Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.
I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.
Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.
Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!
I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.
Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
I had a pretty high rank on ruby and java answers, with some high traffic stuff, there were always people trying to completely edit my answers into something else entirely, it was such a shitty experience that I just decided the effort wasn’t worth it.
I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.
> Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data.
That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The "quality of the site data" is a 100% honest motivation and I don't understand why people are unwilling to accept that. I and others have made countless attempts to explain it.
> I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods
The people you're referring to are not control freaks, and also are not "moderators". Most curation on the site requires consensus between multiple people who are generally not coordinating.
> Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
I can practically guarantee that the person you're referring to was not a moderator. If it was (someone with the diamond icon beside the username, and who appeared on https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators), you should have posted on the meta site about it. The pattern of behaviour you describe is clearly abusive and against the Code of Conduct (and would have been across all versions thereof), and would absolutely been acted upon.
If an "ordinary" (perhaps with higher rep) user was harassing you like this, that is why they put a "flag" link under every question and answer, and icon beside each comment, to raise a flag for moderator attention. This sort of thing is and always has been taken seriously.
Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes.
On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.
On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.
I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).
The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.
Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.
It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!
But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.
(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)
You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.
This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.
A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.
The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.
But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.
Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.
The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.
Yeah, this is much more accurate to what was actually happening. During that high period they struggled to get people to stop posting low-quality "do my homework" style questions - despite what people on here say the barrier for entry was extremely low and those made up the vast majority of what was posted.
I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.
The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.
The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.
StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.
SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.
And what was the alternative to stack overflow before AI?
People were desperate for an alternative, and ran with the first semi-viable one that emerged.
AI is arguably worse than SO for precision. It will hallucinate, and agree with you when you're wrong. But stack overflow is so unwelcoming to newcomers that people switched anyway.
> Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020?
The year that Google made "open source contribution" a checkbox on your annual review. That's when almost ALL these types of sites went to dogshit. And then everybody followed Google which then weaponized it even more.
Once Google made Fake Internet Points(tm) worth actual money via your annual review, all holy hell broke loose over the sites.
It's the same thing. Why did AI compete so aggressively with them? It's because their system was one that produced confident misinformation from hobbyists while gatekeeping actual experts.
The same thing is not yet happening to wikipedia as you can see with the pageview tool. You may be confusing a covid bump. At most any drop is within an order of magnitude.
Ouch, great, you should show that protocol you used to get causation out of an observational study to the entire scientific community! It's unclear what area will give you a Nobel Prize for that, but several of them will rush to do it first.
One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed.
The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.
I really enjoyed asking questions where I linked a similar answered question, went through the details that caused my problem to be mechanically different or rendered the other answer as not possible, and then having a moderator close it as a duplicate and link the answer half my post had been dedicated to explaining the difference.
So it's not just me. The "duplicate" thing alone made it hard to use a lot of the time. Other stuff like people just being arrogant didn't bother me so much.
If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.
I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes
1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)
2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"
3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.
They chose being controlled and not being Reddit - I can imagine lots of ways to do both - still they chose the toxic way and now they are dead, goal achieved.
> Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"
This was a bad idea, and worked terribly.
I have over 1800 answers on the site, many of them detailed, well-considered, long answers to difficult problems. But my highest rated answer by far was to someone asking two completely different questions at once (both of which have far better individual versions) in a way that was barely comprehensible even after multiple attempts by the community to rewrite in something approximating proper English.
For reference, the original version, verbatim:
> if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ] and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2 and for the second (2+3)/2 third (3+4)/2 ...... etc
> how can do as that ? like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?
> also how can i sum a list of number ? a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]
> is it:
> b = sum(a) print b
> in i get one number !? it doesn't work with me help me plz
In my opinion, the main thing was toxic moderation and the general lack of effort in creating a welcoming or constructive environment.
Moderation and community accessibility can exist. I think your points have described the early SO, but moderation has definitely gone downhill as the years went on.
