Summarizer

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor that the moderation started taking on a life of its own. Stack Overflow moderator drama felt constant in the later 2010s with endless weird drama spilling across Twitter, Reddit, and the moderator’s personal blogs. That’s about the same time period where it felt like the moderation team was more interested in finding reasons to exercise their moderation power than in maintaining an interesting website. Since about 2020 every time I click a Stack Overflow link I estimate there’s a 50/50 chance that the question I clicked on would be marked as off topic or closed or something before anyone could answer it. Between the moderator drama and the constant bait-and-switch feeling of clicking on SO links that didn’t go anywhere the site just felt more exhausting than helpful.

Lots of moderation issues are also UI issues. I suspect it’s the same issue for whatever is the “meta” in a competitive video game. Optimization based on the available affordances ?

Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall.

His tone was extremely passive aggressive and rude. I don’t think he made the site better - he contributed to the downfall

This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is." Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place. That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years. With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding. But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.

I always found these discussions around the tone of SO moderation so funny—as a German, I really felt right at home there. No cuddling! No useless flattery! Just facts and suggestions for improvement if necessary, as it should be. Loved it at the time.

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.

Friend in my group was in the public beta back in '08. We all ended up signing up by the end of '09. I used it off-and-on over the years (have some questions and replies with hundreds of upvotes). Though SO had a rap for having what might seem like harsh replies or moderation, it was often imho just blunt/curt, to the point, and often objectively defensible. I also agree with your timeframe that, in the later 2010s, the site became infected with drama, and moderation suddenly started reaching its tendrils into non-technical areas, when it should not have. And on an ostensibly technical site, no less! I found myself contributing less and less (same with Wikipedia), because I merely wanted to continue honing my craft through learning and contributing technical data with others who shared this same passion... I did not want to have politics shoved in my face, or have every post of mine have to be filtered through an increasingly extreme ideology which had nothing to do with the technical nature of the site. When I had my SO suspended with no warning or recourse for writing "master" in a reply, I knew it was time to leave for good. Most of the admins on the site transformed from technical (yet sometimes brash!) geeks, into political flag-waving and ideology-pushing avatars (including pushing their sexual agendas front and center), and not of the FSF/FLOSS kind, either. These types of dramas have infected nearly everything online, especially since 2020. Even Linus has lost his mind with pushing politics into what should be purely technical areas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936049 LLMs were a final blow for many reasons, though I think that a huge part of it is that LLMs won't chide you and suspend/ban you for wanting to stick to strictly technical matters. I don't have to pledge allegiance to a particular ideology and pass a purity test before asking technical questions to an LLM.

The moderation definitely got kind of nasty in the last 5 years or so. To the point where you would feel unwelcome for asking a question you had already researched, and felt was perfectly sound to ask. However, that didn't stop millions of people from asking questions every day , it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated). My feeling was always that the super mods were people who had too much time on their hands... and the site would've been better without them (speaking in the past tense, now). But I don't think that's what killed it. LLMs scraping all its content and recycling it into bite-sized Gemini or GPT answers - that's what killed it.

>it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated). Great observation. Just like friendship, open communities psychologically feel as though there should be some balance. Spending free time contributing to something (even if you don't directly expect anything in return with ulterior motives) to benefit others, then getting an anvil dropped on your head when you dare to ask for a morsel in return, was an awful feeling which occurred too often there. The site and moderation, especially since the late 2010s (and especially in 2020 and beyond), became malignantly predatory.

I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec. It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so you can't even view the question any more. I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again. In case anyone's wondering, I ended up asking on the WhatWG or W3C or something github project (via an issue?). The TLDR was rather eye opening, that basically the spec only codifies points of contention for browsers and old behaviors are generally undocumented. With some pointers I figured out the default size behavior through code diving, and it was complex (as in, hard to use) and very unintuitive.

>I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again. And it was a real gut punch when this would happen (or getting suspended/banned) to long-time users, as well. They largely precipitated their own demise, so I say good riddance.

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

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

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

He's demonstrating in real-time to other contributors here why SO is toast hahaha The feeling you are getting when talking to that arrogant brick wall was the prototypical SO user experience.

Still haven't been given a single example? And no, closing a question isn't necessarily hostile.

Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand. As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer.

I encourage you to recognize the statements you see as vitriol instead as brand markers as to how SO is known in the world. It's not a small set of folks who feel as if they were treated unfairly first.

If it's so many, surely someone should be able to provide some example of them being treated unfairly soon! But seriously, I'm fine with people not liking SO. I just don't think the discourse on HN around it is very fruitful and mostly emotional. SO have clearly done something wrong to get that kind of widespread reputation, but I'm also allowed to be disappointed in how it's being discussed.

You may think you're making some kind of point by repeatedly asking for examples of vitriol on SO, but all it shows is that you haven't looked, or haven't sincerely reflected on what you saw from the perspective of a regular user.

