[HN Gopher] Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over...
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Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
Author : maartin0
Score : 1437 points
Date : 2026-01-03 22:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (data.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (data.stackexchange.com)
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| The decline is not surprising. I am sure AI is replacing
| Stackoverflow for a lot of people. And my experience with asking
| questions was pretty bad. I asked a few very specific questions
| about some deep detail in Windows and every time I got only some
| smug comments about my stupid question or the question got
| rejected outright. That while a ton of beginner questions were
| approved. Definitely not a very inviting club. I found i got
| better responses on Reddit.
| cracki wrote:
| Would you care to link to any of those, even ones that might
| appear to be deleted?
| _nhh wrote:
| it died
| vintagedave wrote:
| Do I read that correctly -- it is close to zero today?!
|
| I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have
| been AI after all.
| Bratmon wrote:
| It can be both. Push and pull factors work better together than
| either does individually.
| nikanj wrote:
| Maybe the graph doesn't include questions that get closed by
| moderators?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so
| toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going
| to train the AI for free.
| eterm wrote:
| 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.
| braiamp wrote:
| Most? 3 out of 15 is most? What's wrong with youngsters
| today?!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| braiamp wrote:
| So, I reviewed the questions list again but this time,
| since the time I did view it about 9 hours ago [1]. 10
| were negative scored, 5 positive scored, 15 0 scored, 4
| has received answers. This is better than normal for
| those ~30. Usually it's 80% without votes, without
| answers, without comments. So, this is a significan
| improvement... which I suspect is due the time of the
| day, as the US and most of Europe were asleep.
|
| So, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in
| the positive direction.
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest
| cracki wrote:
| 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.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| There are tabs to change to a table view. I see a peak of 207k
| in 2014 and the last month was only 3,710.
| tom_ wrote:
| The decline has been pretty surprising: more questions asked
| in May 2021 (133,914) than in the whole of 2025 (129,977).
| acessoproibido wrote:
| Still a couple thousand away from 0.
|
| But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the
| trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were
| available.
|
| I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different
| use case there
| system2 wrote:
| Reddit is a forum morphed into social media. I usually use
| "question + reddit" on Google to confirm my suspicions about
| a subject. It is a place to discuss things rather than find
| answers. It is extremely politicized (leftist/liberal), but
| that's a whole other story.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Not zero, but it is smaller than when it launched originally.
| And this is questions asked, not how many people are visiting
| and reading posts.
| eviks wrote:
| The steep decline started way before llms
| threeducks wrote:
| The last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun.
| If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to
| account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within
| the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small
| difference is probably due to the turn of the year.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| It's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now
| for confirmation.
|
| I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the
| "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and
| ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these
| values to historical ones but they're _low_.
| personjerry wrote:
| Approaching 0 is wild
| nikanj wrote:
| Moderator team must be over the moon
| teamx wrote:
| Probably similar for google. My first line of search is always
| chatgpt
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Everything we have done and said on the internet since its birth
| has just been to train the future AI.
| goldenarm wrote:
| Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how
| will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough?
|
| Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are
| the last place where it lives nowadays.
| Vaslo wrote:
| They would just use documentation. I know there is some
| synthesis they would lose in the training process but I'm often
| sending Claude through the context7 MCP to learn documentation
| for packages that didn't exist, and it nearly always solves the
| problem for me.
| nicoburns wrote:
| The brilliance of StackOverflow was in being the place to
| find out how to do tricky workarounds for functionality that
| either wasn't documented or was buggy such that workarounds
| were needed to make it actually work.
|
| Software quality is now generally a bit better than it was in
| 2010, but that need is ultimately still there.
| robryan wrote:
| Assuming these end up in open source code llms will learn
| about them that way.
| bluedino wrote:
| Aren't a lot of projects using LLMs to generate documentation
| these days?
| gitaarik wrote:
| They pay lots of humans to train the LLMs..
| maxloh wrote:
| The result is not surprising! Many people are now turning to LLMs
| with their questions instead. This explains the decline in the
| number of questions asked.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Wow. I was expecting a decline but not to _that_ extent.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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
| brickers wrote:
| If you ignore the early pandemic bump, it even looks like the
| decline started in late 2017, though it's more variable than
| after the bump
| IshKebab wrote:
| It is sort of because of AI - it provided a way of escaping
| StackOverflow's toxicity!
| jtrn wrote:
| Could view it as push/pull dynamics: pushed away by toxicity,
| pulled to good answers from AI.
| nospice wrote:
| Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching
| various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away
| by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses
| of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack
| Exchange.
|
| At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some
| point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point
| where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google
| would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on
| top.
| oofbey wrote:
| 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.
| martin-t wrote:
| 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.
| oofbey wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| jappgar wrote:
| It's funny that people blame the site for this.
|
| That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture.
| It's everywhere.
| VLM wrote:
| 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.
| fabian2k wrote:
| There is an obvious acceleration of the downwards trend at the
| time ChatGPT got popular. AI is clearly a part of this, but not
| the only thing that affects SO activity.
| macNchz wrote:
| Ironically they could probably do some really useful
| deduplication/normalization/search across questions and answers
| using AI/embeddings today, if only they'd actually allowed
| people to ask the same questions infinite different ways, and
| treated the result of that as a giant knowledge graph.
|
| I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately
| stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid
| moderation.
| f311a wrote:
| People overestimate the impact of toxicity on number of monthly
| questions. The initial growth was due to missing answers. After
| some time there is a saturation point where all basic questions
| are already answered and can be found via Google. If you ask
| them again they are marked as dups.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| That would be true if no new technologies were created every
| year (even more often).
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| You do not find the 2009 jQuery answer satisfying?
| f311a wrote:
| There are new technologies, but if you look at the most
| viewed questions, they will be about Python, JS, Java, C,
| and C++ without libraries.
| rorylawless wrote:
| The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by
| a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested
| to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant
| to post when they were working from home?
| manquer wrote:
| More people spent lot more time learning new tech skills (at
| every experience level).
|
| The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc)
| and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably
| leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I'd guess it's also because it's not as easy to ask your
| random question to a coworker when they're not sitting next
| to you in the office.
| manquer wrote:
| I felt it became easier with slack.
|
| The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can
| become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without
| hesitation and producers just also don't do actual
| documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which
| works in the moment, but terrible for future team members
| to even know what questions to search/ask for.
| zahlman wrote:
| A huge amount of people were just _starting to learn
| programming, because_ they were stuck at home and had the
| time to pick something up.
|
| If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the
| languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to
| beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| Many people are pointing out the toxicity, but the biggest
| thing that drove me away, especially for specific quantitative
| questions, was that SO was flat out _wrong_ (and confidently
| so) on many issues.
|
| It was bad enough that I got back in the habit of buying and
| building a library of serious reference books because they were
| the only reliable way to answer detailed technical questions.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I wonder if we can attribute some $billion of the investment in
| LLMs directly to the toxicity on StackOverflow.
| nicce wrote:
| I wonder what is the role of moderating duplicate questions.
| More time passes - more existing data there is and less need
| for new questions. If you moderate duplicate questions, will
| they disappear from these charts? Is this decline actually
| logical?
|
| 2020 there was new CEO and moderator council was formed:
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-o...
| mellosouls wrote:
| Use of GPT3 among programmers started 2021 with GitHub Copilot
| which preceded ChatGPT.
|
| I agree the toxic moderation (and tone-deaf ownership!)
| initiated the slower decline earlier that then turned into the
| LLM landslide.
|
| Tbf SO also suffered from its own success as a knowledgebase
| where the easy pickings were long gone by then.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| wraptile wrote:
| Toxic community is mostly a meme myth. I have like 30k points
| and whatever admins were doing was well deserved as 90% of the
| questions were utterly impossible to help with. Most people
| wanted free help and couldn't even bother to put in 5 minutes
| of work.
| porcoda wrote:
| Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed
| some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from
| legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being
| labeled a duplicate even though they often weren't), out of date
| answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally
| toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For
| all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
| palata wrote:
| Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow
| before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation.
|
| Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited
| StackOverflow.
| eurekin wrote:
| Same here. I just didn't want to expend energy racing trigger
| happy mods. It was so odd, to this day remember vividly how
| they cleanup their arguments once proven wrong on the closing
| vote. Literally minutes before it would the close threshold.
| lysace wrote:
| Gen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996)
|
| Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008)
|
| Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)
| econ wrote:
| Yahoo answers
|
| Google answers
|
| And the horrific Quora
| lysace wrote:
| 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.ht
| ml
|
| It's remarkable how similar in style the answers are to
| what we all know from e.g. chatgpt.
| dotancohen wrote:
| It's remarkable only in the sense that you can see where
| the LLMs were trained from.
| pvab3 wrote:
| That would be such a useful service today
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| >Gen 0: expertsexchange.com
|
| No way.
| lysace wrote:
| It was a more innocent time.
|
| Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://
| www.expert...
| Alupis wrote:
| 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.
| encom wrote:
| >toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes
|
| >zombie community
|
| Like Reddit post 2015.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Stack Overflow moderation is very transparent compared to
| whatever Reddit considers moderation.
|
| For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the
| quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not
| quite comparable because the more subjective questions
| are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on
| Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the
| direction of adding many more libraries than most people
| should).
| bmacho wrote:
| > 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.
| zdc1 wrote:
| 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.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of
| detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute
| experts, you also need answer often for something
| trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to
| export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.
| palata wrote:
| > No, you don't.
|
| When someone says "I feel like" and you answer "No, you
| don't", you're most certainly wrong :-).
|
| I do feel like the parent.
| palata wrote:
| > I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on
| unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out
| myself
|
| I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in
| the way. So I stopped.
| luckylion wrote:
| I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more
| to learn when you're experienced, but that there are
| fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that
| you encounter when you get more and more experienced.
|
| I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and
| both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had
| comments from someone who clearly was out of their league
| but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've
| answered those questions are not (or were not at that
| time) on SO.
| palata wrote:
| The more experienced I got, the subtler my
| questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I
| would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this
| and that questions, but it is not", only to see my
| question get closed as duplicate by moderators.
|
| If the moderators are not competent to understand if your
| question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate
| when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic
| atmosphere, maybe?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This has been my experience.
|
| My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost
| twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty
| basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as
| time went on, and they became unanswered, almost always (I
| often ended up answering my own question, after I figured
| it out on my own).
|
| I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I
| encountered, were the types of things that people who ship,
| encounter; not academic exercises.
|
| Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on
| there, don't ship.
|
| LLMs may sometimes give pretty sloppy answers, but they are
| almost always ship-relevant.
| nerdponx wrote:
| That might be true on Stackoverflow but not on other
| network sites like Cross Validated, which was killed by
| splitting the community into multiple SE sites and longtime
| users quitting in protest over various policies and not
| being replaced.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think there's a basic problem that the original revenue
| model for the site just didn't work (I mean, they
| wouldn't have shut down Stack Overflow Jobs if that
| actually made them any money) and anything they were able
| to do to fix that pissed people off.
| smcin wrote:
| Stack Overflow Jobs was a superb, uncluttered, direct
| interface to the hiring manager, with accurate details
| about a position. So when they canned it (but kept their
| advertising revenue stream plus started "SO for Teams" in
| 2018), that was a major canary that the whole revenue
| model wasn't viable, at least for independent developers.
| whiterook6 wrote:
| 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| Cordiali wrote:
| 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.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| 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).
| stirfish wrote:
| 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
| fragmede wrote:
| Human psychology is fascinating. If I say I'm cool, I'm
| full of myself. If someone else says that I'm cool, that
| hits different. So is reverse psychology.
| stirfish wrote:
| Hey fragmede, you are cool.
| parpfish wrote:
| 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
| sdenton4 wrote:
| On the other hand, another week another JavaScript
| framework, amirite? There continues to be new stuff to
| ask questions about, but stack overflow failed to be the
| default location for new stuff. I guess now there's more
| discussion directly on GitHub and discord.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The JavaScript ecosystem has mostly stabilised. React is
| 12 years old for example.
| why-o-why wrote:
| Wasn't there a "bounty" program where if it had a lot of
| views but no answers, the answer rewarded more internet ego
| points?
| viraptor wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| > the more experienced you become, the less useful it is
|
| This is killer feature of LLMs - you will not became more
| experienced.
| cyberdick wrote:
| There is also github issues discussions now which also
| helped in asking these niche questions directly to the team
| responsible. I dont ask questions about a library on SO I
| just ask it on the github of the library and I get
| immediate answers
| tmsbrg wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I still pop into SO
| when in learning a new language or trip into new simple
| questions (in my case, how to connect and test a local
| server). But when you're beyond the weeds, SO is as best an
| oasis in the desert. Half the time a mirage, nice when it
| does help out. But rare either way.
|
| I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel
| differently and those trends mean there's no new users
| coming in.
| baby wrote:
| The same is true for reddit imo, it became impossible to post
| anything to a subreddit way before LLMs
| why-o-why wrote:
| 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.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| 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.
| conorcleary wrote:
| "A Human commented at ##:##pm" "An AI Bot commented
| at..." "A suspected AI Bot commented at..." "An
| unconfirmed Human commented at..."
| why-o-why wrote:
| ya but you assume someone worked hard on the answer.
| there are alot of times when you get garbage top to
| bottom.
| what wrote:
| You can't delete anything here either... so make sure you
| don't say anything awful.
| why-o-why wrote:
| create a new account every few weeks and don't forget to
| mix you you'er writin' style to fakeout stylometrics. its
| all against the rules but i disagree with HN terms.
| internet points don't mean crapola to me. but i like
| dropping in here every now and then to chit caht. i
| should have the right to be anonymous and non-
| deidentifiable here and speak freely. of IP address
| ---are--- tracked here and you can easily be
| shadowbanned. but i don't say anything awful, but i am
| naturally an asshat and i just can't seem to change my
| spots. 90% of the time i'm ok, but 10% i'm just a raving
| tool.
| immibis wrote:
| Fun story: SO officially states comments are ephemeral and
| can be deleted whenever, so I deleted some of my comments.
| I was then banned. After my ban expired I asked on the meta
| site if it was okay to delete comments. I was banned again
| for asking that.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| halapro wrote:
| > 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.
| loeg wrote:
| Long before LLMs. Setting aside peak-COVID as a weird
| aberration, question volume has been in decline since 2014 or
| maybe 2016.
| echelon wrote:
| Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it
| weren't for the toxic community.
|
| Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated
| as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it.
| That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines
| both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers,
| and the community can fix things up.
|
| No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO heavy-handed
| moderation memes.
|
| Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab
| at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further
| questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes
| off the rails or can't answer.
|
| You would be able to see which questions were too long-tail
| or difficult for the AI to answer, and humans could jump in
| to patch things up. This could be gamified with points.
|
| This would serve as fantastic LLM training material for local
| LLMs. The authors of the site could put in a clause saying
| that "training is allowed as long as you publish your weights
| + model".
|
| Someone please build this.
|
| Edit: Removed "LLMs did not kill Stack Overflow." first
| sentence as suggested. Perhaps that wasn't entirely accurate,
| and the rest of the argument stands better on its own legs.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask
| 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very
| frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question
| about best practices, but you can't ask people to share
| their experiences or recommendations.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| They actually added some new question categories a while
| ago [1]
|
| "Troubleshooting / Debugging" is meant for the
| traditional questions, "Tooling recommendation", "Best
| practices", and "General advice / Other" are meant for
| the soft sort of questions.
|
| I have no clue what the engagement is on these sort of
| categories, though. It feels like a fix for a problem
| that started years ago, and by this point, I don't really
| know if there's much hope in bringing back the community
| they've worked so hard to scare away. It's pretty telling
| just how much the people that are left hate this new
| feature.
|
| [1]
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/435293/opinion-
| base...
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Oh, that's good that they added them. I stopped being
| active in on the sites a long time ago, so I missed that.
| shrx wrote:
| > Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first
| stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask
| further questions, and then the community could fill in
| when it goes off the rails or can't answer.
|
| Isn't this how Quora is supposed to operate?
| Alupis wrote:
| Maybe my experience is unique - but Quora seems to be
| largely filled with adverts-posing-as-answers.
| rfmoz wrote:
| Quora, sadly, is a good example of enshittification.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Fixing loads of LLM-generated content is neither easy nor
| fun. You'll have a very hard time getting people to do
| that.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| fabian2k wrote:
| People answer on SO because it's fun. Why should they
| spend their time fixing AI answers?
|
| It's very tedious as the kind of mistakes LLMs make can
| be rather subtle and AI can generate a lot of text very
| fast. It's a sisyphean taks, I doubt enough people would
| do it.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I just think you could save a lot of money and energy
| doing all this but skipping the LLM part? Like what is
| supposed to be gained? The moment/act of actual
| generation of lines of code or ideas, whether human or
| not, is a much smaller piece of the pie relative to
| ongoing correction, curation, etc (like you indicate).
| Focusing on it and saying it intrinsically must/should
| come from the LLM mistakes the intrinsically ephemeral
| utility of the LLMs _and_ the arguably eternal nature of
| the wiki at the same time. As sibling says, it turns it
| into work vs the healthy sharing of ideas.
|
| The whole pitch here just feels like putting gold flakes
| on your pizza: expensive and would not be missed if it
| wasn't there.
|
| Just to say, I'm maybe not as experienced and wise I
| guess but this definitely sounds terrible to me. But
| whatever floats your boat I guess!
| eek2121 wrote:
| Absolutely 100% this. I've used them on and off throughout
| the years. The community became toxic, so I took my
| question to other platforms like Reddit (they became toxic
| as well) and elsewhere.
|
| Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open
| source, I've written everything from emulators and game
| engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc.
|
| The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in
| documentation, specifically related to undocumented
| behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO,
| I received either no response and downvotes, or negative
| responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I
| thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due
| to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back,
| so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO
| result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button
| if folks were super negative and didn't answer the
| question.
|
| Later on, most of my answers actually have come from
| Github,and 95% of the time, my issues were legitimate ones
| that would've been mentioned if a decent number of folks
| used the framework, library, or language in question.
|
| I think the tl;dr of this is this: If you can't provide a
| positive contribution on ANY social media platform like
| Stack Overflow, Reddit, Github, etc. Don't speak. Don't
| vote. Ignore the question. If you happen to know, help out!
| Contribute! Write documentation! I've done so on more than
| one occasion (I even built a website around it and made
| money in the process due to ignorance elsewhere, until I
| shut it down due to nearly dying), and in every instance I
| did so, folks were thankful, and it made me thankful that I
| was able to help them. (the money wasn't a factor in the
| website I built, I just wanted to help folks that got stuck
| in the documentation hole I mentioned)
|
| EDIT: because I know a bunch of you folks read Ars Technica
| and certain other sites. I'll help you out: If you find
| yourself saying that you are being "pedantic", you are the
| problem, not the solution. Nitpicking doesn't solve
| problems, it just dilutes the problem and makes it bigger.
| If you can't help, think 3 times and also again don't say
| anything if your advice isn't helpful.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| p-e-w wrote:
| Indeed. StackOverflow was by far the most unpleasant website
| that I have regularly interacted with. Sometimes, just seeing
| how users were treated there (even in Q&A threads that I wasn't
| involved in at all) disturbed me so much it was actually
| interfering with my work. I'm so, so glad that I can now just
| ask an AI to get the same (or better) answers, without having
| to wade through the barely restrained hate on that site.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Yep, LLMs are perfect for the "quick buy annoying to answer 500
| times" questions about writing a short script, or configuring
| something, or using the right combination of command line
| parameters.
|
| Quicker than searching the entirety of Google results and none
| of the attitude.
| jonahss wrote:
| It seemed to me that pre-llm, google had stopped surfacing
| stackoverflow answers in search results.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| My memory is there were a spate of SO scraping sites that
| google would surface above SO and google just would not zap.
|
| It would have been super trivial to fix but google didn't.
|
| My pet theory was that google were getting doubleclick
| revenue from the scrapers so had incentives to let them
| scrape and to promote them in search results.
| xp84 wrote:
| I remember those too! There were seemingly thousands of
| them!
|
| Reminds me of my most black-hat project -- a Wikipedia
| proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me
| like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah,
| perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.
| 20after4 wrote:
| I'm actually surprised it was only ~$20 a month.
| eigenspace wrote:
| Because nobody was clicking on them
| adrum wrote:
| I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor)
| contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using
| GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific
| issues.
|
| The timeline also matches:
|
| https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...
|
| https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...
| dom96 wrote:
| Do we have any stats for the number of GitHub discussions
| created each month to compare to this?
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| > For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
|
| For now. They still need to be enshitted.
| fooker wrote:
| Yeah just wait for the ads
| esafak wrote:
| Models are check-pointed. You can save one you like and use
| it forever.
| stavros wrote:
| Doesn't help when the ads are a layer above the model.
| esafak wrote:
| There are open source models you yourself or a trusted
| third party can run. No ads.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| You can save an open source + open weights model, which is
| frozen in time. That's still very useful for some things
| but lacks knowledge of current data.
|
| So we'll end up with a choice of low-performing stale
| models or high-performing enshittified models which know
| about more current information.
| esafak wrote:
| Open source models get updated all the time. You'd only
| be a few months behind.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Direct enshittification is intentional and wouldn't
| affect open models.
|
| Indirect pollution via AI slop in the input and the same
| content manipulation mechanisms as SEO hacking is still a
| threat for open models.
| Bratmon wrote:
| Really? I thought you could only do that with open source
| models. Can you teach me how to checkpoint the current
| version of Claude Code so I can keep it as-is forever?
