llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/batch-0-2461f874-62b3-4950-bcb6-3540c23ef21b-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. Knowledge repository vs help desk debate
5. Community decline timeline
6. Discord as alternative platform
7. Future of LLM training data
8. Gamification and reputation systems
9. Expert knowledge preservation
10. Reddit as alternative
11. Question quality standards
12. Moderator power dynamics
13. Google search integration decline
14. Stack Exchange expansion problems
15. Human interaction loss
16. Documentation vs community answers
17. Site mission misalignment
18. New user experience
19. GitHub Discussions alternative
20. Corporate ownership changes
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46483491",
"text": "Some comments:\n\n- 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.\n\n- 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., Bun, by asking around in the Bun Discord, etc. The final nail in the coffin is of course LLMs, which can offer a SO-level answer to a decent percentage of questions instantly. (The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top.)\n\n- I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?"
}
,
{
"id": "46484235",
"text": "> 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.\n\nI was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this.\n\nThe moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor that the moderation started taking on a life of its own. Stack Overflow moderator drama felt constant in the later 2010s with endless weird drama spilling across Twitter, Reddit, and the moderator’s personal blogs. That’s about the same time period where it felt like the moderation team was more interested in finding reasons to exercise their moderation power than in maintaining an interesting website.\n\nSince about 2020 every time I click a Stack Overflow link I estimate there’s a 50/50 chance that the question I clicked on would be marked as off topic or closed or something before anyone could answer it. Between the moderator drama and the constant bait-and-switch feeling of clicking on SO links that didn’t go anywhere the site just felt more exhausting than helpful."
}
,
{
"id": "46485256",
"text": "There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also...\n\nFor most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not \"search engines\"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't.\n\nAt some point, Google started surfacing fewer \"tried and true\" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore.\n\n...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call.\n\nI don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits.\n\n[0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html"
}
,
{
"id": "46485368",
"text": "Oh, hey, Shog, good to see you doing well. It was a heck of a ride, hmm?"
}
,
{
"id": "46493207",
"text": "Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at least after Facebook implodes."
}
,
{
"id": "46493829",
"text": "Believe me, I'm full of vision (and hope). But it's hard to write stuff when there's so much to write that I can't find a natural starting point, and when the (lack-of-)network effects are so brutal."
}
,
{
"id": "46490353",
"text": "> the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing.\n\nHi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly in a vacuum (from the outside).\n\nHow much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected things? I always got the impression that they tried to scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave of less technical/principled users."
}
,
{
"id": "46493272",
"text": "There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama.\n\nOTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come.\n\nIn a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed."
}
,
{
"id": "46486402",
"text": "Best answer so far, too bad way down here."
}
,
{
"id": "46488691",
"text": "It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490281",
"text": "I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies.\n\nThe obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale.\n\nYet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst.\n\nI don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful."
}
,
{
"id": "46494198",
"text": "Agreed, think we're getting warmer."
}
,
{
"id": "46490200",
"text": "It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them."
}
,
{
"id": "46486534",
"text": "Lots of moderation issues are also UI issues.\n\nI suspect it’s the same issue for whatever is the “meta” in a competitive video game.\n\nOptimization based on the available affordances ?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490474",
"text": "I swear that about 3 of your replies look like LLM content or at best \"LLM-massaged\" messages :-("
}
,
{
"id": "46493179",
"text": "I was writing like a robot before robots could write, dammit!"
}
,
{
"id": "46495590",
"text": "I've done that, too. It's a bit like a dream where it's not clear what's real and what's not."
}
,
{
"id": "46502650",
"text": "It has been ... Borderline creepy... Watching how folks - including some professional writers - have adapted their workflows to the capabilities of LLMs, treating them as a copywriter whose input is a spec and for whose output they are the editor.\n\nBecause it seems natural to me; that's how I've always written... Except, I'm also the bot. Just turn off part of my brain and an endless stream of verbiage emerges, vaguely centered around a theme... Then the real work begins: editing for relevance and imposing a coherent structure.\n\nSo, I don't really fault anyone who adopts these new tools for the task. But I have some strong feelings about the lazy editing."
}
,
{
"id": "46488686",
"text": "Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall."
}
,
{
"id": "46489177",
"text": "Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.\n\nUnfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.\n\nIt's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems."