I’m not new to communities with their own culture, expectations, and rules.
I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and while you can always find drama everywhere, newbies are welcomed not thrown rule books.
If you make a well meaning edit that was formatted wrong as a newbie, you’d most likely get a welcome note and guidance; not threats or whatnot.
It’s like “Go away until you follow all our rules and we like you” versus “Welcome, thanks for contributing to Wikipedia, here’s our rules, feel free to ask me questions or help”.
These were all good things about stackexchange (and a precious few other places), yeah. Especially the latter two. Whenever I see people using stuff like linkedin to 'vet' things, I think of this. Reddit is much more cliquey and free-for-all, and has a lot more emotional fighting than the egoistic sort of arguments that sometimes took/take place on SO. I still prefer SO.
During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.
I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.
That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
I asked two questions which were both locked as dupes. The referenced questions mine were supposed to have duplicated were not, in fact the same question. After that I didn't bother. If I could find my answer with a search engine, fine, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to engage on the site.
I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.
As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.
Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.
I think so too, but many people have many oppositions to AI and would prefer knowledge to be in the hands of knowledgeable community, rather than AI companies. SO was poised to be this alternative, but leadership showed they did not see value in knowledge-work for its own sake.
This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.
Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content.
They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.
They'd even delete chats. You'd see, in comments, someone inviting the author to chat, but the link would (in the present) take you to a 404 page. Did the question get an answer? Did chat ever work? Was something useful shared? We'll never know.
> overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well.
The site has more than three times as many publicly-visible questions as Wikipedia has articles. And that's with the scope restricted to just programming.
When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.
There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it.
I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.
I say this every time the topic of SO/AI comes up.
LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response.
There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes to close my question) before I gave up.
this for me was one of the truly liberating parts of LLMs for me: simply being able to ask a question and get a straight answer without having to run the gauntlet of why I shouldn't be doing what I am trying to do in the first place. The friction of trying to explain why I still wanted to do it that way deterred me from asking so many questions.
FWIW I haven't had bad experiences on the Godot subreddit, but I haven't tried in three years since the API change. And AI seems laughably bad at Godot for any non-trivial questions, and for those trivial questions, it's better just to peruse the docs.
No online community can maintain quality unless there are systems in place to prevent mentally ill internet addicts from gaining power over it. This should have a name. We can can call it Eudaimoniac's Law.
Anything that gives power on a basis of seniority, activity, volunteering, is guaranteed to suck very soon. There are just way too many mentally ill authoritarians permanently online for normal people to stave them off with naive good faith.
> That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
The biggest problem was highlighted from day one: StackOverflow was bound to become "DeadOverflow". It couldn't possibly work because the entire notion of having one correct answer to a question in a domain that constantly evolves was broken.
What killed the site was "Ever relevant question" showing up in a Google search (pick other search engine) and pointing to a "Correct and accepted answer" that was wrong with then another answer with more upvotes but which was... Already outdated.
That's why people coined the term "DeadOverflow": the very way the site was conceived would inevitably lead to dead answers.
And people pointed that out early on. Nobody listened, many of the OGs who created that company made a nice exit.
But SO was destined to eventually fail.
The entire karma/gamification/clique of users gate-keeping was bad but the issue of dead answers / DeadOverflow simply couldn't be solved, so it doesn't even matter.
Losing 99.41% of its activity is brutal but it's honestly surprising that a concept that couldn't possibly work even survived that long.
> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
thanks in advance,
--
znpy
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.
I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.
The founders of SO had a theory, that irrelevant noise was what drove a site into insignificance over time. Even if it was just polite chit-chat. They took pains to automate out as much as they could, and put in place a culture that actively discouraged and removed it when possible. That culture remains even though the founders are long gone.
This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.
This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.