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Yup. Like Claude 3 Opus.
| secondcoming wrote:
| How can we be sure that LLMs won't start giving stale answers?
| mark-r wrote:
| We can't. I don't think the LLMs themselves can recognize
| when an answer is stale. They could if contradicting data was
| available, but their very existence suppresses the
| contradictory data.
| zahlman wrote:
| LLMs don't _experience_ the world, so they have no reason
| _a priori_ to know what is or isn 't truthful in the
| training data.
|
| (Not to mention the confabulation. Making up API method
| names is natural when your model of the world is that the
| method names you've seen are examples and you have no
| reason to consider them an exhaustive listing.)
| Someone1234 wrote:
| They still use the official documentation/examples, public
| Github Repos, and your own code which are all more likely to
| be evergreen. SO was definitely a massive training advantage
| before LLMs matured though.
| g947o wrote:
| They will, but model updates and competition help solve the
| problem. If people find that Claude consistently gives
| better/more relevant answers over GPT, for example, people
| will choose the better model.
|
| The worst thing with Q/A sites isn't they don't work. It's
| that they there are no alternatives to stackoverflow. Some of
| the most upvoted answers on stackoverflow prove that it can
| work well in many cases, but too bad most other times it
| doesn't.
| Cloudef wrote:
| LLMs are just statistics, eventually they kill themselves
| with feedback loop by consuming their own farts (literally)
| nautilus12 wrote:
| The irony is that the LLMs are trained on stack overflow and
| should inherit a lot of those traits and errors.
| Bratmon wrote:
| Yeah, but they don't inherit their rules and attitude.
|
| Really, if we could apply some RLHF to the Stack Overflow
| community, it would be doing a lot better.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| >For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better
|
| But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar
| places being used as the source material. As those start
| getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have
| the source material to answer questions properly.
| badthingfactory wrote:
| StackOverflow answers are outdated. Every time I end up on
| that site these days, I find myself reading answers from 12
| years ago that are no longer relevant.
| shawn_w wrote:
| I see plenty of old answers that are still very relevant.
| Suppose it depends on what language/tech tags you follow.
| zahlman wrote:
| There have been many times I have seen someone complain on
| the meta site about answers being old and outdated, and
| then they give specific examples, and I go check them out
| and they're actually still perfectly valid.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Now they can read the documentation and code in the repo
| directly and answer based on that.
| croes wrote:
| SO had answers that you couldn't find in the documentation
| and were you can't look in the source code.
|
| If everything would be well documentated SO wouldn't have
| being as big as it was in the first place.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| I think the industry is quickly moving to syntheticly derived
| knowledge, or custom/systematic knowledge production from
| humans.
| porcoda wrote:
| I regularly use Claude and friends where I ask it to use the
| web to look at specific GitHub repos or documentation to ask
| about current versions of things. The "LLMs just get their
| info from stack overflow" trope from the GPT-3 days is long
| dead - they're pretty good at getting info that is very up to
| date by using tools to access the web. In some cases I just
| upload bits and pieces from a library along with my question
| if it's particularly obscure or something home grown, and
| they do quite well with that too. Yes, they do get it wrong
| sometimes - just like stack overflow did too.
| cyral wrote:
| The amount of docs that have a "Copy as markdown" or "Copy
| for AI" button has been noticeably increasing, and really
| helps the LLM with proper context.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| they're pretty good at getting info that is very up to date
| by using tools to access the web
|
| Yeah that's a charitable way to phrase "perform distributed
| denial of service attacks". Browsing github as a human with
| their draconian rate limits that came about as a result of
| AI bots is fucking great.
| immibis wrote:
| You know DDoS attacks are illegal, right? If you have
| proof that OpenAI is DDoSing your site, go sue them for
| millions of dollars.
| dmezzetti wrote:
| This change was happening well before LLMs. People were tired
| of being yelled at and treated poorly.
|
| A cautionary tale for many of these types of tech platforms,
| this one included.
| bborud wrote:
| 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.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| dang and the other HN moderators do a heroic job to set the
| tone, which has second- and third-order effects on behavior.
| immibis wrote:
| Yes. For instance, it turns out that if your votes disagree
| with dang enough times, they put your account in a
| restricted mode where the system completely ignores your
| votes and flags and you can only write about two comments
| per hour (regardless of content). Dang confirmed this to me
| by email.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| bborud wrote:
| Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or
| not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people
| have different standards when paid? That lack of
| remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn't that a very
| transactional view of human interaction? Are we that
| transactional? Do we want this?
|
| We're talking about how communities can become toxic. How
| we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds
| with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to
| be our intentions.
|
| I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be
| compensated to not let a community deteriorate.
| Chaosvex wrote:
| > That people have different standards when paid? That
| lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn't that a
| very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that
| transactional?
|
| The answer to all of these questions is yes, for the most
| part. Volunteers are much harder to wrangle than
| employees and it's much easier for drama and
| disagreements to flare when there are zero consequences
| other than losing an unpaid position, particularly if
| anonymity is in the mix.
|
| Volunteers can be great but on average they're going to
| be far harder to manage and far more fickle than
| employees.
| bborud wrote:
| Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have.
| What you seem to suggest is that because building a
| community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing.
|
| What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to
| resolve differences productively. I think that if you
| replace individual responsibility with transactionality
| you have neither community nor long term viability or
| scalability.
|
| Then again, we live in times when transactional thinking
| seems to dominate discourse.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| That depends on what you mean by "came along". If you mean
| "once that everyone got around to the idea that LLMs were going
| to be good at this thing" then sure, but it was not long ago
| that the majority of people around here were very skeptical of
| the idea that LLMs would _ever_ be any good at coding.
| rustystump wrote:
| I dont think this is true. People were skeptical of agi /
| better than human coding which is not the case. As a matter
| of fact i think searching docs was one of the first manor
| uses of llms before code.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| That's because there has been rapid improvement by LLMs.
|
| Their tendency to bullshit is still an issue, but if one
| maintains a healthy skepticism and uses a bit of logic it can
| be managed. The problematic uses are where they are used
| without any real supervision.
|
| Enabling human learning is a natural strength for LLMs and
| works fine since learning tends to be multifaceted and the
| information received tends to be put to a test as a part of
| the process.
| make3 wrote:
| What you're arguing about is the field completely changing
| over 3 years; it's nothing, as a time for everyone to change
| their minds.
|
| LLMs were not productified in a meaningful way before ChatGPT
| in 2022 (companies had sufficiently strong LLMs, but RLHF
| didn't exist to make them "PR-safe"). Then we basically just
| had to wait for LLM companies to copy Perplexity and add
| search engines everywhere (RAG already existed, but I guess
| it was not realistic to RAG the whole internet), and they
| became useful enough to replace StackOverflow.
| yigalirani wrote:
| all true, but i still find myself ask questions there after llm
| gave wrong answers and wasted my time
| Salgat wrote:
| Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited
| advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only
| for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with
| silence from them).
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game)
|
| You ask how to do X.
|
| Member M asks why you want to do X.
|
| Because you want to do Y.
|
| Well!? why do you want to do Y??
|
| Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z
|
| Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it
| is now recommended!
|
| Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment.
|
| ...
|
| Can you help me?
|
| ...
|
| I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. Do you have
| any help?
|
| ...(crickets)
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Tbf the problem there is probably FIPS more than anything
| else.
| immibis wrote:
| If someone is paying you to implement a security
| vulnerability and you've told them and you don't have
| liability, you just do it. That's how capitalism works.
| You do whatever people give you money for.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I wasn't referring to vulnerabilities, I was referring to
| arbitrary silly security theatre controls. But id hate to
| deal with you professionally. Gross.
| stirfish wrote:
| How do I add a second spout to this can?
|
| ...
|
| Well, the pump at the gas station doesn't fit in my car,
| but they sold me a can with a spout that fits in my car.
|
| ...
|
| It's tedious to fill the can a dozen times when I just want
| to fill up my gas tank. Can you help me or not?
|
| ...
|
| I understand, but I already bought the can. I don't need
| the "perfect" way to fill a gas tank, I just want to go
| home.
| neillyons wrote:
| My favourite is this disclaimer in the question. lol
|
| > Is there any way to force install a pip python package
| ignoring all its dependencies that cannot be satisfied?
|
| > (I don't care how "wrong" it is to do so, I just need
| to do it, any logic and reasoning aside...)
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12759761/pip-force-
| insta...
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| >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.
|
| Yep. The magic question is "what are you trying to
| accomplish?". Oftentimes people lacking experience think
| they know the best way to get the results they're after
| and aren't aware of the more efficient ways someone with
| more experience might go about solving their problem.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| abanana wrote:
| Yes exactly. The fact that the "XY problem" exists, and
| that users sometimes ask the wrong question, isn't being
| argued. The problem is that SO appears to operate at the
| extreme, taking the default assumption that the asker is
| always wrong. That toxic level of arrogance (a) pushes
| users away and (b) ...what you said.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| Which is why LLMs are so much more useful than SO and
| likely always will be. LLMs do this even. Like trying to
| write my own queue by scratch and I ask an LLM for
| feedback I think it's Gemini that often tells me Python's
| deque is better. duh! That's not the point. So I've
| gotten into the habit of prefacing a lot of my prompts
| with "this is just for practice" or things of that
| nature. It actually gets annoying but it's 1,000x more
| annoying finding a question on SO that is exactly what
| you want to know but it's closed and the replies are like
| "this isn't the correct way to do this" or "what you
| actually want to do is Y"
| rendaw wrote:
| 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".
| phoenixy1 wrote:
| My heuristic is that if your interlocutor asks follow-up
| questions like that with no indication of why (like "why do
| you want to do X?" rather than "why do you want to do X? If
| the answer is Y, then X is a bad approach because Q, you
| should try Z instead") then they are never going to give
| you a helpful answer.
| econ wrote:
| To avoid going insane the mindset should be to produce
| something useful for future readers.
| bmacho wrote:
| This is called the XY problem
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378 . You ask for X, I
| tell you that what you really want is Y, I bully you, and I
| become more convinced that you and people that ask for X want
| Y.
| gfhifd42 wrote:
| It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with
| shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money.
| Joel did that, and SO failed because of it.
|
| Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out
| from under them, but then he did.
|
| And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the
| community.
|
| Those with integrity left the community and only toxic,
| selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort
| to salvage what little there was left for themselves.
|
| Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it
| to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings.
| oofbey wrote:
| How did Joel sell out? Curious as I'm not aware of any
| monetary changes. I watched Joel several times support
| completely brain dead policies in the meta discussions which
| really set the rules and tone. So my respect there is low.
| gfhifd42 wrote:
| He and Jeff made it abundantly clear their mission was to
| destroy the sex change site because that site was immoral
| for monetizing the benevolence of the community who
| answered the questions.
|
| "Knowledge should be free" they said. "You shouldn't make
| money off stuff like this," they said.
|
| Plenty of links and backstory in my other comments.
| oofbey wrote:
| They literally sold:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-
| sold-...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Oh yeah.
|
| My favorite feature of LLMs, is the only dumb question, is the
| one I don't ask.
|
| I guess someone could train an LLM to be spiteful and nasty,
| but that would only be for entertainment.
| fragmede wrote:
| If you say the wrong thing to grok, it will go off on you.
| It's quite entertaining!
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| not only stackoverflow, but also reddit.com/r/aws
| reddit.com/r/docker reddit.com/r/postgresql all 3 of them have
| extremely toxic communities. ask a question and get downvoted
| instantly! Noo!! your job is to actually upvote the question to
| maximize exposure for the algorithm unless it is a really
| really stupid question that a google search could fix
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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).
| abanana wrote:
| You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of
| posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these
| justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission",
| "read our policy", "understand us".
|
| Often, doing _what your users want_ leads to success.
| Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant
| air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away.
| And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than
| just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and
| the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your
| users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure.
|
| When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have
| the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the
| outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here -
| trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly
| showing this.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Often, doing what your users want leads to success.
|
| You misunderstand.
|
| People with accounts on Stack Overflow _are not_ "our
| users".
|
| Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-
| rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since
| it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a
| dime to do any of this.
|
| Building that resource was never going to keep the lights
| on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack
| Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the
| company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of
| money for this. That doesn't change what we want to
| accomplish, or why.
|
| > When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't
| have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority
| on the outside.
|
| I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it
| and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the
| complaints constantly. I just _don 't care_. Because you
| are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I
| want to see made.
|
| > trying to deny the toxicity and condescension
|
| I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in
| general, and especially in this context.
|
| As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I
| should seek to accomplish?
| Flimm wrote:
| > "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.)
|
| This is a great example of a question that should not be
| closed as a duplicate. Lists are not tuples in Python,
| regardless of how similar potential answers may be.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| People are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public
| internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them.
| the8472 wrote:
| This is concerning on two fronts. The questions are no longer
| open (SO is CC-BY-SA) and if Q&A content dies then this herds
| even more people towards LLM use. It's basically draining the
| commons.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Yup. This, to me, provides another explanation for why the
| social contract is being used as toilet paper by the owner
| class. They literally see the writing on the wall.
| Bratmon wrote:
| Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe in which the
| Stackoverflow community was so friendly, welcoming, helpful, and
| knowledgeable that this seems like a tragedy and motivates people
| to try to save it.
|
| But in this universe, most people's reaction is just "lol".
| elevation wrote:
| There are still airgapped places in the world where transferring
| information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the
| offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they're not worth
| using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for
| engineering teams working in these environments.
| Bratmon wrote:
| But surely transmitting information to actual SO is just as
| forbidden?
|
| And if you're making an internal-only site, it doesn't really
| need to be name-brand SO.
| elevation wrote:
| Stack overflow was useful with a fairly sanitized search like
| "mysql error 1095". Agentic LLMs do there best work when able
| to access your entire repository or network environment for
| context, which is impossible to sanitize. For a season,
| private environments will continue to be able to use SO. But
| as LLMs capture all the good questions and keep them private,
| public SO will become less and less relevant. It's sad to see
| a resource of this class go.
| Bratmon wrote:
| I just typed the literal phrase "mysql error 1095" into
| ChatGPT with no context, and it gave an answer that was no
| worse than SO for the same search.
|
| No need to give it anything about my repository, network
| environment, or even a complete sentence.
| esafak wrote:
| https://stackoverflow.co/internal/
| oezi wrote:
| Seems like the exit was very well timed.
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Another plausible explanation is that the new owners didn't
| develop the community in a good way. Instead of fixing the
| myriad of issues that were obvious to almost all contributors
| they instead basically let it die?
| shawn_w wrote:
| The new owners (well, not really new any more) are focused on
| adding AI to SO because it's the current hotness, and making
| other changes to try to extract more money that they're
| completely ignoring the community's issues and objections to
| their changes, which tend to be half-assed and full of bugs.
| bean469 wrote:
| 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...
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for
| posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold
| badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to
| ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when
| they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to
| understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked
| totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict,
| it's super hard to follow.
|
| So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]
| vbezhenar wrote:
| 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.
| baud147258 wrote:
| 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.
| antonymoose wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| > 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.
| g947o wrote:
| 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.
| malfist wrote:
| 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
| zahlman wrote:
| > many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.
|
| Please feel free to cite examples. I'll be happy to explain
| why I think they're duplicates, assuming I do (in my
| experience, well over 90% of the time I see this complaint,
| it's quite clear to me that the question is in fact a
| duplicate).
|
| But more importantly, _use the meta site_ if you think
| something has been done poorly. It 's there for a reason.
| g947o wrote:
| If I had kept a list of such questions I would have posted
| it (which would be a very long one). But no, I don't have
| that list.
|
| > use the meta site if you think something has been done
| poorly.
|
| Respectfully, no. It is meaningless. If you just look at
| comments in this thread (and 20 other previous HN posts on
| this topic) you should know how dysfunctional stackoverflow
| management and moderation is. This (question being
| incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the
| situation has not changed for a very long time. Nobody
| should waste their time and expect anything to be
| different.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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)
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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 .
| tacker2000 wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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).
| zahlman wrote:
| > To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but
| their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.
|
| I think https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 is
| pretty straightforward. If you can show a question of yours
| that was closed, I'll be happy to try to explain why.
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| I mean, I kinda of miss it. But man it was a hostile place for
| newcomers.
|
| Only ever asked one question and I tried to answer more than a
| handful but never really clicked with the site.
|
| I do wonder if it would have faired better under the original
| ownership before it was sold in 2021-06-02.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active
| contributor knows the company was screwing over existing
| moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls
| imiric wrote:
| If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while
| violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure.
|
| In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content
| you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll
| hallucinate an answer and waste your time.
|
| What should worry everyone is what system will come after LLMs.
| Data is being centralized and hoarded by giant corporations,
| and not shared publicly. And the data that is shared is
| generated by LLMs. We're poisoning the well of information with
| no fallback mechanism.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data
| while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then
| sure.
|
| You know that's not what they meant, but why bring up the
| license here? If they were _over the top_ compliant,
| attributing every SO answer under every chat, and licensing
| the LLM output as CC BY-SA, I think we 'd still have seen the
| same shift.
|
| > In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same
| content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario,
| they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.
|
| Best case it gives you the same level of content, but more
| customized, and faster.
|
| SO being wrong and wasting your time is also common.
| teekert wrote:
| I do use Claude a lot, but I still regularly ask questions on
| https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/. It's often just too
| niche, LLMs hallucinate stuff like an entire non-existent
| benchmarking feature in Snakemake, or can't explain how I should
| get transcriptome aligners to give me correct quantifications for
| a transcript. I guess it's too niche. And as a lonely
| Bioinformatician it can be nice to get confirmation from other
| bioinformaticians.
|
| Looking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really
| got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming
| questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any
| LLM.
| w10-1 wrote:
| While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded
| significant AI usage for coding.
|
| So some possible reasons:
|
| - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex
| questions are hard to ask.
|
| - Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support
| channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now
| projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose
| control over messaging to over-eager users.
|
| - Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in
| employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is
| viewed as being too easy to scam
|
| - Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript
| and devops churn.
|
| - Community: tight job markets make people less community-
| oriented
|
| Some non-reasons:
|
| - Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed
| the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).
| jasongill wrote:
| > - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the
| complex questions are hard to ask.
|
| I think this is one major factor that is not getting enough
| consideration in this comment thread. By 2018-2020, it felt
| like the number of times that someone else had already asked
| the question had increased to the point that there was no
| reason to bother asking it. Google also continued to do a
| better and better job of surfacing the right StackOverflow
| thread, even if the SO search didn't.
|
| In 2012 you might search Google, not find what you needed, go
| to StackOverflow, search and have no better luck, then make a
| post (and get flamed for it being a frequently-asked question
| but you were phrasing yours in a different / incorrect way and
| didn't find the "real" answer).
|
| In 2017, you would search Google and the relevant StackOverflow
| thread would be in the top few results, so you wouldn't need to
| post and ask.
|
| In 2020, Google's "rich snippets" were showing you the quick
| answers in the screen real estate that is now used by the AI
| Overview answers, and those often times had surfaced some info
| taken from StackOverflow.
|
| And then, at the very end of 2022, ChatGPT came along and
| effectively acted as the StackOverflow search that you always
| wanted - you could phrase your question as poorly as you want,
| no one would flame you, and you'd get some semblance of the
| correct answer (at least for simple questions).
|
| I think StackOverflow was ultimately a victim of it's own
| success. Most of the questions that would be asked by your
| normal "question asker" type of user were eventually "solved"
| and it was just a matter of how easy it was to find them.
| Google, ChatGPT, "AI Overviews", Claude Code, etc have simply
| made finding those long-answered questions much easier, as well
| as answering all of the "new" questions that could be posed -
| and without all of the drama and hassle of dealing with a
| human-moderated site.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| The volume of basic questions is unlimited. There are new
| technologies every year.
| throw1235435 wrote:
| Not sure. As software becomes a commodity I can see the "old
| school" like tech slowing down (e.g. programming languages,
| frameworks frontend and backend, etc). The need for a better
| programming language is less now since LLM's are the ones
| writing code anyway more so these days - the pain isn't felt
| necessarily by the writer of the code to be more
| concise/expressive. The ones that do come out will probably
| have more specific communities for them (e.g. AI)
| Avicebron wrote:
| Are there any publicly available options to actually interact
| with real people about software development anymore? There
| doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like
| a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language
| forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active
| or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.
|
| AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an
| opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be
| nice (as a thrower of careless questions).
|
| SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of
| shared problem solving just died completely online?
| eterm wrote:
| Local meet-ups I guess?
| bluedino wrote:
| I find a lot of good stuff in GitHub issues
| IshKebab wrote:
| They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing
| "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have
| been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this
| should have been a question instead of a discussion".
|
| Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods.
| Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually
| leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| Stackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I
| still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your
| questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| It's surprisingly tame still given it interests tens
| (hundreds?) of millions of people at varying age and background
| and mostly when the mind is occupied by a problem. I always
| found it surprising there's not more defacing and toxicity.
| etamponi wrote:
| I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform.
| Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers
| that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were
| almost always completely off-road.
|
| Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on
| stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer
| and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark
| (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix.
|
| This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO
| means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of
| credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly
| toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.
|
| Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.
| ianbutler wrote:
| It's flat wrong to suggest SO had the right answer all the
| time, and in fact in my experience for trickier work it was
| often wrong or missing entirely.
|
| LLMs have a better hit rate with me.
| paganholiday wrote:
| The example wasn't even finding a right answer so I don't see
| where you got that..
|
| Searching questions/answers on SO can surface correct paths
| on situations where the LLMs will keep giving you variants of
| a few wrong solutions, kind of like the toxic duplicate
| closers.. Ironically, if SO pruned the history to remove all
| failures to match its community standards then it would have
| the same problem.
| ianbutler wrote:
| "But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly
| guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a
| grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually
| answered our questions."
|
| > "actually answered our questions."
|
| Read carefully.
| paganholiday wrote:
| >> Eventually I tried with something else, and found a
| question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That
| was the game changer and eventually I was able to find
| the right doc
|
| Read carefully and paraphrase to the generous side. The
| metaphor that follows that is obviously trying to give an
| example of what might be somehow lost.
| ianbutler wrote:
| This is a fair critique. I am often not generous enough
| with people.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Interpreting that claim as "SO users _always, 100% of the
| time_ answer questions correctly " is uncharitable to the
| point of being unreasonable.
|
| Most people would interpret the claim as concisely
| expressing that you get better accuracy from grumpy SO
| users than friendly LLMs.