}
,
{
"id": "46489401",
"text": "Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.\n\nThis always cracks me up. I've seen it so many times, and so many books cover this...\n\nClassic statement is \"never take your eye off the ball\".\n\nSure, you need to plan ahead. You need to move down a path. But take your eye off of today, and you won't get to tomorrow.\n\nMaybe they'll SCO it, and spend the next 10 years suing everyone and their LLM dog.\n\nYou know, I wonder how the board and execs made out suing Linux related... things. End users were threatened too, compelled to pay...\n\nSO could be spun off into a neat tiger, nipping at everyone's toes."
}
,
{
"id": "46490623",
"text": "But was “today “ that profitable? Stack overflow always struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make money. If the current business makes very little money, it may not be worth the work."
}
,
{
"id": "46489319",
"text": "His tone was extremely passive aggressive and rude. I don’t think he made the site better - he contributed to the downfall"
}
,
{
"id": "46493159",
"text": "This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus \"vaguely passive-aggressive\" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between \"this is a debate\" and \"this is how it is.\"\n\nSometimes I put that line in the wrong place.\n\nThat said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.\n\nWith the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.\n\nBut even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done."
}
,
{
"id": "46496547",
"text": "I always found these discussions around the tone of SO moderation so funny—as a German, I really felt right at home there. No cuddling! No useless flattery! Just facts and suggestions for improvement if necessary, as it should be. Loved it at the time."
}
,
{
"id": "46489894",
"text": "Can you provide an example? The only rude Shog9 posts I can think of were aimed at people abusing the system: known, persistent troublemakers, or overzealous curators exhibiting the kinds of behaviours that people in this thread would criticise, probably far more rudely than Shog ever did."
}
,
{
"id": "46499895",
"text": "Friend in my group was in the public beta back in '08. We all ended up signing up by the end of '09. I used it off-and-on over the years (have some questions and replies with hundreds of upvotes). Though SO had a rap for having what might seem like harsh replies or moderation, it was often imho just blunt/curt, to the point, and often objectively defensible. I also agree with your timeframe that, in the later 2010s, the site became infected with drama, and moderation suddenly started reaching its tendrils into non-technical areas, when it should not have. And on an ostensibly technical site, no less!\n\nI found myself contributing less and less (same with Wikipedia), because I merely wanted to continue honing my craft through learning and contributing technical data with others who shared this same passion... I did not want to have politics shoved in my face, or have every post of mine have to be filtered through an increasingly extreme ideology which had nothing to do with the technical nature of the site. When I had my SO suspended with no warning or recourse for writing \"master\" in a reply, I knew it was time to leave for good. Most of the admins on the site transformed from technical (yet sometimes brash!) geeks, into political flag-waving and ideology-pushing avatars (including pushing their sexual agendas front and center), and not of the FSF/FLOSS kind, either.\n\nThese types of dramas have infected nearly everything online, especially since 2020. Even Linus has lost his mind with pushing politics into what should be purely technical areas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936049\n\nLLMs were a final blow for many reasons, though I think that a huge part of it is that LLMs won't chide you and suspend/ban you for wanting to stick to strictly technical matters. I don't have to pledge allegiance to a particular ideology and pass a purity test before asking technical questions to an LLM."
}
,
{
"id": "46485245",
"text": "I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the question)"
}
,
{
"id": "46488038",
"text": "The moderation definitely got kind of nasty in the last 5 years or so. To the point where you would feel unwelcome for asking a question you had already researched, and felt was perfectly sound to ask. However, that didn't stop millions of people from asking questions every day , it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated).\n\nMy feeling was always that the super mods were people who had too much time on their hands... and the site would've been better without them (speaking in the past tense, now). But I don't think that's what killed it. LLMs scraping all its content and recycling it into bite-sized Gemini or GPT answers - that's what killed it."
}
,
{
"id": "46500000",
"text": ">it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated).\n\nGreat observation. Just like friendship, open communities psychologically feel as though there should be some balance. Spending free time contributing to something (even if you don't directly expect anything in return with ulterior motives) to benefit others, then getting an anvil dropped on your head when you dare to ask for a morsel in return, was an awful feeling which occurred too often there. The site and moderation, especially since the late 2010s (and especially in 2020 and beyond), became malignantly predatory."
}
,
{
"id": "46485838",
"text": "I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about \"default\" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec.\n\nIt was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so you can't even view the question any more.\n\nI'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again.\n\nIn case anyone's wondering, I ended up asking on the WhatWG or W3C or something github project (via an issue?). The TLDR was rather eye opening, that basically the spec only codifies points of contention for browsers and old behaviors are generally undocumented. With some pointers I figured out the default size behavior through code diving, and it was complex (as in, hard to use) and very unintuitive."
