llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/batch-14-c1125411-ae46-4b79-93a2-4c9484460cf1-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": "46483092",
"text": "Interestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched!\n\nIt’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower?\n\n[1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover..."
}
,
{
"id": "46488608",
"text": "StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.\n\nInstead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This killed the pub and with it the business.\n\nThe most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old timers took when they joined. And duplicates allow anyone with a grudge to take revenge. After all, there are no new questions, and you will always find a duplicate if you want to.\n\nTo create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by itself."
}
,
{
"id": "46500447",
"text": ">StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.\n\nI really like this description. I and others here who are talking about negative experiences there seem to decry how we enjoy programming (you see words like \"fun\" and \"passion\" used in these posts), and how SO decided to take this good faith and cheer and bludgeon users for often opaque reasons, just so they could power trip. As much as I have many reservations about LLMs, I can ask LLMs to be as emotionless (or even emotional but chipper/happy) as I want. On SO, you needed to prostrate yourself and self-criticize to even have the opportunity to be bludgeoned further by the moderators. Who tf would want to spend their time contributing there? Even if you contributed a decent or even great amount to the site, you would still get whacked over the head if you dared to ask a question of your own.\n\nThis is why people jumped to LLMs, even when they were far less capable than they are now. Most people (SO moderators don't view others as \"people\", as is apparent in this thread) would rather receive mid-tier answers from an LLM (though LLMs have now exceeded this level of quality) while still having fun, than get castigated and \"closed as duped\" on SO."
}
,
{
"id": "46488669",
"text": "Another exemple being \"Comments are not for extended discussion ! if you want to actively bring value by adding information, later updates, history, or just fun that cultivates a community, please leave and go do that somewhere else like our chat that doesn't follow at all the async functionnality of this platform and is limited to the regular userbase while scaring the newcomers.\""
}
,
{
"id": "46489010",
"text": "\"comments are not for extended discussion\" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided \"yeah, let's kill this\".\n\nThe people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes just letting a community do what it wants (within reasonable boundaries, of course) leads to a better and more successful product than actively trying to steer things in a certain direction."
}
,
{
"id": "46489449",
"text": "Oh absolutely - when it becomes clear you have high engagement somewhere, adapt that feature to facilitate the engagement! They could have made comments threaded or embedded ways to expand it into the right forum, but instead they literally shut down engagement. Bonkers."
}
,
{
"id": "46500458",
"text": "hahaha, I almost forgot about that! \"stop talking about edge cases and other things pertinent to this topic in comments about this topic!! reeeeeeeee!!!!\""
}
,
{
"id": "46483268",
"text": "A lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of accountability for everyone that influences the product, it eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with common sense stepped in to put an end to it."
}
,
{
"id": "46490986",
"text": "As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0].\n\nI'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.\n\nI 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.\n\nThe problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Discord chats, StackOverflow or GitHub issues. People still don't know how to ask questions:\n\n* [1]\n* [2]\n* [3]\n\n[0]: https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-as...\n[1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670\n[2]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649\n[3]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515"
}
,
{
"id": "46484797",
"text": "This is a huge loss.\n\nIn the past people asked questions of real people who gave answers rooted in real use. And all this was documented and available for future learning. There was also a beautiful human element to think that some other human cared about the problem.\n\nNow people ask questions of LLMs. They churn out answers from the void, sometimes correct but not rooted in real life use and thought. The answers are then lost to the world. The learning is not shared.\n\nLLMs have been feeding on all this human interaction and simultaneously destroying it."
}
,
{
"id": "46482599",
"text": "Do I read that correctly — it is close to zero today?!\n\nI used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all."
}
,
{
"id": "46482837",
"text": "Not zero, but it is smaller than when it launched originally. And this is questions asked, not how many people are visiting and reading posts."
}
,
{
"id": "46482683",
"text": "Still a couple thousand away from 0.\n\nBut yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available.\n\nI wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there"
}
,
{
"id": "46483294",
"text": "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."
}
,
{
"id": "46482680",
"text": "It's surely both.\n\nLook at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest\n\nMost questions have negative karma.\n\nEven if somehow that is \"deserved\", that's not a healthy ecosystem.\n\nAll that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders.\n\nSO worked when \"everyone\" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even \"basic\" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them.\n\nSO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls."
