Comment by jsLavaGoat

Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.

IMO it was a combination of moderators and users

Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).

> but it always was that way.

I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.

But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.

A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens.

There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.

The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.

It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5

It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...

if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise).

I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.

It was always strict, that was its feature. But it was dying well before ChatGPT came along, due to going from strict to unusably over-moderated.

Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency.

Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.

Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves.

It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.

Why are you trying to do that? You should do this totally different thing that I do because I know how to do it.

Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so.

It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.

yeah, everyone seems to just ellide over the ability of LLM's to scrape all of stack overflow and do the same hack and slash response.

Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.

StackOverflow's extremely strict moderation was probably the #1 reason it turned into a high quality resource rather than a dumpster fire like reddit.

I had a work SO account with many questions/answers - everything fine. Later I created a SO account for use with my private projects and happened to have answered a couple questions without getting upvotes. The algorithm banned me from answering questions with the remark that I should improve the quality of my answers. You can bet that I never answered a question again on SO with any account.