}
,
{
"id": "46500044",
"text": ">I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again.\n\nAnd it was a real gut punch when this would happen (or getting suspended/banned) to long-time users, as well. They largely precipitated their own demise, so I say good riddance."
}
,
{
"id": "46486173",
"text": "Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good."
}
,
{
"id": "46486270",
"text": "Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?"
}
,
{
"id": "46489015",
"text": "It's not about if it's \"worthy of being asked\", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.\n\nOne other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever taken part in moderating the review queue, you would've seen the insane amount of low-quality questions flowing in. I saw probably ten variants of \"how to center my div\" daily being closed as duplicates. The asker might be miffed about getting their question closed (but with a link to a solution..), but if you want to actually get answers to the high quality questions, the noise has to be filtered somehow.\n\nOf course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners figure out their syntax errors or how to apply a general solution to their specific issue. And you may not like SO for it, but to not want to be a site for that is their prerogative."
}
,
{
"id": "46490477",
"text": "> Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.\n\nHaving your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? Just Google with site:StackOverflow.com and you won’t have to click through many results to find something closed.\n\nSpending all of the time to log back into the site and try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to have more people try to nit-pick it again hardly sounds attractive.\n\n> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners\n\nThe entire point of the story above was that it wasn’t a beginner question."
}
,
{
"id": "46491851",
"text": "> Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you?\n\nIt is believable. But it being a problem I don't see. If it's off-topic, that's sad for you but no reason to feel angry or it being \"hostile\" or something. It's just off-topic. Same if I started posting lots of local news from my city to HN. It's simply just off-topic and not what the site should contain. If it's already answered, being pointed to that answer by someone spending the time to digging it up is also not rude. Sure, you may feel bad because you feel someone \"reprimanded\" you or something. But that's on you."
}
,
{
"id": "46494509",
"text": "Why do you continue to ask for examples if you're just going to downplay them or explain them away like you did here?"
}
,
{
"id": "46500131",
"text": "He's demonstrating in real-time to other contributors here why SO is toast hahaha\n\nThe feeling you are getting when talking to that arrogant brick wall was the prototypical SO user experience."
}
,
{
"id": "46501466",
"text": "No need for name calling. If anything, you're demonstrating what I'm pointing out: emotionally charged responses to perfectly polite behavior."
}
,
{
"id": "46496021",
"text": "Still haven't been given a single example? And no, closing a question isn't necessarily hostile."
}
,
{
"id": "46490073",
"text": "> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners\n\nThis is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers.\n\nSelf-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward."
}
,
{
"id": "46490241",
"text": "Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand.\n\nAs for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer."
}
,
{
"id": "46490399",
"text": "I encourage you to recognize the statements you see as vitriol instead as brand markers as to how SO is known in the world. It's not a small set of folks who feel as if they were treated unfairly first."
}
,
{
"id": "46490648",
"text": "If it's so many, surely someone should be able to provide some example of them being treated unfairly soon! But seriously, I'm fine with people not liking SO. I just don't think the discourse on HN around it is very fruitful and mostly emotional. SO have clearly done something wrong to get that kind of widespread reputation, but I'm also allowed to be disappointed in how it's being discussed."
}
,
{
"id": "46494495",
"text": "You may think you're making some kind of point by repeatedly asking for examples of vitriol on SO, but all it shows is that you haven't looked, or haven't sincerely reflected on what you saw from the perspective of a regular user."
}
,
{
"id": "46490865",
"text": "I think you are seeing emotional response is because SO has really fucked with people’s emotions, it is by far the most toxic place for SWEs to have ever existed and nothing is close 100th to it. expecting a non-emotional responses from SWEs about SO is asking too much (for most)"
}
,
{
"id": "46486694",
"text": "Hm… as the person was new to SO it’s very possible they don’t understand what a good question looks like and I thought it may be helpful to give feedback on what may have gone wrong… but if you see that as “begging” and you don’t think you need any feedback, you have it all sorted out after all, then yeah it’s a waste of everyone’s time."
}
,
{
"id": "46487181",
"text": "Thing is, if that's how you are greeted at stackoverflow, then you'll go elsewhere where you're not treated like an idiot. Stackoverflow's decline was inevitable, even without LLMs."
}
,
{
"id": "46487353",
"text": "And thus SO dies as people will go somewhere they can actually get their question answered."
}
]
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