llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/batch-4-cb9a0a4a-3160-4afe-ac00-186cf5dd2bd3-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": "46484732",
"text": "You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other questions first, ensure that your account has enough \"clout\" to overturn stupid closures of questions, and when you have wasted enough time doing that, then you can finally ask your own question. Or you can just go somewhere else that isn't an intellectual charade and circle jerking and figure it out without wasting tons of time chasing clout and hoping a moderator won't just close the question as duplicate. SO was never the best platform, exactly because of its horrendous moderation. It was good, yes. It had the quality assurance, to a degree, yes. But when just asking a question becomes such a monumental task, people will go elsewhere, to better platforms. Which includes other forums, and, LLMs. So no, what you're attributing to LLMs is merely a symptom of the deeper issue."
}
,
{
"id": "46490104",
"text": "It was bad enough that many people resorted to asking their questions in Discord instead which is a massive boomerang back to trying to get help in IRC and just praying that someone is online and willing to help you on the spot. Having to possibly ask your question multiple times before you get some spotty help in a real time chat where it's next to impossible to find again seems unimaginably worse than using an online forum but the fact of it remains and tells us there was something driving people away from sites like SO."
}
,
{
"id": "46488439",
"text": "> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help.\n\nBy the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with."
}
,
{
"id": "46483554",
"text": "That \"Dead Internet\" phrase keeps becoming more likely, and this graph shows that. Human-to-human interactions, LLMs using those interactions, less human-to-human interactions because of that, LLMs using... ?"
}
,
{
"id": "46485360",
"text": "> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning.\n\nOverwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to \"moderators\" who in reality have historically done hardly any of it; the site simply didn't scale like that. There have been tens of millions of questions, versus a couple dozen moderators.)\n\nThe kinds of questions that people are getting quick, accurate answers for from an LLM are, overwhelmingly, the sort of thing that SO never wanted. Generally because they are specific to the person asking: either that person's issue won't be relevant to other people, or the work hasn't been done to make it recognizable by others.\n\nAnd then of course you have the duplicates. You would not believe the logic some people put forward to insist that their questions are not duplicate; that they wouldn't be able, in other words, to get a suitable answer (note: the purpose is to answer a question, not solve a problem) from the existing Q&A. It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.\n\nI agree that Reddit played a big role in this. But not just by answering questions; by forming a place where people who objected to the SO content model could congregate.\n\nInsulting other users is and always has been against Stack Overflow Code of Conduct. The large majority of insults, in my experience, come from new users who are upset at being politely asked to follow procedures or told that they aren't actually allowed to use the site the way they're trying to. There have been many duplicate threads on the meta site about why community members (with enough reputation) are permitted to cast close votes on questions without commenting on what is wrong. The consensus: close reasons are usually fairly obvious; there is an established process for people to come to the meta site to ask for more detailed reasoning; and comments aren't anonymous, so it makes oneself a target."
}
,
{
"id": "46485560",
"text": "It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality.\n\n> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.\n\nThis, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new (for example after a library change) and marking it as duplicate of an unanswered answer if a guarantee that the next SEO user won’t see it."
}
,
{
"id": "46485718",
"text": "> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.\n\nNo, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise.\n\nIf you mean \"without writing a direct answer to the new question first\", that is the exact point of the system . Literally all you have to do is click the link and read the existing answers.\n\n> it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new\n\nSure. But someone else knew about the old question, found it for you , and directly pointed you at it so that you could get an answer immediately . And did all of this for free .\n\nAnd , by doing this, now everyone else who thinks of your phrasing for the question, will be immediately able to find the old question, without even having to wait for someone to recognize the duplicate."
}
,
{
"id": "46486041",
"text": "I’m sure I’ve had the experience of being told it’s a duplicate, without resolving my problem.\n\nIn any case, you may be right, and yet if you search this thread for “horrible” and “obnoxious”, you’ll find dozens of occurrence. Maybe defining the rules of engagement so that the user is wrong every time doesn’t work."