I think you are seeing emotional response is because SO has really fucked with people’s emotions, it is by far the most toxic place for SWEs to have ever existed and nothing is close 100th to it. expecting a non-emotional responses from SWEs about SO is asking too much (for most)

Thing is, if that's how you are greeted at stackoverflow, then you'll go elsewhere where you're not treated like an idiot. Stackoverflow's decline was inevitable, even without LLMs.

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

Right? It's a perfect example of the problem. In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help. But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think of users as a problem and an interruption, even though they were the only reason we were getting paid. I've been refusing to contribute to SO for so long that I can't even remember the details. But I still recall the feeling I got from their dismissive jackassery. Having their content ripped off by LLMs is the final blow, but they have richly earned their fate.

> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before? This is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top "Question Answerer" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work. So this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions.

Nobody, least of all me, is saying people should work for free. But not being paid to do something you don't want to do is a reason to go do something else, not hang around and be a hostile, superior dick about it, alienating the users.

The answerers are just as much users as the questioners - possibly in fact more as they are the ones spending time whilst the askers often (especially the poor ones) just ask a question and then go away. Unfortunately the SO management want money and so want the fly away askers more than the answerers who provide the benefit of the site.

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/

I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully.

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

>Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group? The fact that you even have to point this out to them, and how they still don't understand the root of the problem, is precisely why SO is finished.

its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be posted on Stack Overflow", which was insane to me because Stack Overflow has a "terraform" tag and category. If you visit it, you will see tons of users trying to post valid questions only to have the mods shut them down angrily.

Yeah. You're not a real programmer. It's just terraform. You're a stupids and we're smaht, and you should go off into your little corner and cry while we jerk each other off about how smart we are. Gee, I wonder why people don't want to use the site?

Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional.

Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment. The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere.

Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before. Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time. Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content. One thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example. Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate.

Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy? There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created. What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term. It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site.

The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started. In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it. That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding. However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult. Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate. Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back. This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone . The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude. Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered.

As a former Wikipedia administrator, I think one of the things that Wikipedia has done exactly right is to strongly prioritize readers first, editors second, and administrators third. The unofficial Wikipedia administrator symbol is a mop, because it's much more a position of responsibility than it is a position of power. I obviously think you and other user-hostile people should be permitted to congregate and accomplish something. What I object to in Stack Overflow's case is the site being taken over by people like that, serving themselves and their own preferences with such vigor that they alienated vast numbers of potential contributors, putting the site on a path of decline from which is unlikely to recover. Even by your own terms, having a place for some (conveniently unspecified) group to "congregate in public and try to accomplish something" looks certain to be a failure. However much you don't care about deadness or declining revenue, the people paying the bills surely do. Stack Overflow was only a success because it served and adapted to users. But I give you points for being honest about your hostility to the entire point of the site. It not only makes it clear why it's failing, but it'll keep people from being sorry when it gets closed down.

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.

> that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer. My brain is spitting out a parse error on this sentence. Too many double negatives. Zahlman was claiming above that the "duplicate" question linked earlier in the thread wasn't a useful question. Its not useful because if you read the accepted answer in the original thread, you can figure it out easily. Prove it then. Figure it out easily for us. I think the point of SO is for people to look up the answers to questions they have. If people have similar but distinct questions with different answers, it seems objectively better to surface both SO threads. Ideally they'd be linked together so if I accidentally stumble on the wrong question, there's a link to the question I'm actually interested in. > "I found this answer on [SO](link) Why bother with all of that? I mean, it sounds like all those extra words are all to grovel sufficiently to the SO moderator-gods, hoping in their capricious anger they won't mark your question as a duplicate and wipe it from the internet. Grovelling doesn't help the question asker or the question answerer. As a user, my problem with SO isn't that people ask bad questions. Its usually that the question I actually have - if its been asked - has long ago been deleted as a duplicate. And the only question remaining on the site is subtly different from the problem I'm actually facing. Or the answer is tragically out of date. Perhaps if people asked better questions, the moderators would be happier. But the site shouldn't be run purely for the benefit of its moderators. It became a meme. "How do I do X in javascript?" "Here's how you do it using jQuery." "But I'm not using jquery." "Question closed!"

I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first. The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences. It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy". I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience.

I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude that people get the information they need. In fact, your latest response is so far out that I've started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta here.

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

>this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO They've become parodies of themselves to such an extent that this topic should be a new sterling example of Poe's law hahahahaha

Exactly... I'm getting a laugh out of this thread because it's so easy to spot the power-trippers who are enraged at how their fiefdom is rapidly going extinct.

> 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.

Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything. I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.

this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences. SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...

I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO, and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite improvement in QoL for me.

Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"

Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?

Here is one fine example. [1] The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you. There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here: > "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them! > Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR!