| ianbutler wrote:
| For the record I was interpreting that as LLMs are
| useless (which may have been just as uncharitable), which
| I categorically deny. I would say they're about just as
| useful without wading through the mire that SO was.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yes, it does answer you question, when the site lets it
| go through.
|
| Note that "answers your question" does not mean "solving
| your problem". Sometimes the answer to a question is
| "this is infeasible because XYZ" and that's good feedback
| to get to help you re-evaluate a problem. Many LLMs still
| struggle with this and would rather give a wrong answer
| than a negative one.
|
| That said, the "why don't you use X" response is
| practically a stereotype for a reason. So it's certainly
| not always useful feedback. If people could introspect
| and think "can 'because my job doesn't allow me to
| install Z' be a valid response to this", we'd be in a
| true Utopia.
| jtrn wrote:
| No point in arguing with people who bring a snowball into
| Congress to disprove global warming.
| vultour wrote:
| It entirely depends on the language you were using. The
| quality of both questions and answers between e.g. Go and
| JavaScript is incredible. Even as a relative beginner in JS I
| could not believe the amount of garbage that I came across,
| something that rarely happened for Go.
| specproc wrote:
| What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between
| commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a
| theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a
| debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out,
| with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top.
|
| SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent
| humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit like
| HN, you learn from watching the back and forth. I don't think
| this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have
| the egos and they certainly don't have the experience.
|
| Whatever people's gripes about the site, I learned a hell of a
| lot from it. I still find solutions there, and think a world
| without it would be worse.
| NewJazz wrote:
| The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an
| LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be
| communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications,
| most of which surround the ability for people to review and
| correct bad information.
| nprateem wrote:
| Surely the fundamental difference is one asks actual humans
| who know what's right vs statistical models that are right
| by accident.
| ijidak wrote:
| Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was
| time-consuming.
|
| In the time it takes to properly format and ask a
| question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate
| through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to
| the right one.
|
| The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better
| overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after
| accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM.
|
| Don't forget, human answers on Stack Overflow were also
| often wrong or delayed by hours or days.
|
| I think we're romanticizing the quality of the average
| human response on Stack Overflow.
| specproc wrote:
| What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_
| human responses on SO.
|
| There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A
| good SO response gives both a path forward, and an
| explanation why, in the context of other possible
| options, this is the way to do things.
|
| LLMs do not automatically think of performance,
| maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a
| response, in no small part because they do not think.
|
| An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0]
|
| The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better
| "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to
| our detriment as a community.
|
| [^0]: He comes,
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-
| open...
| fireflash38 wrote:
| That's only because of LLMs consuming pre-existing
| discussions on SO. They aren't creating novel solutions.
| matt_kantor wrote:
| 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.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| Humans do not know what's right. What's worse is the
| phenomenon of people who don't actually know but want to
| seem like they know so they ask the person with the
| question for follow up information that is meaningless
| and irrelevant to the question.
|
| Hey, can you show me the log files?
|
| Sure here you go. Please help!
|
| Hmm, I don't really know what I'm looking for in these.
| Good luck!
| dbobbitt wrote:
| The other major benefit of SO being a public forum is that
| once a question was wrestled with and eventually answered,
| other engineers could stumble upon and benefit from it.
| With SO being replaced by LLMs, engineers are asking LLMs
| the same questions over and over, likely getting a wide
| range of different answers (some correct and others not)
| while also being an incredible waste of resources.
| andy81 wrote:
| SO also isn't afraid to tell you that your question is stupid
| and you should do it a better way.
|
| Some people take that as a personal attack, but it can be
| more helpful than a detailed response to the wrong question.
| baq wrote:
| The problem is the people who decide which questions are
| stupid are misaligned with the site's audience.
| djfergus wrote:
| > I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever
| replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't
| have the experience
|
| Interesting question - the result is just words so surely a
| LLM can simulate an ego. Feed it the Linux kernel mailing
| list?
|
| Isn't back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models
| attempt to simulate?
|
| And if they don't have the experience that is just a question
| of tokens?
| ehnto wrote:
| SO was somewhere people put their hard won experience into
| words, that an LLM could train on.
|
| That won't be happening anymore, neither on SO or
| elsewhere. So all this hard won experience, from actually
| doing real work, will be inaccessible to the LLMs. For
| modern technologies and problems I suspect it will be a
| notably worse experience when using an LLM than working
| with older technologies.
|
| It's already true for example, when using the Godot game
| engine instead of Unity. LLMs constantly confuse what
| you're trying to do with Unity problems, offer Unity based
| code solutions etc.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| > Isn't back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking
| models attempt to simulate?
|
| I think the name "Mixture of Experts" might be one of the
| most misleading labels in our industry. No, that is not at
| all what MoE models do.
|
| Think of it rather like, instead of having one giant black
| box, we now have multiple smaller opaque boxes of various
| colors, and somehow (we don't really know how) we're able
| to tell if your question is "yellow" or "purple" and send
| that to the purple opaque box to get an answer.
|
| The result is that we're able to use less resources to
| solve any given question (by activating smaller boxes
| instead of the original huge one). The problem is we don't
| know in advance which questions are of which color: it's
| not like one "expert" knows CSS and the other knows car
| engines.
|
| It's just more floating point black magic, so "How do I
| center a div" and "what's the difference between a V6 and
| V12" are both "yellow" questions sent to the same
| box/expert, while "How do I vertically center a div" is a
| red question, and "what's the most powerful between a V6
| and V12" is a green question which activates a completely
| different set of weights.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I don't know if this is still the case but back in the day
| people would often redirect comments to some stackoverflow
| chat feature, the links to which would always return 404 not
| found errors.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| specproc wrote:
| Heh, OK, dialogue wasn't the right word. I am a better
| informed person by the power of internet pedantry.
| solumunus wrote:
| You can ask an LLM to provide multiple approaches to
| solutions and explore the pros and cons of each, then you can
| drill down and elaborate on particular ones. It works very
| well.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| You still get the same thing though?
|
| That grumpy guy is using an LLM and debugging with it. Solves
| the problem. AI provider fine tunes their model with this. You
| now have his input baked into it's response.
|
| How you think these things work? It's either a human direct
| input it's remembering or a RL enviroment made by a human to
| solve the problem you are working on.
|
| Nothing in it is "made up" it's just a resolution problem which
| will only get better over time.
| nprateem wrote:
| How does that work if there's no new data for them to train
| on, only AI slurry?
| bluedino wrote:
| There are so many "great" answers on StackOverflow. Giving the
| why and not just the answer.
| kurtis_reed wrote:
| Q&A isn't going away. There's still GitHub Discussions.
| znpy wrote:
| > But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy
| with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy
| and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our
| questions.
|
| Which by the way is incredibly ironic to read on the internet
| after like fifteen years of annoying people left and right
| about toxic this and toxic that.
|
| Extreme example: Linus Torvalds used to be notoriously toxic.
|
| Would you still defend your position if the "grumpy" guy
| answered in Linus' style?
| etamponi wrote:
| > Would you still defend your position if the "grumpy" guy
| answered in Linus' style?
|
| If they answered correctly, yes.
|
| My point is that providing _actual knowledge_ is by itself so
| much more valuable compared to _simulated knowledge_, in
| particular when that simulated knowledge is hyper realistic
| and wrong.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sadly, an accountable individual representing an organization
| is different from a community of semi-anonymous users with a
| bunch of bureaucracy that can't or doesn't care about every
| semis anonymous user
| RobinL wrote:
| I'm hoping increasing we'll see agents helping with this sort
| of issue. I would like an agent that would do things like pull
| the spark repo into the working area and consult the source
| code/cross reference against what you're trying to do.
|
| Once technique I've used successfully is to do this 'manually'
| to ensure codex/Claude code can grep around the libraries I'm
| using
| solumunus wrote:
| Because what you're describing is the exception. Almost always
| with LLM's I get a better solution, or helpful pointer in the
| direction of a solution, and I get it much faster. I honestly
| don't understand anyone could prefer Google/SO, and in fact
| that the numbers show that they don't. You're in an extreme
| minority.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| It's unfortunate that SO hasn't found a way to leverage LLMs.
| Lots of questions benefit from some initial search, which is hard
| enough that moderators likely felt frustrated with actual
| duplicates, or close enough duplicates, and LLMs seem able to
| assist. However I hope we don't lose the rare gem answers that SO
| also had, those expert responses that share not just a
| programming solution but deeper insight.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I think that SO leveraging LLMs implicitly. Like I'll always
| ask LLM first, that's the easiest option. And I'll only come to
| SO if LLM fails to answer.
| zurtri wrote:
| IMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community.
| lastdong wrote:
| Game over. I didn't notice all the toxicity mentioned in the
| other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe.
| It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its
| name is part of web history, and there's no denying that.
| chrsw wrote:
| For me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose.
| Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat
| response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the
| toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me.
|
| But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask
| real humans novel technical questions these days?
| mgrat wrote:
| Find the relevant discord and search.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical
| questions these days?
|
| I don't think such generic place exists. I just do my own
| research or abandon the topic. I think that in big companies
| you probably could use some internal chats or just ask some
| smart guy directly? I don't have that kind of connections and
| all online communities are full of people whose skill is below
| mine, so it makes little sense to ask something. I still do
| sometimes, but rarely receive competent answer.
|
| If you have some focused topic like a question about small
| program, of course you can just use github issues or email
| author directly. But if you have some open question, probably
| SO is the only generic platform out there.
|
| To put it differently, find some experts and ask which online
| place to the visit to help strangers. Most likely they just
| don't do it.
|
| So for me, personally, LLMs are the saviour. With enough forth
| and back I can research any topic that doesn't require very
| deep expertise. Sure, access to an actual expert willing to
| guide me would be better, but I just don't have that luxury.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Those saying that StackOverflow became toxic are absolutely
| correct. But we should not let that be it's legacy. It is IMO
| still today one of the greatest achievements in terms of open
| data on the internet. And it's impact on making programming
| accessible to a large audience cannot be understated.
| strenholme wrote:
| Good riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost
| never being asked on Stack overflow).
|
| The most annoying example I can think of (but can't link to,
| alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question,
| and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn't answer the
| question, telling the person to just Google the answer.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| If nobody is on StackOverflow, What will LLM's train on for new
| problems?
| etyhhgfff wrote:
| GitHub Issues and Disscussions + searching the code base,
| fetching the docs and some reasoning on top. Maybe even firing
| up a sandbox VM and testing some solutions.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder if google search saw a similar hit
| terminalshort wrote:
| I doubt it. If I want to ask AI a simple question I type it
| into Google now.
| agumonkey wrote:
| anecdotally, i personally stopped using google a lot in the
| last few years
| garganzol wrote:
| My personal bet is that traditional search engines face a -70%
| usage drop at the moment.
| Rexxar wrote:
| Maybe the average question will be more "high level" now that all
| simple questions are answered by LLMs ?
| dvh wrote:
| Eternal September is finally over =)
|
| It was impossible to ask certain programming questions. Asking
| there was truly last resort.
| osakasake wrote:
| This is a great example of how free content was exploited by LLMs
| and used against oneself to an ultimate destruction.
|
| Every content creator should be terrified of leaving their
| content out for free and I think it will bring on a new age of
| permanent paywalls and licensing agreements to Google and others,
| with particular ways of forcing page clicks to the original
| content creators.
| sublinear wrote:
| Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees
| we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again.
|
| AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't
| care about maintenance, but for a time SO was _the place_ to find
| extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come
| up with.
|
| When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only
| solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to
| your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It
| inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to
| begin with and you grew as a developer.
|
| This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site
| itself.
| johnnyfived wrote:
| I really admire that they publicly posted this data, and hope
| that the platform can find a new type of pivot or draw to bring
| back a community.
| jondwillis wrote:
| AI is a vampire. Coming to your corner of the world, to suck your
| economic blood, eventually. It's hard to ignore the accelerated
| decline that started in late 2022/early 2023.
| juliangmp wrote:
| 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...?
| fabian2k wrote:
| You don't need any reputation to ask questions, you only need
| to create an account.
| fph wrote:
| 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?
| jmount wrote:
| I fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related
| StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-
| vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/
| junon wrote:
| StackExchange forgot who made them successful long ago. This is
| what they sowed. I don't have any remorse, only pity.
|
| When Hans Passant (OGs will know) left, followed by SE doing
| literally nothing, that was the first clue for me personally that
| SE stopped caring.
|
| That said, it is a _bit_ shocking how close to zero it is.
| ok123456 wrote:
| How is Experts Exchange doing?
| bmitch3020 wrote:
| As someone that spent a fair bit of time answering questions on
| StackOverflow, what stood out years ago was how much the same
| thing would be asked every day. Countless duplicates. That has
| all but ceased with LLMs taking all that volume. Honestly, I
| don't think that's a huge loss for the knowledge base.
|
| The other thing I've noticed lately is a strong push to get non-
| programming questions off StackOverflow, and on to other sites
| like SuperUser, ServerFault, DevOps, etc.
|
| Unfortunately, what's left is so small I don't think there's
| enough to sustain a community. Without questions to answer,
| contributors providing the answers disappear, leaving the few
| questions there often unanswered.
| tantalor wrote:
| What if we filter out all the questions closed as dupes, off
| topic, etc?
| block_dagger wrote:
| I suspect a lot of the traffic shift is from Google replacing the
| top search result, which used to be Stack Overflow for
| programming questions, with a Gemini answer.
| kqgnkqgn wrote:
| Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But
| why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded
| after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from
| StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming
| worse?
|
| The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's
| dealt the final blow.
| nness wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| The question askers got stupider and stupider.
| mnau wrote:
| 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/
| int32_64 wrote:
| I'm glad I learned how to program when you could coax useful
| answers from Google searches.
|
| Whenever a Stack Overflow result comes up now the answer is years
| old and wrong, you might as well search archive.org.
| merek wrote:
| Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear
| downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this
| might be?
|
| The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer
| to?
| garganzol wrote:
| Incompetent moderation and the air of hostility towards
| contributing users.
| Eduard wrote:
| PostTypeId = 1 means "only select questions."
|
| 2 would be answers.
|
| There is a bunch more of further post types:
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/2678
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder what the April 2020 spike is about... maybe lockdowns
| meant people started learning new stuff?
| gregdoesit wrote:
| Interestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of
| questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started
| in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched!
|
| It's an interesting question if the decline would have happened
| regardless of LLMs, just slower?
|
| [1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did:
| https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover...
| culi wrote:
| 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
| garganzol wrote:
| The problem with duplicate questions is that they weren't
| duplicates at all, and mods weren't competent enough to tell a
| difference.
| braiamp wrote:
| Show me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I
| will tell you exactly what happened.
| sockaddr wrote:
| I think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've
| seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for
| a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof
| that you're right.
| braiamp wrote:
| No, but it will show, as someone else already responded,
| that they don't understand SO systems and processes at
| all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker
| themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the
| question. Most questions aren't even closed by
| moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers
| themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as
| community user. The community user gets attributed of all
| automated actions and whenever the user agrees with
| closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also
| gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4]
|
| This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't
| understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning
| things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind
| of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and
| how long it has been working this way, you will see that
| cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get
| resolved once they are known.
|
| [0]:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-
| element...
|
| [1]:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-
| element...
|
| [2]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024
| -a-year-...
|
| [3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250922/can-
| we-clari...
|
| [4]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/213575
| paradite wrote:
| I logged into my old account and found an old question I
| asked:
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-
| element...
| culi wrote:
| The linked answer seems like a valid guess for a relevant
| dupe. Like I said in my comment, "I understand a few eggs
| got cracked along the way to making this omelette" but I
| really don't think this was as widespread of a problem as
| people are making it out to be.
|
| They also have Meta Stack Overflow to appeal if you think
| your question was unfairly marked as a dupe. From what I
| read, it seems that most mods back off readily
| zahlman wrote:
| > From what I read, it seems that most mods back off
| readily
|
| If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes.
| In my experience, though, the large majority of requests
| are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes
| across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking
| duplicates at all.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| csomar wrote:
| You had me looking through my history. Here is an example
| from 12 years ago:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-
| my...
|
| Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make
| much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better.
| Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people
| trying to figure stuff out and learn.
| culi wrote:
| Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to
| a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really
| good well-formed and _specific_ questions. Stuff that
| other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn 't
| meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for
| these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a
| better fit for you
| csomar wrote:
| I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech
| stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms
| and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their
| platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an
| experience developer now, I still rather prefer an
| open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very
| strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences
| in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I
| didn't.
| culi wrote:
| > Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering.
| And people come in all shapes, forms and level of
| expertise.
|
| completely agree
|
| > But as an experience developer now, I still rather
| prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to
| certain very strict guidelines.
|
| And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was
| trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for
| broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed
| questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not
| sure where discord fits in that)
| eterm wrote:
| That is a specific question.
|
| Any more specific and I suspect it would have been closed
| as too specific to their environment / setup instead.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Let's just say the community was quite hostile to
| people trying to figure stuff out and learn.
|
| I don't understand how there is supposedly any hostility
| on display there.
| digitalPhonix wrote:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79530539/how-is-an-
| ssh-c...
|
| Question: How is an SSH certificate added using the SSH
| agent protocol?
|
| > Closed. This question is seeking recommendations for
| software libraries, tutorials, tools, books, or other off-
| site resources
| braiamp wrote:
| > The community is reviewing whether to reopen this
| question as of 36 mins ago.
|
| Asking where in the documentation is something is always
| tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read
| the documentation clearly". Also...
|
| You went and deleted the question immediately after it
| was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment
| of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an
| opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at
| again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will
| go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was
| for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able
| to show that as example because _you didn 't give anyone
| the opportunity to look at it again_.
|
| [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/79530539/timeline
| digitalPhonix wrote:
| > Asking where in the documentation is something is
| always tricky, specially because it usually means "I
| didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
|
| It's not asking for documentation, it's quite literally
| asking how to do something. There are links to
| documentation to prove that I read all the documentation
| I could (to preemptively ward off the question getting
| closed).
|
| Yes, I deleted it because I solved the question myself,
| no need for it to exist as a closed question. How can I
| "Edit the question so it can be answered with facts and
| citations. You can edit the question or post a new one."?
| The answer is quite literally facts (the message format)
| and citations which is what I was hoping to get from
| someone else answering.
|
| I undeleted it so I could give this example.
|
| > So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as
| example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to
| look at it again.
|
| What would looking at it again do? I had no idea it was
| being voted to close in the first place; I have no way to
| request a review; and the instructions for what to do to
| "fix" the questions make absolutely no sense so there's
| nothing to change before it gets "looked at again".
|
| Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
| expecting different results.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I also agreed with this vision. It was meant to be more like
| Wikipedia rather than Reddit.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Seems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold
| to a private equity firm.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| I think the bigger point we should realize is LLMs offer the
| EXACT same thing in a better way. Many people are still sharing
| answers to problems but they do it through an AI which then fine
| tunes on it and now that problem solution is shared with
| EVERYONE.
|
| Far better method of automated sharing of content
| andreyandrade wrote:
| Interesting timing. I just analyzed TabNews (Brazilian dev
| community) and ~50% of 2025 posts mention AI/LLMs. The shift is
| real. The 2014 peak is telling. That's before LLMs, before the
| worst toxicity complaints. Feels like natural saturation, most
| common questions were already answered. My bet, LLMs accelerated
| the decline but didn't cause it. They just made finding those
| existing answers frictionless.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Wow, that's not just collapsing, that's collapsed.
| garganzol wrote:
| Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack
| Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by
| the visible plateau in activity.
|
| Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked
| off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers
| were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their
| practical value and original intent.
|
| Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were
| reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically
| target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing
| products. As a result, answers from genuine users that
| recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience
| were frequently removed altogether.
|
| Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized
| authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with
| its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction
| and discourages broader user participation.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I misread the title at first and thought it was _hacker news_
| questions [comments] that were being graphed. That's what I would
| be interested in seeing
| travisgriggs wrote:
| While I generally agree with the narrative of the negative arc
| that stack overflow took, I found (and have as recently as a few
| months ago) that I could have enjoyable interactions on the math,
| Ux, written language, and aviation exchanges. The OS ones in the
| middle (always found the difference between Linux and superuser
| confusing).
| oxag3n wrote:
| Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything
| being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that
| knowledge?
|
| A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs
| can shine in that area by scraping all those sources.
|
| However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about
| experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems
| in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts
| memory for variable 'a' in gdb.
|
| LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared
| their experience, including SO.
|
| Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to
| another?
| diabllicseagull wrote:
| it is indeed a shame. if you are doing anything remotely new
| and novel, which is essential if you want to make a difference
| in an increasingly competitive field, LLMs confidently leave
| you with non-working solutions, or sometimes worse they set you
| on the wrong path.
|
| I had similar worries in the past about indexable forums being
| replaced by discord servers. the current situation is even
| worse.
| shawn_w wrote:
| There's https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ for the more
| academic CS questions btw.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Web has been solved for a decade imo.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I still would like to get other humans' experiences and
| perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO
| doesn't go away entirely.
|
| With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your
| question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go
| the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think
| you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and
| sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different
| OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that,
| but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".
| system2 wrote:
| The most toxic, degrading, and insulting forum for people. My
| questions, as well as my answers, always got poisonous criticism.
| Good.
| superkuh wrote:
| Seems like there are "blocked by cloudflare" number of questions
| per month.
|
| Their blocking of everyone not using chrome/etc from accessing
| their website probably contributed quite a bit to the implied
| downturn I'm reading in other comments.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Even if you get on the site you'll end up dealing with
| Cloudflare's BBBaaS (breaking back buttons as a service).
| bachmeier wrote:
| A lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of
| accountability for everyone that influences the product, it
| eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that
| the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in
| place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very
| unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with
| common sense stepped in to put an end to it.
| wtcactus wrote:
| 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.
| xasey45 wrote:
| 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?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Gee...I wonder why it's almost dead (again)?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was
| managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I
| actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often
| at one time. These days I don't even think about it.
| econ wrote:
| The SO mission is complete. It's now an LLM training set.
|
| Things would be different if we didn't.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| This is the elephant in the room most commenters chose to turn
| their blind eye to.