}
,
{
"id": "46498895",
"text": "> I’m sure I’ve had the experience of being told it’s a duplicate, without resolving my problem.\n\nAnd when that happens you're invited to edit your question with more details so that's clear, to get it reopened."
}
,
{
"id": "46490038",
"text": ">> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.\n\n> No, they literally cannot.\n\nYou missed that people repeatedly closed question as duplicate when it was not a duplicate.\n\nSo it had answer, just to a different mildly related question.\n\nLLM are having problems but they gaslight me in say 3% of cases, not 60% of cases like SO mods."
}
,
{
"id": "46490298",
"text": "Please feel free to show examples."
}
,
{
"id": "46489998",
"text": "> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.\n\nMultiple times my questions closed as duplicates of question that was answering a different question.\n\nEven when I explicitly linked that QA in my question and described how it differs from mine."
}
,
{
"id": "46485714",
"text": "This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms of not having to need to ask redundant questions)."
}
,
{
"id": "46483513",
"text": "> I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after?\n\nI've wondered this too and I wonder if the existing corpus plus new GitHub/doc site scrapes will be enough to keep things current."
}
,
{
"id": "46483610",
"text": "Widespread internet adoption created “eternal September”, widespread LLM deployment will create “eternal 2018”"
}
,
{
"id": "46486070",
"text": "\"I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers.\"\n\nI think at least one other reason is that a lot of the questions were already posted. There are only so many questions of interest, until a popular new technology comes along. And if you look at mathoverflow (which wouldnt have the constant shocks from new technologies) the trend is pretty stable...until right around 2022. And even since then, the dropoff isn't nearly so dramatic.\nhttps://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/edit/19272..."
}
,
{
"id": "46487965",
"text": ">>what happens now?\n\nI'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the response .\n\nThe overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where everything collaboratively built falls apart.\n\nThe machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and self-righteous.... /okay.\n\nthere was always a needy component to Stack Overflow. \"I have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this algorithm?\" and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be honest, it was the giving of information which forced you to think, and research, and answer correctly , which made systems like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the fucking future.\n\nThings are gonna slide / in all directions / won't be nothin you can measure anymore. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.[0]\n\n[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WlbQRoz3o4"
}
,
{
"id": "46488339",
"text": "Labs are spending billions on data set curation and RL from human experts to fill in the areas where they're currently weak. It's higher quality data than SO, the only issue is that it's not public."
}
,
{
"id": "46488374",
"text": "Can you explain what you're saying in greater depth?\n\nAre you saying that the reason there is no human expertise on the internet anymore is that everyone with knowledge is now under contract to train AIs?"
}
,
{
"id": "46488690",
"text": "No, I think the reason human expertise on the internet is dying out is because we have a cacophany of voices trying to be heard on the internet, and experts aren't interested in screaming into the void unless they directly need to do it to pay their bills."
}
,
{
"id": "46488808",
"text": "I would say that going onto Stack Overflow to answer questions made me a better coder - yeah, even with the cacophony of bullshit and repeats. It's almost more offensive for that job to be taken by \"AI\" than the job of writing the stupid code I was trying to help people fix.\n\n[edit] because I kind of get what you're saying... I truly don't care what marginal benefits people are trying to get out of popularity in the high school locker room that is the Social Media internet. I still have a weird habit of giving everyone a full answer to their questions, and trying to teach people what I know when I can. Not for kudos or points, but because the best way to learn is by teaching ."
}
,
{
"id": "46485078",
"text": "The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question\n\nFor me, the value was writing answers on topics I was interested in…and internet points as feedback on their quality.\n\nWhen SE abandoned their app, it broke my habit."
}
,
{
"id": "46486171",
"text": "There's another significant forum: GitHub, the rise of which coincided with the start of SO's decline. I bet most niche questions went over to GH repos' issue/discussion forums, and SO was left with more general questions that bored contributors."
}
,
{
"id": "46488799",
"text": "> - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?\n\nTo me this shows just how limited LLMs are. Hopefully more people realize that LLMs aren't as useful as they seem, and in 10 years they're relegated to sending spam and generating marketting websites."
