llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/topic-7-4aef42c4-8c09-400c-9bf8-0f8d9cf524d6-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: Gamification and reputation systems COMMENTS: 1. Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group? 2. They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago. 3. yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the "Top Answer" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by "Recent" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant 4. Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation. 5. Deadness is the symptom, not the cause. Users don't avoid SO because it's dead, but rather, SO is dead because users avoid it. It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. There's another thread on the front page about IPv6 where someone had a good analogy: IPv4 vs IPv6 is like Python 2 vs 3. The Python 2 diehards continued arguing furiously to an emptier and emptier room. They never felt they were proven wrong, and the intensity of the argument never diminished but the argument was with fewer and fewer people until they were just arguing with themselves as the world moved on without them. And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026, after the horse is long gone. Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. You might want to reflect on why you hold such fervent beliefs that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now? The referenced comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477920 6. > It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. No, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years. What you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care. The goal was never for the site to be "not dead". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found. The site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts. > And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026 This is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over than they should have needed. But really, the feedback for Stack Overflow is trying to take it in the direction of places that existed long beforehand. If you want forums, you know where to find them. And now you can also find LLMs. Which, as commonly used by people seeking programming help, are basically a grizzled forum guy in a can. >Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. "Everyone actually agrees with [me]" is the polar opposite of what I actually believe and am actually saying. I am well aware that the model is unpopular. My point is that the popularity of the model is irrelevant to me. > Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now? I have a lot of reputation points (the site still exists), far more than I ever felt I deserved, and I never really felt like they were worth anything. A huge percentage of them come from an answer to a terrible question (that was still terrible after heroic attempts at editing; this all happened long before there was a common understanding of the purpose of question closure or what would make good standards for questions) that, once I understood things properly, I closed and tried to get deleted. Over the last few years, with that new understanding, I have been trying to give away my superfluous reputation points in bounties, trying to get missing answers written for the few really good questions lacking good answers that I identify, always to no avail (the bounty system promptly became a honeypot for ChatGPT hallucinations as soon as ChatGPT became available). You do not know me or my motivations in the slightest. 7. > 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. 8. > So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago. What? No. The canonical target isn't closed. So go write the new answer there . The answer acceptance mark is basically irrelevant, and the feature ill-conceived. Except usually there are dozens of answers already; the best possible answer has emerged; and people keep writing redundant nonsense for the street cred of having an answer on a popular Stack Overflow question. > The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself. We do not care that people don't want to come and ask new questions. There are already way, way too many questions for the site's purpose. The policy is aimed at something that you don't care about. The result is a "verdict" we don't care about. 9. 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. [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 . 10. The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question For me, the value was writing answers on topics I was interested in…and internet points as feedback on their quality. When SE abandoned their app, it broke my habit. 11. I don't think "good moderation or not" really touches what was happening with SO. I 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. The 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). With all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening. 12. Agreed. The reputation system was extremely ill considered and never revisited. You may be interested in https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 . 13. > 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 ). 14. Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me. When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim. And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it. It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved. 15. People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions. Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content. 16. > People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience. > The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many. 17. I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier". The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead. I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either. 18. Here's my brilliant idea: the longer it takes for an answer to be marked correct, or the more answers there are before one is marked correct, the more points that answer deserves. 19. 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. 20. How about if people with a higher reputation contribute an exponentially higher score when voting? Like, someone with ten top-rated answers has a 1,000-point vote (more nuanced than that, obviously). 21. Maybe there's a key idea for something to replace StackOverflow as a human tech Q&A forum: Having a system which somehow incentivizes asking and answering these sorts of challenging and novel questions. These are the questions which will not easily be answered using LLMs, as they require more thought and research. 22. Wasn't there a "bounty" program where if it had a lot of views but no answers, the answer rewarded more internet ego points? 23. Not automatically. You could add a bounty using your own points if the question didn't get an accepted answer in 2 days. Which is kinda cool, but also very biased for older contributors. I could drop thousands of points bounty without thinking about it, but new users couldn't afford the attention they needed. 24. The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me as a bizarre feature, to put words in other people’s mouths. I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting. I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP. 25. > took gamification way too far I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes. 26. None of those worked as programming tools. I really miss Google Answers though, with the bounties. Random example: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/762357.html It's remarkable how similar in style the answers are to what we all know from e.g. chatgpt. 27. Hardly. - A huge number of developers will want to use such a tool. Many of them are already using AI in a "single player" experience mode. - 80% of the answers will be correct when one-shot for questions of moderate difficulty. - The long tail of "corrector" / "wiki gardening" / pedantic types fill fix the errors. Especially if you gamify it. Just because someone doesn't like AI doesn't mean the majority share the same opinion. AI products are the fastest growing products in history. ChatGPT has over a billion MAUs. It's effectively won over all of humanity. I'm not some vibe coder. I've been programming since the 90's, including on extremely critical multi-billion dollar daily transaction volume infra, yet I absolutely love AI. The models have lots of flaws and shortcomings, but they're incredibly useful and growing in capability and scope -- I'll stand up and serve as your counter example. 