> i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
You came to a place where the terms and conditions state explicitly (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice...) that you license your answer to the community with a Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), and then got upset that someone from the community exercised those rights. Then you (almost certainly) incorrectly described that person as a "mod". Every user of Stack Overflow is entitled to propose edits, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation (about 150,000 accounts, versus 25 currently active moderators and only a handful of retired ones) can make those edits unilaterally.
> dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
And you didn't even consider that there might be an underlying goal of producing a relatively uniform (at least: direct, but professional) style, because third parties might want to read that. When you ask a question, you can probably only usefully get answered once; the most successful questions get millions of views.
When third parties find a Q&A with a search engine, language like that is wasting their time, and in fact is actually exclusionary. It gives the impression of walking in on someone else's private communication, when in fact the entire point of the exercise is to produce a question that someone else could equally well have asked. (The purpose is so that the other person can read the question, verify they're in the right place, read the answers and be answered instantaneously.)
It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.
> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.
The community arrived at, drafted and enforce policy forbidding AI-generated content; this usually meant answers because that was the obvious use case for LLMs.
(We were getting absolutely flooded from day 1 with really obviously LLM-generated crap, which represented absolutely zero value add over the OP going to chatgpt dot com and copy-pasting the question there instead. Often this came from users who came back to the site after years of hiatus, who had an established track record in previous answers of being barely able to communicate in English at all; and then they would come to the meta site and insist that they hadn't used an LLM, apparently completely unable to understand how blatantly obvious they were being about it.)
The company repeatedly attempt to force shitty AI-powered features on the community, and also tried to intervene with enforcement of that policy, complaining that false positives would be too damaging. These features got roundly rejected again and again, but this was ignored. Again, much of this represented zero value-add over going to chatgpt dot com directly. Some examples:
The intervention against moderator enforcement of policy (an actual moderator action! Ordinary community members can't just delete an answer for being LLM-generated, although they do take almost all the other actions people complain about offsite) got so bad that it led to an actual strike.
Yes, yes, the usual narrative. They were not welcoming.
I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website:
* Most questions were low effort crap
* Users were mostly divided between only asking questions and only answering questions
* The reputation system favored: 1) easy questions (understood by a larger audience -> more people upvoting), 2) fast answers (before the question dropped from the front page; also answers with more votes got more visibility).
So, contrary to the usual narrative, the incentives and most activity was directed to answering newbie questions. That made up most of the volume, and it was what the reputation system rewarded. Even if a question got closed as a duplicated, by that time there usually were already answers to most easy questions. And deletion could only happen after some time (two days IIRC).
The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system.
The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.
I tried to answer an SO question exactly once, around 15 years ago. Someone asked a question which was covered perfectly by some OSS code I had already published, so I linked to that in my answer (while explaining how the linked code was relevant). My answer was promptly deleted, of course, for linking to code. After that I lost all desire to contribute.
I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary.
I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get pointer on how to track that behavior I was seeing. Of course the second I post it I got a -1 plus “can’t reproduce”/“please add minimal example”.
An other time, I had a question that was very similar to an existing one, but different setup and the answer did not solve my problem at all. Mentioned all that, linked the other question and specifically wrote that it was NOT addressing my problem. Posted it, soon after tagged as duplicate with that one answer that did NOT solve the problem.
After that I rarely asked questions again.
Also the points system made it frustrating as a new user: someone 2 years ago asks a basic language question “+50 upvotes”. You asked a similar question, asking extra clarification on an aspect “-2, already answered, read the doc” and so on. And with such a big deal made about reputation it felt like just being born early and being able to be an early adopter meant you got east points. For new users, though luck.
The one advantage of actually trying to use SO was that the fear of asking a question usually made me do so much research that I'd solve my issue in the process of fully describing it.
That did also make the community lose out on the answer though.
Yeah, I think the issue with Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange is one of how too much gatekeeping and elitism tends to eventually be the death knell for a community.