}
,
{
"id": "46488854",
"text": "Or we just stagnate, as tech no longer can afford to change."
}
,
{
"id": "46483821",
"text": "Too bad stack overflow didn't high-quality-LLM itself early. I assume it had the computer-related brainpower.\n\nwith respect to the \"moderation is the cause\" thing... Although I also don't buy moderation as the cause, I wonder if any sort of friction from the \"primary source of data\" can cause acceleration.\n\nfor example, when I'm doing an interenet search for the definition of a word like buggywhip, some search results from the \"primary source\" show:\n\n> buggy whip, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary\n\n> Factsheet What does the noun buggy whip mean? There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun buggy whip. See 'Meaning & use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.\n\nwhich are non-answer to keep their traffic.\n\nbut the AI answer is... the answer.\n\nIf SO early on had had some clear AI answer + references, I think that would have kept people on their site."
}
,
{
"id": "46485700",
"text": "The meta post describing the policy of banning AI-generated answers from the site ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 ) is the most popular of all time. Company interference with moderator attempts to enforce that policy lead to a moderator strike. The community is vehemently against the company's current repeated attempts to sneak AI into the system, which have repeatedly produced embarrassing results (see for example https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427807 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 etc.).\n\nWhat you propose is a complete non-starter."
}
,
{
"id": "46486398",
"text": "Your first example is a public announcement of an llm assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback on an experiment isn't \"sneaking\" and the replies are a tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of questions so AI review seems like it should be useful.\n\nThe top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this, the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just don't do it.\n\nThe second top voted answer says \"I was able to do a prompt injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug\". So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol.\n\nIt seems clear these people started from a belief that ai is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why this specific feature is bad.\n\nIt's crazy that you are defending this group all over this HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem. I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in years.\nThose replies are embarrassing for the SO community, not AI."
}
,
{
"id": "46483941",
"text": "The newer questions that LLMs can't answer will be answered in forums - either SO, reddit, or elsewhere. There will be a much higher percentage of relevant content with far fewer new pages regurgitating questions about solved problems. So the LLMs will be able to keep up."
}
,
{
"id": "46485687",
"text": "> What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?\n\nThat's a great question. I have no idea how things will play out now - do models become generalized enough to handle \"out of distrubition\" problems or not ? If they don't then I suppose a few years from now we'll get an uptick in Stackoverflow questions; the website will still exist it's not going anywhere."
}
,
{
"id": "46490492",
"text": "> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO.\n\nPlus they might find the answer on SO without asking a new question - You probably would expect the # of new questions to peak or plateau even if the site wasn't dying, due to the accumulation of already-answered questions."
}
,
{
"id": "46483594",
"text": "I think the interesting thing here for those of us who use open source frameworks is that we can ask the LLM to look at the source to find the answer (eg. Pytorch or Phoenix in my case). For closed source libraries I do not know."
}
,
{
"id": "46484982",
"text": "Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means.\n\nNow all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative."
}
,
{
"id": "46483820",
"text": "> SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions\n\nWe will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some details/quirks/gotchas.\n\nExample of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more effective than LLMs."
}
,
{
"id": "46486415",
"text": "We'll get to the point where we can mass moderate core knowledge eventually. We may need to hand out extra weight for verified experts and some kind of most-votes-win type logic (perhaps even comments?), but live training data updates will be a massive evolution for language models."
}
,
{
"id": "46486482",
"text": "> will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?\n\nI honestly don't think they need to. As we've seen so far, for most jobs in this world, answers that sound correct are good enough.\n\nIs chasing more accuracy a good use of resources if your audience can't tell the difference anyway?"
}
,
{
"id": "46494913",
"text": "The LLMs will learn from our interactions with them. That's why they're often free"
}
,
{
"id": "46483892",
"text": "I don't think \"good moderation or not\" really touches what was happening with SO.\n\nI joined SO early and it had a \"gamified\" interface that I actually found fun. Putting in effort and such I able to slowly gain karma.\n\nThe problem was as the site scaled, the competition to answer a given question became more and more intense and that made it miserable. I left at that point but I think a lot people stayed with dynamic that was extremely unhealthy. (and the quality of accepted questions declined also).\n\nWith all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening."
