llm/5daab79e-f20f-476c-ab87-82c7ff678250/batch-16-13fdabb1-0d36-42ee-ab18-228eeedcb7f9-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 Outdated answers problem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": "46482883",
"text": "This is a great example of how free content was exploited by LLMs and used against oneself to an ultimate destruction.\n\nEvery content creator should be terrified of leaving their content out for free and I think it will bring on a new age of permanent paywalls and licensing agreements to Google and others, with particular ways of forcing page clicks to the original content creators."
}
,
{
"id": "46483025",
"text": "What if we filter out all the questions closed as dupes, off topic, etc?"
}
,
{
"id": "46486196",
"text": "It's funny to see people's new year's resolution to learn how to code in the graph"
}
,
{
"id": "46483032",
"text": "I suspect a lot of the traffic shift is from Google replacing the top search result, which used to be Stack Overflow for programming questions, with a Gemini answer."
}
,
{
"id": "46483731",
"text": "Everyone here talks about LLMs, but for me, the reason why StackOverflow became totally irrelevant is because of dedicated Discord servers and forums."
}
,
{
"id": "46483188",
"text": "I misread the title at first and thought it was hacker news questions [comments] that were being graphed. That’s what I would be interested in seeing"
}
,
{
"id": "46485409",
"text": "Good riddance.\n\nI stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the community was such a pain in the ass to deal with."
}
,
{
"id": "46483173",
"text": "Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity.\n\nMany 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.\n\nSome 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.\n\nAdditionally, 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."
}
,
{
"id": "46485263",
"text": "While the decline started a decade ago in 2014 and accelerated in 2020, the huge drop since 2023 is remarkable"
}
,
{
"id": "46484391",
"text": "Has AI summarization led to people either getting their answer from a search engine directly, and failing that, just giving up?"
}
,
{
"id": "46485458",
"text": "RTFM"
}
,
{
"id": "46487625",
"text": "TFMs are not a thing anymore. Most of them are merely collections of sparse random dots one might join by sheer luck only, granted no other knowledge of the system being attempted to document."
}
,
{
"id": "46490149",
"text": "I don't know what you are building, but if a thing doesn't have comprehensive docs it doesn't make it into my stack."
}
,
{
"id": "46490306",
"text": "glad I don’t work at any place that would make a professional write this comment"
}
,
{
"id": "46482618",
"text": "The result is not surprising! Many people are now turning to LLMs with their questions instead. This explains the decline in the number of questions asked."
}
,
{
"id": "46483980",
"text": "Couldn’t have happened to a meaner community"
}
,
{
"id": "46486037",
"text": "You're clearly excluding gaming communities such as DotA2."
}
,
{
"id": "46482607",
"text": "Everything we have done and said on the internet since its birth has just been to train the future AI."
}
,
{
"id": "46485070",
"text": "It was a good idea ruined by the compulsively obtuse and pedantic, not unlike Reddit."
}
,
{
"id": "46482869",
"text": "Maybe the average question will be more \"high level\" now that all simple questions are answered by LLMs ?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483557",
"text": "they pretend like everything is fine at HN too wouldn't surprise me looking similar in the future."
}
,
{
"id": "46488335",
"text": "Clicked on the link and got stopped by cloudflare. Guess I won't be giving them any more traffic either."
}
,
{
"id": "46483796",
"text": "StackOverflow cemented my fears of asking questions. Even though there were no results for what I needed, I was too afraid to ask.\n\nGood riddance, now I’m never afraid to ask dumb questions to LLM and I’ve learned a lot more with no stress of judgement."
}
,
{
"id": "46482955",
"text": "I've never once asked a question on there\nMostly because you can't unless your account has X something-points. Which you get by answering questions.\n\nThis threw me off so much when I got started with programming. Like why are the people who have the most questions, not allowed to ask any...?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483022",
"text": "Are you sure? You can post questions even with a completely new blank account. It's comments that require some reputation, maybe you were thinking about those?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483007",
"text": "You don't need any reputation to ask questions, you only need to create an account."
}
,
{
"id": "46491573",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46486096",
"text": "Someone turn off the lights on the way out"
}
,
{
"id": "46482852",
"text": "If nobody is on StackOverflow, What will LLM's train on for new problems?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491438",
"text": "GitHub Issues and Disscussions + searching the code base, fetching the docs and some reasoning on top. Maybe even firing up a sandbox VM and testing some solutions."
}
,
{
"id": "46482751",
"text": "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\".\n\nLet'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."
}
,
{
"id": "46487419",
"text": "StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs.\n\nPathetic 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.\n\nhttps://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners..."
}
,
{
"id": "46482602",
"text": "Probably similar for google. My first line of search is always chatgpt"
}
,
{
"id": "46485045",
"text": "End of an era. :-("
}
,
{
"id": "46484281",
"text": "A death graph.\n\nKind of sad that they ran out of ideas how to fix SO."
}
,
{
"id": "46483337",
"text": "Gee...I wonder why it's almost dead (again)?"
}
,
{
"id": "46482860",
"text": "I wonder if google search saw a similar hit"
}
,
{
"id": "46483560",
"text": "My personal bet is that traditional search engines face a -70% usage drop at the moment."
}
,
{
"id": "46483126",
"text": "I doubt it. If I want to ask AI a simple question I type it into Google now."
}
,
{
"id": "46483354",
"text": "anecdotally, i personally stopped using google a lot in the last few years"
}
,
{
"id": "46485614",
"text": "It is always good to see other cultured people who structure their SQL queries the right way."
}
,
{
"id": "46486254",
"text": "Derivative of S curve"
}
,
{
"id": "46482615",
"text": "Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough?\n\nPrecise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays."
}
,
{
"id": "46482659",
"text": "They would just use documentation. I know there is some synthesis they would lose in the training process but I’m often sending Claude through the context7 MCP to learn documentation for packages that didn’t exist, and it nearly always solves the problem for me."
}
,
{
"id": "46482739",
"text": "The brilliance of StackOverflow was in being the place to find out how to do tricky workarounds for functionality that either wasn't documented or was buggy such that workarounds were needed to make it actually work.\n\nSoftware quality is now generally a bit better than it was in 2010, but that need is ultimately still there."
}
,
{
"id": "46483046",
"text": "Assuming these end up in open source code llms will learn about them that way."
}
,
{
"id": "46483227",
"text": "Aren't a lot of projects using LLMs to generate documentation these days?"
}
,
{
"id": "46484736",
"text": "They pay lots of humans to train the LLMs.."
}
,
{
"id": "46484896",
"text": "And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - \"too broad\".\nI mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds?\n\nAlthough I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well."
}
,
{
"id": "46483633",
"text": "It was a good 16 year-ish run."
}
]
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