True, you might want people who are more articulate or thoughtful than the majority, but if you go too hard on that, you end up putting a time limit on how long the community will probably last. People won't stick around a community that treats them like crap, and that's a problem because at least some of those amateurs/newbies will become your future experts and power users. The people scared away by bullies like the one mentioned here didn't come back to Stack Exchange once they became the type of expert the site needed. They just shared their knowledge elsewhere.
My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most.
May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.
I did, and it wasn't much better on the other side.
And funnily enough, the questions that I answered that most contributed to getting me through the gauntlet years later were closed at duplicates (they weren't).
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants
I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:
1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.
2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.
It seems to me that AI did SO in, not its moderation culture.
SO is not a place to ask where to get your homework assignment done, that's for sure. The gamification does not necessarily reward the best content, but I didn't experience hostility myself.
(I do find this site fairly hostile. And Wikipedia is the lowest possible hell, I've never in my life experienced anything comparable to the ferocity with which people prosecute their grudges, all the way to IRL doxxing. German language Wikipedia is another whole level of self-appointed officialdom.)
I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site).
AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord.
SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.
You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.
I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?
Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.
Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
The vast majority of duplicate closures use already answered questions as duplicates. So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. In my observation this is usually the case, though the answer might be more generic.
I have also seen bad duplicate closures that weren't actually exact duplicates. But people talk like this is the only kind of duplicate closure that actually happens. I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, or if people are missing that their question is actually answered in the duplicate.
I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.
Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.
LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.
>StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions
This is significantly under selling it.
Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.
I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable
I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.
His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”
At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive
I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one
> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation
Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale.
> They slowly killed the site in this manner.
It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy.
> knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question.
It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question.
> I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
I disagree. Stack Overflow was made to succeed, not fail ... originally.
Then the founders left, and meta basically chronicles the echo chamber of mistakes made. It's not the intent: that was to help coders code. Meta was dominated by people who lost the intent, and wanted to build a library.
as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.
Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference. SO was supposed to help programmers program.
The former continues to succeed, with hiccups, because they remember their goal. The latter is dead, and it failed because it tried to be the former, forgetting their goal.
In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort.
I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form.
These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine.
In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead?
Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.
> Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over.
I did get over it when I stopped bothering with SO. Sorry, but a community whose ethos is "you need a thick skin to belong" is not one most people even want to belong to.
S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community.
I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.
Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.
It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.
One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"
Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
From my perspective it wasn’t death by a thousand cuts, it all comes back to just one cut: an over-reliance on volunteer moderators. If they paid staff to run their communities, they could have issued a simple “don’t be a dick or we’ll fire you” rule. But because they relied on volunteers, they had to cater to those volunteers to keep them. And the volunteers drove the site into ruin to make it a better experience for moderators.
SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people.
Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.
An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.
Once or twice someone on SO used their chat feature to help me out after I asked a question, back when I was a n00b. That was really kind of them. Eventually, once I actually knew my stuff, I spent some time answering good questions on there. And yeah I had to be discerning.
Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.
Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."
Reddit has many different subs that suffer from its problems in different degrees, so there's still islands of relative calm and sanity, usually in low-traffic subs. To some extent this was also true of different sites in the overall StackExchange network, but SO itself always dominated the network, it was designed and run as a monoculture, and that culture was, well ... gestures vaguely in SO's direction
It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.
I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.
Yup, there was some political bill discussion about some recent issue and others were posting links, so I thought I'd concur with an interesting vote breakdown link showing how each house/party voted. Something anyone I would gather was in good faith.
Nope, instant longtime account shadow permanent ban. Wow.
Do you know if those contributors were able to get their accounts back? I was a heavy contributor in a couple of technological subs, and my account was shadowbanned and then removed with no recourse or way to regain access.
Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.
Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever.
They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.
It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.
It was also the rise of Github and the importance of the software hosted there. More consistent documentation and transparent issue trackers/PRs helped a lot dealing with evolving software.
> and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on.
