llm/5daab79e-f20f-476c-ab87-82c7ff678250/topic-7-c32c76aa-c62f-448a-a710-54ece93d8464-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments. TOPIC: Reddit and Discord as alternatives COMMENTS: 1. Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - 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. The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO. I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers. Reddit is kind of a dark horse here, as I began seeing answers on Google to more modern technical questions link to a Reddit thread frequently along with SO from 2016 onwards. I also suspect Discord played a part, though this is harder to gauge; I certainly got a number of answers to questions for, e.g. 2. What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. Whatever. 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. (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.) 3. There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Reddit and HN, which are poorly optimized for answering questions. 4. You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other ques 5. It was bad enough that many people resorted to asking their questions in Discord instead which is a massive boomerang back to trying to get help in IRC and just praying that someone is online and willing to help you on the spot. Having to possibly ask your question multiple times before you get some spotty help in a real time chat where it's next to impossible to find again seems unimaginably worse than using an online forum but the fact of it remains and tells us there was something driving people away from sites like SO. 6. There's another significant forum: GitHub, the rise of which coincided with the start of SO's decline. I bet most niche questions went over to GH repos' issue/discussion forums, and SO was left with more general questions that bored contributors. 7. The newer questions that LLMs can't answer will be answered in forums - either SO, reddit, or elsewhere. There will be a much higher percentage of relevant content with far fewer new pages regurgitating questions about solved problems. So the LLMs will be able to keep up. 8. > SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions We will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some details/quirks/gotchas. Example of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more effective than LLMs. 9. As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state. But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute poison. I'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from Civ4: "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That sums it up exactly. There is a certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up as Reddit mods, for example. Rules and standards are good up to a point but some people forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselve 10. On the other hand, another week another JavaScript framework, amirite? There continues to be new stuff to ask questions about, but stack overflow failed to be the default location for new stuff. I guess now there's more discussion directly on GitHub and discord. 11. >toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes >zombie community Like Reddit post 2015. 12. Stack Overflow moderation is very transparent compared to whatever Reddit considers moderation. For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not quite comparable because the more subjective questions are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the direction of adding many more libraries than most people should). 13. The same is true for reddit imo, it became impossible to post anything to a subreddit way before LLMs 14. Absolutely 100% this. I've used them on and off throughout the years. The community became toxic, so I took my question to other platforms like Reddit (they became toxic as well) and elsewhere. Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open source, I've written everything from emulators and game engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc. The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in documentation, specifically related to undocumented behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO, I received either no response and downvotes, or negative responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back, so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button if folks were super negative and didn't answer the question. Later on, most of my answers actually have come from Git 15. not only stackoverflow, but also reddit.com/r/aws reddit.com/r/docker reddit.com/r/postgresql all 3 of them have extremely toxic communities. ask a question and get downvoted instantly! Noo!! your job is to actually upvote the question to maximize exposure for the algorithm unless it is a really really stupid question that a google search could fix 16. Its karma farming. Number must go up regardless of the human cost. Thats why the same problem is seen here, to a lesser extent. Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement. Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter. 17. I felt it became easier with slack. The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without hesitation and producers just also don't do actual documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which works in the moment, but terrible for future team members to even know what questions to search/ask for. 18. At my place of work we use an indexing service for discord that creates an index of searchable static pages for all discord interactions. So while I agree the help desk style system isn’t really better it also doesn’t necessarily mean that it is lost forever in a silo. Before you ask, we use https://www.linen.dev/ but I’m sure there are other similar solutions by now 19. Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you 20. > Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. completely agree > 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. And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not sure where discord fits in that) 21. 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. 22. My genuine impression is that communities moved from forums to discord. Maybe that's why they are harder to find 23. And discord is a terrible tool for knowledge collection imo. Their search is ok, but then I find myself digging through long and disjointed message threads, if replies/threading are even used at all by the participants. 24. Not to mention, it's not indexed by search engines. It's the "deep web". 25. Yes, its a treasure hunt every single time when some project has most of their discussions on discord. It's awful imo. 26. When I grew up shakes fist at clouds I had a half dozen totally independent forums/sites to pull on for any interest or hobby no matter how obscure. I want it back! 27. It's true though, and the information was so deep and specific. Plus the communities were so legitimate and you could count on certain people appearing in threads and waiting for their input. Now the best you have are subreddits or janky Facebook groups . 