}
,
{
"id": "46483777",
"text": "Most? 3 out of 15 is most? What's wrong with youngsters today?!"
}
,
{
"id": "46484501",
"text": "Right now, at the first 15 one has a positive vote, 6 have negative votes, going down to -3.\n\nThe 8 at 0 are just taking longer to amass those negative votes. It's incredibly rare that a positive one ever goes somewhere."
}
,
{
"id": "46486386",
"text": "So, I reviewed the questions list again but this time, since the time I did view it about 9 hours ago [1]. 10 were negative scored, 5 positive scored, 15 0 scored, 4 has received answers. This is better than normal for those ~30. Usually it's 80% without votes, without answers, without comments. So, this is a significan improvement... which I suspect is due the time of the day, as the US and most of Europe were asleep.\n\nSo, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in the positive direction.\n\n[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest"
}
,
{
"id": "46487497",
"text": "It is not \"karma\". It is not to be taken personally. It represents the objective usefulness of the question, not the personal worth of the person asking it."
}
,
{
"id": "46500555",
"text": "AI didn't necessarily kill SO because it was strictly better at giving technical answers (and it certainly wasn't better when GPTs initially burst onto the mass-appeal scene several years ago), but that it provided an alternative (even if subpar) where users could actually get responses to their questions (and furthermore not be ridiculed by psychopaths while doing so was the cherry on top)."
}
,
{
"id": "46482650",
"text": "It can be both. Push and pull factors work better together than either does individually."
}
,
{
"id": "46487145",
"text": "It's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now for confirmation.\n\nI was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the \"live stats\" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_."
}
,
{
"id": "46486301",
"text": "The last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun. If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small difference is probably due to the turn of the year."
}
,
{
"id": "46482681",
"text": "There are tabs to change to a table view. I see a peak of 207k in 2014 and the last month was only 3,710."
}
,
{
"id": "46483141",
"text": "The decline has been pretty surprising: more questions asked in May 2021 (133,914) than in the whole of 2025 (129,977)."
}
,
{
"id": "46485436",
"text": "The steep decline started way before llms"
}
,
{
"id": "46482673",
"text": "It's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going to train the AI for free."
}
,
{
"id": "46482668",
"text": "Maybe the graph doesn’t include questions that get closed by moderators?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483524",
"text": "SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different."
}
,
{
"id": "46484392",
"text": "I recall when they disabled the data export a few years ago [0], March 2023. Almost certainly did this in response to the metrics they were seeing, but it accelerated the decline [1].\n\n[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-da...\n\n[1] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926..."
}
,
{
"id": "46486499",
"text": "One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..?\n\nMost SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it)."
}
,
{
"id": "46485765",
"text": "SO has lost against LLMs because it has insistently positioned itself as a knowledge base rather than a community. The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it.\n\nThey basically made a bet because they wanted to be the full anti-thesis of ad-ridden garbage-looking forums. Pure information, zero tolerance for humanity, sterile looking design.\n\nThey achieved that goal, but in the end, they dug their own grave too.\n\nLLMs didn’t admonish us to write our questions better, or simply because we asked for an opinion. They didn’t flag, remove our post with no advance notice. They didn’t forbid to say hello or thanks, they welcomed it. They didn’t complain when we asked something that was asked many times. They didn’t prevent us from deleting our own content.\n\nOh yeah, no wonder nobody bothers with SO anymore.\n\nIt’s a good lesson for the future."
}
,
{
"id": "46485969",
"text": "IMO people underestimate the value of heavy moderation. But moderation heavy or light, good or bad.\n\nWhy wait hours for an answer when an LLM gives it in seconds?"