No; answers got outdated because of people not doing what they were supposed to do, which is: post a new answer on the old question. (Assuming that the old answers actually are outdated. It happens all the time that decade-old answers are still perfectly relevant, or even still represent the Right Way to Do It(TM).)
Somehow, people never wanted to do that when it actually mattered, but would constantly post new, repetitive, low-quality answers on popular old questions (often re-combining multiple old answers) even though the solutions hadn't actually become outdated, simply because they were popular questions and they hoped to gain visibility from it (whether from reputation, or because user profile pages had a "number of users reached" metric which literally just sums the view counts of the pages where you have a question or answer, including views that occurred before your post).
That said, there are plenty of cases where an old question got closed as a duplicate of a newer question: either because it went unnoticed before, or because of deliberate action to reverse the direction of closure, with the goal of pointing future viewers to the best possible Q&A. This was explicitly in accordance with policy: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251938 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423085 . As a general rule, policy is "timeless": the timestamp on a post is not relevant to determining the right thing to do with it.
In an age where we all get the same generic answer from LLMs, SO could have been the place to have meaningful conversations on tech topics. Instead they became irrelevant
I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.
Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?
Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.
So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.
I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.
The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.
Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.
IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.
But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.
As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.
And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.
SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.
And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.
I stopped posting there around then. Multiple times in a row I asked a question, got it closed as a duplicate/pointed to another thread/met with "why are you even trying to do that" despite being clear about my problem. It was obvious the people answering/closing the question skimmed it and I already gave a ton of context. It just stopped being useful
People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
> SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form
SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.
Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.
I'm used to enjoying your comments here, but this is an unusually bad take, and frankly personally hurtful. None of this was ever about that kind of power or control, and hearing constant accusations to the contrary was one of the things that compounded the stress of curation for me.
I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]
Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.
I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.
The sale is relevant. The spike in activity right before the sale already shows the management hand and how they actively ran the org to optimize for this sale. The rebound right after is hard, and it was (right) before chatgpt
They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over
Everyone trumpeting the "bad SO moderation" angle is delusional. Stack Overflow was far better than conventional forums. Without LLMs, SO would have stayed popular, there is no doubt about it. The massive decline was clearly and obviously caused mainly by LLMs.
Mostly: Discord, Github issues (as forum), X (twitter at the time), and Discourse! Discourse was growing steadily, even startups like OpenAI and neobanks like nubank (Brazil) had forums for their users because keeping your community active and close was something considered valuable (devrel since then has experienced a rapidly decline).
I see people talking about the negative experiences, and I'm sure they are real, but I also had some very positive experiences.
I remember being amazed that some internet stranger took the time to understand my question and provide some great solution where I was stuck. It gave me a little encouragement and social connection as I plugged away on a project alone.
I miss that feel good human connection when an LLM can quickly get me an answer.
meh, in my experience good quality LLMs are significantly more correct than Stack Overflow ever was and have access to your code and machine to help you diagnose issues.
Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.
Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.
Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.
The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.
Sometimes you'd get banned for asking an exact duplicate of a previous question of yours that was closed. They'd tell you to edit the closed question and it would be reopened.
But if you'd edited the closed question instead, it wouldn't be reopened.
LLM's are the primary cause of SO decline.
Largely due to LLM's having scraped SO (and everything else available on the WWW). It's the reason there is a decline in traffic across the web i.e. Wikipedia. LLM's surface the required search query or info directly.
Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.
The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.
The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...
> The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.
Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO.
This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.
SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.
There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.
> This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.
Literally describing how academia has worked since time immemorial.
Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.
Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.
I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.
You mean the fall to a thousand questions per month. Now that the volume is low enough someone has a chance of looking at every single one of them, maybe the StackOverflow community can finally collaborate in peace, safe from the onslaught of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation.
I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.
> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years
Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only
need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it.
AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already
largely prior to AI.
You are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.
I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer.
There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.
