llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/batch-3-9a0b1a49-01c0-4f74-b673-1df225aca17f-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": "46484687",
"text": "The \"human touch\" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the \"robot touch,\" thanks very much."
}
,
{
"id": "46484731",
"text": "Right? The \"human touch\" is \"you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!\""
}
,
{
"id": "46485449",
"text": "No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of \"you fucking moron\" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been carefully considered and revisited over many years and have clear logic behind them, considering the goals of the site.\n\nIt's just that those goals (i.e. \"we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort\") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. \"I want my code to work\").\n\nI have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But I have seen many examples (and been subjected to one or two myself) of crash-outs resulting from learning that the site is, by design, much more like Wikipedia than like Quora.\n\nQuite a large fraction of questions that get closed boil down to \"here's my code that doesn't work; what's wrong\"? (Another large fraction doesn't even show that much effort.) The one thing that helped a lot with this was the Staging Ground, which provided a place for explicit workshopping of questions and explanation of the site's standards and purpose, without the temptation to answer. But the site staff didn't understand what they had, not at all."
}
,
{
"id": "46491783",
"text": "> It's just that those goals (i.e. \"we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort\") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. \"I want my code to work\").\n\nThis explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/"
}
,
{
"id": "46493540",
"text": "Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.\n\nThat is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them."
}
,
{
"id": "46497544",
"text": "> Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.\n\nUnderstood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information.\n\nFrom what you are saying, they pretended to give fish when in reality only teaching fishing. Users went their because they were told that they could get fish, and only found out once there that there was no fish, only fishing lessons.\n\nBlame lies squarely on SO, not on users. If SO clarified their marketing as \"Not a Q and A site\" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.\n\nRight now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange, and this is what it says on the landing page, front and center:\n\nStack Exchange Q&A communities are different."
}
,
{
"id": "46498932",
"text": "> Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information.\n\nAt the beginning, even Atwood and Spolsky didn't really know what \"a Q&A site\" is. They didn't have a precedent for what they were making; that was the point of making it. Even Quora came later, and it's useless now because they didn't get it.\n\nIt turns out that a Q and A site actually fundamentally is pretty close to \"a wiki of fact-checked information\", just with Qs as a prompting and labeling mechanism. (Which really isn't that surprising; if you've seen e.g. science books for children in Q&A format, you'll notice the Qs are generally unrealistic for children to ask. I remember one that was along the lines of \"is it true you can get electricity from a lemon?\", used to introduce a description of a basic copper-zinc battery cell.)\n\nBy 2011 or so, at least Atwood had figured this out, and was publicly blogging to explain it. By 2014, a core group of users clearly grasped the idea, but was still struggling to figure out what kinds of close reasons actually keep questions on target (and were also struggling with a ton of social issues in general).\n\n> Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange\n\nNot true. https://stackoverflow.com/tour"
}
,
{
"id": "46502742",
"text": "> https://stackoverflow.com/tour\n\nFrom your link:\n\n> This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.\n\n>\n\n> Just questions...\n\n>\n\n> ...and answers.\n\nAnd that's specifically what you said the site was not ; people were going there for answers to their questions. They weren't getting them."
}
,
{
"id": "46485140",
"text": "Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?"
}
,
{
"id": "46485462",
"text": "Here is one fine example. [1]\n\nThe person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you.\nThere are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted.\n\n[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit...\n[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/"
}
,
{
"id": "46494520",
"text": "You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here:\n\n> \"Why not?\" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them!\n\n> Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR!"
}
,
{
"id": "46485214",
"text": "I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior (\"closed as duplicate\") than somebody explicitly articulating that.\n\nIt's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri)."
}
,
{
"id": "46485537",
"text": "There is nothing \"passive-aggressive\" about closing a question as a duplicate.\n\nIt is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the OP: an already-existing answer to a common question is provided instantly ."
}
,
{
"id": "46486901",
"text": "I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as duplicates several times, but I always understood this as an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's just normal friction of human interaction."
}
,
{
"id": "46488636",
"text": "The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. Far too often, the already-existing answer is years old and either no longer the best answer, or doesn't actually address a major part of the question. Or it simply was never a very good answer to begin with.\n\nWhat would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? If the previous answer really is adequate, it won't attract further responses. If it's not, well, now its shortcomings can be addressed.\n\nClosing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. It generally means that somebody missed their true calling on an HOA board somewhere."
}
,
{
"id": "46491046",
"text": "> The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP.\n\nThe purpose of having the answer there is not to solve the OP's problem . It is to have a question answered that contributes to the canon of work. This way, everyone can benefit from it.\n\n> What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions?\n\nScattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.\n\nYou might as well ask: what would be the harm in putting a comment in your code mentioning the existence of a function that serves your purpose, but then rewriting the code in-line instead of trying to figure out what the parameters should be for the function call?\n\n> Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia.\n\nThis analogy makes no sense. The Wikipedia analogue is making page synonyms or redirects or merges, and those are generally useful. \"Deletionism\" is mainly about what meets the standard for notability."