I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody explicitly articulating that. It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri).

How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service. Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape. If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems The moderation was precisely the reason I stopped using stackoverflow and started looking for answers and asking questions elsewhere. It was nearly impossible to ask anything without someone replying "Why would you even want to do that, do <something completely different that does not solve my problem> instead!". Or someone claiming it's a duplicate and you should use that ancient answer from another question that 1) barely fits and doesnt solve my problem and 2) is so outdated, it's no longer useful. Whenever I had to ask something, I had to add a justification as to why I have to do it that way and why previous posts do not solve the issue, and that took more space than the question itself. I certainly won't miss SO.

I will miss it but you are right about moderation. I don't know what the issue is on some platforms, reddit and SO come to mind. Moderators on many other platforms or forums seem to be alright and keep a clear head, even when they have to deal with a lot of vitriol and they get little thanks for their work. There are probably negative examples as well but some platforms seem to be especially vulnerable. If I had to run reddit or SO, I would limit moderation to one subreddit/subdomain. No idea if that would help, but the problem isn't exactly invisible.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers. I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.

You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other questions first, ensure that your account has enough "clout" to overturn stupid closures of questions, and when you have wasted enough time doing that, then you can finally ask your own question. Or you can just go somewhere else that isn't an intellectual charade and circle jerking and figure it out without wasting tons of time chasing clout and hoping a moderator won't just close the question as duplicate. SO was never the best platform, exactly because of its horrendous moderation. It was good, yes. It had the quality assurance, to a degree, yes. But when just asking a question becomes such a monumental task, people will go elsewhere, to better platforms. Which includes other forums, and, LLMs. So no, what you're attributing to LLMs is merely a symptom of the deeper issue.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with.

It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality. > It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers. This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new (for example after a library change) and marking it as duplicate of an unanswered answer if a guarantee that the next SEO user won’t see it.

I’m sure I’ve had the experience of being told it’s a duplicate, without resolving my problem. In any case, you may be right, and yet if you search this thread for “horrible” and “obnoxious”, you’ll find dozens of occurrence. Maybe defining the rules of engagement so that the user is wrong every time doesn’t work.

Your first example is a public announcement of an llm assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback on an experiment isn't "sneaking" and the replies are a tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of questions so AI review seems like it should be useful. The top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this, the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just don't do it. The second top voted answer says "I was able to do a prompt injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug". So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol. It seems clear these people started from a belief that ai is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why this specific feature is bad. It's crazy that you are defending this group all over this HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem. I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in years. Those replies are embarrassing for the SO community, not AI.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems Just to add another personal data point: i started posting in on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting. Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. Moderation was an incredible problem for stack overflow.

The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could.

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

I stopped because of moderators. They literally killed the site for me.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems Questions asked on SO that got downvoted by the heavy handed moderation would have been answered by LLMs without any of the flak whatsoever. Those who had downvoted other's questions on SO for not being good enough, must be asking a lot of such not good enough questions to an LLM today. Sure, the SO system worked, but it was user hostile and I'm glad we all don't have to deal with it anymore.

As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state. But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute poison. I'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from Civ4: "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That sums it up exactly. There is a certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up as Reddit mods, for example. Rules and standards are good up to a point but some people forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselves and having debates about what's a repeated question, how questions and answers should be structured, etc. This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. And this goes back to the rules and standards being a tool not a goal. My stance was (and is) that shouldn't we solve flame wars when they happen rather than going around and "solving" imaginary problems? I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider. Even something that does have a definite answer like "how do I efficiently code a factorial function?" has multiple but different defensible answers. Even in one language you can have multiple implementations that might, say, be compile-time or runtime. Another commenter here talked about finding the nearest point on an ellipse and came up with a method they're proud of where there are other methods that would also do the job. Anyway, I'd occasionally login and see a constant churn on my answers from moderators doing pointless busywork as this month they'd decided something needed to be capitalized or not capitalized. A perfect example of this kind of thing is Bryan Henderson's war on "comprised of" on Wikipedia [2]. Anyway, I think the core issue of SO was that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit and I got a lot of accepted answers on questions that could never be asked today. You'll also read many anecdotes about people having a negative experience asking questions on SO in later years where their question was immediately closed as, say, a duplicate when the question wasn't a duplicate. The moderator just didn't understand the difference. That sort of thing. But any mature site ultimately ends with an impossible barrier to entry as newcomers don't know all the cultural rules that have been put in place and they tend to have a negative experience as they get yelled at for not knowing that Rule 11.6.2.7 forbids the kind of question they asked. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus [2]: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-c...

Dunno why you are being downvoted - there is a certain type of person who contributes virtually nothing on Wikipedia except peripheral things like categories. BrownHairedGirl was the most toxic person in Wikipedia but she was lauded by her minions - and yet she did virtually no content creation whatsoever. Yet made millions of edits!

Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me. When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim. And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it. It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved.

Moderation got worse over time

I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix. This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions. Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.

Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question. Hey, can you show me the log files? Sure here you go. Please help! Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!

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

The problem is the people who decide which questions are stupid are misaligned with the site's audience.

The example wasn't even finding a right answer so I don't see where you got that.. Searching questions/answers on SO can surface correct paths on situations where the LLMs will keep giving you variants of a few wrong solutions, kind of like the toxic duplicate closers.. Ironically, if SO pruned the history to remove all failures to match its community standards then it would have the same problem.

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.

> But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions. Which by the way is incredibly ironic to read on the internet after like fifteen years of annoying people left and right about toxic this and toxic that. Extreme example: Linus Torvalds used to be notoriously toxic. Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style?

Sadly, an accountable individual representing an organization is different from a community of semi-anonymous users with a bunch of bureaucracy that can't or doesn't care about every semis anonymous user

Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions. Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.

> I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in the way. So I stopped.

The more experienced I got, the subtler my questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this and that questions, but it is not", only to see my question get closed as duplicate by moderators. If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?

My feeling is that many times the moderators are not competent to decide correctly. They could go with "when in doubt, keep the duplicate", but they chose the opposite. Meaning that instead of happy users and duplicates, they have no duplicates, and no more users.

>toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes >zombie community Like Reddit post 2015.

Stack Overflow moderation is very transparent compared to whatever Reddit considers moderation. For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not quite comparable because the more subjective questions are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the direction of adding many more libraries than most people should).

Same here. I just didn't want to expend energy racing trigger happy mods. It was so odd, to this day remember vividly how they cleanup their arguments once proven wrong on the closing vote. Literally minutes before it would the close threshold.

Fun story: SO officially states comments are ephemeral and can be deleted whenever, so I deleted some of my comments. I was then banned. After my ban expired I asked on the meta site if it was okay to delete comments. I was banned again for asking that.

The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me as a bizarre feature, to put words in other people’s mouths. I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting. I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP.

Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).

This is called the XY problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378 . You ask for X, I tell you that what you really want is Y, I bully you, and I become more convinced that you and people that ask for X want Y.

Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game) You ask how to do X. Member M asks why you want to do X. Because you want to do Y. Well!? why do you want to do Y?? Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended! Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment. ... Can you help me? ... I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. Do you have any help? ...(crickets)

Yes exactly. The fact that the "XY problem" exists, and that users sometimes ask the wrong question, isn't being argued. The problem is that SO appears to operate at the extreme, taking the default assumption that the asker is always wrong. That toxic level of arrogance (a) pushes users away and (b) ...what you said.

Which is why LLMs are so much more useful than SO and likely always will be. LLMs do this even. Like trying to write my own queue by scratch and I ask an LLM for feedback I think it’s Gemini that often tells me Python’s deque is better. duh! That’s not the point. So I’ve gotten into the habit of prefacing a lot of my prompts with “this is just for practice” or things of that nature. It actually gets annoying but it’s 1,000x more annoying finding a question on SO that is exactly what you want to know but it’s closed and the replies are like “this isn’t the correct way to do this” or “what you actually want to do is Y”

My heuristic is that if your interlocutor asks follow-up questions like that with no indication of why (like “why do you want to do X?” rather than “why do you want to do X? If the answer is Y, then X is a bad approach because Q, you should try Z instead”) then they are never going to give you a helpful answer.

How do I add a second spout to this can? ... Well, the pump at the gas station doesn't fit in my car, but they sold me a can with a spout that fits in my car. ... It's tedious to fill the can a dozen times when I just want to fill up my gas tank. Can you help me or not? ... I understand, but I already bought the can. I don't need the "perfect" way to fill a gas tank, I just want to go home.

Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO heavy-handed moderation memes. Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer. You would be able to see which questions were too long-tail or difficult for the AI to answer, and humans could jump in to patch things up. This could be gamified with points. This would serve as fantastic LLM training material for local LLMs. The authors of the site could put in a clause saying that "training is allowed as long as you publish your weights + model". Someone please build this. Edit: Removed "LLMs did not kill Stack Overflow." first sentence as suggested. Perhaps that wasn't entirely accurate, and the rest of the argument stands better on its own legs.

The community is not "toxic". The community is overwhelmed by newcomers believing that they should be the ones who get to decide how the site works (more charitably: assuming that they should be able to use the site the same way as other sites, which are not actually at all the same and have entirely different goals). I don't know why you put "duplicates" in quotation marks. Closing a duplicate question is doing the OP (and future searchers) a service, by directly associating the question with an existing answer.

