llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/topic-3-84cfcd2e-83f8-402e-b56b-d5771822f091-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments.
TOPIC: Knowledge repository vs help desk debate
COMMENTS:
1. There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also...
For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't.
At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore.
...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call.
I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits.
[0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
2. It's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.
One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever taken part in moderating the review queue, you would've seen the insane amount of low-quality questions flowing in. I saw probably ten variants of "how to center my div" daily being closed as duplicates. The asker might be miffed about getting their question closed (but with a link to a solution..), but if you want to actually get answers to the high quality questions, the noise has to be filtered somehow.
Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners figure out their syntax errors or how to apply a general solution to their specific issue. And you may not like SO for it, but to not want to be a site for that is their prerogative.
3. > Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you?
It is believable. But it being a problem I don't see. If it's off-topic, that's sad for you but no reason to feel angry or it being "hostile" or something. It's just off-topic. Same if I started posting lots of local news from my city to HN. It's simply just off-topic and not what the site should contain. If it's already answered, being pointed to that answer by someone spending the time to digging it up is also not rude. Sure, you may feel bad because you feel someone "reprimanded" you or something. But that's on you.
4. The point here is you worked tech support so you were paid to answer user questions.
However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?
5. When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - "what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?" Sometimes they just wanted to talk.
Not every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate.
... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions.
Stack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205
Arguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of "how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer.
It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.
The failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible.
Yes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides.
I would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
6. > It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.
This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully".
> It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable.
It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.
7. > The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question
I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer.
Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie.
8. > Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.
The community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced.
However, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...
Note the "Questions closed" and "Questions reopened".
Compare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-...
The tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the "make the site friendly" by removing comments and banning users.
The "some of the answers should have been deleted" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.
9. > every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.
Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?
10. No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place.
Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point . It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal.
11. What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my "users" . I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of "dead-ness", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that.
Because from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia . For a scope of "practical matters about writing code", as compared to "any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it".
I am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congregate in public and try to accomplish something. I do not share your goals. The community is not like software, and "serving and adapting to users" does not benefit the people doing the work. We never arranged to have the kind of "users" you describe.
12. > Zahlman was claiming above that the "duplicate" question linked earlier in the thread wasn't a useful question. Its not useful because if you read the accepted answer in the original thread, you can figure it out easily.
No, I was not . Duplicate questions are often very useful.
They just... shouldn't host separate answers in a separate place, because that leads to a) duplicated answering effort and b) dilution of results for third parties who search for the information later.
Having a question like this linked as a duplicate highlights the fact that the same fundamental problem can be conceived of in different ways, and appear different due to ancillary requirements.
> If people have similar but distinct questions with different answers, it seems objectively better to surface both SO threads. Ideally they'd be linked together
But we aren't talking about different answers. A bit of adaption to ancillary details is expected. Otherwise there would be no duplicate questions, and also no reason to ever try to have Stack Overflow in the first place, because asking on a forum would be fine. Searching the Internet to figure out how to fix your code could never work and never help, because obviously nobody else has ever written your code before.
But problem-solving doesn't actually work that way.
Closing duplicate questions as duplicates is linking them together.
> Why bother with all of that? I mean, it sounds like all those extra words are all to grovel sufficiently to the SO moderator-gods
This is because you are still approaching the site with the mindset of "what do I have to do to get these other people to give me the information I want?"
But it's not (just) about you . A good question will be seen by many other people.
> Its usually that the question I actually have - if its been asked - has long ago been deleted as a duplicate.
Duplicates are not automatically deleted and not ordinarily manually deleted.
> And the only question remaining on the site is subtly different from the problem I'm actually facing.
Would reading the answers give you the information need to solve the problem, after first putting in the expected effort to isolate a single problem? If not, why not? That's what we care about.
> Or the answer is tragically out of date.
My experience has been that old answers are not actually "out of date" nearly as often as people would expect. But when they are, this is fixed by putting a new answer on the existing question . The bounty system was created largely for this reason. It has proven a failure, for a variety of reasons, but that's a failure of understanding gamification, not a problem with the model.
> Perhaps if people asked better questions, the moderators would be happier. But the site shouldn't be run purely for the benefit of its moderators.
It's frankly infuriating to read things like this. I have already said so many times that the overwhelming majority of the people objected to are not moderators , but people insist on using that language, not making any effort to understand the existing community, and then wondering why they feel unwelcome. More importantly, though, we are going out of our way to try to build something that benefits everyone . While most people asking questions are thinking only of themselves.