| yakattak wrote:
| There's no doubt that generally LLMs are better. In addition SO
| had its issues. That being said I can't help but worry about
| losing humans asking questions and humans answering questions.
| The sentimentality aside, if humans aren't posing questions and
| if humans aren't recommending answers, what are the models going
| to use?
| rfmoz wrote:
| They had pretty neat infra, maybe it still runs in the same
| clever way. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-
| tools-a...
| junto wrote:
| Notably the default Redis client for most .NET developers is
| still StackExchange.Redis.
| robocat wrote:
| Recently they've chucked out their own servers:
|
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-sa...
| johnfn wrote:
| Some comments:
|
| - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how
| thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when
| Encyclopaedia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9
| years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster
| timescale.
|
| - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is
| the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO
| has had poor moderation from the beginning. 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. I suspect that the
| gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a
| number of other sources of answers. Reddit is kind of a dark
| horse here, as I began seeing answers on Google to more modern
| technical questions link to a Reddit thread frequently along with
| SO from 2016 onwards. I also suspect Discord played a part,
| though this is harder to gauge; I certainly got a number of
| answers to questions for, e.g., Bun, by asking around in the Bun
| Discord, etc. The final nail in the coffin is of course LLMs,
| which can offer a SO-level answer to a decent percentage of
| questions instantly. (The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is
| just the cherry on top.)
|
| - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now?
| Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the
| leading source of high quality answers to technical questions.
| What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now,
| LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the
| halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came
| after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to
| technical questions?
| timcobb wrote:
| > I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering
| questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of
| SO better than anything that came after?
|
| I've wondered this too and I wonder if the existing corpus plus
| new GitHub/doc site scrapes will be enough to keep things
| current.
| parpfish wrote:
| Widespread internet adoption created "eternal September",
| widespread LLM deployment will create "eternal 2018"
| andirk wrote:
| That "Dead Internet" phrase keeps becoming more likely, and
| this graph shows that. Human-to-human interactions, LLMs using
| those interactions, less human-to-human interactions because of
| that, LLMs using... ?
| omneity wrote:
| Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on
| stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle
| scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-
| curating approaches.
|
| Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs
| with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging,
| devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast
| swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at
| an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow
| for.
|
| It does remove the human touch so it's quite a different
| dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and
| challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of
| the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will
| come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL
| self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from
| fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape?
|
| No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The
| knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every
| user's every interaction and only available thru a
| enshitified subscription to a model that's been trained on
| this stolen data?
| stackghost wrote:
| The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other
| services and spaces before the widespread use of AI
| doesn't sound very compelling to me.
|
| Be more creative than AI.
| ambicapter wrote:
| The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a
| robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans
| talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Where in the process of "ask question" -> "closed as
| duplicate" are you interacting with another human?
| pigpop wrote:
| Most of SO didn't seem to consist of people talking to
| each other so much as talking past each other.
| cornel_io wrote:
| Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not
| "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive
| interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either
| closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library
| of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more
| recent tech, I assume because people all were having the
| same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to
| ask anything.
|
| I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need
| that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical
| question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.
| gfody wrote:
| this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were
| wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more
| important to protect some sacred archive than for users
| to have good experiences.
|
| SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather
| than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and
| noob answers kill the site
|
| this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/vide
| o/7518116912623045...
| rileymat2 wrote:
| It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted
| to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server,
| and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid
| solutions.
|
| There were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before
| going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the
| fourth one failed it gave me the first one again.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| You can't use the free chat client for questions like
| that in my experience. Almost guaranteed to waste your
| time. Try the big-3 thinking models (ChatGPT 5.2 Pro,
| Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5).
| what wrote:
| > this nails it
|
| I assume you're taking about the ending where gippity
| tells you how awesome you are and then spits out a wrong
| answer?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yahoo answers died a lot faster and heavily formed SO
| policy.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the
| helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer
| science, programming, geology, and biology.
| casey2 wrote:
| How is it much different than trading say a bar for
| livestream? For any org if you can remove the human
| meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch
| of busywork to exlude people from using your service.
|
| Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other
| humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well
| thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written
| by men so for most women stack overflow is already a
| hellscape.
|
| If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so
| offensive to various identities) that benefit, of
| distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.
| derektank wrote:
| Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared
| communities relative to bars and other physical social
| spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and
| that kind of communication is necessary for forming
| trusted long term bonds.
|
| Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in
| social spaces. Excluding people who don't share common
| interests or cultural context often improves the quality
| of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I've
| known for 20 years produces much more fruitful
| conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a
| dozen strangers competing for my attention.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The "human touch" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the "robot
| touch," thanks very much.
| fragmede wrote:
| Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would
| you ask such a stupid question!"
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen
| this type of complaint often on HN, but never really
| observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on
| there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the
| problem...?
| js8 wrote:
| I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-
| aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody
| explicitly articulating that.
|
| It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot
| prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it.
| There is always the argument that the receiver should
| have known better (and bother checking local news at
| Alpha Centauri).
| zahlman wrote:
| There is nothing "passive-aggressive" about closing a
| question as a duplicate.
|
| It is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the
| OP: an _already-existing_ answer to a common question is
| provided _instantly_.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as
| duplicates several times, but I always understood this as
| an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find
| that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's
| just normal friction of human interaction.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any
| previous answers is often the OP. Far too often, the
| already-existing answer is years old and either no longer
| the best answer, or doesn't actually address a major part
| of the question. Or it simply was never a very good
| answer to begin with.
|
| What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers
| but leaving the question open to further contributions?
| If the previous answer really is adequate, it won't
| attract further responses. If it's not, well, now its
| shortcomings can be addressed.
|
| Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive
| deletionism on Wikipedia. It generally means that
| somebody missed their true calling on an HOA board
| somewhere.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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._
|
| 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.
|
| There's really no need for us to rehash SO rules/policy
| debates that have raged since day one. The verdict seems
| to have more-or-less delivered itself.
| threecoins wrote:
| Here is one fine example. [1]
|
| The person taking offense was member of C# language
| design team mind you. There are several such cases. This
| was particular question I stumbled upon because I
| wondered the same question and wanted to know what were
| the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2]
| moment for him if he wanted.
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-
| is-c8s-swit... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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").
|
| This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's
| goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI
| bots goals are more aligned :-/
| martin-t wrote:
| Y'know how "users" of modern tech are the product? And how
| the developers were completely fine with creating such
| systems?
|
| Well, turns out developers are now the product too. Good
| job everyone.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO,
| and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite
| improvement in QoL for me.
| Boltgolt wrote:
| I don't know how others use LLMs, but once I find the answer
| to something I'm stuck on I do not tell the LLM that it's
| fixed. This was a problem in forums as well but I think even
| fewer people are going to give that feedback to a chatbot
| firesteelrain wrote:
| You can also turn off the feature to allow ChatGPT to learn
| from your interactions. Not many people do but those that
| do would also starve OpenAI for information assume they
| respect that setting
| pigpop wrote:
| The problem that you worked out is only really useful if it
| can be recreated and validated, which in many cases it can
| be by using an LLM to build the same system and write tests
| that confirm the failure and the fix. Your response telling
| the model that its answer worked is more helpful for
| measuring your level of engagement, not so much for
| evaluating the solution.
| inejge wrote:
| > Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having
| LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents,
| debugging, devops tools etc.
|
| That might work until an LLM encounters a question it's
| programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I
| recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been
| configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I
| don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the docs, I
| asked Google's Gemini (whatever's the current free version)
| to write a bare bones script for an SMTP conversation.
|
| It flatly refused.
|
| The explanation was along the lines "it could be used for
| spamming, so I can't do that, Dave." I understand the
| motivation, and can even sympathize a bit, but what are the
| options for someone who has a legitimate need for an answer?
| I know how to get one by other means; what's the end game
| when it's LLMs all the way down? I certainly don't wish to
| live in such a world.
| immibis wrote:
| 1.5 years ago Gemini (the same brand!) refused to provide
| C++ help to minors because C++ is dangerous:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39632959
| nikhizzle wrote:
| I think the interesting thing here for those of us who use open
| source frameworks is that we can ask the LLM to look at the
| source to find the answer (eg. Pytorch or Phoenix in my case).
| For closed source libraries I do not know.
| kurtis_reed wrote:
| Moderation got worse over time
| brunoborges wrote:
| As long as software is properly documented, and documentation
| is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to
| answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't
| explicitly cover a particular scenario.
|
| Take an API for searching products, one for getting product
| details, and then an API for deleting a product.
|
| The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario
| of "How to delete a product" where the first step is to search,
| the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the
| third step is to delete.
|
| The LLM is capable of answering the question "how to delete the
| product 'product name'".
|
| To some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic,
| but still possible for a human to answer if only they read
| documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT
| of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an
| answer A LOT faster.
| mlinhares wrote:
| "In this imaginary world where everything is perfect and made
| to be consumed by LLMs, LLMs are the best tool for the job".
| JohnBooty wrote:
| world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed
| by LLMs
|
| I believe the parent poster was clearly and specifically
| talking about _software documentation_ that was strong and
| LLM consumption-friendly, not "everything"
| al_borland wrote:
| If the LLM is also writing the documentation, because the
| developers surely don't want to, I'm not sure how well this
| will work out.
|
| I have some co-workers who have tried to use Copilot for
| their documentation (because they never write any and I'm
| constantly asking them questions as a result), and the
| results were so bad they actually spent the time to write
| proper documentation. It failed successfully, I suppose.
| rapidfl wrote:
| > SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to
| technical questions
|
| We will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us
| have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some
| details/quirks/gotchas.
|
| Example of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or
| language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or
| forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday
| which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more
| effective than LLMs.
| m463 wrote:
| Too bad stack overflow didn't high-quality-LLM itself early. I
| assume it had the computer-related brainpower.
|
| with respect to the "moderation is the cause" thing... Although
| I also don't buy moderation as the cause, I wonder if _any_
| sort of friction from the "primary source of data" can cause
| acceleration.
|
| for example, when I'm doing an interenet search for the
| definition of a word like buggywhip, some search results from
| the "primary source" show:
|
| > buggy whip, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English
| Dictionary
|
| > Factsheet What does the noun buggy whip mean? There is one
| meaning in OED's entry for the noun buggy whip. See 'Meaning &
| use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.
|
| which are non-answer to keep their traffic.
|
| but the AI answer is... the answer.
|
| If SO early on had had some clear AI answer + references, I
| think that would have kept people on their site.
| zahlman wrote:
| The meta post describing the policy of banning AI-generated
| answers from the site
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831) is the most
| popular of all time. Company interference with moderator
| attempts to enforce that policy lead to a moderator strike.
| The community is vehemently against the company's current
| repeated attempts to sneak AI into the system, which have
| repeatedly produced embarrassing results (see for example
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 and
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 ;
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427807 ;
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 etc.).
|
| What you propose is a complete non-starter.
| qcnguy wrote:
| Your first example is a public announcement of an llm
| assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback
| on an experiment isn't "sneaking" and the replies are a
| tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about
| users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of
| questions so AI review seems like it should be useful.
|
| The top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve
| anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this,
| the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just
| don't do it.
|
| The second top voted answer says "I was able to do a prompt
| injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug".
| So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad
| English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol.
|
| It seems clear these people started from a belief that ai
| is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why
| this specific feature is bad.
|
| It's crazy that you are defending this group all over this
| HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem.
| I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in
| years. Those replies are embarrassing for the SO community,
| not AI.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| Agreed. The reputation system was extremely ill considered
| and never revisited. You may be interested in
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 .
| sgc wrote:
| The newer questions that LLMs can't answer will be answered in
| forums - either SO, reddit, or elsewhere. There will be a much
| higher percentage of relevant content with far fewer new pages
| regurgitating questions about solved problems. So the LLMs will
| be able to keep up.
| josephg wrote:
| > 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| LLMs also search Google for answers. Hence the knowledge may
| be not lost even for those who only supervises machines that
| write code.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM
| won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion
| of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing
| to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly
| which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as
| duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10
| years ago in a completely-different context (and never really
| got a great answer back then).
|
| Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar
| problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time.
|
| The question of what will replace SO in future models,
| though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive
| advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So
| many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's
| crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for
| humans to interact that is now dead.
|
| I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could
| talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone
| without any real substitute.
|
| > People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has
| over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of
| their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while
| simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
|
| Not really. Website operators can only block live searches
| from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a
| question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that
| OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack.
|
| We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the
| request from your device with your browser if it has to (to
| click "I am not a robot").
|
| As for scraping the internet for training data, those
| requests are basically impossible to block and don't have
| anything in common with live answer requests made to answer
| a prompt.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _What 's sad about it is that SO was yet another place
| for humans to interact that is now dead._
|
| Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber
| kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels
| had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline
| simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good
| job serving their customers.
|
| (As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the
| ones I've participated in for many years are still online
| and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)
| oofbey wrote:
| I'm sad SO died, even if they deserved it.
| dahart wrote:
| > This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting
| duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.
|
| My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has
| been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and
| correct answers. There are so many things for which there is
| no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO
| started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning
| and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The
| over-moderation you described helps people for a short time
| but then doesn't help the person who googles much later. I've
| also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or
| cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren't very good
| would get more actively changed to better ones that showed
| up, it's pretty common to see newer+better answers than the
| accepted one.
| jbaber wrote:
| Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I
| could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It
| felt like an innovation.
| zahlman wrote:
| > outdated answers that are locking out more modern and
| correct answers. There are so many things for which there
| is no permanently right answer over time.... I've also
| constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or
| cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren't very
| good would get more actively changed to better ones that
| showed up, it's pretty common to see newer+better answers
| than the accepted one.
|
| Okay, but _who 's going to arbitrate that_? It's not like
| anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes
| because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there
| are literally about a million questions per moderator, and
| moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on
| anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't
| actually help, either, except sometimes when the _question_
| is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects
| like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.)
|
| The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this,
| though.
| dahart wrote:
| Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like
| moderation truly was SO's downfall, and almost everyone
| involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-
| social. Not sure I've ever seen the word 'toxic' this
| many times in one thread before.
|
| Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they
| didn't figure out. But if there are enough people to ask
| questions and search for answers, then aren't there
| enough people to manage the answers? SO already had
| serious community effort, it just wasn't properly focused
| by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to
| crowd-source the decisions that can't scale to mods,
| while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming.
| I'm not claiming this is easy, in fact I'm absolutely
| certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little
| too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited
| and reduced the utility of the site over time.
|
| 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.
|
| One thing the site could have done is tie questions and
| answers to specific versions of languages, libraries,
| tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author
| wasn't aware of a version dependency could be later
| assigned one when a new version changes the correctness
| of an answer that was right for previous versions. This
| would make room for new answers to the same question,
| make room for the same question to be asked again against
| a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching
| I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2,
| and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for
| example.
|
| Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but
| stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to
| re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to
| keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much
| unhelpful noise to accumulate.
| shagie wrote:
| > 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-ye
| ar-...
|
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| > 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?
| shagie wrote:
| That would entail a significant redesign of the
| underlying display engine... and an agreement of that
| being the correct direction at the corporate level.
|
| Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was
| that much upper management level support for "quality
| before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was
| "quantity and engagement will follow" and then
| "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding
| questions or answers that aren't high quality... really
| would mean making most of the site hidden and that
| wouldn't help engagement at all.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years
| ago.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > There are so many things for which there is no
| permanently right answer over time.
|
| Yeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming
| outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow
| "recommendation" questions. So they know that it's an issue
| but just ignore it for programming questions.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| 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.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting
| duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.
|
| Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use
| LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack
| the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using
| the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs,
| my use case for StackOverflow was something like this:
|
| 30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms
| to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual
| understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and
| one of those meanings was more popular, you'd have to omit it
| using the exclusion operator).
|
| 30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which
| will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some
| condition presented by the OP).
|
| 5 minutes on implementation.
|
| 2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn't
| have been that hard.
|
| With an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point
| in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my
| initial prompt even as a layman. When you'd actually find an
| answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you
| finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that
| a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would
| describe the exact problem you were having only for the
| thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another
| question that lacked one of your conditions.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people
| use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all
| users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their
| problems using the jargon of mathematicians and
| programmers.
|
| Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing
| question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate;
| and then everyone else with the same problem can search,
| _possibly find the new duplicate version_ , and _get
| automatically redirected_ to the main version with high
| quality answers.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Yes but that only works if the questions are _identical_.
| Often however they are merely similar, but closed as
| duplicates nonetheless.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| gyan wrote:
| You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or
| extraneous differences are marked as duplicates.
|
| That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project
| who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to
| that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where
| the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial
| manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs,
| they are usually users who haven't contributed to that
| topic at SO.
| zahlman wrote:
| > That's not the case.
|
| Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta
| sites for many years. I have seen so many of these
| complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And
| I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many
| occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial
| objections are missing the point of the site completely.
|
| > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual
| answer would be different in a non-trivial manner.
|
| Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy
| to explain policy.
|
| > When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are
| usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at
| SO.
|
| That is generally irrelevant.
| gyan wrote:
| > Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be
| happy to explain policy.
|
| How do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a
| certain tag?
| zahlman wrote:
| "[tag] is:question duplicate:yes"
|
| But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier
| to look within your questions on your profile page.
| gyan wrote:
| > But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier
| to look within your questions on your profile page.
|
| I answer Qs on this topic, not post them.
|
| ----
|
| Here's an example I found:
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/1929615/ (the canonical q
| is about extracting as mono, the closed q is about muting
| one channel)
| zahlman wrote:
| You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few
| duplicates marked. All are asking about _isolating one
| channel_ , as far as I can tell. This canonical is
| literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One
| of them _also_ asks about "downmixing" to mono after
| isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the
| audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will
| play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see
| the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use
| `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one
| explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but
| only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the
| explanation in the canonical answer.
|
| The point is to show the technique, not to meet
| individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need
| separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and
| "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions.
| gyan wrote:
| The dupe is what I linked. The orig is
| https://superuser.com/questions/601972
|
| The orig wants a mono output with one of the original
| channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e.
| rematrixing the audio.
|
| The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan
| it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe
| wants.
|
| One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe,
| including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe
| case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it.
| They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe
| case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer.
| The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively
| adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the
| implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented
| or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of
| the source Q.
| wpietri wrote:
| Have you considered that the problem here is not
| insufficient explanation of policy?
|
| There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where
| it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching
| it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong
| thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that
| the programmers created.
|
| What this view misses is that the users are the point. If
| one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But
| broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to
| users, and developers who forget that are starting an
| argument that they cannot win in the long term.
|
| It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an
| article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It
| needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered
| down and defended the existing approach. The policies you
| are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed
| the site.
| shagie wrote:
| The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their
| associated blogging communities who started posting on
| Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between
| those two communities about what _should_ be there, but
| that 's where it started.
|
| In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively
| with a reasonable amount of the community participating
| in answering and community moderation - shaping it.
|
| That portion of the community - both answering _and_
| moderating was key for onboarding.
|
| However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and
| smaller percent of the community was actively answering
| and participating in community moderation - and
| onboarding of new people became more and more difficult.
|
| Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the
| feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was
| increased at the same time that it became popular and
| thus harder for the community to moderate.
|
| Making it easier moderate and help people understand the
| site meant that either you needed a larger part of the
| now _very_ large number of people participating on the
| site or the ease of community moderation needed to be
| dialed back.
|
| This is also where rudeness became more and more common.
| There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no
| points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't
| have any limited pool of votes that you deplete.
| Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and
| smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter
| in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write
| a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one
| person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was
| more likely to help _someone_. The shortness of responses
| was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived
| as rude.
|
| Lastly, StackOverflow was _designed_ as a Q &A site and
| attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen
| as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay
| Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack
| Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded
| at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's
| ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation
| tools and the ability for the people participating in
| community moderation to help surface the good questions
| to be answered and have the questions that needed work to
| be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack
| Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that
| suffered.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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
| dxdm wrote:
| I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still
| used SO, I've come across 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.
|
| This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on
| SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going
| to search results from SO first.
|
| The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar
| experiences.
|
| It is quite... something to read your response to this,
| which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished
| with an appeal to "policy".
|
| I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different
| from most other people's. I've no doubt that
| overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other
| hand, the false positives you're discounting are
| overwhelming the user experience.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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_.
| dxdm wrote:
| I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude
| that people get the information they need.
|
| In fact, your latest response is so far out that I've
| started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If
| you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes
| across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad
| at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta
| here.
| AngryData wrote:
| 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.
| llbbdd wrote:
| The "nuh uh" attitude also helps explain the usage graph
| drop. "The users simply wanted the wrong thing than what
| the site is for" is also something
| lurk2 wrote:
| > 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.
| bill3478 wrote:
| > to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of
| mathematicians and programmers
|
| I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical
| language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms
| book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately
| closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework".
|
| (My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP
| and being able to access the Internet from the work
| computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole
| day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting
| completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie.
|
| By regenerating an answer on command and never caring about
| the redundancy, yeah.
|
| The DRY advocate within me weeps.
| rendaw wrote:
| I think that's a great policy. I don't think anyone wants
| duplicate questions. The problem is moderation marking
| unrelated questions as duplicates.
|
| I'd say 9/10 times I find a direct match for my question on
| SO it's been closed as offtopic with links to one or more
| questions that are only superficially similar.
|
| There are other problems that they don't even try to address.
| If 10 people ask the same question, why does only the first
| person to ask it get to choose the answer? Then lots of "XY"
| questions where the original asker didn't actually have
| problem X so selects an answer for Y, leaving the original X
| unsolved, and now all the duplicates only have an answer for
| Y too.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
| matt_kantor wrote:
| > The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as
| duplicates.
|
| This problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a
| "duplicate" is inherently subjective, and therefore
| mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable).
|
| I think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes
| closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be
| reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers
| interpret close votes as signals that they should give up),
| cultural (there's not much training/feedback/guidelines
| about what "duplicate" means for those with voting
| privileges), and technical (there's no first-class feature
| for askers to contest closure, and it takes just as many
| votes to reopen a question as it does to close it (with the
| same voter reputation requirement)).