28. I suppose all sites that have a voting component run the risk of becoming unpleasant. Hacker News, and we who frequent it, ought to have that in mind. 29. I think it has more to do with the fact that when you offer zero salary for moderators, you have to take what you can get, and it ain't good. I don't really see a connection to the voting mechanic. 30. It's also disconnected incentives. SO users get numbers to go up by taking moderation actions so of course they do that. Also you literally get banned from reviewing questions if you don't flag enough of them to be closed. These are incentives put in place by the SO company intentionally. It's not like only slimy people get to use moderator tools like on Reddit, since you need a lot of reputation points you get by having questions and answers voted up. It's more like (1) you select people who write surface-level-good answers since that's what's upvoted, and they moderate with a similar attitude and (2) once you have access to moderator tools you're forced to conform with (1) or your access is revoked, and (3) the company is completely incompetent and doesn't give a shit about any of this. 31. Its karma farming. Number must go up regardless of the human cost. Thats why the same problem is seen here, to a lesser extent. Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement. Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter. 32. I agree there was some natural slow down as the corpus grew - the obvious questions were answered. But if the community was healthy, that should not have caused growth to stop. New technologies get created all the time, each starting with zero SO questions. (Or Google releases v2.0 which invalidates all answers written about v1.) SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though. 33. I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which. But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior. I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar. 34. Arstechnica used to have different kinds of upvotes for "funny" vs "insightful" - I forget exactly all of them. But I found it awesome. I wanted to and could read the insightful comments, not the funny ones. A couple years back they redid the discussion system and got rid of it. Since then the quality of discussion has IMHO completely tanked. 35. That was not closed by a moderator. In fact, it was closed automatically by the system, when you agreed that the question was a duplicate. Because of my privilege level I can see that information in the close dialog: > A community member has associated this post with a similar question. If you believe that the duplicate closure is incorrect, submit an edit to the question to clarify the difference and recommend the question be reopened. > Closed 10 years ago by paradite, CommunityBot. > (List of close voters is only viewable by users with the close/reopen votes privilege) ... Actually, your reputation should be sufficient to show you that, too. Anyway, it seems to me that the linked duplicate does answer the question. You asked why the unit-less value "stopped working", which presumably means that it was interpreted by newer browsers as having a different unit from what you intended; the linked duplicate is asking for the rules that determine the implicit unit when none is specified. 36. I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource. 37. Has anyone tried building a modern Stack Overflow that's actually designed for AI-first developers? The core idea: question gets asked → immediately shows answers from 3 different AI models. Users get instant value. Then humans show up to verify, break it down, or add production context. But flip the reputation system: instead of reputation for answers, you get it for catching what's wrong or verifying what works. "This breaks with X" or "verified in production" becomes the valuable contribution. Keep federation in mind from day one (did:web, did:plc) so it's not another closed platform. Stack Overflow's magic was making experts feel needed. They still do—just differently now. 38. 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. 39. In 2014, one benefit of Stack Overflow / Exchange is a user searching for work can include that they are a top 10% contributor. It actually had real world value. The equivalent today is users with extensive examples of completed projects on Github that can be cloned and run. OP's solution if contained in Github repositories will eventually get included in a training model. Moreover, the solution will definitely be used for training because it now exists on Hacker News. 40. LOL. As a top 10% contributor on Stack Overflow, and on FlashKit before that, I can assure you that any real world value attached to that status was always imaginary, or at least highly overrated. Mainly, it was good at making you feel useful and at honing your own craft - because providing answers forced you to think about other people's questions and problems as if they were little puzzles you could solve in a few minutes. Kept you sharp. It was like a game to play in your spare time. That was the reason to contribute, not the points. 41. Yeah, they didn't even bother to suggest paying you with tokens for the job well done! The audacity! 42. hehe yea this existing of course. like these guys https://yupp.ai/ they have not announced the tokens but there are points and they got all their VC money from web3 VC. I'm sure there are others trying 43. That seems like a horrible core idea. How is that different from data labeling or model evaluation? Human beings want to help out other human beings, spread knowledge and might want to get recognition for it. Manually correcting (3 different) automation efforts seems like incredible monotone, unrewarding labour for a race to the bottom. Nobody should spend their time correcting AI models without compensation. 44. 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 :) 45. I can relate. I used to have a decent SO profile (10k+ reputation, I know this isnt crazy but it was mostly on non low hanging fruit answers...it was a grind getting there). I used to be proud of my profile and even put it in my resume like people put their Github. Now - who cares? It would make look like a dinosaur sharing that profile, and I never go to SO anymore. 46. I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks. But it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate. I said to myself, let it die. 47. I was an early adopter. Have over 30k reputation because stack overflow and my internship started at the same time. I left because of the toxic culture, and that it's less useful the more advanced you get 48. It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me. 49. Once StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers. I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.” To their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community. 50. > I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. You can only get at most 2000 rep from suggested edits. After you get 2000 rep, your edits aren't "suggested" anymore and require no review... and you don't get any rep for doing them. 51. I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it. 52. Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here. There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention. Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now. If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it. Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts. I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system. 53. > Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here. I have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately. But, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions. > If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it. No, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no "force"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more "force" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is "working", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena. There's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about "the site being in a death spiral". Because that is an assessment based on popularity. Popular != good; more importantly, valuing popularity is about valuing the ability of the site to make money for its owners, but none of the people curating it see a dime of that. They (myself included) are really only intrinsically motivated to create the thing. The thing is demonstrably useful. Just not in the mode of interaction that people wanted from it. The meta site constantly gets people conspiracy theorizing about this. Often they end up asserting things about the reputation system that are the exact opposite of how it actually works. For example, you can gain a maximum of 1000 reputation, ever, from editing posts, and it only applies to people whose edits require approval. The unilateral edits are being done by someone who sees zero incentive beyond the edited text appearing for others. They're done because of a sincere belief that a world where third parties see the edited text is better than a world where third parties see the original text. > Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts. You're talking about people who, in almost every case, as an objective matter of fact, are not moderators. The overwhelming majority of "moderation actions" of every stripe are done by the community, except for the few that actually require a moderator ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658 ). 54. The graph is scary, but I think it's conflating two things: 1. Newbies asking badly written basic questions, barely allowed to stay, and answered by hungry users trying to farm points, never to be re-read again. This used to be the vast majority of SO questions by number. 2. Experiencied users facing a novel problem, asking questions that will be the primary search result for years to come. It's #1 that's being canibalized by LLM's, and I think that's good for users. But #2 really has nowhere else to go; ChatGPT won't help you when all you have is a confusing error message caused by the confluence of three different bugs between your code, the platform, and an outdated dependency. And LLMs will need training data for the new tools and bugs that are coming out. 55. And half the garbage is from people "moderating"! You are literally rewarded points for doing moderating activities, so of course every post is flooded with BS edits, votes to close, etc.. Cobra effect and whatnot. 56. What points do you get for moderation activity? 57. You get points for suggesting edits and badges for completing review activities (votes to close, triage, etc). I thought you got points for the latter as well but looks like that's not the case. 58. > You get points for suggesting edits ... Up to 2000 points. When you get to 2000 points, your edits are no longer suggestions and you don't get any additional points for it. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/268479/why-dont-you... --- This is a common misperception about moderation on Stack Overflow. You'll often see people claim that people get rep for doing moderation tasks. And some people do pursue badges... though the gold review badge (1000 reviews) has only been awarded 47 times on Stack Overflow ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/81/steward ) ... and silver (250 reviews) 65 times ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/78/reviewer ). ... so I would find it difficult to accept that badges are things that motivate people. If anything, a story of new people doing community moderation could be told in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/80/custodian (it has been several months since a person has done a review for the first time). 59. Love this comment [1] under the post > $1.8 billion? So do those of us who contribute get any of that? 1. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha... 60. Apparently it was removed to reduce the load on the database see [0], [1]. The top voted response points out that SO are [2]: > destroying a valuable feature for users. Kinda wild they allowed it. As that answer also suggests, perhaps rather than remove it entirely, they could just compute those stats at a lesser frequency to reduce load. [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/399661/389220 [1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/437862/5783745 [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/400024/389220 61. It's surely both. Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest Most questions have negative karma. Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem. All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders. SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them. SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls. 62. Right now, at the first 15 one has a positive vote, 6 have negative votes, going down to -3. The 8 at 0 are just taking longer to amass those negative votes. It's incredibly rare that a positive one ever goes somewhere. 63. It is not "karma". It is not to be taken personally. It represents the objective usefulness of the question, not the personal worth of the person asking it. 64. Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more. I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board. With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September). I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed. 65. I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time. I use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago. I used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time. So perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP. I don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components. 66. I don't think the reputation system ever worked that way - new users could always answer questions, but comments required more reputation. 67. I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in. 68. I've never once asked a question on there Mostly because you can't unless your account has X something-points. Which you get by answering questions. This threw me off so much when I got started with programming. Like why are the people who have the most questions, not allowed to ask any...? 69. Are you sure? You can post questions even with a completely new blank account. It's comments that require some reputation, maybe you were thinking about those? 70. You don't need any reputation to ask questions, you only need to create an account. 71. Code golfing on SO was fun, too! I just looked it up, and "Note: This tag is currently blacklisted and can no longer be used." lmfao, what a braindead site, so glad I left years ago, after many years of greatly reduced activity. Source (at the top): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf?tab=New... Look at fun stuff like this from 2010: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2440314/code-golf-%cf%80... 72. I ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000. I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated. This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people using R, this seemed like something completely new. So, they just downvoted the question and told me I was wrong. I ended up answering my own question… but was also told that was wrong and that all points must have the same error interval. Instead of answering a programming question, people just went around denying experimental physics. I think that was the beginning of the end of SO for me. 73. Another note to add here: The whole system was stupid, too! What do you mean, I can only give answers, but not comment? While there is much more to say about SO's demise, the "interaction" on the platform was definitely not one of its strengths, either. 74. 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.
Gamification and reputation systems
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