13. Top-level view:
from the perspective of people who aren't explicitly trying to teach on their own initiative, overall the site has outlived its purpose. In that time it drew way too many total questions to surface what's actually valuable; between that and no functional search (the internal search was always bad; Google et. al. got worse over time, partly intentionally) you're lucky to find anything valuable.
I'm not generally worried about out-of-date answers; the truly outdated answers are mostly on outdated questions , describing situations that don't come up any more or premises that are no longer valid for ordinary programmers (e.g., fixing problems with obsolete tools).
Combing through to curate properly is too little, too late now. Much stronger (but polite, of course) gatekeeping was required earlier on, which in turn required (among other things) proper means for communication between "core" users and the public. At this point, it's best to start over (hence the part where I'm now a moderator at Codidact).
There's a lot more I want to say, but I don't have it organized in my head and this is way downthread already. Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post?
14. > many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.
Yes.
We consider that duplicate.
Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need .
15. How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? They seem like mutually exclusive goals for 95% of cases.
16. > How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"?
The same way that a K-12 education does.
17. > Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate
Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use.
Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search.
Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances
I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling process didn’t really work the way it was supposed to, and you keep telling them that they are wrong, and that the site actually works well for its intended purpose—even though its intended purpose was to help users find what they were looking for, and they are telling you that they can’t.
Part of StackOverflow’s decline was inevitable and wouldn’t have been helped by any changes the site administrators could have made; a machine can simply answer questions a lot faster than a collection of human volunteers. But there is a reason people were so eager to leave. So now instead of conforming to what users repeatedly told the administrators that they wanted, StackOverflow can conform to being the repository of questions that the administrators wanted, just without any users or revenue besides selling the contributions made by others to the LLMs that users have demonstrated they actually want to use.
18. > The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.
The idea was, if there's an answer on the other question that solves your question, your question remains in existence as a signpost pointing to the other one without having to pollute and confuse by having a mixture of similar answers across both with different amounts of votes.
19. The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution.
If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.
20. > They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet
This is mostly how I engaged with SO for a long, long time. I think it’s a testament to SO’s curation of answers that I didn’t ask almost any questions for like 5+ years after starting programming
21. I agree with that and I think it was the right decision. There was grousing about overmoderation but I think a lot of people got unreasonably annoyed when their question was closed. And the result was a pretty well-curated and really useful knowledge base.
22. 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.
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").
I 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.
Quite 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.
23. Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.
That 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.
24. > Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.
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.
From 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.
Blame 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.
Right 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:
Stack Exchange Q&A communities are different.
25. > 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.
At 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.
It 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.)
By 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).
> Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange
Not true. https://stackoverflow.com/tour
26. > https://stackoverflow.com/tour
From your link:
> This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.
>
> Just questions...
>
> ...and answers.
And that's specifically what you said the site was not ; people were going there for answers to their questions. They weren't getting them.
27. > The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP.
The 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.
> What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions?
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.
You 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?
> Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia.
This 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.
28. To the extent that moderation ever prevented questions from getting answers, that was by closing them.
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.
The 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.
29. 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".
99% of all the junk that got closed was just dumps of code and 'it doesn't work'. Not useful to anyone.
30. > Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.
No, 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.
If 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.
> 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
Sure. 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 .
And , 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.
31. "I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers."
I 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.
https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/edit/19272...
32. > 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.
Plus 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.
33. > Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory.
99.9% 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 )
Why 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.
On Stack Overflow, the expectations are:
1. 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.)
2. 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.
3. 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.
34. > 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.
It's literally a Q&A site. Questions need actual answers, not just opinions or "this worked for me".
35. > 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.
Please 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.
The 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... ).
> 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.
Please 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 ).
36. I believe that this tension about what type of questions was baked into the very foundation of StackOverflow.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...
> 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.
vs
https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
> 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.
(the emphasis on "good" is in the original)
And 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)
---
Questions 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.
That was the first failing of NotProgrammingRelated.StackExchange ... later Programming.StackExchange ... later SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange.
The 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.
That'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.
Stack 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.
While 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.
As 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.
What 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.
As 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.
Corporate, 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.
37. > As 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.
Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwood was the one who wanted to keep things strictly on mission and Spolsky was the one more interested in growing a community. Yes? I do get the impression that there was a serious ideological conflict there; between the "library of detailed, high-quality answers" and the, well, "to every question" (without a proper understanding of what should count as a distinct, useful question that can have a high-quality answer). But also, the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out for the "library" goal ( https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex... ). And I suspect they both shared blame in that.