}
,
{
"id": "46485709",
"text": "Agreed. The reputation system was extremely ill considered and never revisited. You may be interested in https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 ."
}
,
{
"id": "46485273",
"text": "> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems\n\nJust to add another personal data point: i started posting in on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting.\n\nModerators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory.\n\nModeration was an incredible problem for stack overflow."
}
,
{
"id": "46485756",
"text": "> Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory.\n\n99.9% probability the people who made those edits a) were not moderators ; b) were acting completely in accordance with established policy (please read: \"Why do clear, accurate, appropriately detailed posts still get edited?\" https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 )\n\nWhy do you think you should be the one who gets to decide whether that's \"acceptable\"? The site existed before you came to it, and it has goals, purposes and cultural norms established beforehand. It's your responsibility, before using any site on the Internet that accepts user-generated content, to try to understand the site's and community's expectations for that content.\n\nOn Stack Overflow, the expectations are:\n\n1. You license the content to the site and to the community, and everyone is allowed to edit it. (This is also explicitly laid out in the TOS.)\n\n2. You are contributing to a collaborative effort to build a useful resource for the programming community: a catalog of questions whose answers can be useful to many people, not just to yourself.\n\n3. Content is intended to be matter-of-fact and right to the point, and explicitly not conversational. You are emphatically not participating in a discussion forum."
}
,
{
"id": "46486911",
"text": "The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could."
}
,
{
"id": "46490013",
"text": "What \"tone\"? Why is it unreasonable to say these sorts of things about Stack Overflow, or about any community? How is \"your questions and answers need to meet our standards to be accepted\" any different from \"your pull requests need to meet our standards to be accepted\"?"
}
,
{
"id": "46487160",
"text": "Thank you for being the voice of reason in this comment section!"
}
,
{
"id": "46485187",
"text": "I stopped because of moderators. They literally killed the site for me."
}
,
{
"id": "46485867",
"text": "> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems\n\nQuestions asked on SO that got downvoted by the heavy handed moderation would have been answered by LLMs without any of the flak whatsoever.\n\nThose who had downvoted other's questions on SO for not being good enough, must be asking a lot of such not good enough questions to an LLM today.\n\nSure, the SO system worked, but it was user hostile and I'm glad we all don't have to deal with it anymore."
}
,
{
"id": "46485234",
"text": "As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state.\n\nBut what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute poison.\n\nI'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from Civ4: \"the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy\". That sums it up exactly. There is a certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up as Reddit mods, for example.\n\nRules and standards are good up to a point but some people forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselves and having debates about what's a repeated question, how questions and answers should be structured, etc.\n\nThis manifested as the war of \"closed, non-constructive\" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. And this goes back to the rules and standards being a tool not a goal. My stance was (and is) that shouldn't we solve flame wars when they happen rather than going around and \"solving\" imaginary problems?\n\nI lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like \"should I use Javascript or Typescript?\" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider.\n\nEven something that does have a definite answer like \"how do I efficiently code a factorial function?\" has multiple but different defensible answers. Even in one language you can have multiple implementations that might, say, be compile-time or runtime.\n\nAnother commenter here talked about finding the nearest point on an ellipse and came up with a method they're proud of where there are other methods that would also do the job.\n\nAnyway, I'd occasionally login and see a constant churn on my answers from moderators doing pointless busywork as this month they'd decided something needed to be capitalized or not capitalized.\n\nA perfect example of this kind of thing is Bryan Henderson's war on \"comprised of\" on Wikipedia [2].\n\nAnyway, I think the core issue of SO was that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit and I got a lot of accepted answers on questions that could never be asked today. You'll also read many anecdotes about people having a negative experience asking questions on SO in later years where their question was immediately closed as, say, a duplicate when the question wasn't a duplicate. The moderator just didn't understand the difference. That sort of thing.\n\nBut any mature site ultimately ends with an impossible barrier to entry as newcomers don't know all the cultural rules that have been put in place and they tend to have a negative experience as they get yelled at for not knowing that Rule 11.6.2.7 forbids the kind of question they asked.\n\n[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus\n\n[2]: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-c..."
