Comment by nospice

5 months ago

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.

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nospice

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oofbey  5 months ago

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  5 months ago

    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  5 months ago

      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  5 months ago

> 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  5 months ago

It's funny that people blame the site for this.

That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture. It's everywhere.

  • VLM  5 months ago

    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.