llm/5daab79e-f20f-476c-ab87-82c7ff678250/batch-14-5be84401-715c-4f44-a701-d7122c96091f-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 Outdated answers problem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": "46483410",
"text": "> If by \"body-slammed\" you mean \"trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license\", then sure.\n\nYou know that's not what they meant, but why bring up the license here? If they were over the top compliant, attributing every SO answer under every chat, and licensing the LLM output as CC BY-SA, I think we'd still have seen the same shift.\n\n> In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.\n\nBest case it gives you the same level of content, but more customized, and faster.\n\nSO being wrong and wasting your time is also common."
}
,
{
"id": "46483230",
"text": "Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge?\n\nA lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources.\n\nHowever SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb.\n\nLLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO.\n\nAre we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483460",
"text": "There's https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ for the more academic CS questions btw."
}
,
{
"id": "46483441",
"text": "it is indeed a shame. if you are doing anything remotely new and novel, which is essential if you want to make a difference in an increasingly competitive field, LLMs confidently leave you with non-working solutions, or sometimes worse they set you on the wrong path.\n\nI had similar worries in the past about indexable forums being replaced by discord servers. the current situation is even worse."
}
,
{
"id": "46485455",
"text": "Web has been solved for a decade imo."
}
,
{
"id": "46485012",
"text": "Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more.\n\nI have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board.\n\nWith AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September).\n\nI don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions"
}
,
{
"id": "46483501",
"text": "Good.\n\nThis is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic.\n\nLLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup."
}
,
{
"id": "46484028",
"text": "Makes for a good conspiracy theory. Bad actors intentionally making the internet hostile. https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE"
}
,
{
"id": "46488845",
"text": "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.\n\nAnd 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.\n\nLLMs 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.\n\nLooking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve."
}
,
{
"id": "46482794",
"text": "Game over. I didn’t notice all the toxicity mentioned in the other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe. It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its name is part of web history, and there’s no denying that."
}
,
{
"id": "46489747",
"text": "The corresponding answers graph: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/a..."
}
,
{
"id": "46492135",
"text": "I used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483469",
"text": "They had pretty neat infra, maybe it still runs in the same clever way. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a..."
}
,
{
"id": "46485550",
"text": "Recently they've chucked out their own servers:\n\nhttps://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-sa..."
}
,
{
"id": "46483649",
"text": "Notably the default Redis client for most .NET developers is still StackExchange.Redis."
}
,
{
"id": "46482644",
"text": "People are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them."
}
,
{
"id": "46482803",
"text": "This is concerning on two fronts. The questions are no longer open (SO is CC-BY-SA) and if Q&A content dies then this herds even more people towards LLM use.\nIt's basically draining the commons."
}
,
{
"id": "46483018",
"text": "Yup. This, to me, provides another explanation for why the social contract is being used as toilet paper by the owner class. They literally see the writing on the wall."
}
,
{
"id": "46482969",
"text": "I fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/"
}
,
{
"id": "46483675",
"text": "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\"\n\nhttps://sosimulator.xyz/"
}
,
{
"id": "46490830",
"text": "A decline in number of questions asked can also be because most people's questions are already answered in the database.\n\nHow would you query this for post views over time?"
}
,
{
"id": "46493279",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46490260",
"text": "I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time.\n\nI use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago.\n\nI used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time.\n\nSo perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP.\n\nI don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components."
}
,
{
"id": "46483877",
"text": "Whenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you”\n\nhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246333"
}
,
{
"id": "46482620",
"text": "Wow. I was expecting a decline but not to that extent."
}
,
{
"id": "46483118",
"text": "Seems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold to a private equity firm."
}
,
{
"id": "46487137",
"text": "StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me.\n\nActually I think it never did.\n\nIt 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.\n\nAnd then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile.\n\nI hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities."
}
,
{
"id": "46487236",
"text": "I don't think the reputation system ever worked that way - new users could always answer questions, but comments required more reputation."
}
,
{
"id": "46487388",
"text": "OK, you might be right and I got it backwards. It still felt wrong at the time before I got enough points."
}
,
{
"id": "46486732",
"text": "I think the disallowing of “controversial” technical questions might have helped as much as the AI boom.\n\nSo frustrating to be reading a deeply interesting technically and intense debate to be closed down by an admin."
}
,
{
"id": "46482750",
"text": "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.\n\nAI 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).\n\nSO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483213",
"text": "I find a lot of good stuff in GitHub issues"
}
,
{
"id": "46482927",
"text": "Local meet-ups I guess?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483035",
"text": "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?\n\nThe precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow."
}
,
{
"id": "46483291",
"text": "Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood:\n\n> 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!\n\nhttps://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...\n\n> Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year.\n\nhttps://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...\n\n> 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.\n> All the content on"
}
,
{
"id": "46483133",
"text": "I think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to \"get to the bottom\" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism.\n\nAll of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered.\n\nI remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/dis"
}
,
{
"id": "46483198",
"text": "The question askers got stupider and stupider."
}
,
{
"id": "46486975",
"text": "I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans."
}
,
{
"id": "46483834",
"text": "The founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way that site is worth $1.8 billion now."
}
,
{
"id": "46483979",
"text": "Spolsky and co. sold SO in 2021 - timing IS everything."
}
,
{
"id": "46483164",
"text": "Wow, that's not just collapsing, that's collapsed."
}
,
{
"id": "46487265",
"text": "Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to . LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact.\n\nAnd that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder.\n\nI'm not sad."
}
,
{
"id": "46487448",
"text": "LLMs did not eat SO, it was SO that fed the LLMs too well.\n\nhttps://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners..."
}
,
{
"id": "46482600",
"text": "Approaching 0 is wild"
}
,
{
"id": "46482676",
"text": "Moderator team must be over the moon"
}
,
{
"id": "46485642",
"text": "Now imagine what happens when a new programming language comes along. When we have a question, we will no longer be able to Google it and find answers to it on Stack Overflow. We will ask the LLMs. They will work it out. From that moment, the LLM we used has the knowledge for solving this particular problem. Over time, this produces huge moat for the largest providers. I believe it is one of the subtler reasons why the AI race is so fierce."
}
,
{
"id": "46486815",
"text": "I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.\n\nI was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already."
}
,
{
"id": "46490329",
"text": "Everyone is saying LLMs did this site in, but what if we just asked all the questions already? We should be celebrating how we solved programming!"
}
,
{
"id": "46484985",
"text": "Where will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration."
}
,
{
"id": "46485962",
"text": "Why do you think people stop creating new posts just because SO collapsed? People on GitHub issues and Reddit answer programming questions everyday.\n\nSO was dying even before ChatGPT was released. LLMs just accelerated that process."
}
]
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