llm/5daab79e-f20f-476c-ab87-82c7ff678250/batch-12-a26fdabf-6d14-4130-8e91-c320f16dc562-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. Toxic moderation culture
2. LLMs replacing Stack Overflow
3. Duplicate question closures
4. Community hostility toward newcomers
5. Question quality standards
6. Knowledge base vs help forum debate
7. Future of LLM training data
8. Reddit and Discord as alternatives
9. Gamification and reputation systems
10. Outdated answers problem
11. SO sale to private equity
12. Google search integration decline
13. Expert knowledge preservation
14. GitHub Discussions adoption
15. Elitist gatekeeping behavior
16. Human interaction loss
17. Question saturation theory
18. Moderator power dynamics
19. AI-generated content concerns
20. Community decline timeline
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46483407",
"text": "I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it."
}
,
{
"id": "46485982",
"text": "> To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.\n\nI think https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 is pretty straightforward. If you can show a question of yours that was closed, I'll be happy to try to explain why."
}
,
{
"id": "46483639",
"text": "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.\n\nMaybe 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.\n\nI 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."
}
,
{
"id": "46486010",
"text": "> 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.\n\nYes, 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.\n\n> I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them.\n\nIt would be better to focus on saving time for yourself, by understanding the goal. Please read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254"
}
,
{
"id": "46486277",
"text": "Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.\n\nThere 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.\n\nAlso its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now.\n\nIf the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.\n\nFrankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.\n\nI was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system."
}
,
{
"id": "46489684",
"text": "> Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.\n\nI have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately.\n\nBut, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions.\n\n> If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.\n\nNo, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no \"force\"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more \"force\" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is \"working\", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena.\n\nThere's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about \"the site being in a death spiral\". Because that i"
}
,
{
"id": "46484231",
"text": "The graph is scary, but I think it's conflating two things:\n\n1. Newbies asking badly written basic questions, barely allowed to stay, and answered by hungry users trying to farm points, never to be re-read again. This used to be the vast majority of SO questions by number.\n\n2. Experiencied users facing a novel problem, asking questions that will be the primary search result for years to come.\n\nIt's #1 that's being canibalized by LLM's, and I think that's good for users. But #2 really has nowhere else to go; ChatGPT won't help you when all you have is a confusing error message caused by the confluence of three different bugs between your code, the platform, and an outdated dependency. And LLMs will need training data for the new tools and bugs that are coming out."
}
,
{
"id": "46486095",
"text": "The newbies vastly outnumber the experienced people (in every discipline), and have more to ask per-capita, and are worse at asking it. Category 2 is much smaller. The volume of Stack Overflow was never going to be sustainable and was not reasonably reflective of its goals.\n\nWe are talking about a site that has accumulated more than three times as many questions as there are articles on Wikipedia. Even though the scope is \"programming languages\" as compared to \"literally anything that is notable\".\n\nBut there are other places people can go, such as https://software.codidact.com (fd: I am a moderator there)."
}
,
{
"id": "46485149",
"text": "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.\n\nOn 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."
}
,
{
"id": "46487386",
"text": "\"well posed questions\"\n\nAnd 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.\n\nAll I can say to these is: Ma'am, this is a Wendy's."
}
,
{
"id": "46492420",
"text": "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?\"\n\nFor 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?\n\nMaybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then?"
}
,
{
"id": "46486121",
"text": "Yes, LLMs are great at answering questions, but providing reasonable answers is another matter.\n\nCan you really not think of anything that hasn't already been asked and isn't in any documentation anywhere? I can only assume you haven't been doing this very long. Fairly recently I was confronted with a Postgres problem, LLMs had no idea, it wasn't in the manual, it needed someone with years of experience. I took them IRC and someone actually helped me figure it out.\n\nUntil \"AI\" gets to the point it has run software for years and gained experience, or it can figure out everything just by reading the source code of something like Postgres, it won't be useful for stuff that hasn't been asked before."
}
,
{
"id": "46487345",
"text": "The first actually insightful comment under the OP. I agree all of it.\n\nIf SO manages to stay online, it'll still be there for #2 people to present their problems. Don't underestimate the number of bored people still scouring the site for puzzles to solve.\n\nSE Inc, the company, are trying all kinds of things to revitalize the site, in the service of ad revenue. They even introduced types of questions that are entirely exempt from moderation. Those posts feel literally like reddit or any other forum. Threaded discussions, no negative scores, ...\n\nIf SE Inc decides to call it quits and shut the place down and freeze it into a dataset, or sell it to some SEO company, that would be a loss."
