llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/batch-1-6a046e77-a9af-46e4-8442-87e61d75f860-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": "46487127",
"text": "This comment sums up everything wrong with Stack Overflow.\n\nI strongly suggest you re-read your comments here and self-reflect."
}
,
{
"id": "46488724",
"text": "Right? It's a perfect example of the problem.\n\nIn college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help.\n\nBut there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think of users as a problem and an interruption, even though they were the only reason we were getting paid.\n\nI've been refusing to contribute to SO for so long that I can't even remember the details. But I still recall the feeling I got from their dismissive jackassery. Having their content ripped off by LLMs is the final blow, but they have richly earned their fate."
}
,
{
"id": "46490504",
"text": "The point here is you worked tech support so you were paid to answer user questions.\n\nHowever the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?"
}
,
{
"id": "46494476",
"text": "> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?\n\nThis is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top \"Question Answerer\" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work.\n\nSo this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions."
}
,
{
"id": "46493567",
"text": "Nobody, least of all me, is saying people should work for free. But not being paid to do something you don't want to do is a reason to go do something else, not hang around and be a hostile, superior dick about it, alienating the users."
}
,
{
"id": "46497187",
"text": "The answerers are just as much users as the questioners - possibly in fact more as they are the ones spending time whilst the askers often (especially the poor ones) just ask a question and then go away.\n\nUnfortunately the SO management want money and so want the fly away askers more than the answerers who provide the benefit of the site."
}
,
{
"id": "46494136",
"text": "When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - \"what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?\" Sometimes they just wanted to talk.\n\nNot every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate.\n\n... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions.\n\nStack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205\n\nArguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of \"how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?\" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer.\n\nIt wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.\n\nThe failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible.\n\nYes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides.\n\nI would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/"
}
,
{
"id": "46497802",
"text": "> It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.\n\nThis is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their \"first opportunity to be the bully\".\n\n> It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable.\n\nIt obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available."
}
,
{
"id": "46500094",
"text": "+"
}
,
{
"id": "46491682",
"text": "I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their \"dumb\" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully."
}
,
{
"id": "46494710",
"text": "I think this \"first opportunity to be the bully\" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how."
}
,
{
"id": "46500079",
"text": ">Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?\n\nThe fact that you even have to point this out to them, and how they still don't understand the root of the problem, is precisely why SO is finished."
}
,
{
"id": "46487933",
"text": "They clearly aren't asking for the question to be resurrected."
}
,
{
"id": "46494433",
"text": "its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times\n\nI gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that \"Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be posted on Stack Overflow\", which was insane to me because Stack Overflow has a \"terraform\" tag and category. If you visit it, you will see tons of users trying to post valid questions only to have the mods shut them down angrily."
}
,
{
"id": "46497874",
"text": "https://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/terraform\n\nhttps://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terraform"
}
,
{
"id": "46494516",
"text": "Yeah. You're not a real programmer. It's just terraform. You're a stupids and we're smaht, and you should go off into your little corner and cry while we jerk each other off about how smart we are.\n\nGee, I wonder why people don't want to use the site?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490389",
"text": "Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional."
}
,
{
"id": "46490527",
"text": "Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment.\n\nThe late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere."
}
,
{
"id": "46483954",
"text": "> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question\n\nI read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer.\n\nSad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie."
}
,
{
"id": "46484884",
"text": "> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.\n\nMy personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The over-moderation you described helps people for a short time but then doesn’t help the person who googles much later. I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one."
}
,
{
"id": "46485394",
"text": "> outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.\n\nOkay, but who's going to arbitrate that ? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.)\n\nThe Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though."
}
,
{
"id": "46489700",
"text": "Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before.\n\nAnyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time.\n\nModeration should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.\n\nOne thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example.\n\nSome of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate."
}
,
{
"id": "46490364",
"text": "> Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.\n\nThe community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced.\n\nHowever, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation.\n\nhttps://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...\n\nNote the \"Questions closed\" and \"Questions reopened\".\n\nCompare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-...\n\nThe tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the \"make the site friendly\" by removing comments and banning users.\n\nThe \"some of the answers should have been deleted\" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain."