> were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities
And the solution turned out to be putting every user in their own safety bubble of recommended conten and expanding the bubble only when user gets adventurous. And TikTok became gold standard for that that everone tries to emulate with varying degrees of success
One thing I wonder, if you look at the comments here it is clear the moderation and the general hostility of the site was a big reason why a lot of people left or didn't engage with it. Yet, I can't recall SO doing anything about this, and its confusing to me why. Was it:
a) They don't acknowledge this was a problem.
b) They are unwilling to tackle this problem.
c) They are unable to tackle this problem.
I'd love to know what the people who run the site (from a business perspective) think about this. It might offer some insight into its cousins that are going down the same path (reddit / wikipedia).
Might be a vocal minority. I used to visit SO every day, several times a day, for like 10+ years, got so much value from it and would not have changed anything to the site. "AI Overview" in Google completely killed it tho and I don't really see what they could do about it other than completely change the site into something else. RIP.
Most people who came to SO wanted the site to be something it fundamentally wasn't supposed to be; that it in fact specifically existed not to be, to provide an alternative, because the thing that everyone wants (a discussion forum) is actually bad.
When the site was launched, lots of people seemed to agree with Atwood and Spolsky that discussion forums are bad and that they knew better. But in the long run, this still proved to be a minority opinion, by a long shot.
In short, I don't acknowledge that it was a problem because it wasn't. It was expected and okay that lots of people didn't want to engage with the format. The format was not for them. The purpose of the format was to produce an artifact that would benefit them indirectly, for free, by improving Google search results (until Google fucked it up).
But the site (the platform itself, and the people implementing it; not the community) fucked up by failing to recognize that most people really do want a fundamentally unproductive, unfocused social environment (and a help desk!) after all.
More importantly, it fucked up by presenting a UI that misleads people into thinking they could have that experience (post a question and there's space for answers under it; obviously that means that people are answering directly for your benefit and not anyone else! and of course we can go back and forth about this, and they'll help me solve my problem! and there are votes, like Reddit!)
In any case, business perspective prevailed, subject matter experts stopped sticking around. Personally, I think the (slow but steady over many years) switch from b) to c) is what doomed the site.
There was a few noteworthy company post, especially those after the mass layoffs / private equity takeover on the meta site that acknowledged the problem, so its certainly not a), even when you apply a strict standard about the terms in which to acknowledge the problem (which was well-known long before). Those company statements had some rather clear and well-received community commentary below that essentially questioned whether any of the suggestions on tackling the problem should even be tried. The very-much-not-welcoming onboarding experience, while it had great potential for improvements, was yet serving the sites unique needs quite well. Two weeks of persistence and reading the manual were not much of a detrimental filter.. not to those that would eventually go on to contribute back for many years. And those were the ones that ultimately mattered. Not those one-off solve-my-homework posts that only saw indifferent/annoyed moderation action. That probably still wonder why nobody took their hand and spent their evening guiding them through the steps necessary to make their post useful to anyone other than just the original author.
a) they choose a certain very specific ideal as a target, but utterly failed to convey that to a majority of site visitors;
b) their picked target and path visually and functionally matched by like 90% with a thing already existing for decades previously and very familiar to a majority of internet users - with a regular forum with sections and treads;
c) they make fundamental errors even inside the scope of their own ideal and vision - like for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;
d) while they copied forum structure (failure B) they also failed to envision (or did a mistake in that) how the ideal target result would look like a long time in the future;
e) they failed to acknowledge all of the above, reflect on and fix own mistakes, instead they declared those mistakes "a culture" and persisted in deepening them;
Basically they picked a forum format, known at those times to literally everybody on the internet and decided to use it to make something vastly different, while failing both at communicating that intention and also failing at actually adapting UI and tools to better suit their target.
Very well put. Except they didn't think they were "picking a forum format". Forums with that style of voting were still kinda rare at the time (Reddit was young at SO's date of creation) and the Q&A formatting was supposed to look intentionally different from a "thread", which is also way (at least in the original design) comments were de-emphasized, and moderation policy held that the large majority of comments could be deleted at any time.