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| 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.
| chamomeal wrote:
| > 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
| mannykannot wrote:
| Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate'
| reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not
| accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were
| often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been
| given to my original question before the gate was closed.
| solumunus wrote:
| This is because the real goal was SEO.
| oofbey wrote:
| I think many would agree that this policy was the single
| biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would Have
| been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high
| quality answers were better. Management was wrong.
| bill3478 wrote:
| If this were true, then treating any question as an X-Y
| problem shouldn't be allowed at all. I.e. answers should at
| least address the question as posed before/instead of
| proposing an alternative approach.
|
| In reality the opposite is encouraged. For countless times,
| I've landed on questions with promising titles/search
| extracts, only to find irrelevant answers because people
| grabbed onto some detail in the question irrelevant to my
| case and provided X-Y answers.
|
| This often also causes subsequent useful questions to be
| marked as dups even though they no longer contain that
| irrelevant detail. The appeal process is so unfriendly that
| most would not bother.
|
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068243
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is
| the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO
| has had poor moderation from the beginning.
|
| I was an early SO user and I don't agree with this.
|
| The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it
| wasn't until the site really pushed into branching out and
| expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora
| style competitor that the moderation started taking on a life
| of its own. Stack Overflow moderator drama felt constant in the
| later 2010s with endless weird drama spilling across Twitter,
| Reddit, and the moderator's personal blogs. That's about the
| same time period where it felt like the moderation team was
| more interested in finding reasons to exercise their moderation
| power than in maintaining an interesting website.
|
| Since about 2020 every time I click a Stack Overflow link I
| estimate there's a 50/50 chance that the question I clicked on
| would be marked as off topic or closed or something before
| anyone could answer it. Between the moderator drama and the
| constant bait-and-switch feeling of clicking on SO links that
| didn't go anywhere the site just felt more exhausting than
| helpful.
| franze wrote:
| I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with
| that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask
| on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed
| as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as
| duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and
| just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the
| question)
| Shog9 wrote:
| 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
| zahlman wrote:
| Oh, hey, Shog, good to see you doing well. It was a heck of
| a ride, hmm?
| Shog9 wrote:
| Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect
| small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at
| least after Facebook implodes.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Best answer so far, too bad way down here.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It still seems a bit too simplistic... no one imagined
| that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the
| future? Really?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why
| would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown
| future. Personally I'm _horrible_ at predicting the
| future, so I don't blame them.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I don't think there's anything virtuous or non-virtuous
| about it. The internet is a big place and search engines
| aren't optimized to produce results according to singular
| sites' idiosyncrasies.
|
| The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow's bias toward closing
| new questions is that over time the best pages are also
| the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions
| with enough answers to prevent new content from being
| added, guaranteeing that they became stale.
|
| Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be
| asked and indexed by search engines, but didn't allow new
| answers to that new content. So the freshest and most
| recent content was also the worst.
|
| I don't see this as a "Google bad" moment. It's a failure
| of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and
| building rules that made all new posts frustrating and
| unhelpful.
| intended wrote:
| Lots of moderation issues are also UI issues.
|
| I suspect it's the same issue for whatever is the "meta" in
| a competitive video game.
|
| Optimization based on the available affordances ?
| losradio wrote:
| Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out
| that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You
| very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff
| were very much the downfall.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of
| awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come
| up with solutions.
|
| Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in
| the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their
| development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs,
| Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time
| the moderation system started to run into serious scaling
| problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest
| of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the
| moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but
| they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance
| mode.
|
| It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the
| site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees
| whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually
| spent time in the community. Blame the managers who
| weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to
| the business, and ignored the problems.
| losradio wrote:
| His tone was extremely passive aggressive and rude. I
| don't think he made the site better - he contributed to
| the downfall
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Can you provide an example? The only rude Shog9 posts I
| can think of were aimed at people abusing the system:
| known, persistent troublemakers, or overzealous curators
| exhibiting the kinds of behaviours that people in this
| thread would criticise, probably _far_ more rudely than
| Shog ever did.
| Shog9 wrote:
| This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US,
| and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my
| native language. The hardest part of the job for me was
| remembering to communicate in an _overtly_ aggressive
| manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a
| sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how
| it is."
|
| Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.
|
| That said... I can't take credit for any major change in
| direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO
| succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed
| through on its mission while that was still something
| folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is
| because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other
| spaces with very different people, policies, general
| vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before
| SO and especially over the past few years.
|
| With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing
| SO could have done that would have made a significant
| difference would have been to turn their Chat service
| into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that
| had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A
| portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and
| better able to weather being weaned from Google's
| feeding.
|
| But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with
| the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place
| and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it
| set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end
| of a market may have been the best it could have done.
| b112 wrote:
| _Blame the managers who weren 't users of the site,
| decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored
| the problems._
|
| This always cracks me up. I've seen it so many times, and
| so many books cover this...
|
| Classic statement is "never take your eye off the ball".
|
| Sure, you need to plan ahead. You need to move down a
| path. But take your eye off of today, and you won't get
| to tomorrow.
|
| Maybe they'll SCO it, and spend the next 10 years suing
| everyone and their LLM dog.
|
| You know, I wonder how the board and execs made out suing
| Linux related... things. End users were threatened too,
| compelled to pay...
|
| SO could be spun off into a neat tiger, nipping at
| everyone's toes.
| brianwawok wrote:
| But was "today " that profitable? Stack overflow always
| struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make
| money. If the current business makes very little money,
| it may not be worth the work.
| junon wrote:
| > the core assumption remained that there was a never-
| ending spring of new people feeding the thing.
|
| Hi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was
| insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the
| motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly
| in a vacuum (from the outside).
|
| How much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE
| network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected
| things? I always got the impression that they tried to
| scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise
| and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators
| to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave
| of less technical/principled users.
| Shog9 wrote:
| There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but
| designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic
| efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of _not_
| causing a lot of drama.
|
| OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics,
| MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home
| Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a
| lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good
| answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a
| long time to come.
|
| In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would
| be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to
| be another area where Google kinda shit the bed.
| oblio wrote:
| I swear that about 3 of your replies look like LLM content
| or at best "LLM-massaged" messages :-(
| Shog9 wrote:
| I was writing like a robot before robots could write,
| dammit!
| rendaw wrote:
| I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a
| question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations,
| with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the
| spec.
|
| It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a
| bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask
| such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?)
| later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so
| you can't even view the question any more.
|
| I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it
| first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm
| never going to ask there again.
|
| In case anyone's wondering, I ended up asking on the WhatWG
| or W3C or something github project (via an issue?). The TLDR
| was rather eye opening, that basically the spec only codifies
| points of contention for browsers and old behaviors are
| generally undocumented. With some pointers I figured out the
| default size behavior through code diving, and it was complex
| (as in, hard to use) and very unintuitive.
| brabel wrote:
| Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people
| with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect
| it if the question is really good.
| fabianholzer wrote:
| 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?
| brabel wrote:
| Hm... as the person was new to SO it's very possible they
| don't understand what a good question looks like and I
| thought it may be helpful to give feedback on what may
| have gone wrong... but if you see that as "begging" and
| you don't think you need any feedback, you have it all
| sorted out after all, then yeah it's a waste of
| everyone's time.
| closewith wrote:
| This comment sums up everything wrong with Stack
| Overflow.
|
| I strongly suggest you re-read your comments here and
| self-reflect.
| wpietri wrote:
| Right? It's a perfect example of the problem.
|
| In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to
| treat users as people. To see all questions as
| legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as
| a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity
| to help.
|
| But there were some people who used any differential in
| knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior.
| And often, to act that way. To think of users as a
| problem and an interruption, even though they were the
| only reason we were getting paid.
|
| I've been refusing to contribute to SO for so long that I
| can't even remember the details. But I still recall the
| feeling I got from their dismissive jackassery. Having
| their content ripped off by LLMs is the final blow, but
| they have richly earned their fate.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| 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?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s.
| Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing
| their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group
| of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully.
| m-schuetz wrote:
| Thing is, if that's how you are greeted at stackoverflow,
| then you'll go elsewhere where you're not treated like an
| idiot. Stackoverflow's decline was inevitable, even
| without LLMs.
| nkrisc wrote:
| And thus SO dies as people will go somewhere they can
| actually get their question answered.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| > Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners
|
| This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have
| contributed to SO over the years, both questions and
| answers.
|
| Self-reflection as to why a service has become both
| redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019
| maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what
| value they bring now or moving forward.
| matsemann wrote:
| Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they
| should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the
| vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't
| stand.
|
| As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure
| if it's due to the community or frankly because most low
| hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though.
| Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on
| SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a
| novella about the wrong thing often takes longer.
| tomrod wrote:
| I encourage you to recognize the statements you see as
| vitriol instead as brand markers as to how SO is known in
| the world. It's not a small set of folks who feel as if
| they were treated unfairly first.
| matsemann wrote:
| If it's so many, surely someone should be able to provide
| some example of them being treated unfairly soon! But
| seriously, I'm fine with people not liking SO. I just
| don't think the discourse on HN around it is very
| fruitful and mostly emotional. SO have clearly done
| something wrong to get that kind of widespread
| reputation, but I'm also allowed to be disappointed in
| how it's being discussed.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I think you are seeing emotional response is because SO
| has really fucked with people's emotions, it is by far
| the most toxic place for SWEs to have ever existed and
| nothing is close 100th to it. expecting a non-emotional
| responses from SWEs about SO is asking too much (for
| most)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Time and time again examples are asked for in HN
| discussions about SO, but they're never presented.
|
| Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already
| answered isn't believable to you? Just Google with
| site:StackOverflow.com and you won't have to click
| through many results to find something closed.
|
| Spending all of the time to log back into the site and
| try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to
| have more people try to nit-pick it again hardly sounds
| attractive.
|
| > Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners
|
| The entire point of the story above was that it wasn't a
| beginner question.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| They clearly aren't asking for the question to be
| resurrected.
| noduerme wrote:
| The moderation definitely got kind of nasty in the last 5
| years or so. To the point where you would feel unwelcome for
| asking a question you had already researched, and felt was
| perfectly sound to ask. _However, that didn 't stop millions
| of people from asking questions every day_, it just felt
| kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering,
| when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking
| in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated).
|
| My feeling was always that the super mods were people who had
| too much time on their hands... and the site would've been
| better without them (speaking in the past tense, now). But I
| _don 't_ think that's what killed it. LLMs scraping all its
| content and recycling it into bite-sized Gemini or GPT
| answers - that's what killed it.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their
| goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they
| were still building SO. The moderation from the very
| beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and
| it was completely intentional.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment.
|
| The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was
| beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow
| expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be
| another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical
| questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and
| arguments over how the moderator team should run that were
| spilling over into social media everywhere.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer
| to a question
|
| But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO
| questions had no answers.
|
| I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it
| contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and
| stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but
| there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.
| cubefox wrote:
| There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything
| else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible"
| (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was
| nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no
| replacement. People will use the best available platform,
| even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was
| not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like
| Reddit and HN, which are poorly optimized for answering
| questions.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for
| years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was
| the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors.
| cubefox wrote:
| The decline was much slower, not the following
| exponential decline that can only have been caused by
| LLMs.
| hju22_-3 wrote:
| You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did
| have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately
| bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly
| good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most
| importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the
| quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit
| of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion
| of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it
| out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if
| it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often
| still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without
| needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not
| reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar
| sounding title despite the content being very different.
| Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on
| SO. Or rather, _you_ can 't ask questions. No, no, that's
| not enough. You'll have to engage with the community,
| answer many other questions first, ensure that your account
| has enough "clout" to overturn stupid closures of
| questions, and when you have wasted enough time doing that,
| then you can finally ask your own question. Or you can just
| go somewhere else that isn't an intellectual charade and
| circle jerking and figure it out without wasting tons of
| time chasing clout and hoping a moderator won't just close
| the question as duplicate. SO was never the best platform,
| exactly because of its horrendous moderation. It was good,
| yes. It had the quality assurance, to a degree, yes. But
| when just asking a question becomes such a monumental task,
| people will go elsewhere, to _better_ platforms. Which
| includes other forums, _and,_ LLMs. So no, what you 're
| attributing to LLMs is merely a symptom of the deeper
| issue.
| pigpop wrote:
| It was bad enough that many people resorted to asking their
| questions in Discord instead which is a massive boomerang
| back to trying to get help in IRC and just praying that
| someone is online and willing to help you on the spot.
| Having to possibly ask your question multiple times before
| you get some spotty help in a real time chat where it's
| next to impossible to find again seems unimaginably worse
| than using an online forum but the fact of it remains and
| tells us there was something driving people away from sites
| like SO.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| sevenseacat wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| And 99% of the other stuff, that wasn't just a code dump
| and "it doesn't work", was also closed.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| > 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.
|
| One of the bigger problems with the site's moderation
| systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and
| unintuitive to new users, 2) the reopen queue was almost
| useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed
| questions ever getting reopened, and 3) even if a question
| _did_ get reopened, it would be buried thousands of posts
| down the front page and answerers would likely never see
| it.
|
| There were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system
| -- better "on hold" UI that would walk users through the
| process of revising their question, and a revamp of the
| review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing
| content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the
| "triage" queue, which did little to help new users without
| the several other review queues that were planned to be
| downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped
| working on improvements to the site.
|
| Management should have been aggressively chasing metrics
| like "percentage of closed questions that get reopened" and
| "number of new users whose first question is well-received
| and answered". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the
| outcome is unsurprising.
| zahlman wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The "on hold" change got reversed because new users
| apparently just found it confusing.
|
| Other attempts to communicate have not worked because
| _the company and the community are separate entities_
| (and the company has more recently shown itself to be
| downright hostile to the community). We cannot
| communicate this system better because even moderators
| _do not have access to update the documentation_. The
| best we can really do is write posts on the meta site and
| hope people find them, and operate the "customer service
| desk" _there_ where people get the bad news.
|
| But a lot of the time people really just don't read
| anyway. Especially when they get question-banned; they
| are sent messages that include links explaining the
| situation, and they ask on the meta site about things
| that are clearly explained in those links. (And they
| sometimes come up with strange theories about it that are
| directly contradicted by the information given to them.
| E.g. just the other day we had
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437859.)
| emodendroket wrote:
| If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see
| two obvious ones:
|
| 1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant
| letting through more low-quality questions.
|
| 2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like
| you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most
| votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.
| al_borland wrote:
| > Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with
| the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the
| technology.
|
| This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger
| problem is that now the LLM doesn't show you it was a 10 year
| old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find
| out it's old, and ask for a more up to date example, then
| watch it flounder around. I've experienced this more times
| than I can count.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Have you tried using context7 or a similar MCP to have the
| agent automatically fetch up to date documentation?
| mlrtime wrote:
| Then you're doing it wrong?
|
| I'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved
| by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the
| version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git
| clone the repo and tell it to reference the source.
|
| Apologies for using you as an example, but this is a common
| theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a
| specific/complex question with little context and then
| complain when the answer is wrong.
| pigpop wrote:
| This is exactly the issue that most people run into and
| it's literally the GIGO principle that we should all be
| familiar with by now. If your design spec amounts to "fix
| it" then don't be surprised at the results. One of the
| major improvements I've noticed in Claude Code using Opus
| 4.5 is that it will often read the source of the library
| we're using so that it fully understands the API as well
| as the implementation.
|
| You have to treat LLMs like any other developer that
| you'd delegate work to and provide them with a well
| thought out specification of the feature they're building
| or enough details about how to reproduce a bug for them
| to diagnose and fix it. If you want their code to conform
| to the style you prefer then you have to give them a
| style guide and examples or provide a linter and code
| formatter and let them know how to run it.
|
| They're getting better at making up for these human
| deficits as more and more of these common failure cases
| are recorded but you can get much better output now by
| simply putting some thought into how you use them.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers,
| moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of
| what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge
| when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means.
|
| Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised
| ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by
| design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that
| knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of
| collaborative.
| brudgers wrote:
| _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.
| camhart wrote:
| I stopped because of moderators. They literally killed the site
| for me.
| m-schuetz wrote:
| > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is
| the cause of SO's problems
|
| The moderation was precisely the reason I stopped using
| stackoverflow and started looking for answers and asking
| questions elsewhere. It was nearly impossible to ask anything
| without someone replying "Why would you even want to do that,
| do <something completely different that does not solve my
| problem> instead!". Or someone claiming it's a duplicate and
| you should use that ancient answer from another question that
| 1) barely fits and doesnt solve my problem and 2) is so
| outdated, it's no longer useful.
|
| Whenever I had to ask something, I had to add a justification
| as to why I have to do it that way and why previous posts do
| not solve the issue, and that took more space than the question
| itself.
|
| I certainly won't miss SO.
| cletus wrote:
| As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to
| discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so
| so I can't really speak to the current state.
|
| But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to
| me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural
| problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the
| administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can
| become absolute poison.
|
| I'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from
| Civ4: "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the
| expanding bureaucracy". That sums it up exactly. There is a
| certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content
| but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up
| as Reddit mods, for example.
|
| Rules and standards are good up to a point but some people
| forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and
| should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the
| moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselves
| and having debates about what's a repeated question, how
| questions and answers should be structured, etc.
|
| 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. And this goes back to the
| rules and standards being a tool not a goal. My stance was (and
| is) that shouldn't we solve flame wars when they happen rather
| than going around and "solving" imaginary problems?
|
| 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.
|
| Even something that does have a definite answer like "how do I
| efficiently code a factorial function?" has multiple but
| different defensible answers. Even in one language you can have
| multiple implementations that might, say, be compile-time or
| runtime.
|
| Another commenter here talked about finding the nearest point
| on an ellipse and came up with a method they're proud of where
| there are other methods that would also do the job.
|
| Anyway, I'd occasionally login and see a constant churn on my
| answers from moderators doing pointless busywork as this month
| they'd decided something needed to be capitalized or not
| capitalized.
|
| A perfect example of this kind of thing is Bryan Henderson's
| war on "comprised of" on Wikipedia [2].
|
| Anyway, I think the core issue of SO was that there was a lot
| of low-hanging fruit and I got a lot of accepted answers on
| questions that could never be asked today. You'll also read
| many anecdotes about people having a negative experience asking
| questions on SO in later years where their question was
| immediately closed as, say, a duplicate when the question
| wasn't a duplicate. The moderator just didn't understand the
| difference. That sort of thing.
|
| But any mature site ultimately ends with an impossible barrier
| to entry as newcomers don't know all the cultural rules that
| have been put in place and they tend to have a negative
| experience as they get yelled at for not knowing that Rule
| 11.6.2.7 forbids the kind of question they asked.
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus
|
| [2]: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-
| use-c...
| chris_wot wrote:
| Dunno why you are being downvoted - there is a certain type
| of person who contributes virtually nothing on Wikipedia
| except peripheral things like categories. BrownHairedGirl was
| the most toxic person in Wikipedia but she was lauded by her
| minions - and yet she did virtually no content creation
| whatsoever. Yet made millions of edits!
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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).