}
,
{
"id": "46490517",
"text": "> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.\n\nYeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491025",
"text": "That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level.\n\nUnfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for \"quality before quantity\" After the sale it feels like it was \"quantity and engagement will follow\" and then \"engagement through any means\". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all."
}
,
{
"id": "46486424",
"text": "They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago."
}
,
{
"id": "46494424",
"text": "yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the \"Top Answer\" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by \"Recent\" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant"
}
,
{
"id": "46485250",
"text": "Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation."
}
,
{
"id": "46488000",
"text": "> There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.\n\nYeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow \"recommendation\" questions. So they know that it's an issue but just ignore it for programming questions."
}
,
{
"id": "46485066",
"text": "> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.\n\nHaving duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this:\n\n30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator).\n\n30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP).\n\n5 minutes on implementation.\n\n2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard.\n\nWith an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my initial prompt even as a layman. When you’d actually find an answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question that lacked one of your conditions."
}
,
{
"id": "46485404",
"text": "> Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers.\n\nYes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version , and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers."
}
,
{
"id": "46485675",
"text": "Yes but that only works if the questions are identical . Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless."
}
,
{
"id": "46485696",
"text": "No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place.\n\nPerhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point . It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal."
}
,
{
"id": "46485793",
"text": "You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates.\n\nThat's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO."
}
,
{
"id": "46485909",
"text": "> That's not the case.\n\nYes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely.\n\n> I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner.\n\nPlease feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.\n\n> When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO.\n\nThat is generally irrelevant."
}
,
{
"id": "46488853",
"text": "Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy?\n\nThere's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created.\n\nWhat this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term.\n\nIt's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site."
}
,
{
"id": "46489685",
"text": "The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started.\n\nIn the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it.\n\nThat portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding.\n\nHowever, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult.\n\nHere I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate.\n\nMaking it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back.\n\nThis is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone . The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude.\n\nLastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered."
}
,
{
"id": "46490176",
"text": "What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my \"users\" . I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of \"dead-ness\", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that.\n\nBecause from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia . For a scope of \"practical matters about writing code\", as compared to \"any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it\".\n\nI am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congregate in public and try to accomplish something. I do not share your goals. The community is not like software, and \"serving and adapting to users\" does not benefit the people doing the work. We never arranged to have the kind of \"users\" you describe."
}
,
{
"id": "46493539",
"text": "As a former Wikipedia administrator, I think one of the things that Wikipedia has done exactly right is to strongly prioritize readers first, editors second, and administrators third. The unofficial Wikipedia administrator symbol is a mop, because it's much more a position of responsibility than it is a position of power.\n\nI obviously think you and other user-hostile people should be permitted to congregate and accomplish something. What I object to in Stack Overflow's case is the site being taken over by people like that, serving themselves and their own preferences with such vigor that they alienated vast numbers of potential contributors, putting the site on a path of decline from which is unlikely to recover.\n\nEven by your own terms, having a place for some (conveniently unspecified) group to \"congregate in public and try to accomplish something\" looks certain to be a failure. However much you don't care about deadness or declining revenue, the people paying the bills surely do. Stack Overflow was only a success because it served and adapted to users.\n\nBut I give you points for being honest about your hostility to the entire point of the site. It not only makes it clear why it's failing, but it'll keep people from being sorry when it gets closed down."