Absolutely 100% this. I've used them on and off throughout the years. The community became toxic, so I took my question to other platforms like Reddit (they became toxic as well) and elsewhere. Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open source, I've written everything from emulators and game engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc. The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in documentation, specifically related to undocumented behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO, I received either no response and downvotes, or negative responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back, so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button if folks were super negative and didn't answer the question. Later on, most of my answers actually have come from Github,and 95% of the time, my issues were legitimate ones that would've been mentioned if a decent number of folks used the framework, library, or language in question. I think the tl;dr of this is this: If you can't provide a positive contribution on ANY social media platform like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Github, etc. Don't speak. Don't vote. Ignore the question. If you happen to know, help out! Contribute! Write documentation! I've done so on more than one occasion (I even built a website around it and made money in the process due to ignorance elsewhere, until I shut it down due to nearly dying), and in every instance I did so, folks were thankful, and it made me thankful that I was able to help them. (the money wasn't a factor in the website I built, I just wanted to help folks that got stuck in the documentation hole I mentioned) EDIT: because I know a bunch of you folks read Ars Technica and certain other sites. I'll help you out: If you find yourself saying that you are being "pedantic", you are the problem, not the solution. Nitpicking doesn't solve problems, it just dilutes the problem and makes it bigger. If you can't help, think 3 times and also again don't say anything if your advice isn't helpful.

It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it. Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did. And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community. Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort to salvage what little there was left for themselves. Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings.

You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us". Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure. When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here - trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly showing this.

> Often, doing what your users want leads to success. You misunderstand. People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users". Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this. Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why. > When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care . Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made. > trying to deny the toxicity and condescension I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context. As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish?

I suppose all sites that have a voting component run the risk of becoming unpleasant. Hacker News, and we who frequent it, ought to have that in mind.

dang and the other HN moderators do a heroic job to set the tone, which has second- and third-order effects on behavior.

Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? Do we want this? We’re talking about how communities can become toxic. How we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to be our intentions. I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be compensated to not let a community deteriorate.

> That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? The answer to all of these questions is yes, for the most part. Volunteers are much harder to wrangle than employees and it's much easier for drama and disagreements to flare when there are zero consequences other than losing an unpaid position, particularly if anonymity is in the mix. Volunteers can be great but on average they're going to be far harder to manage and far more fickle than employees.

Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have. What you seem to suggest is that because building a community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing. What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to resolve differences productively. I think that if you replace individual responsibility with transactionality you have neither community nor long term viability or scalability. Then again, we live in times when transactional thinking seems to dominate discourse.

It's because I was involved with a large volunteer-based project that was a literal 24/7/365 operation for several years (dozens of volunteers at any given time and tens of thousands of concurrent users) and can speak first hand as to the differences. I didn't say it's not worth doing but it will bring challenges that wouldn't exist with employees. Paying people adds a strong motivator to keep toxic behaviour at bay. Your experiences will heavily depend on the type of project you're running but regardless, you can't hold volunteers, especially online, to the same expectations or standards as employees. The amount of time and effort they can invest will wax and wane and there's nothing you can do about it. Anonymity and lack of repercussions will eventually lead to drama or power struggles when a volunteer steps out of line in a way that they wouldn't in paid employment. There is no fix that'll stop occasional turbulence, it's just the way it is. Not all of your volunteers will be there for the greater good of your community. Again, that is absolutely not to say that it can't be worth the effort but if you go into it eyes open, you'll have a much better time and be able to do a better job at heading off problems. I've seen other people express similar opinions to yours and it wasn't until they experienced being in the driver's seat that they understood how difficult it is.

It's also disconnected incentives. SO users get numbers to go up by taking moderation actions so of course they do that. Also you literally get banned from reviewing questions if you don't flag enough of them to be closed. These are incentives put in place by the SO company intentionally. It's not like only slimy people get to use moderator tools like on Reddit, since you need a lot of reputation points you get by having questions and answers voted up. It's more like (1) you select people who write surface-level-good answers since that's what's upvoted, and they moderate with a similar attitude and (2) once you have access to moderator tools you're forced to conform with (1) or your access is revoked, and (3) the company is completely incompetent and doesn't give a shit about any of this.

Yeah, but they don't inherit their rules and attitude. Really, if we could apply some RLHF to the Stack Overflow community, it would be doing a lot better.

not only stackoverflow, but also reddit.com/r/aws reddit.com/r/docker reddit.com/r/postgresql all 3 of them have extremely toxic communities. ask a question and get downvoted instantly! Noo!! your job is to actually upvote the question to maximize exposure for the algorithm unless it is a really really stupid question that a google search could fix

Yep, LLMs are perfect for the "quick buy annoying to answer 500 times" questions about writing a short script, or configuring something, or using the right combination of command line parameters. Quicker than searching the entirety of Google results and none of the attitude.

Indeed. StackOverflow was by far the most unpleasant website that I have regularly interacted with. Sometimes, just seeing how users were treated there (even in Q&A threads that I wasn’t involved in at all) disturbed me so much it was actually interfering with my work. I’m so, so glad that I can now just ask an AI to get the same (or better) answers, without having to wade through the barely restrained hate on that site.