}
,
{
"id": "46492120",
"text": "Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.\n\nSo instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.\n\nThere's really no need for us to rehash SO rules/policy debates that have raged since day one. The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself."
}
,
{
"id": "46493509",
"text": "> So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.\n\nWhat? No. The canonical target isn't closed. So go write the new answer there . The answer acceptance mark is basically irrelevant, and the feature ill-conceived.\n\nExcept usually there are dozens of answers already; the best possible answer has emerged; and people keep writing redundant nonsense for the street cred of having an answer on a popular Stack Overflow question.\n\n> The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.\n\nWe do not care that people don't want to come and ask new questions. There are already way, way too many questions for the site's purpose. The policy is aimed at something that you don't care about. The result is a \"verdict\" we don't care about."
}
,
{
"id": "46483785",
"text": "The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow."
}
,
{
"id": "46484357",
"text": "The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX."
}
,
{
"id": "46487564",
"text": "Where in the process of \"ask question\" -> \"closed as duplicate\" are you interacting with another human?"
}
,
{
"id": "46489854",
"text": "Most of SO didn't seem to consist of people talking to each other so much as talking past each other."
}
,
{
"id": "46483860",
"text": "One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other services and spaces before the widespread use of AI doesn’t sound very compelling to me.\n\nBe more creative than AI."
}
,
{
"id": "46484575",
"text": "How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service.\n\nJust through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape.\n\nIf companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater."
}
,
{
"id": "46484776",
"text": "Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds.\n\nAlso, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention."
}
,
{
"id": "46483722",
"text": "As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario.\n\nTake an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product.\n\nThe documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of \"How to delete a product\" where the first step is to search, the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the third step is to delete.\n\nThe LLM is capable of answering the question \"how to delete the product 'product name'\".\n\nTo some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic, but still possible for a human to answer if only they read documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an answer A LOT faster."
}
,
{
"id": "46485347",
"text": "If the LLM is also writing the documentation, because the developers surely don’t want to, I’m not sure how well this will work out.\n\nI have some co-workers who have tried to use Copilot for their documentation (because they never write any and I’m constantly asking them questions as a result), and the results were so bad they actually spent the time to write proper documentation. It failed successfully, I suppose."
}
,
{
"id": "46494736",
"text": "Indeed, how documentation is written is key. But funny enough, I have been a strong advocate that documentation should always be written in Reference Docs style, and optionally with additional Scenario Docs.\n\nThe former is to be consumed by engineers (and now LLMs), while the later is to be consumed by humans.\n\nScenario Docs, or use case docs, are what millions of blog articles were made of in the early days, then we turned to Stack Overflow questions/answers, then companies started writing documentation in this format too. Lots of Quick Starts for X, Y, and Z scenarios using technology K. Some companies gave away completely on writing reference documentation, which would allow engineers to understand the fundamentals of technology K and then be able to apply to X, Y, and Z.\n\nBut now with LLMs, we can certainly go back to writing Reference docs only, and let LLMs do the extra work on Scenario based docs. Can they hallucinate still? Sure. But they will likely get most beyond-basic-maybe-not-too-advanced scenarios right in the first shot.\n\nAs for using LLMs to write docs: engineers should be reviewing that as much as they should be reviewing the code generated by AI."
}
,
{
"id": "46484701",
"text": "\"In this imaginary world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs, LLMs are the best tool for the job\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46485334",
"text": "world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs\n\nI believe the parent poster was clearly and specifically talking about software documentation that was strong and LLM consumption-friendly, not \"everything\""
}
,
{
"id": "46494079",
"text": "Yeah, old news? It's how it is today with humans.\n\nYou SHOULD be making things in a human/LLM-readable format nowadays anyway if you're in tech, it'll do you well with AIs resorting to citing what you write, and content aggregators - like search engines - giving it more preferential scores."
}
,
{
"id": "46485188",
"text": "> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems\n\nThe moderation was precisely the reason I stopped using stackoverflow and started looking for answers and asking questions elsewhere. It was nearly impossible to ask anything without someone replying \"Why would you even want to do that, do <something completely different that does not solve my problem> instead!\". Or someone claiming it's a duplicate and you should use that ancient answer from another question that 1) barely fits and doesnt solve my problem and 2) is so outdated, it's no longer useful.\n\nWhenever I had to ask something, I had to add a justification as to why I have to do it that way and why previous posts do not solve the issue, and that took more space than the question itself.\n\nI certainly won't miss SO."
}
,
{
"id": "46498135",
"text": "I will miss it but you are right about moderation. I don't know what the issue is on some platforms, reddit and SO come to mind. Moderators on many other platforms or forums seem to be alright and keep a clear head, even when they have to deal with a lot of vitriol and they get little thanks for their work.\n\nThere are probably negative examples as well but some platforms seem to be especially vulnerable. If I had to run reddit or SO, I would limit moderation to one subreddit/subdomain. No idea if that would help, but the problem isn't exactly invisible."