A lot of it was also ignored for too long because of the assumption that a) the site would just die if it clamped down on everything from the start; b) the site would naturally attract experts with good taste in questions (including maybe even the ability to pose good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dixer questions) before the beginners ever cleared the barrier of trying to phrase a proper question instead of using a forum.
(Nowadays, there are still small forums all over the place. And many of them try to maintain some standards for the OP. And they're all plagued with neophytes who try to use the forum as if it were a chat room . The old adage about foolproofing rings true.)
Around 2014 is when the conflict really seems to have boiled over (as new question volume was peaking). Notably, that also seems to be when the dupe-hammer was introduced ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589 ).
38. Jeff was the author of https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and was more focused on quality than community - his vision was the library.
Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for.
And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the Web 2.0 ideals of the time and the hook to keep a person coming back to it. It was part of the question that was to be answered "how do you separate the core group from the general participants on a site?" ... and that brings me to "people need to read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) to understand how it shaped Stack Overflow.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/its-clay-shirkys-internet-we-j... (2008)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110827205048/https://stackover... (Podcast #23 from 2011)
Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes.
Spolsky: Oh...
Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105232/clay-shirkys... (2011)
2014 sounds about right for when it peaked... it was also when a lot of things hit the fan one after another. General stress, the decline of community moderation. The dup hammer was a way to try to reduce the amount of close votes needed - but in doing so it became "everything is a nail" when the dup hammer. It was used to close poor questions as dups of other questions ... and rather than making it easier to close questions that didn't fit well, corporate allowed the "everything is a dup" problem to fester.
That also then made Stack Overflow's search become worse. Consider https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080 which provides itself as a timestamp of 2014...
How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question.
That question now has 10,356 questions linked to it... and that's part of the "why search quality is going down" - because poor questions were getting linked and not deleted. Search went downhill, dupe hammer was over used because regular close votes took too long because community moderation was going down, which in turn caused people to be grumpy about "closed as dup" rather than "your question looks like it is about X, but lacks an MCVE to be able to verify that... so close it as a dup of X rather than needing 5 votes to get an MCVE close.. which would have been more helpful in guiding a user - but would mean people would start doing FGITW to answer it maybe and you'd get it as a dup of something else instead."
All sorts of problems around that time.
39. The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help.
If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs).
StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.
40. > What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters.
Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience.
Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.
41. Also: the bigger the corpus of already answered questions, it’s more likely that you can just look up an answer instead of asking.
Eventually SO becomes a site exclusively for lurkers instead of a platform for active participation
42. The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if you could retroactively years later re-award it to a newer answer. Since the gamification angle was so prominent, that might rob the decade-old author of their points for their then-correctness, so idk if they even allowed it.
43. I noticed a similar thing for Python 3 questions, closed as a duplicate of a Python 2 response. Why they weren't collated and treated as a living document is beyond me.
44. Remember when the R developers would ask and answer their own basic questions about R, essentially building up a beginner tutorial on stack overflow? That was a cool time
45. And you can't delete your post when you realize how awful it was years later! That anti-information sticks around for ages. Even worse when there are bad answers attached to it, too.
46. If you're talking about deleting questions, that's because deleting the question would delete everyone's answers that they potentially worked very hard on and which others might find useful. If you think the answers are bad you can always post your own competing answer.
47. To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.
I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.
An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up.
It just goes back to first principles.
The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.
48. The well known XY problem[1].
I spent years on IRC, first getting help and later helping others. I found out myself it was very useful to ask such questions when someone I didn't know asked a somewhat unusual question.
The key is that if you're going to probe for Y, you usually need to be fairly experienced yourself so you can detect the edge cases, where the other person has a good reason.
One approach I usually ended up going for when it appeared the other person wasn't a complete newbie was to first explain that I think they're trying to solve the wrong problem or otherwise going against the flow, and that there's probably some other approach that's much better.
Then I'd follow up with something like "but if you really want to proceed down this rrack, this is how I'd go about it", along with my suggestion.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
49. It's great when you're helping people one on one, but it's absolutely terrible for a QA site where questions and answers are expected to be helpful to other people going forward.
I don't think your analogy really helps here, it's not a question. If the question was "How do I get to the top of the mountain" or "How do I want to get to the top of the mountain without hiking" the answer to both would be "Gondola".
50. > Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.
Except that SO has a crystal clear policy that the answer to questions should be helpful for everybody reaching it through search, not only the person asking it. And that questions should never be asked twice.
So if by chance, after all this dance the person asking the question actually needs the answer to a different question, you'll just answer it with some completely unrelated information and that will the the mandatory correct answer for everybody that has the original problem for any reason.