}
,
{
"id": "46492208",
"text": "Deadness is the symptom, not the cause. Users don't avoid SO because it's dead, but rather, SO is dead because users avoid it. It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly.\n\nThere's another thread on the front page about IPv6 where someone had a good analogy: IPv4 vs IPv6 is like Python 2 vs 3. The Python 2 diehards continued arguing furiously to an emptier and emptier room. They never felt they were proven wrong, and the intensity of the argument never diminished but the argument was with fewer and fewer people until they were just arguing with themselves as the world moved on without them.\n\nAnd that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026, after the horse is long gone. Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. You might want to reflect on why you hold such fervent beliefs that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now?\n\nThe referenced comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477920"
}
,
{
"id": "46493803",
"text": "> It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly.\n\nNo, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years.\n\nWhat you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care.\n\nThe goal was never for the site to be \"not dead\". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found.\n\nThe site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts.\n\n> And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026\n\nThis is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over than they should have needed.\n\nBut really, the feedback for Stack Overflow is trying to take it in the direction of places that existed long beforehand. If you want forums, you know where to find them. And now you can also find LLMs. Which, as commonly used by people seeking programming help, are basically a grizzled forum guy in a can.\n\n>Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you.\n\n\"Everyone actually agrees with [me]\" is the polar opposite of what I actually believe and am actually saying. I am well aware that the model is unpopular. My point is that the popularity of the model is irrelevant to me.\n\n> Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now?\n\nI have a lot of reputation points (the site still exists), far more than I ever felt I deserved, and I never really felt like they were worth anything. A huge percentage of them come from an answer to a terrible question (that was still terrible after heroic attempts at editing; this all happened long before there was a common understanding of the purpose of question closure or what would make good standards for questions) that, once I understood things properly, I closed and tried to get deleted. Over the last few years, with that new understanding, I have been trying to give away my superfluous reputation points in bounties, trying to get missing answers written for the few really good questions lacking good answers that I identify, always to no avail (the bounty system promptly became a honeypot for ChatGPT hallucinations as soon as ChatGPT became available).\n\nYou do not know me or my motivations in the slightest."
}
,
{
"id": "46494057",
"text": "> The goal was never for the site to be \"not dead\"\n\nok? fine then. If you think it's fine for the site to be dead then please stop spamming comments defending it. It doesn't need any defence to stay dead and such defence is not useful.\n\nResponse to child comment: no, you are not replying to people telling you why you need to care about a thing. You are mostly replying randomly throughout the thread and telling people why they are wrong."
}
,
{
"id": "46494286",
"text": "I am only responding to many people trying to explain why I should care about the thing I don't care about. The defense is useful because a) it being \"dead\" by these metrics is unimportant; b) people are blaming a community for mistreating them, when they came in without any intent of understanding or adapting to that community; c) other sites in this mold exist, and are trying to establish themselves."
}
,
{
"id": "46486025",
"text": "> Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.\n\nHow do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a certain tag?"
}
,
{
"id": "46486145",
"text": "\"[tag] is:question duplicate:yes\"\n\nBut if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page."
}
,
{
"id": "46486471",
"text": "> But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page.\n\nI answer Qs on this topic, not post them.\n\n----\n\nHere's an example I found:\n\nhttps://superuser.com/questions/1929615/\n(the canonical q is about extracting as mono, the closed q is about muting one channel)"
}
,
{
"id": "46490268",
"text": "You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel , as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled \"ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel\". One of them also asks about \"downmixing\" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer.\n\nThe point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate \"how do I get the second line of a file?\" and \"how do I get the third line of a file?\" questions."
}
,
{
"id": "46491204",
"text": "The dupe is what I linked.\nThe orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972\n\nThe orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio.\n\nThe dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants.\n\nOne can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q."
}
,
{
"id": "46493815",
"text": "> The dupe is what I linked. The orig is\n\nAh, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me.\n\n> The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe\n\nIDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert."
}
,
{
"id": "46495323",
"text": "> it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there\n\nReally? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation? I've used ffmpeg plenty of times, but it doesn't seem obvious to me how I'd mute one audio channel.\n\nFrom your other comments it sounds like you believe SO should have less content. Why? How would SO be improved by forcing people to figure something like this out from the existing answer? I just don't understand the benefit to having that question marked as a duplicate and deleted.\n\nI've long wondered the same thing about wikipedia. Why does wikipedia delete well written pages about obscure topics? Is their hard disk full? Does every page cost them money? Does google search struggle at scale? I don't understand the benefit to deleting good content."
}
]
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