}
,
{
"id": "46484601",
"text": "If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones:\n\n1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions.\n\n2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology."
}
,
{
"id": "46485365",
"text": "> Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.\n\nThis is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times than I can count."
}
,
{
"id": "46487315",
"text": "Then you're doing it wrong?\n\nI'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git clone the repo and tell it to reference the source.\n\nApologies for using you as an example, but this is a common theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a specific/complex question with little context and then complain when the answer is wrong."
}
,
{
"id": "46489992",
"text": "This is exactly the issue that most people run into and it's literally the GIGO principle that we should all be familiar with by now. If your design spec amounts to \"fix it\" then don't be surprised at the results. One of the major improvements I've noticed in Claude Code using Opus 4.5 is that it will often read the source of the library we're using so that it fully understands the API as well as the implementation.\n\nYou have to treat LLMs like any other developer that you'd delegate work to and provide them with a well thought out specification of the feature they're building or enough details about how to reproduce a bug for them to diagnose and fix it. If you want their code to conform to the style you prefer then you have to give them a style guide and examples or provide a linter and code formatter and let them know how to run it.\n\nThey're getting better at making up for these human deficits as more and more of these common failure cases are recorded but you can get much better output now by simply putting some thought into how you use them."
}
,
{
"id": "46498208",
"text": "Sonnet does it as well, I use it to save credits, I honestly don't see much difference to Opus if you keep your problems/codebase/general context window small enough. In JavaScript land, known for its volatile ecosystem, it often uses constructors that don't exist anymore because of API changes. But a small lookup of the source is usually enough for it to correct the code immediately."
}
,
{
"id": "46494223",
"text": "I’ve specified many of these things and still had it fall on its face. And at some point, I’m providing so much detail that I may as well do it myself, which is ultimately what ends up happening.\n\nAlso, it seems assuming the latest version would make much more sense than assuming a random version from 10 years ago. If I was handing work off to another person, I would expect to only need to specify the version if it was down level, or when using the latest stable release."
}
,
{
"id": "46495105",
"text": "Usually that's resolved by saying \"I want you to use v2\" or whatever it is, which you can't really do with a Stack Overflow answer as easily."
}
,
{
"id": "46485794",
"text": "Have you tried using context7 or a similar MCP to have the agent automatically fetch up to date documentation?"
}
,
{
"id": "46484285",
"text": "> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question\n\nBut the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers.\n\nI am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days."
}
,
{
"id": "46485561",
"text": "To the extent that moderation ever prevented questions from getting answers, that was by closing them.\n\nWhen a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.\n\nThe value proposition is getting an answer to a question that is useful to a reasonably broad audience . That very often means a question that someone else asked, the answer to which is useful to you. It is not getting an \"answer\" to a \"question\" where an individual dumps some code trying to figure out what's wrong."
}
,
{
"id": "46490422",
"text": "> When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.\n\nOne of the bigger problems with the site's moderation systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and unintuitive to new users, 2) the reopen queue was almost useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed questions ever getting reopened, and 3) even if a question did get reopened, it would be buried thousands of posts down the front page and answerers would likely never see it.\n\nThere were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system -- better \"on hold\" UI that would walk users through the process of revising their question, and a revamp of the review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the \"triage\" queue, which did little to help new users without the several other review queues that were planned to be downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped working on improvements to the site.\n\nManagement should have been aggressively chasing metrics like \"percentage of closed questions that get reopened\" and \"number of new users whose first question is well-received and answered\". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the outcome is unsurprising."
}
,
{
"id": "46490997",
"text": "Yes.\n\nThe \"on hold\" change got reversed because new users apparently just found it confusing.\n\nOther attempts to communicate have not worked because the company and the community are separate entities (and the company has more recently shown itself to be downright hostile to the community). We cannot communicate this system better because even moderators do not have access to update the documentation . The best we can really do is write posts on the meta site and hope people find them, and operate the \"customer service desk\" there where people get the bad news.\n\nBut a lot of the time people really just don't read anyway. Especially when they get question-banned; they are sent messages that include links explaining the situation, and they ask on the meta site about things that are clearly explained in those links. (And they sometimes come up with strange theories about it that are directly contradicted by the information given to them. E.g. just the other day we had https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437859 .)"
}
,
{
"id": "46487130",
"text": "And that was the core problem with Stack Overflow - they wanted to build a system of core Q&As to be a reference, but everyone treated it as a \"fix my very specific problem now\".\n\n99% of all the junk that got closed was just dumps of code and 'it doesn't work'. Not useful to anyone."
}
,
{
"id": "46492388",
"text": "And 99% of the other stuff, that wasn't just a code dump and \"it doesn't work\", was also closed."
}
,
{
"id": "46484536",
"text": "There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was \"horrible\" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as \"horrible\". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Reddit and HN, which are poorly optimized for answering questions."
}
,
{
"id": "46484669",
"text": "Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors."
}
,
{
"id": "46486625",
"text": "The decline was much slower, not the following exponential decline that can only have been caused by LLMs."
}
]
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