Summarizer

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

Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions. Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode. It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Top-level view: from the perspective of people who aren't explicitly trying to teach on their own initiative, overall the site has outlived its purpose. In that time it drew way too many total questions to surface what's actually valuable; between that and no functional search (the internal search was always bad; Google et. al. got worse over time, partly intentionally) you're lucky to find anything valuable. I'm not generally worried about out-of-date answers; the truly outdated answers are mostly on outdated questions , describing situations that don't come up any more or premises that are no longer valid for ordinary programmers (e.g., fixing problems with obsolete tools). Combing through to curate properly is too little, too late now. Much stronger (but polite, of course) gatekeeping was required earlier on, which in turn required (among other things) proper means for communication between "core" users and the public. At this point, it's best to start over (hence the part where I'm now a moderator at Codidact). There's a lot more I want to say, but I don't have it organized in my head and this is way downthread already. Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post?

The "nuh uh" attitude also helps explain the usage graph drop. "The users simply wanted the wrong thing than what the site is for" is also something

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

I think many would agree that this policy was the single biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would Have been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high quality answers were better. Management was wrong.

It doesn't appear to have worked.

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

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

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

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

> Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish. Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information. From what you are saying, they pretended to give fish when in reality only teaching fishing. Users went their because they were told that they could get fish, and only found out once there that there was no fish, only fishing lessons. Blame lies squarely on SO, not on users. If SO clarified their marketing as "Not a Q and A site" then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange, and this is what it says on the landing page, front and center: Stack Exchange Q&A communities are different.

> Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information. At the beginning, even Atwood and Spolsky didn't really know what "a Q&A site" is. They didn't have a precedent for what they were making; that was the point of making it. Even Quora came later, and it's useless now because they didn't get it. It turns out that a Q and A site actually fundamentally is pretty close to "a wiki of fact-checked information", just with Qs as a prompting and labeling mechanism. (Which really isn't that surprising; if you've seen e.g. science books for children in Q&A format, you'll notice the Qs are generally unrealistic for children to ask. I remember one that was along the lines of "is it true you can get electricity from a lemon?", used to introduce a description of a basic copper-zinc battery cell.) By 2011 or so, at least Atwood had figured this out, and was publicly blogging to explain it. By 2014, a core group of users clearly grasped the idea, but was still struggling to figure out what kinds of close reasons actually keep questions on target (and were also struggling with a ton of social issues in general). > Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange Not true. https://stackoverflow.com/tour

> https://stackoverflow.com/tour From your link: > This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. > > Just questions... > > ...and answers. And that's specifically what you said the site was not ; people were going there for answers to their questions. They weren't getting them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He and Jeff made it abundantly clear their mission was to destroy the sex change site because that site was immoral for monetizing the benevolence of the community who answered the questions. "Knowledge should be free" they said. "You shouldn't make money off stuff like this," they said. Plenty of links and backstory in my other comments.

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?

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

I 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.

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

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

You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own questions, too. And there are more sites like this (see e.g. https://codidact.com — fd: moderator of the Software section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a reason to stop doing it.

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

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.

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

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

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, reading some of these comments. It looks like a pretty clear divide between the people that wanted to ask questions to get solutions for their own specific problems; and those who were aware of what the site wanted to be and how it actually operated, and were willing to put in the time and answer questions, etc. The sheer amount of garbage that used to get posted every day required some pretty heavy moderation. Most of it was not by actual moderators, it was by high-reputation users. (I have 25K reputation on StackOverflow, and was most active between 2011 and 2018.)

SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.

SO has lost against LLMs because it has insistently positioned itself as a knowledge base rather than a community. The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it. They basically made a bet because they wanted to be the full anti-thesis of ad-ridden garbage-looking forums. Pure information, zero tolerance for humanity, sterile looking design. They achieved that goal, but in the end, they dug their own grave too. LLMs didn’t admonish us to write our questions better, or simply because we asked for an opinion. They didn’t flag, remove our post with no advance notice. They didn’t forbid to say hello or thanks, they welcomed it. They didn’t complain when we asked something that was asked many times. They didn’t prevent us from deleting our own content. Oh yeah, no wonder nobody bothers with SO anymore. It’s a good lesson for the future.

Whenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246333

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/

The SO mission is complete. It's now an LLM training set. Things would be different if we didn't.

StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs. Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of course, but I wanted to do so out of principle. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...

You do realize that they made an entire site for CodeGolf that is reasonably active (and has its own culture... and lead to the creation of specialized languages for it... and even pushed the bounds of OEIS a few times - https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5318 )? https://codegolf.stackexchange.com The issue is that code golf didn't fit well into the intended design of the library and it split off 15 years ago https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#oldest

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.

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

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.

Since the trend must go on, we expect StackExchange to now offer answers, and the user responses need to be questions. We could even make a quiz game show out of that! /s