}
,
{
"id": "46484843",
"text": "I think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a recreational journal or BB.\n\nThe reason the \"experts\" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs."
}
,
{
"id": "46482749",
"text": "While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding.\n\nSo some possible reasons:\n\n- Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.\n\n- Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users.\n\n- Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam\n\n- Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn.\n\n- Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented\n\nSome non-reasons:\n\n- Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist)."
}
,
{
"id": "46482965",
"text": "> - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.\n\nI think this is one major factor that is not getting enough consideration in this comment thread. By 2018-2020, it felt like the number of times that someone else had already asked the question had increased to the point that there was no reason to bother asking it. Google also continued to do a better and better job of surfacing the right StackOverflow thread, even if the SO search didn't.\n\nIn 2012 you might search Google, not find what you needed, go to StackOverflow, search and have no better luck, then make a post (and get flamed for it being a frequently-asked question but you were phrasing yours in a different / incorrect way and didn't find the \"real\" answer).\n\nIn 2017, you would search Google and the relevant StackOverflow thread would be in the top few results, so you wouldn't need to post and ask.\n\nIn 2020, Google's \"rich snippets\" were showing you the quick answers in the screen r"
}
,
{
"id": "46483433",
"text": "The volume of basic questions is unlimited. There are new technologies every year."
}
,
{
"id": "46483852",
"text": "Not sure. As software becomes a commodity I can see the \"old school\" like tech slowing down (e.g. programming languages, frameworks frontend and backend, etc). The need for a better programming language is less now since LLM's are the ones writing code anyway more so these days - the pain isn't felt necessarily by the writer of the code to be more concise/expressive. The ones that do come out will probably have more specific communities for them (e.g. AI)"
}
,
{
"id": "46487304",
"text": "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, reading some of these comments.\n\nIt 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\n(I have 25K reputation on StackOverflow, and was most active between 2011 and 2018.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46487369",
"text": "I think 95% of comments earnestly using the word \"toxic\" can be disregarded.\n\nThey were unaware of or unwilling to follow the rules of the site. They mistook SO for reddit, a place for socializing ."
}
,
{
"id": "46488682",
"text": "Garbage was never moderated on StackOverflow, it was always ignored.\n\nModeration was used by the insiders to keep new people out."
}
,
{
"id": "46489487",
"text": "And half the garbage is from people \"moderating\"! You are literally rewarded points for doing moderating activities, so of course every post is flooded with BS edits, votes to close, etc.. Cobra effect and whatnot."
}
,
{
"id": "46489695",
"text": "What points do you get for moderation activity?"
}
,
{
"id": "46484564",
"text": "The obvious culprit here are the LLMs, but I do wonder whether Github's social features, despite its flaws, have given developers fewer reasons to ask questions on SO?\n\nSpeaking from experience, every time I hit a wall with my projects, I would instinctively visit the project's repo first, and check on the issues / discussions page. More often than not, I was able to find someone with an adjacent problem and get close enough to a solution just by looking at the resolution. If it all failed, I would fall back to asking questions on the discussion forum first before even considering to visit SO."
}
,
{
"id": "46482674",
"text": "Seems like the exit was very well timed.\n\nhttps://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha..."
}
,
{
"id": "46482813",
"text": "Another plausible explanation is that the new owners didn’t develop the community in a good way. Instead of fixing the myriad of issues that were obvious to almost all contributors they instead basically let it die?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483420",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46490431",
"text": "Love this comment [1] under the post\n\n> $1.8 billion? So do those of us who contribute get any of that?\n\n1. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha..."
}
,
{
"id": "46482664",
"text": "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.\n\nBut in this universe, most people's reaction is just \"lol\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46483544",
"text": "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].\n\n[0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/\n\n[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph"
}
,
{
"id": "46483707",
"text": "A similar but not as strong decline. Taking the one but last datapoint for both (stackoverflow/tex respectively): 4436 and 394. If you compare this to how it looked like between 2015-2020 you get (my guess from scanning): 160,000 and 1700. So Stackoverflow as a whole went from 160K -> ~4.4K. That's like a 35x drop, compared to tex, where it's a 1700 -> 394, 4x drop."
}
,
{
"id": "46483671",
"text": "Hate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX site."