}
,
{
"id": "46503719",
"text": "Monica has the last laugh it seems"
}
,
{
"id": "46487567",
"text": "LLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing.\n\nThe steep decline in the early months of 2023 actually started with the release of ChatGPT, which is 2022-11-30, and its gradually widening availability to (and awareness of) the public from that date. The plot clearly shows that cliff.\n\nThe gentle decline since 2016 does not invalidate this. Were it not for LLMs, the site's post rate would now probably be at around 5000 posts/day, not 300.\n\nLLMs are to \"blame\" for eating all the trivial questions that would have gotten some nearly copy-pasted answer by some eager reputation points collector, or closed as a duplicate, which nets nobody any rep.\n\nStack Overflow is not a site for socializing . Do not mistake it for reddit. The \"karma\" does not mean \"I hate you\", it means \"you haven't put the absolute minimum conceivable amount of effort into your question\". This includes at least googling the question before you ask. If you haven't done that, you can't expect to impose on the free time of others.\n\nSO has a learning curve. The site expects more from you than just to show up and start yapping. That is its nature. It is \"different\" because it must be. All other places don't have this expectation of quality. That is its value proposition."
}
,
{
"id": "46483663",
"text": "Here’s how SO could still be useful in the LLM era:\n\nUser asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation to add additional insights and correct mistakes.\n\nIf you’re a user that asks a duplicate question, it’ll just direct you to the good conversation that already happened.\n\nA symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS human generated content that dives deeper and provides reassurances in correctness"
}
,
{
"id": "46486030",
"text": "Users could upvote whether Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT provided the best answer. The best of three is surfaced, the others are hidden behind a \"show alternatives.\"\n\nHowever, I can see how this would be labelled \"shoving AI into everything\" and \"I'm not on SO for AI.\""
}
,
{
"id": "46484203",
"text": "Or they can start claiming copyright on the training content"
}
,
{
"id": "46484279",
"text": "Should probably email this to the CEO of SO"
}
,
{
"id": "46486080",
"text": "So the question for me is how important was SO to training LLMs? Because now that the SO is basically no longer being updated, we've lost the new material to train on? Instead, we need to train on documentation and other LLM output. I'm no expert on this subject but it seems like the quality of LLMs will degrade over time."
}
,
{
"id": "46487555",
"text": "Yep, exactly. Free data grabbing honeypots like SO won't work anymore.\n\nPlease mark all locations on the map where you would hide during the uprise of the machines."
}
,
{
"id": "46488294",
"text": "Why publish anything for free on the internet if it's going to be scanned into some corporation's machine for their free use? I know artists who have stopped putting anything online. I imagine some programmers are questioning whether or not to continue with open source work too."
}
,
{
"id": "46486771",
"text": "It has often been claimed, and even shown, that training LLMs on their own outputs will degrade the quality over time. I myself find it likely that on well-measurable domains, RLVR improvements will dominate \"slop\" decreases in capability when training new models."
}
,
{
"id": "46483000",
"text": "StackExchange forgot who made them successful long ago. This is what they sowed. I don't have any remorse, only pity.\n\nWhen Hans Passant (OGs will know) left, followed by SE doing literally nothing, that was the first clue for me personally that SE stopped caring.\n\nThat said, it is a bit shocking how close to zero it is."
}
,
{
"id": "46482753",
"text": "Stackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck."
}
,
{
"id": "46482872",
"text": "It's surprisingly tame still given it interests tens (hundreds?) of millions of people at varying age and background and mostly when the mind is occupied by a problem. I always found it surprising there's not more defacing and toxicity."
}
,
{
"id": "46482954",
"text": "AI is a vampire. Coming to your corner of the world, to suck your economic blood, eventually. It’s hard to ignore the accelerated decline that started in late 2022/early 2023."
}
,
{
"id": "46482713",
"text": "LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls"
}
,
{
"id": "46482990",
"text": "If by \"body-slammed\" you mean \"trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license\", then sure.\n\nIn the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.\n\nWhat should worry everyone is what system will come after LLMs. Data is being centralized and hoarded by giant corporations, and not shared publicly. And the data that is shared is generated by LLMs. We're poisoning the well of information with no fallback mechanism."
}
,
{
"id": "46483410",
"text": "> If by \"body-slammed\" you mean \"trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license\", then sure.\n\nYou know that's not what they meant, but why bring up the license here? If they were over the top compliant, attributing every SO answer under every chat, and licensing the LLM output as CC BY-SA, I think we'd still have seen the same shift.\n\n> In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.\n\nBest case it gives you the same level of content, but more customized, and faster.\n\nSO being wrong and wasting your time is also common."
}
]
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