51. To avoid going insane the mindset should be to produce something useful for future readers.
52. The community is not "toxic". The community is overwhelmed by newcomers believing that they should be the ones who get to decide how the site works (more charitably: assuming that they should be able to use the site the same way as other sites, which are not actually at all the same and have entirely different goals).
I don't know why you put "duplicates" in quotation marks. Closing a duplicate question is doing the OP (and future searchers) a service, by directly associating the question with an existing answer.
53. > legitimate questions being closed for no good reason
They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 ) and well considered, having been exhaustively discussed over many years.
> or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t
I have seen so many people complain about this. It is vanishingly rare that I actually agree with them. In the large majority of cases it is comically obvious to me that the closure was correct. For example, there have been many complaints in the Python tag that were on the level of "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)
> a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.
On the contrary, the top answerers are the ones who will be happy to copy and paste answers to your question and ignore site policy, to the constant vexation of curators like myself trying to keep the site clean and useful (as a searchable resource) for everyone.
> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
I actually completely agree that people who prefer to ask LLMs should ask LLMs. The experience of directly asking (an LLM) and getting personalized help is explicitly the exact thing that Stack Overflow was created to get away from (i.e., the traditional discussion forum experience, where experts eventually get tired of seeing the same common issues all the time and all the same failures to describe a problem clearly, and where third parties struggle to find a useful answer in the middle of along discussion).
54. They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.
PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620
55. > I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are.
They are not "threads" and are not supposed to be "threads". Thinking about them as if they were, is what leads to the perception of toxicity.
56. > the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.
A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented.
If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that.
Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc.
Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.
57. Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these:
- The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard.
- This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells you of the questions that survived at this point in time, this [0] is the actual graph which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation.
- This is actually a Good Thing™. For years most of the questions went unanswered, non-voted, non-commented, just because there was too many questions happening all the time. So the general trend is not something that the SO community needs to do anything about. Almost 20% of every question asked is marked as duplicate. If people searched... better™ they wouldn't ask as many questions, and so everyone else had more bandwidth to deal with the rest.
- There has been a shift in help desk style of request, where people starting to prefer discord and such to get answers. This is actually a bad thing because that means that the knowledge isn't public nor indexed by the world. So, information becomes harder to find, and you need to break it free from silos.
- The site, or more accurately, the library will never die. All the information is published in complete archives that anyone can replicate and restart if the company goes under or goes evil. So, yeah, such concerns, while appreciated, are easily addressed. At worst, you would be losing a month or two of data.
[0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...
58. Programming is not a static field in the answers side, but it's in the question side. "How to print characters on a terminal with python?" is the same problem today as it was 25 years ago. The answer changed but the problem remained. That's what people saying that programming isn't static is missing: the problem space grows significantly slower than the solution space.
59. I guess I'm the only one that was a fan of SO's moderation. I never got too deep into it (answered some TypeScript questions). But the intention to reduce duped questions made a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of a "living document" where energy is focused on updating and improving answers to old versions of the same question. As a user looking for answers it means I can worry less about finding some other variation of the same question that has a more useful answer
I understand some eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette but overall I'd say about 90% of the time I clicked on a SO link I was rewarded with the answer I was looking for.
Just my two cents
60. I also agreed with this vision. It was meant to be more like Wikipedia rather than Reddit.
61. I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project.
To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite.
May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.
62. > To some extent that was Stack Overflow
Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?
63. Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.
64. You can write a paper, submit the arxiv, and you can also make a blog post.
At any rate, I agree - SO was (is?) a wonderful place for this kind of thing.
I once had a professor mention that they knew me from SO because I posted a few underhanded tricks to prevent an EKF from "going singular" in production. That kind of community is going to be hard to replace, but SO isnt going anywhere, you can still ask a question and answer your own question for permanent, searchable archive.
65. The entire purpose of answering questions as an "expert" on S.O. is/was to help educate people who were trying to learn how to solve problems mostly on their own. The goal isn't to solve the immediate problem, it's to teach people how to think about the problem so that they can solve it themselves the next time. The use of AI to solve problems for you completely undermines that ethos of doing it yourself with the minimum amount of targeted, careful questions possible .
66. I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points.
What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake , as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated.
For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on.
>> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.
Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble.
May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.
67. Consider updating your answer on SO - I know I'll keep visiting SO for answers like these for quite some time. And enjoy the deserved upvotes :)
68. > Please, start a blog!
The second sentence of the SO post is a link to their blog where it was posted originally. The blog is not a replacement for the function SO served.
