llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/batch-15-fac55507-62c8-4849-ba3c-7e9bf0c8029a-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": "46485961",
"text": "As everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI, and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before looks similar\n\nAlso not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?) but that's definitely one of the things that made me default reach for other links instead of SO.\n\n[0] https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png"
}
,
{
"id": "46486239",
"text": "Those popups were a big contributor for me to stop using SO. I stopped updating my uBlock origin rules when LLMs became good enough. I am now using the free Kimi K2 model via Groq over CLI, which is much faster."
}
,
{
"id": "46483230",
"text": "Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge?\n\nA lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources.\n\nHowever SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb.\n\nLLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO.\n\nAre we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483460",
"text": "There's https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ for the more academic CS questions btw."
}
,
{
"id": "46483441",
"text": "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.\n\nI had similar worries in the past about indexable forums being replaced by discord servers. the current situation is even worse."
}
,
{
"id": "46485455",
"text": "Web has been solved for a decade imo."
}
,
{
"id": "46491639",
"text": "I was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but got stuck in one particular function.\n\nIt was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I couldn't find anything on Google.\n\nHad no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time. (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I didn't understand the documentation)\n\nIt was a fond memory of the site for me."
}
,
{
"id": "46483675",
"text": "For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to \"RTFM\"\n\nhttps://sosimulator.xyz/"
}
,
{
"id": "46487521",
"text": "SO peaked long, long before LLMs came along. My personal experience is that GitHub issues took over.\n\nYou can clearly see the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022. That was the final nail in the coffin.\n\nI am still really glad that Stack Overflow saved us from experts-exchange.com - or “the hyphen site” as it is sometimes referred to."
}
,
{
"id": "46486532",
"text": "For this occasion, I just logged in to my SO profile; I've been a member for 9 years now.\n\nTo me, back when I started out learning web dev, as a junior with no experience and barely knowing anything, SO seemed like a paradise for programmers. I could go on there and get unblocked for the complex (but trivial for experts) issues I was facing. Most of the questions I initially posted, which were either closed as duplicates or \"not good enough,\" really did me a lot of discouragement. I wasn't learning anything by being told, \"You did it wrong, but we're also not telling you how you could do it better.\" I agree with the first part; I probably sucked at writing good questions and searching properly. I think it's just a part of the process to make mistakes but SO did not make it better for juniors, at least on the part of giving proper guidance to those who \"sucked\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46485012",
"text": "Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more.\n\nI have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board.\n\nWith AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September).\n\nI don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) \"open-ended questions\" being mixed into the normal questions feed."
}
,
{
"id": "46483501",
"text": "Good.\n\nThis is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic.\n\nLLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup."
}
,
{
"id": "46484028",
"text": "Makes for a good conspiracy theory. Bad actors intentionally making the internet hostile. https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE"
}
,
{
"id": "46482794",
"text": "Game over. I didn’t notice all the toxicity mentioned in the other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe. It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its name is part of web history, and there’s no denying that."
}
,
{
"id": "46482644",
"text": "People are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them."
}
,
{
"id": "46482803",
"text": "This is concerning on two fronts. The questions are no longer open (SO is CC-BY-SA) and if Q&A content dies then this herds even more people towards LLM use.\nIt's basically draining the commons."
}
,
{
"id": "46483018",
"text": "Yup. This, to me, provides another explanation for why the social contract is being used as toilet paper by the owner class. They literally see the writing on the wall."
}
,
{
"id": "46497171",
"text": "Stack Overflow set out to be a better Q&A site but has turned into a user-unfriendly, gatekeeping platform where questions are often marked as duplicates because a similar question was answered 15 years ago. Everything and every question is banned, gatekeep, or marked as a duplicate."
}
,
{
"id": "46483469",
"text": "They had pretty neat infra, maybe it still runs in the same clever way. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a..."
}
,
{
"id": "46485550",
"text": "Recently they've chucked out their own servers:\n\nhttps://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-sa..."