}
,
{
"id": "46487175",
"text": "> This manifested as the war of \"closed, non-constructive\" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars.\n\nIt's literally a Q&A site. Questions need actual answers, not just opinions or \"this worked for me\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46485807",
"text": "> This manifested as the war of \"closed, non-constructive\" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars.\n\nPlease point at some of these \"really good\" questions, if you saved any links. (I have privileges to see deleted questions; deletion is normally soft unless there's a legal requirement or something.) I'll be happy to explain why they are not actually what the site wanted and not compatible with the site's goals.\n\nThe idea that the question \"should have provable answers\" wasn't some invention of moderators or the community; it came directly from Atwood ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-an... ).\n\n> I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like \"should I use Javascript or Typescript?\" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider.\n\nPlease read \"Understanding the standard for \"opinion-based\" questions\" ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434806 ) and \"What types of questions should I avoid asking?\" ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask )."
}
,
{
"id": "46487995",
"text": "I believe that this tension about what type of questions was baked into the very foundation of StackOverflow.\n\nhttps://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...\n\n> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.\n\nvs\n\nhttps://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/\n\n> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.\n\n(the emphasis on \"good\" is in the original)\n\nAnd this can be seen in the revision history of https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (take note of revision 1 and the moderation actions 2011)\n\n---\n\nQuestions that are fun and slightly outside of the intended domain of the site are manageable ... if there is sufficient moderation to keep those types of questions from sucking up all available resources.\n\nThat was the first failing of NotProgrammingRelated.StackExchange ... later Programming.StackExchange ... later SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange.\n\nThe fun things, while they were fun took way more moderation resources than was available. People would ask a fun question, get a good bit of rep - but then not help in curating those questions. \"What is your favorite book\" would get countless answers... and then people would keep posting the same answers rather than reading all of them themselves and voting to cause the \"good\" content to bubble up to the top.\n\nThat's why TeX can have https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun and MathOverflow can have https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/soft-question and https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list -- there is a very high ratio for the active in moderation to active users.\n\nStack Overflow kind of had this at its start... but over time the \"what is acceptable moderation\" was curtailed more and more - especially in the face of more and more questions that should be closed.\n\nWhile fun questions are fun... the \"I have 30 minutes free before my next meeting want to help someone and see a good question\" is something that became increasingly difficult. The \"Keep all the questions\" ideal made that harder and so fewer and fewer of the - lets call them \"atwoodians\" remained. From where I sit, that change in corporate policy was completely solidified when Jeff left.\n\nAs moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - \"it's not on that list, so you can't close it\") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the \"spolskyites\" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.\n\nWhat remained where shells of rules that were the \"truce\" in the tension between the atwoodians and spolskyites and a few people trying to fight the oncoming tide of poorly asked questions with insufficient and neglected tooling.\n\nAs the tide of questions went out and corporate realized that there was necessary moderation that wasn't happening because of the higher standards from the earlier days they tried to make it easier. The golden hammer of duplication was a powerful one - though misused in many cases. The \"this question closes now because its poorly asked and similar to that other canonical one that works through the issue\" was far easier than \"close as {something}\" that requires another four people to take note of it before the question gets an answer from the Fastest Gun in the West. Later the number of people needed was changed from needing five people to three, but by then there was tide was in retreat.\n\nCorporate, seeing things there were fewer questions being asked measured this as engagement - and has tried things to increase engagement rather than good questions. However, those \"let's increase engagement\" efforts were also done with even more of a moderation burden upon the community without the tooling to fix the problems or help the diminishing number of people who were participating in moderating and curating the content of the site."
}
]
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