llm/5daab79e-f20f-476c-ab87-82c7ff678250/batch-2-db14fe76-ee7f-42f9-91f3-053215ce7146-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 Outdated answers problem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": "46489399",
"text": "I think many would agree that this policy was the single biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would\nHave been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high quality answers were better. Management was wrong."
}
,
{
"id": "46489354",
"text": "This is because the real goal was SEO."
}
,
{
"id": "46488600",
"text": "> They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet\n\nThis is mostly how I engaged with SO for a long, long time. I think it’s a testament to SO’s curation of answers that I didn’t ask almost any questions for like 5+ years after starting programming"
}
,
{
"id": "46491670",
"text": "If this were true, then treating any question as an X-Y problem shouldn't be allowed at all. I.e. answers should at least address the question as posed before/instead of proposing an alternative approach.\n\nIn reality the opposite is encouraged. For countless times, I've landed on questions with promising titles/search extracts, only to find irrelevant answers because people grabbed onto some detail in the question irrelevant to my case and provided X-Y answers.\n\nThis often also causes subsequent useful questions to be marked as dups even though they no longer contain that irrelevant detail. The appeal process is so unfriendly that most would not bother.\n\nSee also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068243"
}
,
{
"id": "46484059",
"text": "LLMs also search Google for answers. Hence the knowledge may be not lost even for those who only supervises machines that write code."
}
,
{
"id": "46484930",
"text": "I agree with that and I think it was the right decision. There was grousing about overmoderation but I think a lot of people got unreasonably annoyed when their question was closed. And the result was a pretty well-curated and really useful knowledge base."
}
,
{
"id": "46485377",
"text": "> Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie.\n\nBy regenerating an answer on command and never caring about the redundancy, yeah.\n\nThe DRY advocate within me weeps."
}
,
{
"id": "46484651",
"text": "Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't \"close as duplicate\" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then).\n\nMoreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time.\n\nThe question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's."
}
,
{
"id": "46484764",
"text": "What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.\n\nI was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute.\n\n> People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.\n\nNot really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack.\n\nWe're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click \"I am not a robot\").\n\nAs for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a"
}
,
{
"id": "46484835",
"text": "What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.\n\nWhatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers.\n\n(As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46489433",
"text": "I’m sad SO died, even if they deserved it."
}
,
{
"id": "46483567",
"text": "Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches.\n\nPrivacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow for.\n\nIt does remove the human touch so it's quite a different dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system."
}
,
{
"id": "46486880",
"text": "> Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc.\n\nThat might work until an LLM encounters a question it's programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the docs, I asked Google's Gemini (whatever's the current free version) to write a bare bones script for an SMTP conversation.\n\nIt flatly refused.\n\nThe explanation was along the lines \"it could be used for spamming, so I can't do that, Dave.\" I understand the motivation, and can even sympathize a bit, but what are the options for someone who has a legitimate need for an answer? I know how to get one by other means; what's the end game when it's LLMs all the way down? I certainly don't wish to live in such a world."
}
,
{
"id": "46492301",
"text": "1.5 years ago Gemini (the same brand!) refused to provide C++ help to minors because C++ is dangerous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39632959"
}
,
{
"id": "46486463",
"text": "I don't know how others use LLMs, but once I find the answer to something I'm stuck on I do not tell the LLM that it's fixed. This was a problem in forums as well but I think even fewer people are going to give that feedback to a chatbot"
}
,
{
"id": "46489811",
"text": "The problem that you worked out is only really useful if it can be recreated and validated, which in many cases it can be by using an LLM to build the same system and write tests that confirm the failure and the fix. Your response telling the model that its answer worked is more helpful for measuring your level of engagement, not so much for evaluating the solution."
}
,
{
"id": "46488794",
"text": "You can also turn off the feature to allow ChatGPT to learn from your interactions. Not many people do but those that do would also starve OpenAI for information assume they respect that setting"
}
,
{
"id": "46483683",
"text": "Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape?\n\nNo longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?"
}
,
{
"id": "46485880",
"text": "Y'know how \"users\" of modern tech are the product? And how the developers were completely fine with creating such systems?\n\nWell, turns out developers are now the product too. Good job everyone."
}
,
{
"id": "46486712",
"text": "I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO, and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite improvement in QoL for me."
}
,
{
"id": "46483998",
"text": "Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not \"interacting with peers\". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything.\n\nI have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case."
}
,
{
"id": "46484152",
"text": "this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences.\n\nSO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site\n\nthis nails it:\nhttps://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045..."
}
,
{
"id": "46486483",
"text": "Yahoo answers died a lot faster and heavily formed SO policy."