}
,
{
"id": "46483649",
"text": "Notably the default Redis client for most .NET developers is still StackExchange.Redis."
}
,
{
"id": "46482969",
"text": "I fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/"
}
,
{
"id": "46490126",
"text": "One thing you won’t get with in an LLM is genuine research. I once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code of vim to see how the poster’s question could be resolved. [0]\n\n[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619423/backup-restore-th..."
}
,
{
"id": "46483118",
"text": "Seems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold to a private equity firm."
}
,
{
"id": "46488845",
"text": "Good riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any alternative.\n\nAnd that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking questions because they didn't want to run the moderation gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing.\n\nLLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will oblige.\n\nLooking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve."
}
,
{
"id": "46483877",
"text": "Whenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you”\n\nhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246333"
}
,
{
"id": "46500671",
"text": "When StackOverflow dies, who will train the LLMs?"
}
,
{
"id": "46482620",
"text": "Wow. I was expecting a decline but not to that extent."
}
,
{
"id": "46493163",
"text": "Don't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses?\n\nIt should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible."
}
,
{
"id": "46489747",
"text": "The corresponding answers graph: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/a..."
}
,
{
"id": "46494163",
"text": "The number of active users at StackOverflow started dropping in the middle of 2020, i.e. long time before ChatGPT release in the end of 2022.\n\nhttps://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/192836..."
}
,
{
"id": "46483164",
"text": "Wow, that's not just collapsing, that's collapsed."
}
,
{
"id": "46482750",
"text": "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.\n\nAI 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).\n\nSO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483213",
"text": "I find a lot of good stuff in GitHub issues"
}
,
{
"id": "46482927",
"text": "Local meet-ups I guess?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490260",
"text": "I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time.\n\nI use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago.\n\nI used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time.\n\nSo perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP.\n\nI don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components."
}
,
{
"id": "46490830",
"text": "A decline in number of questions asked can also be because most people's questions are already answered in the database.\n\nHow would you query this for post views over time?"
}
,
{
"id": "46483035",
"text": "Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse?\n\nThe precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow."
}
,
{
"id": "46483291",
"text": "Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood:\n\n> Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!\n\nhttps://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...\n\n> Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year.\n\nhttps://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...\n\n> Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn’t always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive.\n> All the content on the site must exist to serve the mission of learning over entertainment – even if that means making difficult calls about removing some questions and answers that fail to meet those goals, plus or minus 10 percent.\n\nhttps://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/"
}
,
{
"id": "46483133",
"text": "I think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to \"get to the bottom\" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism.\n\nAll of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered.\n\nI remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/discussion board, which feels more appropriate for the current state of the industry."
}
,
{
"id": "46483198",
"text": "The question askers got stupider and stupider."
}
,
{
"id": "46492135",
"text": "I used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?"
}
,
{
"id": "46486732",
"text": "I think the disallowing of “controversial” technical questions might have helped as much as the AI boom.\n\nSo frustrating to be reading a deeply interesting technically and intense debate to be closed down by an admin."
}
,
{
"id": "46483834",
"text": "The founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way that site is worth $1.8 billion now."
}
,
{
"id": "46487137",
"text": "StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me.\n\nActually I think it never did.\n\nIt started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account.\n\nAnd then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile.\n\nI hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities."
}
,
{
"id": "46487236",
"text": "I don't think the reputation system ever worked that way - new users could always answer questions, but comments required more reputation."
}
,
{
"id": "46487388",
"text": "OK, you might be right and I got it backwards. It still felt wrong at the time before I got enough points."
}
,
{
"id": "46483979",
"text": "Spolsky and co. sold SO in 2021 - timing IS everything."
}
,
{
"id": "46482600",
"text": "Approaching 0 is wild"
}
,
{
"id": "46482676",
"text": "Moderator team must be over the moon"
}
]
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