This change was happening well before LLMs. People were tired of being yelled at and treated poorly. A cautionary tale for many of these types of tech platforms, this one included.

They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620

Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange. At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on top.

> I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. They are not "threads" and are not supposed to be "threads". Thinking about them as if they were, is what leads to the perception of toxicity.

It's funny that people blame the site for this. That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture. It's everywhere.

I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which. But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior. I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.

People overestimate the impact of toxicity on number of monthly questions. The initial growth was due to missing answers. After some time there is a saturation point where all basic questions are already answered and can be found via Google. If you ask them again they are marked as dups.

I wonder if we can attribute some $billion of the investment in LLMs directly to the toxicity on StackOverflow.

Ironically they could probably do some really useful deduplication/normalization/search across questions and answers using AI/embeddings today, if only they’d actually allowed people to ask the same questions infinite different ways, and treated the result of that as a giant knowledge graph. I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid moderation.

Toxic community is mostly a meme myth. I have like 30k points and whatever admins were doing was well deserved as 90% of the questions were utterly impossible to help with. Most people wanted free help and couldn't even bother to put in 5 minutes of work.

Use of GPT3 among programmers started 2021 with GitHub Copilot which preceded ChatGPT. I agree the toxic moderation (and tone-deaf ownership!) initiated the slower decline earlier that then turned into the LLM landslide. Tbf SO also suffered from its own success as a knowledgebase where the easy pickings were long gone by then.

It is sort of because of AI - it provided a way of escaping StackOverflow's toxicity!

Could view it as push/pull dynamics: pushed away by toxicity, pulled to good answers from AI.

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

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

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

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

You had me looking through my history. Here is an example from 12 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-my... Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.

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

I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I didn't.

> Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn. I don't understand how there is supposedly any hostility on display there.

Those saying that StackOverflow became toxic are absolutely correct. But we should not let that be it's legacy. It is IMO still today one of the greatest achievements in terms of open data on the internet. And it's impact on making programming accessible to a large audience cannot be understated.

StackOverflow is famously obnoxious about questions badly asked, badly categorized, duplicated… It’s actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit from AI A LOT. Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and creating public records for them.

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

SO is not obnoxious because the users are wrong!

I believe the community has seen the benefit of forums like SO and we won’t let the idea go stale. I also believe the current state of SO is not sustainable with the old guard flagging any question and response you post there. The idea can/should/might be re-invented in an LLM context and we’re one good interface away from getting there. That’s at least my hope.

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

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

If you had used the search feature you’d realize that many similar comments have already been posted on HN. Vote to close.

If only those who voted to close would bother to check whether the dup/close issue was ACTUALLY a duplicate. If only there were (substantial) penalties for incorrectly dup/closing. The vast majority of dup/closes seem to not actually be dup/closes. I really wish they would get rid of that feature. Would also prevent code rot (references to ancient versions of the software or compiler you're interested in that are no longer relevant, or solutions that have much easier fixes in modern versions of the software). Not missing StackOverflow in the least. It did not age well. (And the whole copyright thing was just toxically stupid).

I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource.

SO in 2013 was a different world from the SO of the 2020's. In the latter world your post would have been moderator classified as 'duplicate' of some basic textbook copy/pasted method posted by a karma grinding CS student and closed.

Reddit is my current go-to for human-sourced info. Search for "reddit your question here". Where on reddit? Not sure. I don't post, tbh, but I do search. Has the added benefit of NOT returning stackoverflow answers, since StackOverflow seems to have rotted out these days, and been taken over by the "rejection police".

Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow. So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]

I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks. But it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate. I said to myself, let it die.

I was an early adopter. Have over 30k reputation because stack overflow and my internship started at the same time. I left because of the toxic culture, and that it's less useful the more advanced you get

If I had kept a list of such questions I would have posted it (which would be a very long one). But no, I don't have that list. > use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly. Respectfully, no. It is meaningless. If you just look at comments in this thread (and 20 other previous HN posts on this topic) you should know how dysfunctional stackoverflow management and moderation is. This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time. Nobody should waste their time and expect anything to be different.

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

Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here. There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention. Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now. If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it. Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts. I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system.

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

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

So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my comments. Is deleting comments allowed?" For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain how that's not toxic? Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then?

I think 95% of comments earnestly using the word "toxic" can be disregarded. They were unaware of or unwilling to follow the rules of the site. They mistook SO for reddit, a place for socializing .

Garbage was never moderated on StackOverflow, it was always ignored. Moderation was used by the insiders to keep new people out.

The new owners (well, not really new any more) are focused on adding AI to SO because it's the current hotness, and making other changes to try to extract more money that they're completely ignoring the community's issues and objections to their changes, which tend to be half-assed and full of bugs.

Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe in which the Stackoverflow community was so friendly, welcoming, helpful, and knowledgeable that this seems like a tragedy and motivates people to try to save it. But in this universe, most people's reaction is just "lol".

Lots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same decline [1]. [0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/ [1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph

I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off. What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed. Unfortunately it happens to every online technical community once they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN.

Fellow OG! And it's been happening on HN since the mid-2010s, too. Moderation went out of control everywhere, but at least this site isn't branded as some strictly technical site. Can't believe I'm even saying this, but moderation on a site that encompasses a cornucopia of topics is their prerogative. The mind-boggling thing to me about SO was that the moderation used non-technical criteria (such as failing to recognize why certain problems were asked and were not dupes, and later to shoehorn in political and sexual ideologies) to shape a technical site.

HN has full time staff that provides moderation and does an excellent job. Nonetheless there are numerous users who take it upon themselves to determine what content should be available to the rest of us, as if they were heroes in their own mind. It’s a form of narcissism. While they think of themselves as community saviors everyone else thinks they are censoring assholes. Just let the moderators do their job. Unwanted content will naturally fall off either by downvoting or it will be ignored. All the rest of ask for is just don’t be an asshole.

i've been using SO for 17 years as well but ultimately gave up out of frustration, and a lot of comments here are correctly pointing at the toxicity but the real-time chats were on a next level, it was absolutely maddening how toxic and aggressive these moderators were.

The decline is not surprising. I am sure AI is replacing Stackoverflow for a lot of people. And my experience with asking questions was pretty bad. I asked a few very specific questions about some deep detail in Windows and every time I got only some smug comments about my stupid question or the question got rejected outright. That while a ton of beginner questions were approved. Definitely not a very inviting club. I found i got better responses on Reddit.

Some commenters suggest it's not the moderation. I think it is the key problem, and the alternative communities were the accumulated effect. Bad questions and tough answer competition is part of it, but moderation was more important, I think. Because in the end what kept SO relevant was that people made their own questions on up to date topics. Up until mid-2010s you could make a seriously vague question, and it would be answered, satisfactory or not. (2018 was when I made the last such question. YMMV) After that, almost everything, that hadn't snap-on code answer, was labelled as offtopic or duplicate, and closed, no matter what. (Couple of times I got very rude moderators' comments on the tickets.) I think this lead some communities to avoid this moderator hell and start their own forums, where you could afford civilized discussion. Discourse is actually very handy for this (Ironically, it was made by the same devs that created SO). Forums of the earlier generation, have too many bells and whistles, and outdated UI. Discourse has much less friction. Then, as more quality material was accumulated elsewhere, newbies stopped seeing SO on top of search, and gradually language/library communities churned off one by one. (AI and other summaries, probably did contribute, but I don't think they were the primary cause.)

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.

>StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable. I really like this description. I and others here who are talking about negative experiences there seem to decry how we enjoy programming (you see words like "fun" and "passion" used in these posts), and how SO decided to take this good faith and cheer and bludgeon users for often opaque reasons, just so they could power trip. As much as I have many reservations about LLMs, I can ask LLMs to be as emotionless (or even emotional but chipper/happy) as I want. On SO, you needed to prostrate yourself and self-criticize to even have the opportunity to be bludgeoned further by the moderators. Who tf would want to spend their time contributing there? Even if you contributed a decent or even great amount to the site, you would still get whacked over the head if you dared to ask a question of your own. This is why people jumped to LLMs, even when they were far less capable than they are now. Most people (SO moderators don't view others as "people", as is apparent in this thread) would rather receive mid-tier answers from an LLM (though LLMs have now exceeded this level of quality) while still having fun, than get castigated and "closed as duped" on SO.

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.

hahaha, I almost forgot about that! "stop talking about edge cases and other things pertinent to this topic in comments about this topic!! reeeeeeeee!!!!"

A lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of accountability for everyone that influences the product, it eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with common sense stepped in to put an end to it.

Still a couple thousand away from 0. But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available. I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there

It's surely both. Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest Most questions have negative karma. Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem. All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders. SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them. SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls.

AI didn't necessarily kill SO because it was strictly better at giving technical answers (and it certainly wasn't better when GPTs initially burst onto the mass-appeal scene several years ago), but that it provided an alternative (even if subpar) where users could actually get responses to their questions (and furthermore not be ridiculed by psychopaths while doing so was the cherry on top).

It's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going to train the AI for free.

IMO people underestimate the value of heavy moderation. But moderation heavy or light, good or bad. Why wait hours for an answer when an LLM gives it in seconds?

Monica has the last laugh it seems

StackExchange forgot who made them successful long ago. This is what they sowed. I don't have any remorse, only pity. When Hans Passant (OGs will know) left, followed by SE doing literally nothing, that was the first clue for me personally that SE stopped caring. That said, it is a bit shocking how close to zero it is.

Stackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck.

It's surprisingly tame still given it interests tens (hundreds?) of millions of people at varying age and background and mostly when the mind is occupied by a problem. I always found it surprising there's not more defacing and toxicity.

For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM" https://sosimulator.xyz/

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

Makes for a good conspiracy theory. Bad actors intentionally making the internet hostile. https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE

Stack Overflow set out to be a better Q&A site but has turned into a user-unfriendly, gatekeeping platform where questions are often marked as duplicates because a similar question was answered 15 years ago. Everything and every question is banned, gatekeep, or marked as a duplicate.

Good riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any alternative. And that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking questions because they didn't want to run the moderation gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing. LLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will oblige. Looking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve.

Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed. AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions). SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?

Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse? The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.

Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood: > Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered! https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w... > Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year. https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... > Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn’t always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive. > All the content on the site must exist to serve the mission of learning over entertainment – even if that means making difficult calls about removing some questions and answers that fail to meet those goals, plus or minus 10 percent. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

I think the 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.

StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me. Actually I think it never did. It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account. And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile. I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities.

IMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community.

Before writing the comment I had in my head I did a CTRL+F search for "toxic" in the comment section here. 42 occurences. It says everything about what's happening to SO.

It's a very toxic place, you ask a doubt, and someone will abuse you, down vote you, make you feel you are not for to be a human. Better it's dead.

Incompetent moderation and the air of hostility towards contributing users.

Man after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard, but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I, as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM instead of being able to peruse great answers from different perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.

Good times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show proof, etc.) Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting questions and making snark comments.

Interesting timing. I just analyzed TabNews (Brazilian dev community) and ~50% of 2025 posts mention AI/LLMs. The shift is real. The 2014 peak is telling. That's before LLMs, before the worst toxicity complaints. Feels like natural saturation, most common questions were already answered. My bet, LLMs accelerated the decline but didn't cause it. They just made finding those existing answers frictionless.

For me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose. Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me. But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?

I'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often at one time. These days I don't even think about it.

Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity. Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their practical value and original intent. Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing products. As a result, answers from genuine users that recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience were frequently removed altogether. Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction and discourages broader user participation.

StackOverflow cemented my fears of asking questions. Even though there were no results for what I needed, I was too afraid to ask. Good riddance, now I’m never afraid to ask dumb questions to LLM and I’ve learned a lot more with no stress of judgement.

Couldn’t have happened to a meaner community

I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.

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

They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion". Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.

Good riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost never being asked on Stack overflow). The most annoying example I can think of (but can’t link to, alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question, and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn’t answer the question, telling the person to just Google the answer.

Not surprising. It's very often a toxic, unhelpful, stubborn community. I think maybe once or twice in years of use did I ever find it genuinely welcoming and helpful. Frequently instead I thought "Why should I even bother to post this? It'll just get either downvoted, deleted, or ignored."

LLMs are dogshit in many ways but when it comes to programming they are faster than people, respond instantaneously to further information, and can iterate until they understand the problem fully. Bonus is that you don’t get some dipshit being snarky.

Eternal September is finally over =) It was impossible to ask certain programming questions. Asking there was truly last resort.

Code golfing on SO was fun, too! I just looked it up, and "Note: This tag is currently blacklisted and can no longer be used." lmfao, what a braindead site, so glad I left years ago, after many years of greatly reduced activity. Source (at the top): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf?tab=New... Look at fun stuff like this from 2010: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2440314/code-golf-%cf%80...

I am fully aware that it's split off. My entire point of mentioning it was that even a bit of extra fun got excised from the site. >The issue is that code golf didn't fit well into the intended design Exactly! The intended design of SO was to be a hellhole, even though it was able to stave off this fate in its infancy by virtue of having too many optimistic new users.

I ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000. I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated. This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people using R, this seemed like something completely new. So, they just downvoted the question and told me I was wrong. I ended up answering my own question… but was also told that was wrong and that all points must have the same error interval. Instead of answering a programming question, people just went around denying experimental physics. I think that was the beginning of the end of SO for me.

I mean, I kinda of miss it. But man it was a hostile place for newcomers. Only ever asked one question and I tried to answer more than a handful but never really clicked with the site. I do wonder if it would have faired better under the original ownership before it was sold in 2021-06-02.

I’m glad it’s dead. They were super rude.

Good riddance. I stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the community was such a pain in the ass to deal with.

Flag it as off topic

>This post was not virtue signaling enough and therefore closed as duplicate. SO had the greatest minds but the shitiest moderation

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

Some of the comments in these links are hilariously elitist. They are actively embracing a hostile environment, especially towards newcomers, but how do they expect to grow and maintain a community when they are scaring users away?

Stackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom. Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is mainly about asking and answering questions.

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