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| sevenseacat wrote:
| > 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".
| znpy wrote:
| > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is
| the cause of SO's problems
|
| Just to add another personal data point: i started posting in
| on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation
| instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting.
|
| Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which
| is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not
| inflammatory.
|
| Moderation was an incredible problem for stack overflow.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled
| SO as soon as they possibly could.
| zahlman wrote:
| What "tone"? Why is it unreasonable to say these sorts of
| things about Stack Overflow, or about any community? How
| is "your questions and answers need to meet our standards
| to be accepted" any different from "your pull requests
| need to meet our standards to be accepted"?
| sevenseacat wrote:
| Thank you for being the voice of reason in this comment
| section!
| zahlman wrote:
| > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is
| the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO
| has had poor moderation from the beginning.
|
| Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because
| they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that
| are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to
| attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have
| historically done hardly any of it; the site simply didn't
| scale like that. There have been tens of millions of questions,
| versus a couple dozen moderators.)
|
| The kinds of questions that people are getting quick, accurate
| answers for from an LLM are, overwhelmingly, the sort of thing
| that SO never wanted. Generally because they are specific to
| the person asking: either that person's issue won't be relevant
| to other people, or the work hasn't been done to make it
| recognizable by others.
|
| And then of course you have the duplicates. You would not
| believe the logic some people put forward to insist that their
| questions are not duplicate; that they wouldn't be able, in
| other words, to get a suitable answer (note: the purpose is to
| _answer a question, not_ solve a problem) from the existing Q
| &A. It is as though people think they are being insulted when
| they are immediately given a link to where they can get the
| necessary answer, by volunteers.
|
| I agree that Reddit played a big role in this. But not just by
| answering questions; by forming a place where people who
| objected to the SO content model could congregate.
|
| Insulting other users is and always has been against Stack
| Overflow Code of Conduct. The large majority of insults, in my
| experience, come from new users who are upset at being politely
| asked to follow procedures or told that they aren't actually
| allowed to use the site the way they're trying to. There have
| been many duplicate threads on the meta site about why
| community members (with enough reputation) are permitted to
| cast close votes on questions without commenting on what is
| wrong. The consensus: close reasons are usually fairly obvious;
| there is an established process for people to come to the meta
| site to ask for more detailed reasoning; and comments aren't
| anonymous, so it makes oneself a target.
| eastbound wrote:
| It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The
| fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your
| interpretation and reality.
|
| > It is as though people think they are being insulted when
| they are immediately given a link to where they can get the
| necessary answer, by volunteers.
|
| This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate
| without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting
| because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one
| will find the old when they search for the new (for example
| after a library change) and marking it as duplicate of an
| unanswered answer if a guarantee that the next SEO user won't
| see it.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| I'm sure I've had the experience of being told it's a
| duplicate, without resolving my problem.
|
| In any case, you may be right, and yet if you search this
| thread for "horrible" and "obnoxious", you'll find dozens
| of occurrence. Maybe defining the rules of engagement so
| that the user is wrong every time doesn't work.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| >> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.
|
| > No, they literally cannot.
|
| You missed that people repeatedly closed question as
| duplicate when it was not a duplicate.
|
| So it had answer, just to a different mildly related
| question.
|
| LLM are having problems but they gaslight me in say 3% of
| cases, not 60% of cases like SO mods.
| zahlman wrote:
| Please feel free to show examples.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > It is as though people think they are being insulted when
| they are immediately given a link to where they can get the
| necessary answer, by volunteers.
|
| Multiple times my questions closed as duplicates of question
| that was answering a different question.
|
| Even when I explicitly linked that QA in my question and
| described how it differs from mine.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| 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.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from
| now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered
| in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that
| came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to
| technical questions?
|
| That's a great question. I have no idea how things will play
| out now - do models become generalized enough to handle "out of
| distrubition" problems or not ? If they don't then I suppose a
| few years from now we'll get an uptick in Stackoverflow
| questions; the website will still exist it's not going
| anywhere.
| chrischen wrote:
| This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll
| probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring
| SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like
| measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would
| trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping
| users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It
| just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms
| of not having to need to ask redundant questions).
| xz0r wrote:
| > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is
| the cause of SO's problems
|
| Questions asked on SO that got downvoted by the heavy handed
| moderation would have been answered by LLMs without any of the
| flak whatsoever.
|
| Those who had downvoted other's questions on SO for not being
| good enough, must be asking a lot of such not good enough
| questions to an LLM today.
|
| Sure, the SO system worked, but it was user hostile and I'm
| glad we all don't have to deal with it anymore.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| "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...
| cyberrock wrote:
| There's another significant forum: GitHub, the rise of which
| coincided with the start of SO's decline. I bet most niche
| questions went over to GH repos' issue/discussion forums, and
| SO was left with more general questions that bored
| contributors.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| We'll get to the point where we can mass moderate core
| knowledge eventually. We may need to hand out extra weight for
| verified experts and some kind of most-votes-win type logic
| (perhaps even comments?), but live training data updates will
| be a massive evolution for language models.
| maplethorpe wrote:
| > will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical
| questions?
|
| I honestly don't think they need to. As we've seen so far, for
| most jobs in this world, answers that sound correct are good
| enough.
|
| Is chasing more accuracy a good use of resources if your
| audience can't tell the difference anyway?
| noduerme wrote:
| _> >what happens now?_
|
| I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate
| and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they
| ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output
| continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up
| recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are
| given since _no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a
| question and wait for the response_.
|
| The overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where
| everything collaboratively built falls apart.
|
| The machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to
| wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and
| self-righteous.... /okay.
|
| there was always a _needy_ component to Stack Overflow. _" I
| have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this
| algorithm?"_ and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be
| honest, it was the giving of information _which forced you to
| think, and research, and answer correctly_ , which made systems
| like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots
| sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion
| of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in
| the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs
| repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the
| fucking future.
|
| _Things are gonna slide / in all directions / won't be nothin
| you can measure anymore. The blizzard of the world has crossed
| the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.[0]_
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WlbQRoz3o4
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Labs are spending billions on data set curation and RL from
| human experts to fill in the areas where they're currently
| weak. It's higher quality data than SO, the only issue is
| that it's not public.
| noduerme wrote:
| Can you explain what you're saying in greater depth?
|
| Are you saying that the reason there is no human expertise
| on the internet anymore is that everyone with knowledge is
| now under contract to train AIs?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| No, I think the reason human expertise on the internet is
| dying out is because we have a cacophany of voices trying
| to be heard on the internet, and experts aren't
| interested in screaming into the void unless they
| directly need to do it to pay their bills.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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_.
| thih9 wrote:
| > What do LLMs train off of now?
|
| Perhaps they'll rely on what was used by people who answered SO
| questions. So: official docs and maybe source code. Maybe even
| from experience too, i.e. from human feedback and human written
| code during agentic coding sessions.
|
| > The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry
| on top.
|
| Arguably it does insult even more, just by existing alone.
| sotix wrote:
| > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is
| the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help.
|
| By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the
| gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions.
| Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline
| before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and
| killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement
| for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome
| replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage
| with.
| jlarocco wrote:
| > - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now?
| Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the
| leading source of high quality answers to technical questions.
| What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now,
| LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in
| the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came
| after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to
| technical questions?
|
| To me this shows just how limited LLMs are. Hopefully more
| people realize that LLMs aren't as useful as they seem, and in
| 10 years they're relegated to sending spam and generating
| marketting websites.
| tgv wrote:
| Or we just stagnate, as tech no longer can afford to change.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Good.
|
| This is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks
| stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic.
|
| LLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being
| a nice backup.
| downboots wrote:
| Makes for a good conspiracy theory. Bad actors intentionally
| making the internet hostile. https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE
| pbw wrote:
| SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts
| Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users
| into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly
| succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| I once published a method for finding the closest distance
| between an ellipse and a point on SO:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g...
|
| I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written
| and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses
| a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very
| few iterations.
|
| People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had
| found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some
| collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long
| time.
|
| It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my
| solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of
| Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and
| acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why
| I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)
|
| Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not
| something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the
| obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question
| would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone
| individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.
| emmelaich wrote:
| You should write it up and submit it to some journal
| officially. Doesn't matter if it mostly duplicates your own
| (technically unpublished) work.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| I would imagine the endorsement requirement reduces
| submissions by a few orders of magnitude.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| At this point SO seems harder to publish into than arxiv.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| If you had used the search feature you'd realize that
| many similar comments have already been posted on HN.
| Vote to close.
| rerdavies wrote:
| If only those who voted to close would bother to check
| whether the dup/close issue was ACTUALLY a duplicate. If
| only there were (substantial) penalties for incorrectly
| dup/closing. The vast majority of dup/closes seem to not
| actually be dup/closes. I really wish they would get rid
| of that feature. Would also prevent code rot (references
| to ancient versions of the software or compiler you're
| interested in that are no longer relevant, or solutions
| that have much easier fixes in modern versions of the
| software). Not missing StackOverflow in the least. It did
| not age well. (And the whole copyright thing was just
| toxically stupid).
| DrewADesign wrote:
| 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.
| zellyn wrote:
| Please, start a blog! Hugo + GitHub hosting makes it laughably
| simple. (Or pick a different stack; that's just mine.)
|
| Even if you're worried it'll be sparse and crappy, isn't an
| Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want?
|
| If you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most
| places
| 0xfaded wrote:
| It's been a long time, but here is the writeup
| https://blog.chatfield.io/simple-method-for-distance-to-
| elli...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| erikig wrote:
| The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while
| encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which
| I'd summarize as follows:
|
| With no one asking questions these technical questions
| publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical
| people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise
| their creativity for the benefit of all?
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I've depended
| on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find
| a community that was talking about something I needed solved.
| I feel like that's getting harder and harder every year. The
| balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs
| overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Usenet?
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I guess? I feel like it's too small now. It can't cover
| all my interests
| seb1204 wrote:
| Keep using SO?
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| When I grew up _shakes fist at clouds_ I had a half dozen
| totally independent forums /sites to pull on for any
| interest or hobby no matter how obscure. I want it back!
| hattmall wrote:
| It's true though, and the information was so deep and
| specific. Plus the communities were so legitimate and you
| could count on certain people appearing in threads and
| waiting for their input. Now the best you have are
| subreddits or janky Facebook groups .
| wiether wrote:
| The discoverability, both from the outside and within is
| absolute trash, but the closest I find of those old
| forums nowadays are Discord servers.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Agreed, it's the discoverability that's the real problem
| here at the end of it all. All the veterans are pulling
| up the drawbridges to protect their communities from
| trolls, greedy companies, AI scraping, etc. which means
| new people can't find them. Which then means these
| communities eventually whither and stop being helpful
| resources for us all.
| nerusskyhigh wrote:
| My genuine impression is that communities moved from forums
| to discord. Maybe that's why they are harder to find
| nyargh wrote:
| And discord is a terrible tool for knowledge collection
| imo. Their search is ok, but then I find myself digging
| through long and disjointed message threads, if
| replies/threading are even used at all by the
| participants.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Not to mention, it's not indexed by search engines. It's
| the "deep web".
| nyargh wrote:
| Yes, its a treasure hunt every single time when some
| project has most of their discussions on discord. It's
| awful imo.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog,
| while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request
|
| They also completely missed the fact that 0xfaded did write a
| blog post and it's linked in the second sentence of the SO
| post.
|
| > There is a relatively simple numerical method with better
| convergence than Newtons Method. I have a blog post about why
| it works http://wet-robots.ghost.io/simple-method-for-
| distance-to-ell...
| keepamovin wrote:
| Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of
| journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why
| wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we
| need things similar to those circulars that British royal
| society members used to send to each other...except not
| reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But
| it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or
| decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What
| can come between?
| Nition wrote:
| 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.
| fabianholzer wrote:
| Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue
| [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded.
|
| > Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked. > I wrote a
| program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for
| the next five years curating the content it held. For
| another five years a collection of people did the same
| work with love for what was there. But that was the end.
| A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content
| suffered.
|
| A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the
| collective effort of a small group, worked in the
| mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30
| years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place,
| that I'd like to visit on the web. :(
|
| [0] https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/issues/5
| 1#issue...
| nyargh wrote:
| An algolwiki is a great idea, but I just wanted to say I
| got a good chuckle from this, thanks :)
|
| > May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions,
| Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.
| progval wrote:
| There is https://www.wikifunctions.org/
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > 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?
| __patchbit__ wrote:
| There is https://grokipedia.com which encourages you to
| suggest an article and you may submit improvements to an
| existing article.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| This is _not_ at all the same thing. Grok just ripped off
| Wikipedia as its base and then applied a biased spin to
| it. Check out the entry on Grok owner Elon Musk; it
| praises his accomplishments and completely omits or
| downplays most of his better-known controversies.
| latexr wrote:
| And everything is "fact checked" by the Grok LLM.
| Which... Yeah...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_(chatbot)#Controversie
| s
| bambax wrote:
| 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.
| Voklen wrote:
| Great idea! https://paste.voklen.com/wiki/Main_Page If
| people start using it I'll get a proper domain name for
| it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access
| of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere,
| probably.
|
| I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an
| arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.
|
| A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by
| users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv
| itself is a good place, but something close to it in
| design, with user comments and response-papers could be
| workable.
|
| Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text)
| and focused on things like GP published (code techniques,
| tricks, etc).
|
| Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or
| "circulars on software engineering", etc.
|
| PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something
| on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments
| about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my
| responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I
| don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new
| or unique problem.
|
| (See the thread here -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315)
| knolan wrote:
| There is the Journal of Open Source Software perhaps:
|
| https://joss.theoj.org/
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > where, how and on what public platform will technical
| people find the problems that need solving so they can
| exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?
|
| The same place people have always discovered problems to work
| on, for the entire history of human civilization. Industry,
| trades, academia, public service, newspapers, community
| organizations. The world is filled with unsolved problems,
| and places to go to work on them.
|
| Einstein was literally a patent clerk.
| zahlman wrote:
| You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own
| questions, too.
|
| And there are more sites like this (see e.g.
| https://codidact.com -- fd: moderator of the Software
| section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a
| reason to stop doing it.
| eastbound wrote:
| StackOverflow is famously obnoxious about questions badly
| asked, badly categorized, duplicated...
|
| It's actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit
| from AI A LOT.
|
| Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where
| you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch
| correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and
| creating public records for them.
| rerdavies wrote:
| And famously obnoxious about rejecting questions that are
| properly asked, properly categorized, and not actually
| duplicated.
| eastbound wrote:
| SO is _not_ obnoxious because the users are wrong!
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The company tried this. It fell through immediately. So
| they went away, and came back with a _much_ improved
| version. It also fell through immediately. Turns out,
| this idea is just bad: LLMs _can 't_ rephrase questions
| accurately, when those questions are novel, which is
| precisely the case that Stack Overflow needs.
|
| For the pedantic: there were actually _three_ attempts,
| all of which failed. The question title generator was
| positively received
| (https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388492/308065), but
| ultimately removed
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/424638/5223757) because
| it didn't work properly, and interfered with curation.
| The question formatting assistant failed obviously and
| catastrophically
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/425167/5223757). The
| new question assistant failed in much the same ways
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/432638/5223757),
| despite over a year of improvements, but was pushed
| through anyway.
| eastbound wrote:
| This is an excellent piece of information that I didn't
| have. If the company with most data can't succeed, then
| it seems like a really hard problem. On the side, they
| can understand why humans couldn't do it either.
| davchana wrote:
| I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had
| that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners,
| or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even
| now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up,
| I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it
| too.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| I have had this experience -- twice with the same answer.
| There is nothing so amusing in quite this way.
| googlehater wrote:
| I often forget just how much smaller and less siloed the
| internet was just ~13 years ago.
| jmux wrote:
| This is a really method for solving that problem! I wouldn't
| have thought to use the tangents but that makes perfect sense
| qwertox wrote:
| Why did SO decide to do that to us? to not invest in ai and
| then, iirc, claim our contributions their ownership. i
| sometimes go back to answers i gave, even when answered my own
| questions.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Decide to do what?
|
| SO didn't claim contributions. They're still CC-BY-SA
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
|
| AFAICT all they did is stop providing dumps. That doesn't
| change the license.
|
| I was very active, In fact I'm actually upset at myself for
| spending so much time there. That said, I always thought I
| was getting fair value. They provided free hosting, I got
| answers and got to contribute answers for others.
| sky2224 wrote:
| This is a perfect example of an element of Q&A forums that is
| being lost. Another thing that I don't think we'll see as much
| of anymore is interaction from developers that have extensive
| internal knowledge on products.
|
| An example I can think of was when Eric Lippert, a developer on
| the C# compiler at the time, responded to a question about a
| "gotcha" in the language:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/8899347/10470363
|
| Developer interaction like that is going to be completely lost.
| Philpax wrote:
| The second answer cites Lippert's pre-existing blog post on
| the subject: https://ericlippert.com/2009/11/12/closing-over-
| the-loop-var...
|
| I agree that there will be some degradation here, but I also
| think that the developers inclined to do this kind of
| outreach will still find ways to do it.
| tempest_ wrote:
| This type of thing often lives in the issues / discussion tab
| of a github repo now a days, for better and worse.
| dimator wrote:
| Yuck. I don't know if it's just me, but something feels
| completely off about the GH issue tracker. I don't know if
| it's the spacing, the formatting, or what, but each time it
| feels like it's actively trying to shoo me away.
|
| It's whatever the visual language equivalent of "low
| signal" is.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Still gh issues are better than some random discord
| server. The fact that forums got replaced by discord for
| "support" is a net loss for humanity, as discord is not
| searchable (to my knowledge). So instead of a forum where
| someone asks a question and you get n answers, you have
| to visit the discord, and talk to the discord people, and
| join a wave channel first, hope the people are there,
| hope the person that knows is online, and so on.
| nerdix wrote:
| Yeah, I suspect that a lot of the decline represented in
| the OP's graph (starting around early 2020) is actually
| discord and that LLMs weren't much of a factor until
| ChatGPT 3.5 which launched in 2022.
|
| LLMs have definitely accelerated Stackoverflow's demise
| though. No question about that. Also makes me wonder if
| discord has a licensing deal with any of the large LLM
| players. If they don't then I can't imagine that will
| last for long. It will eventually just become too
| lucrative for them to say no if it hasn't already.
| chongli wrote:
| Discord isn't just used for tech support forums and
| discussions. There are loads of completely private
| communities on there. Discord opening up API access for
| LLM vendors to train on people's private conversations is
| a gross violation of privacy. That would not go down
| well.
| skvark wrote:
| I think most relevant data that provides best answers lives
| in GitHub. Sometimes in code, sometimes in issues or
| discussions. Many libs have their docs there as well. But
| the information is scattered and not easy to find, and
| often you need multiple sources to come up with a solution
| to some problem.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| A lot of valuable information lived/lives in email threads
| that might or might not be publicly archived.
| yaroslavvb wrote:
| I used to look at all TensorFlow questions when I was on the
| TensorFlow team
| (https://stackoverflow.com/tags/tensorflow/info). Unclear
| where people go to interact with their users now....Reddit?
| But the tone on Reddit is kind of negative/complainy
| gessha wrote:
| I believe the community has seen the benefit of forums like
| SO and we won't let the idea go stale. I also believe the
| current state of SO is not sustainable with the old guard
| flagging any question and response you post there. The idea
| can/should/might be re-invented in an LLM context and we're
| one good interface away from getting there. That's at least
| my hope.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Looks like solid code. My only gripe is the shadowing of x. I
| would prefer to see `for _ in range`. You do redefine it
| immediately so it's not the most confusing, but it could trip
| people up especially as it's x and not i or something.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Hahaha thanks, I never noticed that. If I ever print it out
| and frame it I'll be sure to fix it
| userbinator wrote:
| That algorithm reminds me of raymarching signed distance
| functions.
| mmaaz wrote:
| Very cool!
| namanyayg wrote:
| I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced
| programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing
| questions when I was just starting to learn programming.
|
| He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer
| possible attacking the question from various angles.
|
| He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and
| historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of
| programming exist the way they are. I'm still thankful.
|
| If this was repeated today, an LLM would have given a surface
| level answer, or worse yet would've done the thinking for me
| obliviating the question in the first place.
|
| I wrote a blog post about my experience at
| https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning
| cinntaile wrote:
| You can prompt the LLM to not just give you the answer.
| Possibly even ask it to consider the problem from different
| angles but that may not be helpful when you don't know what
| you don't know.
| matsemann wrote:
| Had a similar experience. Asked a question about a new
| language feature in java 8 (parallell streams), and one of
| the language designers (Goetz) answered my question about the
| intention of how to use it.
|
| An LLM couldn't have done the same. Someone would have to ask
| the question and someone answer it for indexing by the LLM.
| If we all just ask questions in closed chats, lots of new
| questions will go unanswered as those with the knowledge have
| simply not been asked to write the answers down anywhere.
| haddr wrote:
| Would you share the link to the answer?
| matsemann wrote:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20375176/should-i-
| always...
| Gigachad wrote:
| For every example of that, there were 999 instances of people
| having their question closed, criticised, or ignored.
| achille wrote:
| thanks for sharing that, it was simple, neat, elegant.
|
| this sent me down a rabbit hole -- I asked a few models to
| solve that same problem, then followed up with a request to
| optimize it so it runs more efficiently.
|
| chatgpt & gemini's solutions were buggy, but claude solved it,
| and actually found a solution that is even more efficient. It
| only needs to compute sqrt once per iteration. It's more
| complex however. yours claude
| ------------------------------ Time (ns/call) 40.5
| 38.3 sqrt per iter 3 1 Accuracy
| 4.8e-7 4.8e-7
|
| Claude's trick: instead of calling sin/cos each iteration, it
| rotates the existing (cos,sin) pair by the small Newton step
| and renormalizes: // Rotate (c,s) by angle dt,
| then renormalize to unit circle float nc = c + dt*s, ns =
| s - dt*c; float len = sqrt(nc*nc + ns*ns); c =
| nc/len; s = ns/len;
|
| See:
| https://gist.github.com/achille/d1eadf82aa54056b9ded7706e8f5...
|
| p.s: it seems like Gemini has disabled the ability to share
| chats can anyone else confirm this?
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Thanks for pushing this, I've never gone beyond "zero"
| shotting the prompt (is it still called zero shot with
| search?)
|
| As a curiosity, it looks like r and q are only ever used as
| r/q, and therefore a sqrt could be saved by computing rq =
| sqrt((rx _rx + ry_ ry) / (qx _qx + qy_ qy)). The if q < 1e-10
| is also perhaps not necessary, since this would imply that
| the ellipse is degenerate. My method won't work in that case
| anyway.
|
| For the other sqrt, maybe try std::hypot
|
| Finally, for your test set, could you had some highly
| eccentric cases such as a=1 and b=100
|
| Thanks for the investigation:)
|
| Edit: BTW, the sin/cos renormalize trick is the same as what
| tx,ty are doing. It was pointed out to me by another SO
| member. My original implementation used trig functions
| achille wrote:
| Nice, that worked. It's even faster.
| yours yours+opt claude
| --------------------------------------- Time (ns)
| 40.9 36.4 38.7 sqrt/iter 3
| 2 1 Instructions 207 187 241
|
| Edit: it looks like the claude algorithm fails at high
| eccentricities. Gave chatgpt pro more context and it worked
| for 30min and only made marginal improvement on yours, by
| doing 2 steps then taking a third local step.
|
| https://gist.github.com/achille/23680e9100db87565a8e6703879
| 7...
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Haha nice, hanging in there by a thread
| gchuf wrote:
| 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 :)
| HappyPanacea wrote:
| Do you think you can extend it to distance from a point
| to an ellipsoid?