}
,
{
"id": "46487422",
"text": "I would ascribe that to these communities evolving differently. There is no reason to assume that the popularity of LaTeX tracks the popularity of programming languages. It's a type setting system. And that doesn't even take into account communities that exist parallel to SO/SE. Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life."
}
,
{
"id": "46487596",
"text": "> Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.\n\nYup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both are still somewhat active.\n\n[0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax\n\n[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf"
}
,
{
"id": "46483611",
"text": "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.\n\nWhat 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.\n\nUnfortunately it happens to every online technical community once they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN."
}
,
{
"id": "46485438",
"text": "HN is a sponsored marketing outlet for YC first and foremost."
}
,
{
"id": "46486474",
"text": "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.\n\nIt’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.\n\nAll the rest of ask for is just don’t be an asshole."
}
,
{
"id": "46488326",
"text": "That has nothing to do with the fact that this forum exists to promote YC and its associated ventures."
}
,
{
"id": "46490986",
"text": "As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0].\n\nI'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a discussion site, rather than the Q&A site that it was set out to be.\n\nI do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile or that they unfairly closed questions without bringing the citations required. I'm not saying at all that SO was without it's flaws in leadership, moderators, community or anything else that made the site what it was. But if you're going to complain, at least bring examples, especially when you have someone here you could hold somewhat accountable.\n\nThe problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Disc"
}
,
{
"id": "46483008",
"text": "As someone that spent a fair bit of time answering questions on StackOverflow, what stood out years ago was how much the same thing would be asked every day. Countless duplicates. That has all but ceased with LLMs taking all that volume. Honestly, I don't think that's a huge loss for the knowledge base.\n\nThe other thing I've noticed lately is a strong push to get non-programming questions off StackOverflow, and on to other sites like SuperUser, ServerFault, DevOps, etc.\n\nUnfortunately, what's left is so small I don't think there's enough to sustain a community. Without questions to answer, contributors providing the answers disappear, leaving the few questions there often unanswered."
}
,
{
"id": "46486794",
"text": "This is horrifying.\n\nGiven the fact that when I need a question answered I usually refer to S.O. , but more recently have taken suggestions from LLM models that were obviously trained on S.O. data...\n\nAnd given the fact that all other web results for \"how do you change the scroll behavior on...\" or \"SCSS for media query on...\" all lead to a hundred fake websites with pages generated by LLMs based on old answers.\n\nDestroying S.O. as a question/answer source leaves only the LLMs to answer questions. That's why it's horrific."
}
,
{
"id": "46483933",
"text": "I joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards .NET and I’ve been working with Microsoft web technologies since the mid 90’s.\n\nMy SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through it, I also thoroughly enjoyed helping others. I also started to publish articles on CodeProject and it kicked off my long tech blogging “career”, and I still enjoy writing and sharing knowledge with others.\n\nI have visited the site maybe once a year since 2017. It got to the point that trying to post questions was intolerable, since they always got closed. At this point I have given up on it as a resource, even though it helped me tremendously to both learn (to answer questions) and solve challenging problems, and get help for edge cases, especially on niche topics. For me it is a part of my l"
}
,
{
"id": "46486340",
"text": "Apparently it was removed to reduce the load on the database see [0], [1].\n\nThe top voted response points out that SO are [2]:\n\n> destroying a valuable feature for users.\n\nKinda wild they allowed it. As that answer also suggests, perhaps rather than remove it entirely, they could just compute those stats at a lesser frequency to reduce load.\n\n[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/399661/389220\n\n[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/437862/5783745\n\n[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/400024/389220"
}
,
{
"id": "46483992",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46482715",
"text": "I do use Claude a lot, but I still regularly ask questions on https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/ . It's often just too niche, LLMs hallucinate stuff like an entire non-existent benchmarking feature in Snakemake, or can't explain how I should get transcriptome aligners to give me correct quantifications for a transcript. I guess it's too niche. And as a lonely Bioinformatician it can be nice to get confirmation from other bioinformaticians.\n\nLooking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any LLM."
}
,
{
"id": "46483092",
"text": "Interestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched!\n\nIt’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower?\n\n[1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover..."
}
,
{
"id": "46483268",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46482523",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46487452",
"text": "Would you care to link to any of those, even ones that might appear to be deleted?"
}
,
{
"id": "46488608",
"text": "StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.\n\nInstead 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nTo create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by itself."
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50