28. The discoverability, both from the outside and within is absolute trash, but the closest I find of those old forums nowadays are Discord servers. 29. Usenet? 30. I guess? I feel like it’s too small now. It can’t cover all my interests 31. Still gh issues are better than some random discord server. The fact that forums got replaced by discord for "support" is a net loss for humanity, as discord is not searchable (to my knowledge). So instead of a forum where someone asks a question and you get n answers, you have to visit the discord, and talk to the discord people, and join a wave channel first, hope the people are there, hope the person that knows is online, and so on. 32. Yeah, I suspect that a lot of the decline represented in the OP's graph (starting around early 2020) is actually discord and that LLMs weren't much of a factor until ChatGPT 3.5 which launched in 2022. LLMs have definitely accelerated Stackoverflow's demise though. No question about that. Also makes me wonder if discord has a licensing deal with any of the large LLM players. If they don't then I can't imagine that will last for long. It will eventually just become too lucrative for them to say no if it hasn't already. 33. Discord isn’t just used for tech support forums and discussions. There are loads of completely private communities on there. Discord opening up API access for LLM vendors to train on people’s private conversations is a gross violation of privacy. That would not go down well. 34. I used to look at all TensorFlow questions when I was on the TensorFlow team ( https://stackoverflow.com/tags/tensorflow/info ). Unclear where people go to interact with their users now....Reddit? But the tone on Reddit is kind of negative/complainy 35. Reddit is my current go-to for human-sourced info. Search for "reddit your question here". Where on reddit? Not sure. I don't post, tbh, but I do search. Has the added benefit of NOT returning stackoverflow answers, since StackOverflow seems to have rotted out these days, and been taken over by the "rejection police". 36. 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. We 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". But there are other places people can go, such as https://software.codidact.com (fd: I am a moderator there). 37. The first actually insightful comment under the OP. I agree all of it. If 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. SE 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, ... If 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. 38. I think 95% of comments earnestly using the word "toxic" can be disregarded. They were unaware of or unwilling to follow the rules of the site. They mistook SO for reddit, a place for socializing . 39. 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? Speaking 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. 40. 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. 41. > Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life. Yup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both are still somewhat active. [0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax [1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf 42. As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0]. I'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. I 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. The problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Disc 43. 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. 44. Some commenters suggest it's not the moderation. I think it is the key problem, and the alternative communities were the accumulated effect. Bad questions and tough answer competition is part of it, but moderation was more important, I think. Because in the end what kept SO relevant was that people made their own questions on up to date topics. Up until mid-2010s you could make a seriously vague question, and it would be answered, satisfactory or not. (2018 was when I made the last such question. YMMV) After that, almost everything, that hadn't snap-on code answer, was labelled as offtopic or duplicate, and closed, no matter what. (Couple of times I got very rude moderators' comments on the tickets.) I think this lead some communities to avoid this moderator hell and start their own forums, where you could afford civilized discussion. Discourse is actually very handy for this (Ironically, it was made by the same devs that created SO). Forums of the earlier generation, have too many b 45. Still a couple thousand away from 0. But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available. I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there 46. Reddit is a forum morphed into social media. I usually use "question + reddit" on Google to confirm my suspicions about a subject. It is a place to discuss things rather than find answers. It is extremely politicized (leftist/liberal), but that's a whole other story. 47. 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. I had similar worries in the past about indexable forums being replaced by discord servers. the current situation is even worse. 48. Good. This is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic. LLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup. 49. 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. AI 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). SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online? 50. I find a lot of good stuff in GitHub issues 51. Why do you think people stop creating new posts just because SO collapsed? People on GitHub issues and Reddit answer programming questions everyday. SO was dying even before ChatGPT was released. LLMs just accelerated that process. 52. > Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days? I don't think such generic place exists. I just do my own research or abandon the topic. I think that in big companies you probably could use some internal chats or just ask some smart guy directly? I don't have that kind of connections and all online communities are full of people whose skill is below mine, so it makes little sense to ask something. I still do sometimes, but rarely receive competent answer. If you have some focused topic like a question about small program, of course you can just use github issues or email author directly. But if you have some open question, probably SO is the only generic platform out there. To put it differently, find some experts and ask which online place to the visit to help strangers. Most likely they just don't do it. So for me, personally, LLMs are the saviour. With enough forth and back I can research any topic that doesn't require very deep expertise. Sure, acc 53. Find the relevant discord and search. 54. Everyone here talks about LLMs, but for me, the reason why StackOverflow became totally irrelevant is because of dedicated Discord servers and forums. Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Reddit and Discord as alternatives
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