ways to expand it into the right forum, but instead they literally shut down engagement. Bonkers.

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.

Don't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses? It should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible.

There's https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ for the more academic CS questions btw.

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

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.

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/

SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now.

Another note to add here: The whole system was stupid, too! What do you mean, I can only give answers, but not comment? While there is much more to say about SO's demise, the "interaction" on the platform was definitely not one of its strengths, either.

Comments have less visibility in moderation. This has made them spam / link farming targets in the past. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow with the mindset that it is a forum to discuss something and have tangential discussions in the comments. https://stackoverflow.com/tour > This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. The "no comments until you get a little bit of rep" is to try to help people realize that difference from the start.

This entire thread is fantastic. I felt nostalgic, angry and then concerned all at once. I love LLMs. But I miss SO. I miss being able to have that community. How do we bring it back? If anyone from the Stack Overflow team is reading this (I assume you are): what’s the plan? My take: stop optimizing for raw question volume and start optimizing for producing and maintaining “known good” public knowledge. The thing SO still has that Discord and LLMs don’t is durable, linkable, reviewable answers with accountable humans behind them. But the workflow needs to match how devs work now. A concrete idea: make “asking” a guided flow that’s more like opening a good GitHub issue. Let me paste my error output, environment, minimal repro, what I tried, and what I think is happening. Then use tooling (including an LLM if you want) to pre check duplicates, suggest missing details, and auto format. Crucially: don’t punish me for being imperfect. Route borderline questions into a sandbox or draft mode where they can be improved instead of just slammed shut. Second idea: invest hard in keeping answers current. A ton of SO is correct but stale. Add obvious “this is old” signaling and make it rewarding to post updates, not just brand new answers. Last thing that I don’t see an easy answer to: LLMs are feasting on old SO content today. But LLMs still need fresh, high quality, real world edge cases tomorrow. They need the complexity and problem solving that humans provide. A lot of the answers I get are recycled. No net new thinking. If fewer people ask publicly, where does that new ground truth come from? What’s the mechanism that keeps the commons replenished? So… TLDR…my question to this group of incredibly intelligent people: how does SO save itself?