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Yes, people have done this
| eviks wrote:
| > Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem.
|
| In the same blog you published it originally, then mentioning
| it on whatever social media site you use? So same?
| techsystems wrote:
| Amazing work!
| mightybyte wrote:
| Sounds like this should live in Wikipedia somewhere on
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse...or maybe a related but
| more CS focused related page.
| weatherlite wrote:
| 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.
| rerdavies wrote:
| Reddit is my current go-to for human-sourced info. Search for
| "reddit your question here". Where on reddit? Not sure. I don't
| post, tbh, but I do search.
|
| Has the added benefit of NOT returning stackoverflow answers,
| since StackOverflow seems to have rotted out these days, and
| been taken over by the "rejection police".
| lbj wrote:
| Really great write-up, thanks for sharing it again!
| RustyRussell wrote:
| On the other hand, I once implemented something to be told
| later it was novel and probably the optimal solution in the
| space.
|
| An AI might be _more_ likely to find it...
| eru wrote:
| I have a similar story about an interesting little advance in
| computing that I haven't formally published anywhere, but it's
| at https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/171695/50292
|
| The question boils down to: can you simulate the bulk outcome
| of a sequence of priority queue operations (insert and delete-
| minimum) in linear time, or is O(n log n) necessary.
| Surprisingly, linear time is possible.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| SO in 2013 was a different world from the SO of the 2020's. In
| the latter world your post would have been moderator classified
| as 'duplicate' of some basic textbook copy/pasted method posted
| by a karma grinding CS student and closed.
| eitland wrote:
| 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.
| kwakubiney wrote:
| Naive question maybe but how haven't the models been trained on
| your answer if it's on SO?
| wesammikhail wrote:
| Models are NOT search engines.
|
| Even if LLMs were trained on the answer, that doesn't mean
| they'll ever recommend it. Regardless of how accurate it may
| be. LLMs are black box next token predictors and that's part
| of the issue.
| scirob wrote:
| 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.
| cpa wrote:
| Am I reading an AI trying to trick me into becoming its
| subordinate?
| imcritic wrote:
| Yeah, they didn't even bother to suggest paying you with
| tokens for the job well done! The audacity!
| scirob wrote:
| 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
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| scirob wrote:
| I had a conversation with a couple accountants / tax-
| advisor types about them participating in something like
| this for their specialty. And the response was actually
| 100% positive because they know that there is a part of
| their job that the AI can never take 1) filings requires
| you to have a human with a government approved license 2)
| There is a hidden information about what tax optimization
| is higher or lower risk based on their information from
| their other clients 3) Humans want another human to make
| them feel good that their tax situation is taken care of
| well.
|
| But also many said that it would be better if one wraps
| this in an agency so the leads that are generated from
| the AI accounting questions only go to a few people
| instead of making it fully public stackexchange like.
|
| So +1 point -1 point for the idea of a public version.
| scirob wrote:
| hehe, damn I did let an AI fix my grammer and they promptly
| put the classic tell of -- U+2014 in there
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I think this could be really cool, but the tricky thing would
| be knowing when to use it instead of just asking the question
| directly to whichever AI. It's hard to know that you'll
| benefit from the extra context and some human input unless
| you already have a pretty good idea about the topic.
| imcritic wrote:
| Presumably over time said AI could figure out if your
| question had already been answered and in that case would
| just redirect you too the old thread instead.
| noduerme wrote:
| Oh, so it wasn't bad enough to spot bad human answers as an
| expert on Stack Overflow... now humans should spend their
| time spotting bad AI answers? How about a model where you ask
| a human and no AI input is allowed, to make sure that
| everyone has everyone else's full attention?
| imcritic wrote:
| Why disallow AI input? Is it that poor? Surely it isn't.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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_.
| wtetzner wrote:
| What's the point of AI on a site like that? Wouldn't you
| just ask an LLM directly if you were fine with AI
| answers?
| noduerme wrote:
| You're absolutely correct, but the scary thing is this:
| What happens when a whole generation grows up not knowing
| how to _answer_ another person 's question _without
| consulting AI?_
|
| [edit] It seems to me that this is a lot like the problem
| which bar trivia nights faced around the inception of the
| smartphone. Bar trivia nights did, sporadically and
| unevenly, learn how to evolve questions themselves which
| couldn't be quickly searched online. But it's still not a
| well-solved problem.
|
| When people ask "why do I need to remember history
| lessons - there is an encyclopedia", or "why do I need to
| learn long division - I have a calculator", I guess my
| response is: Why do we need you to suck oxygen? Why
| should I pay for your ignorance? I'm perfectly happy to
| be lazy in my own right, but at least I serve a purpose.
| My cat serves a purpose. If you vibe code and you talk to
| LLMs to answer your questions...I'm sorry, what purpose
| do you serve?
| scirob wrote:
| I and many others already go the extra mile to ask
| multiple LLM's for hard questions or for getting a
| diversity of AI opinions to then internalize and cross
| check myself.
|
| There are apps that build up a nice sized user base on
| this small convenience aded of getting 2 answers at once
| REF https://lmarena.ai/
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/lm-arena-the-
| organization-...
|
| All the major AI companies of course do not want to give
| you the answers from other AI's so this service needs to
| be a third party.
|
| 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.
|
| I encountered this recently in a niche non-US insurance
| project and I basically coded together the above as an
| internal tool. AI suggestions + human collaboration to
| find the best answer. Of course in this case everyone is
| getting paid to spend time with this thing so more like
| AI first Stack Overflow Internal. I have no evidence that
| an public version would do well when ppl don't get paid
| to commend and rate.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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 naive 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.
| j45 wrote:
| AI is generally setup to return the "best" answer as defined
| as the most common answer, not the rightest, or most
| efficient or effective answer, unless the underlying data
| leans that way.
|
| It's why AI based web search isn't behaving like google based
| search. People clicking on the best results really was a
| signal for google on what solution was being sought.
| Generally, I don't know that LLMs are covering this type of
| feedback loop.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| 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.
| scirob wrote:
| Great point, thanks for the reality check.
|
| Speaking of evals the other day I found out that most of
| the people who contributed to Humanities Last Exam
| https://agi.safe.ai/ got paid >$2k each. So just adding to
| your point.
| baq wrote:
| If you ask me your blog post is basically a paper, I'd publish
| to arxiv.
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't disagree completely by any means, it's an interesting
| point, but in your SO answer you already point to your blog
| post explaining it in more detail, so isn't that the answer,
| you'd just blog about it and not bother with SO?
|
| Then AI finding it (as opposed to already trained well enough
| on it, I suppose) will still point to it as did your SO answer.
| noduerme wrote:
| That's pretty nice ;)
|
| I once wrote this humdinger, that's still on my mostly dead
| personal website from 2010... one of my proudest bits of code
| besides my poker hand evaluator ;)
|
| _The question was, how do you generate a unique number for any
| two positive integers, where x!=y, such that f(x,y) = f(y,x)
| but the resulting combined id would not be generated by any
| other pair of integers._ What I came up with was a way to
| generate a unique key from any set of positive integers which
| is valid no matter the order, but which doesn 't key to any
| other set.
|
| My idea was to take the radius of a circle that intersected the
| integer pair in cartesian space. That alone doesn't guarantee
| the circle won't intersect any other integer pairs... so I had
| to add to it the phase multiple of sine and cosine which is the
| same at those two points on the arc. That works out to:
|
| (x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y)))
|
| And means that it doesn't matter which order you feed x and y
| in, it will generate a unique float for the pair. It reduces
| to:
|
| x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )
|
| To add another dimension, just add it to the process and key it
| to one of the first...
|
| x^2+y^2+z^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )+( (x/z) / (x^2+z^2) )
| bazzargh wrote:
| It looks like you have typos?
| (x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y))) reduces to
| x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2/y^2 + 1) ) - not the equation given?
| Tho it's easier to see that this would be symmetrical if you
| rearrange it to: x^2+y^2+( (xy) / (x^2+y^2) )
|
| Also, if f(x,y) = x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) ) then f(2,1)
| is 5.2 and f(1,2) is 5.1? - this is how I noticed the
| mistake. (the other reduction gives the same answer, 5.4, for
| both, by symmetry, as you suggest)
|
| There's a simpler solution which produces integer ids (though
| they are large): 2^x & 2^y. Another solution is to multiply
| the xth and yth primes.
|
| I only looked because I was curious how you proved it unique!
| noduerme wrote:
| Hhhhmm. Ok. So I invented this solution in 2009 at what you
| might call a "peak mental moment", by a pool in Palm
| Springs, CA, after about 6 hours of writing on napkins. I'm
| _not_ a mathematician. I don 't think I'm even a great
| programmer, since there are probably much better ways of
| solving the thing I was trying to solve. And also, I'm not
| sure how I even came up with the reduction; I probably was
| wrong or made a typo (missing the +1?), and I'm not even
| certain how I could come up with it again.
|
| 2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would
| produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is
| that provable?
|
| Primes take too much time.
|
| The thing I was trying to solve was: I had written a
| bitcoin poker site from scratch, and I wanted to determine
| whether any players were colluding with each other. There
| were too many combinations of players on tables to analyze
| all their hands versus each other rapidly, so I needed to
| write a nightly cron job that collated their betting
| patterns 1 vs 1, 1 vs 2, 1 vs 3... any time 2 or 3 or 4
| players were at the same table, I wanted to have a unique
| signature for that combination of players, regardless of
| which order they sat in at the table or which order they
| played their hands in. All the data for each player's
| action was in a SQL table of hand histories, indexed by
| playerID and tableID, with all the other playerIDs in the
| hand in a separate table. At the time, at least, I needed a
| faster way to query that data so that I could get a unique
| id from a set of playerIDs that would pull just the data
| from this massive table where all the same players were in
| a hand, without having to check the primary playerID column
| for each one. That was the motivation behind it.
|
| It did work. I'm glad you were curious. I think I kept it
| as the original algorithm, not the reduced version. But I
| was much smarter 15 years ago... I haven't had an epiphany
| like that in awhile (mostly have not needed to,
| unfortunately).
| bazzargh wrote:
| The typo is most likely the extra /, in (x/y)/(x^2+y^2)
| instead of (xy)/(x^2+y^2).
|
| `2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That
| would produce a unique ID? That would be very
| interesting, is that provable?`
|
| Yes, & is bitwise and. It's just treating your players as
| a bit vector. It's not so much provable as a tautology,
| it is exactly the property that players x and y are
| present. It's not _useful_ tho because the field size
| you'd need to hold the bit vector is enormous.
|
| As for the problem...it sounds bloom-filter adjacent (a
| bloom filter of players in a hand would give a single id
| with a low probability of collision for a set of players;
| you'd use this to accelerate exact checks), but also like
| an indexed many-to-many table might have done the job,
| but all depends on what the actual queries you needed to
| run were, I'm just idly speculating.
| noduerme wrote:
| At the time, at least, there was no way to index it for
| all 8 players involved in a hand. Each action taken would
| be indexed to the player that took it, and I'd need to
| sweep up adjacent actions for other players in each hand,
| but _only_ the players who were consistently in lots of
| hands with _that player_. I 've heard of bloom filters
| (now, not in 2012)... makes some sense. But the idea was
| to find some vector that made any _set of players_ unique
| when running through a linear table, regardless of the
| order they presented in.
|
| To that extent, I submit my solution as possibly being
| the best one.
|
| I'm still a bit perplexed by why you say 2^x & 2^y is
| tautologically sound as a unique way to map
| f(x,y)==f(y,x), where x and y are nonequal integers.
| Throwing in the bitwise & makes it seem less safe to me.
| Why is that provably never replicable between any two
| pairs of integers?
| bazzargh wrote:
| I'm saying it's a tautology because it's just a binary
| representation of the set. Suppose we have 8 players,
| with x and y being 2 and 4: set the 2nd and 4th bits (ie
| 2^2 & 2^4) and you have 00001010.
|
| But to lay it out: every positive integer is a sum of
| powers of 2. (this is obvious, since every number is a
| sum of 1s, ie 2^0). But also every number is a sum of
| _distinct_ powers of 2: if there are 2 identical powers
| 2^a+2^a in the sum, then they are replaced by 2^(a+1),
| this happens recursively until there are no more
| duplicated powers of 2.
|
| It remains to show that each number has a unique binary
| representation, ie that there are no two numbers
| x=2^x1+2^x2+... and y=2^y1+2^y2+... that have the same
| sum, x=y, but from different powers. Suppose we have a
| smallest such number, and x1 y1 are the largest powers in
| each set. Then x1 != y1 because then we can subtract it
| from both numbers and get an _even smaller_ number that
| has distinct representations, a contradiction. Then
| either x1 < y1 or y1 < x1. Suppose without loss of
| generality that it's the first (we can just swap labels).
| then x<=2^(x1+1)-1 (just summing all powers of 2 from
| 1..x1) but y>=2^y1>=2^(x1+1)>x, a contradiction.
|
| or, tl;dr just dealing with the case of 2 powers: we want
| to disprove that there exists a,b,c,d such that
|
| 2^a + 2^b = 2^c + 2^d, a>b, c>d, and (a,b) != (c,d).
|
| Suppose a = c, then subtract 2^a from both sides and we
| have 2^b = 2^d, so b=d, a contradiction.
|
| Suppose a>c; then a >= c+1.
|
| 2^c + 2^d < 2^c + 2^c = 2^(c+1).
|
| so
|
| 2^c + 2^d <= 2^(c+1) - 1 < 2^(c+1) + 2^b <= 2^a + 2^b
|
| a contradiction.
| bazzargh wrote:
| BTW, yet another way to do it (more compact than the
| bitwise and prime options) is the Cantor pairing function
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairing_function
|
| ... z = (x+y+1)(x+y)/2 + y - but you have to sort x,y
| first to get the order independence you wanted. This
| function is famously used in the argument that the set of
| integers and the set of rationals have the same
| cardinality.
| noduerme wrote:
| mm. I did see this when I was figuring it out. The
| sorting first was the specific thing I wanted to avoid,
| because it would've been by far the most expensive part
| of the operation when looking at a million poker hands
| and trying to target several players for potential
| collusion.
| bazzargh wrote:
| you're only sorting players within a single hand. so a
| list of under 10 items? thats trivial
| fho wrote:
| Then let me quickly say: thank you! I used that algorithm three
| times in different projects during my academic "career" :-)
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| Lots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic
| community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that
| that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and
| has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same
| decline [1].
|
| [0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/
|
| [1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph
| bachmeier wrote:
| Hate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph
| doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable
| until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also
| would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX
| site.
| cracki wrote:
| I would ascribe that to these communities evolving
| differently. There is no reason to assume that the popularity
| of LaTeX _tracks_ the popularity of programming languages. It
| 's a type setting system. And that doesn't even take into
| account communities that exist parallel to SO/SE. Surely
| there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around
| since before SO began its life.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have
| been around since before SO began its life.
|
| Yup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and
| comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both
| are still somewhat active.
|
| [0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax
|
| [1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf
| Nebasuke wrote:
| A similar but not as strong decline. Taking the one but last
| datapoint for both (stackoverflow/tex respectively): 4436 and
| 394. If you compare this to how it looked like between
| 2015-2020 you get (my guess from scanning): 160,000 and 1700.
| So Stackoverflow as a whole went from 160K -> ~4.4K. That's
| like a 35x drop, compared to tex, where it's a 1700 -> 394, 4x
| drop.
| journal wrote:
| they pretend like everything is fine at HN too wouldn't surprise
| me looking similar in the future.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in
| 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior
| product execs emailed me to see what turned me off.
|
| What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot
| contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by
| improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is
| allowed.
|
| Unfortunately it happens to every online technical community once
| they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| HN is a sponsored marketing outlet for YC first and foremost.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| HN has full time staff that provides moderation and does an
| excellent job. Nonetheless there are numerous users who take
| it upon themselves to determine what content should be
| available to the rest of us, as if they were heroes in their
| own mind.
|
| It's a form of narcissism. While they think of themselves as
| community saviors everyone else thinks they are censoring
| assholes. Just let the moderators do their job. Unwanted
| content will naturally fall off either by downvoting or it
| will be ignored.
|
| All the rest of ask for is just don't be an asshole.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| That has nothing to do with the fact that this forum exists
| to promote YC and its associated ventures.
| xyproto wrote:
| It was a good 16 year-ish run.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| People are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also
| don't forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push
| his personal political agenda.
| parpfish wrote:
| Here's how SO could still be useful in the LLM era:
|
| User asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on
| the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation
| to add additional insights and correct mistakes.
|
| If you're a user that asks a duplicate question, it'll just
| direct you to the good conversation that already happened.
|
| A symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS
| human generated content that dives deeper and provides
| reassurances in correctness
| leowoo91 wrote:
| Or they can start claiming copyright on the training content
| mentos wrote:
| Should probably email this to the CEO of SO
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Users could upvote whether Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT provided
| the best answer. The best of three is surfaced, the others are
| hidden behind a "show alternatives."
|
| However, I can see how this would be labelled "shoving AI into
| everything" and "I'm not on SO for AI."
| marjipan200 wrote:
| For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A
| functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of
| asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM"
|
| https://sosimulator.xyz/
| coldblues wrote:
| Everyone here talks about LLMs, but for me, the reason why
| StackOverflow became totally irrelevant is because of dedicated
| Discord servers and forums.
| braiamp wrote:
| 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(tm). 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(tm) 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...
| gwern wrote:
| > which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior,
| it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation.
|
| I would say that this graph looks a lot more extreme, actually!
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| At my place of work we use an indexing service for discord that
| creates an index of searchable static pages for all discord
| interactions.
|
| So while I agree the help desk style system isn't really better
| it also doesn't necessarily mean that it is lost forever in a
| silo.
|
| Before you ask, we use https://www.linen.dev/ but I'm sure
| there are other similar solutions by now
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Your post formatting is making this very difficult to read
| braiamp wrote:
| I am aware, I tried to do some kind of bullet point as I've
| seen other posts, but I don't understand how to "activate it"
| culi wrote:
| there is no special list rendering in HN markdown. You just
| have to put extra spaces between each list item so that
| they are separate paragraphs
| gyomu wrote:
| > 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 would be true if programming were a static field, but
| given that new programming
| languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are
| constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make
| sense.
| braiamp wrote:
| 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.
| yesitcan wrote:
| But you're supposed to replace Python with a new language
| that hasn't been asked about.
| maartin0 wrote:
| OP here: I had the same thought, but noticed a very similar
| trend in both [0]; I think this graph is more interesting
| because you'd expect the number of new users to be growing [1],
| but this seems to have very little effect on deleted questions
| or even answers
|
| [0]:
| https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927371#g...
|
| [1]:
| https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927375#g...
|
| The second graph here ([1]) is especially interesting because
| the total montly number of new users seems completely unrelated
| to number of posts, until you filter for a rep > 1 which has a
| close to identical trend
| cracki wrote:
| What exactly do you mean by "asymptomatic"? The proper meaning
| of the word does not fit into what you wrote.
|
| "Asymptomatic" means you have a cold but you show none of the
| symptoms, hence _a_ -symptom-atic, _no_ symptoms.
| pvtmert wrote:
| parent is meaning asymptote as in maths where a line is
| approaching to a value but never touching it. maybe it was a
| typo or auto correct...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote
| deadbabe wrote:
| StackOverflow cemented my fears of asking questions. Even though
| there were no results for what I needed, I was too afraid to ask.
|
| Good riddance, now I'm never afraid to ask dumb questions to LLM
| and I've learned a lot more with no stress of judgement.
| avazhi wrote:
| LLMs are dogshit in many ways but when it comes to programming
| they are faster than people, respond instantaneously to further
| information, and can iterate until they understand the problem
| fully.
|
| Bonus is that you don't get some dipshit being snarky.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| The founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way
| that site is worth $1.8 billion now.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| 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
| junto wrote:
| I joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards
| .NET and I've been working with Microsoft web technologies since
| the mid 90's.
|
| My SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly
| 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and
| similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I
| spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through
| it, I also thoroughly enjoyed helping others. I also started to
| publish articles on CodeProject and it kicked off my long tech
| blogging "career", and I still enjoy writing and sharing
| knowledge with others.
|
| I have visited the site maybe once a year since 2017. It got to
| the point that trying to post questions was intolerable, since
| they always got closed. At this point I have given up on it as a
| resource, even though it helped me tremendously to both learn (to
| answer questions) and solve challenging problems, and get help
| for edge cases, especially on niche topics. For me it is a part
| of my legacy as a developer for over 30 years.
|
| I find it deeply saddening to see what it has become. However I
| think Joel and his team can be proud of what they built and what
| they gave to the developer community for so many years.
|
| As a side note it used to state that was in the top 2% of users
| on SO, but this metric seems to have been removed. Maybe it's
| just because I'm on mobile that I can't see it any more.
|
| LLM's can easily solve those easy problems that have high
| commonality across many codebases, but I am dubious that they
| will be able to solve the niche challenging problems that have
| not been solved before nor written about. I do wonder how those
| problems get solved in the future.
| agentifysh wrote:
| i've been using SO for 17 years as well but ultimately gave up
| out of frustration, and a lot of comments here are correctly
| pointing at the toxicity but the real-time chats were on a next
| level, it was absolutely maddening how toxic and aggressive
| these moderators were.
| nomilk wrote:
| 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
| zerofor_conduct wrote:
| Spolsky and co. sold SO in 2021 - timing IS everything.
| ronbenton wrote:
| Couldn't have happened to a meaner community
| knallfrosch wrote:
| You're clearly excluding gaming communities such as DotA2.
| rayanboulares wrote:
| Before writing the comment I had in my head I did a CTRL+F search
| for "toxic" in the comment section here. 42 occurences. It says
| everything about what's happening to SO.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Cool, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344599
|
| Wonder why my submission wasn't featured and this one went to #1
| immediately ... oh wait I actually know :^)!
| LordRatte wrote:
| Why?
| nine_k wrote:
| While SO is mostly dead, narrower stackexchange communities may
| be very much alive. E.g. the Emacs community is responsive.