}
,
{
"id": "46484555",
"text": "It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server, and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid solutions.\n\nThere were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the fourth one failed it gave me the first one again."
}
,
{
"id": "46484967",
"text": "You can't use the free chat client for questions like that in my experience. Almost guaranteed to waste your time. Try the big-3 thinking models (ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5)."
}
,
{
"id": "46485102",
"text": "> this nails it\n\nI assume you’re taking about the ending where gippity tells you how awesome you are and then spits out a wrong answer?"
}
,
{
"id": "46485146",
"text": "I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer science, programming, geology, and biology."
}
,
{
"id": "46484687",
"text": "The \"human touch\" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the \"robot touch,\" thanks very much."
}
,
{
"id": "46484731",
"text": "Right? The \"human touch\" is \"you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!\""
}
,
{
"id": "46485449",
"text": "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.\n\nIt'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\").\n\nI have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But"
}
,
{
"id": "46491783",
"text": "> 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\").\n\nThis explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/"
}
,
{
"id": "46493540",
"text": "Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.\n\nThat 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."
}
,
{
"id": "46485140",
"text": "Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?"
}
,
{
"id": "46485462",
"text": "Here is one fine example. [1]\n\nThe person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you.\nThere are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted.\n\n[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit...\n[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/"
}
,
{
"id": "46494520",
"text": "You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here:\n\n> \"Why not?\" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them!\n\n> Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR!"
}
,
{
"id": "46485214",
"text": "I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior (\"closed as duplicate\") than somebody explicitly articulating that.\n\nIt's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri)."
}
,
{
"id": "46485537",
"text": "There is nothing \"passive-aggressive\" about closing a question as a duplicate.\n\nIt is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the OP: an already-existing answer to a common question is provided instantly ."
}
,
{
"id": "46486901",
"text": "I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as duplicates several times, but I always understood this as an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's just normal friction of human interaction."
}
,
{
"id": "46488636",
"text": "The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. Far too often, the already-existing answer is years old and either no longer the best answer, or doesn't actually address a major part of the question. Or it simply was never a very good answer to begin with.\n\nWhat would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? If the previous answer really is adequate, it won't attract further responses. If it's not, well, now its shortcomings can be addressed.\n\nClosing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. It generally means that somebody missed their true calling on an HOA board somewhere."
}
,
{
"id": "46491046",
"text": "> The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP.\n\nThe purpose of having the answer there is not to solve the OP's problem . It is to have a question answered that contributes to the canon of work. This way, everyone can benefit from it.\n\n> What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions?\n\nScattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.\n\nYou might as well ask: what would be the harm in putting a comment in your code mentioning the existence of a function that serves your purpose, but then rewriting the code in-line instead of trying to figure out what the parameters should be for the function call?\n\n> Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia.\n\nThis analo"
}
,
{
"id": "46492120",
"text": "Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.\n\nSo instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.\n\nThere's really no need for us to rehash SO rules/policy debates that have raged since day one. The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself."
}
,
{
"id": "46493509",
"text": "> So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.\n\nWhat? No. The canonical target isn't closed. So go write the new answer there . The answer acceptance mark is basically irrelevant, and the feature ill-conceived.\n\nExcept usually there are dozens of answers already; the best possible answer has emerged; and people keep writing redundant nonsense for the street cred of having an answer on a popular Stack Overflow question.\n\n> The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.\n\nWe do not care that people don't want to come and ask new questions. There are already way, way too many questions for the site's purpose. The policy is aimed at something that you don't care about. The result is a \"verdict\" we don't care about."
}
,
{
"id": "46483785",
"text": "The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow."
}
,
{
"id": "46484357",
"text": "The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX."
}
,
{
"id": "46487564",
"text": "Where in the process of \"ask question\" -> \"closed as duplicate\" are you interacting with another human?"
}
,
{
"id": "46489854",
"text": "Most of SO didn't seem to consist of people talking to each other so much as talking past each other."
}
,
{
"id": "46483860",
"text": "One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other services and spaces before the widespread use of AI doesn’t sound very compelling to me.\n\nBe more creative than AI."
}
,
{
"id": "46484575",
"text": "How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service.\n\nJust through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape.\n\nIf companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater."
}
,
{
"id": "46484776",
"text": "Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds.\n\nAlso, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention."
}
,
{
"id": "46483722",
"text": "As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario.\n\nTake an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product.\n\nThe documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of \"How to delete a product\" where the first step is to search, the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the third step is to delete.\n\nThe LLM is capable of answering the question \"how to delete the product 'product name'\".\n\nTo some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic, but still possible for a human to answer if only they read documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an answer A LOT faster."
}
]
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