Comment by bayindirh
4 hours ago
You're absolutely right. The problem was so small that SO only had to make a site-wide survey, make a couple of public statements, big administrative changes and a big campaign to earn hearts and minds back.
Even after that, I still feel sour about the site. Talk about burnt bridges.
Moreover, in 2025, 46% of the survey participants told that they don't feel like part of the community. That number was 44% in 2024 [1], too. Also, 2023 doesn't look better: 45.63% of participants said no [2].
Maybe the survey is rigged. Who knows?
[0]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/stack-overflow#2-feel-l...
[1]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/community#2-feel-like-a...
[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-stack-overflow...
> don't feel like part of the community
Maybe I'm off because I wasn't there for community, I don't really do the online community thing. I was one of the biggest contributors in terms of answers to a couple of the areas (SU, SF, DBA) in the early days and I liked helping people, but I certainly wasn't there to make friends.
I also don't get on with remote work because I don't feel connected to names and faces on screens in remotely the same way as I do to people in the same room, so like I say maybe my personality missed that part of the problem as it doesn't properly appreciate when things are apparently the other way. Or maybe people were looking for the wrong thing in a technical Q&A site that wasn't, as far as I felt, trying to be a social media site.
For technical questions and to help out with similar answers I'd go to SO, SF, SU, DBA, ... For community: the local, the running club, martial arts, or even sometimes DayJob.
> I liked helping people, but I certainly wasn't there to make friends.
SO was not structured to make friends, and I didn't expect anything similar to that end. However, I expected a more friendly (or neutral) conversation, like between colleagues or two people who just met in a conference.
Being put down for programming style, language choices or other nitpick is just bad. I have seen enough flamewars and rude people in my life. I wanted to ask a questions and I got low-key insults or "duplicate!" warnings for things not duplicate, in fact.
I also like learning and helping people, but I don't like to be bullied. I endured that thing enough (5+ years if anybody wonders). I neither want more, nor have time for that, nor young enough to don't care for that.
So, I reverted to consulting documents and finding my own path. At worst, the code doesn't work and/or compiler shows what I did wrong. Even GCC 4 is more polite than some of the people in SO or SE.
Yep, the first killer app for AI was, "hey, I'm having this problem and I'm not sure what's going on, can you help me figure it out?", and being told "sure!" instead of "this is a dupe, use the search function you idiot" or "this is not the right kind of thing to ask here". SO has always been incredibly useful and incredibly frustrating at the same time.
The fun part was not searching before asking. I always did that. Also, not being told to ask better questions. We need to ask good questions and read ESR's guide on that.
The fun(!) part is spending an hour searching the site and meticulously crafting a question which ticks all the SO guideline boxes, and being yeeted out for a "duplicate question which even doesn't meet the guidelines".
At least give a link to the well-aged question, so I can see what I missed. Of course the answer is no, because there's no such question and/or answer.
> You're absolutely right. The problem was so small that SO only had to make a site-wide survey, make a couple of public statements, big administrative changes and a big campaign to earn hearts and minds back.
The SO population decline started before LLMs, too.