69. My experience as well:
Stack Overflow used to (in practice) be a place to ask questions and get help and also help others.
At some point it became all about some mission and not only was it not as useful anymore but it also became a whole lot less fun.
70. > This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time.
The problem is that people come and say "this question is incorrectly closed", but the question is correctly closed.
Yes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places. That doesn't make them correct. I have been involved in this process for years and what I see is a constant stream of people expecting the site to be something completely different from what it is (and designed and intended to be). People will ask, with a straight face, "why was my question that says 'What is the best...' in the title, closed as 'opinion-based'?" (it's bad enough that I ended up attempting my own explainer on the meta site). Or "how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)
71. 25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat.
Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.
I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. But yeah, that and the swearing culture clash were issues I struggled with, and ultimately meant I stopped contributing.
72. > Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.
Yes, because doing things that way was explicitly part of the goal, from the beginning. There are countless other places where you can directly respond to people who need help (and if you like doing that, you should stick to those places). Doing things that way has negative consequences in terms of making something that's useful for on-lookers, and causing a lot of experts to burn out or get frustrated. This is stuff that Jeff Atwood was pointing out when explaining the reason for creating SO in the first place.
> I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them.
It would be better to focus on saving time for yourself, by understanding the goal. Please read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 .
73. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, reading some of these comments.
It looks like a pretty clear divide between the people that wanted to ask questions to get solutions for their own specific problems; and those who were aware of what the site wanted to be and how it actually operated, and were willing to put in the time and answer questions, etc.
The sheer amount of garbage that used to get posted every day required some pretty heavy moderation. Most of it was not by actual moderators, it was by high-reputation users.
(I have 25K reputation on StackOverflow, and was most active between 2011 and 2018.)
74. 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."
75. "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".
The 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.
76. 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.
77. hahaha, I almost forgot about that! "stop talking about edge cases and other things pertinent to this topic in comments about this topic!! reeeeeeeee!!!!"
78. As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0].
I'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.
I 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.
The 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:
* [1]
* [2]
* [3]
[0]: https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-as...
[1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670
[2]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649
[3]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515
79. 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.
They 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.
They achieved that goal, but in the end, they dug their own grave too.
LLMs 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.
Oh yeah, no wonder nobody bothers with SO anymore.
It’s a good lesson for the future.
80. LLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing.
The 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.
The 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.
LLMs 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.
Stack 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.
SO 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.
81. Whenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246333
82. 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?
It 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.
83. A decline in number of questions asked can also be because most people's questions are already answered in the database.
How would you query this for post views over time?
84. Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood:
> 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!
https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...
> Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...
> 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.
> 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.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
85. 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.
All 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.
I 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.
86. This entire thread is fantastic. I felt nostalgic, angry and then concerned all at once.
I love LLMs. But I miss SO. I miss being able to have that community. How do we bring it back?
If anyone from the Stack Overflow team is reading this (I assume you are): what’s the plan?
My take: stop optimizing for raw question volume and start optimizing for producing and maintaining “known good” public knowledge. The thing SO still has that Discord and LLMs don’t is durable, linkable, reviewable answers with accountable humans behind them. But the workflow needs to match how devs work now.
A concrete idea: make “asking” a guided flow that’s more like opening a good GitHub issue. Let me paste my error output, environment, minimal repro, what I tried, and what I think is happening. Then use tooling (including an LLM if you want) to pre check duplicates, suggest missing details, and auto format. Crucially: don’t punish me for being imperfect. Route borderline questions into a sandbox or draft mode where they can be improved instead of just slammed shut.
Second idea: invest hard in keeping answers current. A ton of SO is correct but stale. Add obvious “this is old” signaling and make it rewarding to post updates, not just brand new answers.
Last thing that I don’t see an easy answer to: LLMs are feasting on old SO content today. But LLMs still need fresh, high quality, real world edge cases tomorrow. They need the complexity and problem solving that humans provide. A lot of the answers I get are recycled. No net new thinking. If fewer people ask publicly, where does that new ground truth come from? What’s the mechanism that keeps the commons replenished?
So… TLDR…my question to this group of incredibly intelligent people: how does SO save itself?
87. Comments have less visibility in moderation. This has made them spam / link farming targets in the past.
A lot of people come to Stack Overflow with the mindset that it is a forum to discuss something and have tangential discussions in the comments.
https://stackoverflow.com/tour
> This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.
The "no comments until you get a little bit of rep" is to try to help people realize that difference from the start.
Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Knowledge repository vs help desk debate
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