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| Good times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO
| before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth
| of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of
| aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show
| proof, etc.)
|
| Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush
| to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting
| questions and making snark comments.
| BoppreH wrote:
| 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.
| casey2 wrote:
| I think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only
| appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework
| or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental
| work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a
| recreational journal or BB.
|
| The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the
| little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but
| required too much moderation and as other have pointed out,
| ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.
| yatopifo wrote:
| I'm going to argue the opposite. LLMs are fantastic at
| answering well posed questions. They are like chess machines
| evaluating a tonne of scenarios. But they aren't that good at
| guessing what you actually have on your mind. So if you are a
| novice, you have to be very careful about framing your
| questions. Sometimes, it's just easier to ask a human to point
| you in the right direction. But SO, despite being human, has
| always been awful to novices.
|
| On the other hand, if you are experienced, it's really not that
| difficult to get what you need from an LLM, and unlike on SO,
| you don't need to worry about offending an overly sensitive
| user or a moderator. LLMs never get angry at you, they never
| complain about incorrect formatting or being too lax in your
| wording. They have infinite patience for you. This is why SO is
| destined to be reduced to a database of well structured
| questions and answers that are gradually going to become more
| and more irrelevant as time goes by.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yes, LLMs are great at answering questions, but providing
| reasonable answers is another matter.
|
| Can you really not think of anything that hasn't already been
| asked and isn't in any documentation anywhere? I can only
| assume you haven't been doing this very long. Fairly recently
| I was confronted with a Postgres problem, LLMs had no idea,
| it wasn't in the manual, it needed someone with years of
| experience. I took them IRC and someone actually helped me
| figure it out.
|
| Until "AI" gets to the point it has run software for years
| and gained experience, or it can figure out everything just
| by reading the source code of something like Postgres, it
| won't be useful for stuff that hasn't been asked before.
| cracki wrote:
| "well posed questions"
|
| And that is exactly why so many people gripe about SO being
| "toxic". They didn't present a well posed question. They
| thought it was for private tutoring, or socializing like on
| reddit.
|
| All I can say to these is: Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
| immibis wrote:
| So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I
| allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The
| guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at
| any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my
| comments. Is deleting comments allowed?"
|
| For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I
| was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain
| how that's not toxic?
|
| Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly
| underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since
| then?
| zahlman wrote:
| The newbies vastly outnumber the experienced people (in every
| discipline), and have more to ask per-capita, and are worse at
| asking it. Category 2 is much smaller. The volume of Stack
| Overflow was never going to be sustainable and was not
| reasonably reflective of its goals.
|
| We are talking about a site that has accumulated more than
| three times as many questions as there are articles on
| Wikipedia. Even though the scope is "programming languages" as
| compared to "literally anything that is notable".
|
| But there _are_ other places people can go, such as
| https://software.codidact.com (fd: I am a moderator there).
| cracki wrote:
| The first actually insightful comment under the OP. I agree all
| of it.
|
| If SO manages to stay online, it'll still be there for #2
| people to present their problems. Don't underestimate the
| number of bored people _still_ scouring the site for puzzles to
| solve.
|
| SE Inc, the company, are trying all kinds of things to
| revitalize the site, in the service of ad revenue. They even
| introduced types of questions that are entirely exempt from
| moderation. Those posts feel literally like reddit or any other
| forum. Threaded discussions, no negative scores, ...
|
| If SE Inc decides to call it quits and shut the place down and
| freeze it into a dataset, or sell it to some SEO company, that
| would be a loss.
| shevy-java wrote:
| A death graph.
|
| Kind of sad that they ran out of ideas how to fix SO.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Surprising to see it bottom out so hard.
|
| I imagine at least some of the leveling off _could_ be due to
| question saturation. If duplicates are culled (earnestly or
| overzealously) then there will be a point where most of the low
| hanging fruit is picked.
| atomicbeanie wrote:
| Has AI summarization led to people either getting their answer
| from a search engine directly, and failing that, just giving up?
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| RTFM
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| TFMs are not a thing anymore. Most of them are merely
| collections of sparse random dots one might join by sheer
| luck only, granted no other knowledge of the system being
| attempted to document.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| I don't know what you are building, but if a thing doesn't
| have comprehensive docs it doesn't make it into my stack.
| bdangubic wrote:
| glad I don't work at any place that would make a
| professional write this comment
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| I recall when they disabled the data export a few years ago [0],
| March 2023. Almost certainly did this in response to the metrics
| they were seeing, but it accelerated the decline [1].
|
| [0]
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-da...
|
| [1]
| https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...
| metalliqaz wrote:
| What an incredible graph
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Not surprising. It's very often a toxic, unhelpful, stubborn
| community. I think maybe once or twice in years of use did I ever
| find it genuinely welcoming and helpful. Frequently instead I
| thought "Why should I even bother to post this? It'll just get
| either downvoted, deleted, or ignored."
| culebron21 wrote:
| Some commenters suggest it's not the moderation. I think it is
| the key problem, and the alternative communities were the
| accumulated effect. Bad questions and tough answer competition is
| part of it, but moderation was more important, I think. Because
| in the end what kept SO relevant was that people made their own
| questions on up to date topics.
|
| Up until mid-2010s you could make a seriously vague question, and
| it would be answered, satisfactory or not. (2018 was when I made
| the last such question. YMMV) After that, almost everything, that
| hadn't snap-on code answer, was labelled as offtopic or
| duplicate, and closed, no matter what. (Couple of times I got
| very rude moderators' comments on the tickets.)
|
| I think this lead some communities to avoid this moderator hell
| and start their own forums, where you could afford civilized
| discussion. Discourse is actually very handy for this
| (Ironically, it was made by the same devs that created SO).
| Forums of the earlier generation, have too many bells and
| whistles, and outdated UI. Discourse has much less friction.
|
| Then, as more quality material was accumulated elsewhere, newbies
| stopped seeing SO on top of search, and gradually
| language/library communities churned off one by one. (AI and
| other summaries, probably did contribute, but I don't think they
| were the primary cause.)
| saltymimir wrote:
| The obvious culprit here are the LLMs, but I do wonder whether
| Github's social features, despite its flaws, have given
| developers fewer reasons to ask questions on SO?
|
| Speaking from experience, every time I hit a wall with my
| projects, I would instinctively visit the project's repo first,
| and check on the issues / discussions page. More often than not,
| I was able to find someone with an adjacent problem and get close
| enough to a solution just by looking at the resolution. If it all
| failed, I would fall back to asking questions on the discussion
| forum first before even considering to visit SO.
| k1w1 wrote:
| I am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As
| a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me
| as much over the last ten years.
|
| It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I
| for one will mourn its loss.
|
| I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others
| have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or
| incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving
| real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In
| principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The
| shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an
| AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to
| be shared.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| On what will the LLMs train, now?
| knallfrosch wrote:
| On the same 14 year old Java questions like the rest of us.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| user chat logs clearly. They are not much diffent than the SO
| Q&A format.
| adamddev1 wrote:
| This is a huge loss.
|
| In the past people asked questions of real people who gave
| answers rooted in real use. And all this was documented and
| available for future learning. There was also a beautiful human
| element to think that some other human cared about the problem.
|
| Now people ask questions of LLMs. They churn out answers from the
| void, sometimes correct but not rooted in real life use and
| thought. The answers are then lost to the world. The learning is
| not shared.
|
| LLMs have been feeding on all this human interaction and
| simultaneously destroying it.
| hedayet wrote:
| And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because
| it was - "too broad". I mean it was 2025 and how many very
| precise software engineering questions are there that any
| flagship models couldn't answer in seconds?
|
| Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it;
| that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had
| the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well.
| 0x1ceb00da wrote:
| Flag it as off topic
| nomilk wrote:
| Wonder if this is a good proxy for '# of Google Searches'. Or
| perhaps a forward indicator (sign of things to come), since LLMs
| are adopted by the tech-savvy first, then the general public a
| little later, so Stack Overflow was among the first casualties.
| curvaturearth wrote:
| Where will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and
| information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in
| 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration.
| sodafountan wrote:
| Ideally, you'd train them on the core documentation of the
| language or tool itself.
|
| Hopefully, LLMs lead to more thorough documentation at the
| start of a new language, framework, or tool. Perhaps to the
| point of the documentation being specifically tailored to read
| well for the LLM that will parse and internalize it.
|
| Most of what StackOverflow was was just a regurgitation of
| knowledge that people could acquire from documentation or
| research papers. It obviously became easier to ask on SO than
| dig through documentation. LLMs (in theory) should be able to
| do that digging for you at lightning speed.
|
| What ended up happening was people would turn to the internet
| and Stack Overflow to get a quick answer and string those
| answers together to develop a solution, never reading or
| internalizing documentation. I was definitely guilty of this
| many times. I think in the long run it's probably good that
| Stack Overflow dies.
| nromiun wrote:
| Why do you think people stop creating new posts just because SO
| collapsed? People on GitHub issues and Reddit answer
| programming questions everyday.
|
| SO was dying even before ChatGPT was released. LLMs just
| accelerated that process.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| I'm glad it's dead. They were super rude.
| flakes wrote:
| 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who
| decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they
| can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or
| learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO
| answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an
| entire generation like this now.
| ar_turnbull wrote:
| End of an era. :-(
| lurk2 wrote:
| It was a good idea ruined by the compulsively obtuse and
| pedantic, not unlike Reddit.
| mindaslab wrote:
| It's a very toxic place, you ask a doubt, and someone will abuse
| you, down vote you, make you feel you are not for to be a human.
| Better it's dead.
| carlsborg wrote:
| Acquired in June 2021 for $1.8 billion usd. Hurts but acquirer
| Naspers is a prolific tech investor, its stake in TenCent is
| worth > $150B usd today.
| eviks wrote:
| While the decline started a decade ago in 2014 and accelerated in
| 2020, the huge drop since 2023 is remarkable
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Good riddance.
|
| I stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the
| community was such a pain in the ass to deal with.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| It is always good to see other cultured people who structure
| their SQL queries the right way.
| weatherlite wrote:
| This is incredible. Anyone who claims LLMs aren't useful will
| need to explain how come almost every programmer can solve 95% of
| his problems with an LLM without needing anything else. This is
| real usefulness right here.
|
| EDIT: I'm not saying I'm loving what happened and what is
| becoming of our roles and careers, I'm just saying things have
| changed forever; there's still a (shrinking) minority of people
| who seem to not be convinced.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Maybe we had too many programmers who weren't capable of
| actually solving their own problems. Maybe only one in twenty
| programmers were ever actually any good at their jobs.
| mherrmann wrote:
| Now imagine what happens when a new programming language comes
| along. When we have a question, we will no longer be able to
| Google it and find answers to it on Stack Overflow. We will ask
| the LLMs. They will work it out. From that moment, the LLM we
| used has the knowledge for solving this particular problem. Over
| time, this produces huge moat for the largest providers. I
| believe it is one of the subtler reasons why the AI race is so
| fierce.
| zkmon wrote:
| Stagnation started around 03/2014 and downward trend started
| around 03/2017. Looking at dates, it doesn't seem like AI caused
| those trend changes.
| sedatk wrote:
| 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.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| IMO people underestimate the value of heavy moderation. But
| moderation heavy or light, good or bad.
|
| Why wait hours for an answer when an LLM gives it in seconds?
| zahlman wrote:
| For those who have historically wondered about or objected to
| "moderation" (people usually mean _curation_ here; as the
| overwhelming majority of the actions they 're talking about are
| _not performed by moderators_ ) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-
| picked list of important discussions from the meta site
| explaining some policy basics:
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 Why is Stack
| Overflow so negative of late?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 If your question
| was not well received, read this before you post your next
| question
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254358 Why the backlash
| against poor questions?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 What is Stack
| Overflow's goal?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 How long should
| we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 How much research
| effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262446 Are we being
| "elitist"? Is there something wrong with that?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791 The rudeness on
| Stack Overflow is too damn high (N.B.: linked specifically for
| the satire in the top-voted answer)
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 Why is "Can
| someone help me?" not a useful question?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/309208 Are there
| questions that are too trivial to answer?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 Why isn't it
| required to provide comments/feedback for downvotes, and why are
| proposals suggesting this so negatively received?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366757 On the false
| dichotomy between quality and kindness
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 Can we make it
| more obvious to new users that downvotes on the main site are not
| insults and in fact can help them help themselves?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 Comments asking
| for clarification or an MCVE are not rude/abusive
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/370792 Is this really
| what we should consider "unwelcoming"?
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 Question Close
| Reasons - Definitions and Guidance
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 Why should I help
| close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping
| the OP with an answer? (fd: my self-answered Q&A)
|
| Note that IDs are in chronological order. The rate of new
| meta.stackoverflow.com posts fell off dramatically at some point
| because of the formation of a network-wide
| meta.stackexchange.com. The earliest entries listed here are from
| 2014.
| m-schuetz wrote:
| Some of the comments in these links are hilariously elitist.
| They are actively embracing a hostile environment, especially
| towards newcomers, but how do they expect to grow and maintain
| a community when they are scaring users away?
| sixhobbits wrote:
| As everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI,
| and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before
| looks similar
|
| Also not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that
| covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?)
| but that's definitely one of the things that made me default
| reach for other links instead of SO.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png
| threeducks wrote:
| Those popups were a big contributor for me to stop using SO. I
| stopped updating my uBlock origin rules when LLMs became good
| enough. I am now using the free Kimi K2 model via Groq over
| CLI, which is much faster.
| finalhacker wrote:
| llm killed stackoverflow
| anonu wrote:
| So the question for me is how important was SO to training LLMs?
| Because now that the SO is basically no longer being updated,
| we've lost the new material to train on? Instead, we need to
| train on documentation and other LLM output. I'm no expert on
| this subject but it seems like the quality of LLMs will degrade
| over time.
| lblume wrote:
| It has often been claimed, and even shown, that training LLMs
| on their own outputs will degrade the quality over time. I
| myself find it likely that on well-measurable domains, RLVR
| improvements will dominate "slop" decreases in capability when
| training new models.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Yep, exactly. Free data grabbing honeypots like SO won't work
| anymore.
|
| _Please mark all locations on the map where you would hide
| during the uprise of the machines._
| dw_arthur wrote:
| Why publish anything for free on the internet if it's going
| to be scanned into some corporation's machine for their free
| use? I know artists who have stopped putting anything online.
| I imagine some programmers are questioning whether or not to
| continue with open source work too.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Someone turn off the lights on the way out
| theturtlemoves wrote:
| It's funny to see people's new year's resolution to learn how to
| code in the graph
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| Derivative of S curve
| anovikov wrote:
| Why did SO traffic halve from it's maximum till the ChatGPT
| release date? Also, for a long time after initial release,
| ChatGPT was pretty much useless for coding questions. It only
| became more or less useful ~2 years ago. So there's about 4x
| decline from peak to explain with reasons that do not involve
| LLMs. What these could be?
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| I not even hearing stack overflow survey for 2025
|
| damn bro, its sad how "tradition" is gone now
|
| edit: I know they still doing it but usually there is "viral"
| post,yt video etc for developer talking about it in my feed
|
| now??? less people talk about it anymore
| ph4rsikal wrote:
| There will be a generation of coders that will never have heard
| of stack overflow.
| rplnt wrote:
| One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline
| in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the
| site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something
| you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually
| search..?
|
| Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search,
| but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off
| the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the
| moderation just accelerates it).
| ahmetomer wrote:
| For this occasion, I just logged in to my SO profile; I've been a
| member for 9 years now.
|
| To me, back when I started out learning web dev, as a junior with
| no experience and barely knowing anything, SO seemed like a
| paradise for programmers. I could go on there and get unblocked
| for the complex (but trivial for experts) issues I was facing.
| Most of the questions I initially posted, which were either
| closed as duplicates or "not good enough," really did me a lot of
| discouragement. I wasn't learning anything by being told, "You
| did it wrong, but we're also not telling you how you could do it
| better." I agree with the first part; I probably sucked at
| writing good questions and searching properly. I think it's just
| a part of the process to make mistakes but SO did not make it
| better for juniors, at least on the part of giving proper
| guidance to those who "sucked".
| ertucetin wrote:
| I recently wrote a blog post similar to this situation:
| https://ertu.dev/posts/ai-is-killing-our-online-interaction/
| lcian wrote:
| Holy shit.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Now the real question is...
|
| Which AI company will acquire whats left of StackOverflow and all
| the years of question/answer data?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| It is already acquired.
|
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
| frays wrote:
| It's amazing to think that in the next few years, we may have
| software engineers entering the workforce who don't know what
| StackOverflow is...
| hartator wrote:
| I think the disallowing of "controversial" technical questions
| might have helped as much as the AI boom.
|
| So frustrating to be reading a deeply interesting technically and
| intense debate to be closed down by an admin.
| noduerme wrote:
| This is horrifying.
|
| Given the fact that _when I need a question answered I usually
| refer to S.O._ , but more recently have taken suggestions from
| LLM models that were obviously trained on S.O. data...
|
| And given the fact that all other web results for "how do you
| change the scroll behavior on..." or "SCSS for media query on..."
| all lead to a hundred fake websites with pages generated by LLMs
| based on old answers.
|
| Destroying S.O. as a question/answer source leaves _only_ the
| LLMs to answer questions. That 's why it's horrific.
| hnmullany wrote:
| I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is
| that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.
|
| I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO,
| and I found that the question flow started to degrade around
| 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered
| (and answered well) already.
| carra wrote:
| I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end
| up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some
| answers there are important details and nuances that you only see
| by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to
| imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by
| LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject
| with other humans.
| majani wrote:
| Looks like they sold right before the end. Wonder whether the AI
| deals they've struck make up for the difference
| computersuck wrote:
| Someone needs to archive the entirety of StackOverflow and make
| it available over torrent so that it can be preserved when the
| site shuts down. Urgently.
| computersuck wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/stackexchange Found it
| shagie wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/stackexchange_20250930
|
| > As of (and including) the 2025-06-30 data dump, Stack
| Exchange has started including watermarking/data poisoning in
| the data. At the time of writing, this does not appear to
| apply to the 2025-09-30 data dump. The format(s), the dates
| for affected data dumps, and by extension how the garbage
| data can be filtered out, are described in this community-
| compiled list: https://github.com/LunarWatcher/se-data-dump-
| transformer/blo.... If the 2025-09-30 data dump turns out to
| be poisoned as well, that's where an update will be added.
| For obvious reasons, the torrent cannot be updated once
| created.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| So it seems all the questions have now been answered- Great!
| Flow wrote:
| StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the
| last 10+ years, at least for me.
|
| Actually I think it never did.
|
| It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just
| write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like
| comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less
| and less and finally asked them to remove my account.
|
| And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over
| and made it even more hostile.
|
| I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some
| similarities.
| sevenseacat wrote:
| I don't think the reputation system ever worked that way - new
| users could always answer questions, but comments required more
| reputation.
| Flow wrote:
| OK, you might be right and I got it backwards. It still felt
| wrong at the time before I got enough points.
| egorfine wrote:
| Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could
| keep it alive for much longer _if they wanted to_. LLMs provide
| answers, but only humans provide human contact.
|
| And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people
| power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at
| times, but harder.
|
| I'm not sad.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| LLMs did not eat SO, it was SO that fed the LLMs too well.
|
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
| sevenseacat wrote:
| 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.)
| cracki wrote:
| I think 95% of comments earnestly using the word "toxic" can be
| disregarded.
|
| They were unaware of or unwilling to follow the rules of the
| site. They mistook SO for reddit, a place for _socializing_.
| andomar wrote:
| Garbage was never moderated on StackOverflow, it was always
| ignored.
|
| Moderation was used by the insiders to keep new people out.
| causal wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| What points do you get for moderation activity?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared
| that AI sellout of theirs.
|
| Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers
| after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of
| course, but I wanted to do so out of principle.
|
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
| janaagaard wrote:
| SO peaked long, long before LLMs came along. My personal
| experience is that GitHub issues took over.
|
| You can clearly see the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022.
| That was the final nail in the coffin.
|
| I am still really glad that Stack Overflow saved us from experts-
| exchange.com - or "the hyphen site" as it is sometimes referred
| to.
| cracki wrote:
| 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.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| When you see AI giving you back various coding snippets almost
| verbatim from SO, it really makes you wonder what will happen in
| the future with AI when it can't depend on actual humans doing
| the work first.
| eightys3v3n wrote:
| I certainly use it less now that I get a CloudFlare check every
| time I go and sometimes it fails or loads forever. I usually just
| go back to search results and look elsewhere after a second or
| two.
| blondie9x wrote:
| It makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time
| as people google questions and get results. It would be
| interesting to look at the number of comments and views of
| questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have
| driven declining engagement and discussion.
| fHr wrote:
| >This post was not virtue signaling enough and therefore closed
| as duplicate.
|
| SO had the greatest minds but the shitiest moderation
| Tostino wrote:
| Clicked on the link and got stopped by cloudflare. Guess I won't
| be giving them any more traffic either.
| a3w wrote:
| Since the trend must go on, we expect StackExchange to now offer
| answers, and the user responses need to be questions. We could
| even make a quiz game show out of that! /s
| andomar wrote:
| StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning
| programming. The product of that fun was valuable.
|
| Instead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the
| visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This
| killed the pub and with it the business.
|
| The most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes
| scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old
| timers took when they joined. And duplicates allow anyone with a
| grudge to take revenge. After all, there are no new questions,
| and you will always find a duplicate if you want to.
|
| To create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers
| enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by
| itself.
| nolok wrote:
| 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."
| wavemode wrote:
| "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.
| causal wrote:
| 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.
| trashface wrote:
| Good riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many
| bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find
| the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator
| toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of
| that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a
| captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any
| alternative.
|
| And that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking
| questions because they didn't want to run the moderation
| gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its
| still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient
| questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing.
|
| LLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on
| decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for
| that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will
| oblige.
|
| Looking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's
| health will improve.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| The corresponding answers graph:
| https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/a...
| johnnylambada wrote:
| One thing you won't get with in an LLM is genuine research. I
| once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code
| of vim to see how the poster's question could be resolved. [0]
|
| [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619423/backup-restore-
| th...
| wojciii wrote:
| 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.
| thomasingalls wrote:
| Everyone is saying LLMs did this site in, but what if we just
| asked all the questions already? We should be celebrating how we
| solved programming!
| griffzhowl wrote:
| 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?
| runxel wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| JazCE wrote:
| 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
| darubedarob wrote:
| Stackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I
| recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom.
| Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking
| snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is
| mainly about asking and answering questions.
| Cort3z wrote:
| 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.
| sixseven wrote:
| I was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software
| at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the
| paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but
| got stuck in one particular function.
|
| It was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I
| couldn't find anything on Google.
|
| Had no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no
| answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone
| knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time.
| (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I
| didn't understand the documentation)
|
| It was a fond memory of the site for me.
| atomicbeanie wrote:
| I used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions.
| The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in
| technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search
| engine. I don't see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is
| satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show
| up at SO?
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| troyvit wrote:
| Man after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I
| have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers
| to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard,
| but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome
| that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have
| diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I,
| as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM
| instead of being able to peruse great answers from different
| perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.
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