Unfortunately, this design comes across to a lot of people as comments being threaded replies, and the "question" format as privileging the OP (which makes it that much worse when the system forces question closure to happen out in the open). And recent redesigns, by new ownership obsessed with "engagement" and profitability and apparent complete apathy towards the original goals, have thoroughly enshittified the original.
I also have no idea what you mean about
> for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;
There were always separate tags for various minor versions of Python, for example, and they were commonly incorrectly applied to questions where the version was not relevant.
If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did.
What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.
The users being generally unhelpful wasn't an issue for them, since they were still significantly more helpful than users anywhere else on the internet. Reddit was and still is filled with completely unvetted answers (on pretty much all topics not just programming), Quora was/is a joke, Yahoo answers had some funny posts I guess but nothing you could actually learn from, what else really was there? Before AI, Stack Overflow was as good as it gets.
It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
My perspective: Stack Overflow was started to be a documentation site, but was implemented as a Q/A site. And that doomed it from the start.
If someone wants to get help, and they end up on Stack Overflow, the structure looks like a Q/A site, and they treat it that way. The people "in the know" then accuse them of being "bad" for posting a question to a documentation site. Combine that with the gamification, and it had to turn into the toxic mess that it did.
When I first heard of the gamification method of moderation, I thought it was a really good idea. But, over the years, it has proven to be a means to enforce an echo chamber, rather than a way to filter out bad posts. I have yet to find a site (HN included), where that isn't true.
Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong:
* Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it.
* Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.
Yeah, I used to mostly answer there instead of ask and was in the top % for several big tags whatever that means / is worth, but then at some point I realized things had changed and I was spending more time fighting rules and guidelines rather than sharing knowledge and having a good time so I just stopped.
It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems
A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community
The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"
I have never actively asked a question on SO either. But for every programming question I ever had (literally!), I always either found the solution to it, or the reason why my question was stupid. (Which usually boils down to me not understanding sthg about the technology I'm working with.)
Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...
SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc
And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
So... nothing that it wasn't already doing to itself? There's no one drop where "AI got into the market", SO had been declining steadily for years. I actually expected this post to be about how SO survived by selling its internal organs to AI.
It's always slightly amusing to me how SE has the most restrictive cloudflare turnstile config set.
On the rare occasion that I DO want to go there, they greet me with an impossible gate that takes 15+ seconds to pass on Brave and gets invalidated quickly.
If anyone from SE is reading this: you already failed to protect your data from the LLM crawlers, SE is no longer that much interesting to them. The only visitors you're gating today are not bots, they're humans.
Never meant to be protected. I only contributed there because it specified in no uncertain terms that everything was going to be CC BY-SA licensed and posted in a public archive every now and then, so you do not need to scrape to use & redistribute if you intend to adhere to those terms. That would have been sufficient protection, if only governments had not u-turned from Walt-Disney-Copyright straight to "Open"AI-Copyright.
The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it.
You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation.
Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
Some of the pre-ai decline in questions might just be that they had filled out of alot of the question space. What might be more interesting is the traffic graph as it would be possible to have a decline in questions but still have traffic rising to the existing ones.
Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.
I don’t have some grand theory on SO’s downfall. All I will say is that sometimes us programmers try to optimize every single thing in life and that’s simply not how humans work.
SO tried to optimize the Q/A by eagerly rejecting repeat questions, without considering what the consequences of that were. If you’re in a classroom / lecture hall, your teacher / professor isn’t going to chide you for asking an “obvious” or “repeat” question (bad ones might). Imagine if every time you wanted to talk to a TA or professor you first needed to lookup previously asked questions in a database and then, iff your question hasn’t been asked before, you may ask the professor or TA after hours. Programmers might call this system “efficient” but most people would be pretty unhappy with it.
AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene.
I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.
ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022, and frankly wasn't very good originally. The SO decline started occurring almost two years ahead of that, and was already on a sharp decline before ChatGPT shipped, and certainly before ChatGPT actually became good.
This is revisionist history. People told SO that they were leaving for YEARS because of how incredibly toxic it had become. It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately.
Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended."
They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.
The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?
In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy pro-AI decisions from the admin.
Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin.
Interesting to compare with MathOverflow which has distinctly different policies (only research-level questions) and professional community: https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/st... - also falling lately, but by a factor of 2-3x from peak rather than 1000x.
Just tried to open stack overflow and was told their site was under maintenance. When I refreshed, it blocked my IP for refreshing too many times. I expect better from SO.
Stack overflow was always going to die. AI just sped it up. The misconception that it was a community is surprising. People went there for an answer and left, very few would stick around, not only because there was no incentive, but if you did you'd likely get crapped on by one of the hostile moderators which would ensure you'd leave and never come back, because who wants to willingly be treated badly.
It was basically an imposer syndrome enforcing machine.
Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there.
One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.
Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.
Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.
Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.
Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.
Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.
Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?
Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?
The platform in question was openly hostile to people asking questions and made discussions against the rules. That's why people left the moment a better option came along
But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels.
Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...
I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.
Yeah, I don't remember when was the last time I even visited stackexchange. AI is so much better, it's not even a contest. The real question is where AI will get its knowledge in 10 or 15 years when there is no training material anymore...
I never understood the point if having the unfathomable churn of thousands of new questions per day. The value of SO to me was always a knowledge base with reputation mechanics, and that did not change. I still default to searching before asking AI.
They didn’t stand a chance. Even in the era where they made a great community etc etc AI would have destroyed them. Other people are just a poor source of information now that we have dramatically good search across all human knowledge.
I’m surprised the site had that little activity, relatively, around 2010. That’s when I was using it the most. It seemed plenty large to me at the time… I can’t imagine the experience was that great a few years later. I wasn’t really paying attention by the time it reached the peaks later that decade.
I always found the format of the side obtuse and the culture not very welcoming. My most popular answer ever was something about JavaScript from 2008 or 2009, and to this day, people come in and say “this isn’t the way to do it, this is outdated“. No kidding, but every new question about that gets closed as a duplicate.
I am surprised how early the overall downward trend developed. There is no doubt LLMs put a nail in the coffin, but the 5 years from 2017 to 2022 look to have brought a non trivial decline of their own
Often the people curating the questions are also the ones who are answering them.
Their goal (loosely described) was so that if you pulled up the front page of the site, you'd find questions that are interesting to read and answer.
If you, as a professional visiting the site went to it and found the front page with things that were trivially answered by reading the documentation or "how do I draw a triangle with stars?" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960245 ) the ability for the... for lack of a better term "elders" of the site to try to get people to understand how the site worked and its expectations.
Many of the new users expected Stack Overflow to work much like forums - with a back and forth between people and a chat like environment... that wasn't so. The use of the curation tools to try to help onboard a person were deemed as unfriendly and "toxic" started getting tossed around.
Stack Overflow corporate, trying to be sensitive to the broader cultural movements at the time and the "we need to make this a more inclusive space" made it harder to curate and began a campaign of removing or limiting curation tools as part of "welcoming".
During this time, there was one tool that was enhanced in its effectiveness. If you had a gold badge on a tag you could close it as a dup of another question categorically. Rather than "this question is poorly written and it is unclear what you are asking" (requiring 5 close votes from different people - that would never happen if it didn't happen in the first few minutes because few went to the review queues) they could close the question as a duplicate of what it might be.
That didn't help things when it came to the perception of the site. It was a last ditch effort to try to make it so that the front page was the well asked questions.
Combining the reduction of curation tools, labeling their use as gatekeeping, the growing ratio of new users to elders, and corporate quite literally saying that those people who were doing the curation were the bad guys... well, a lot of them left or reduced their activity.
That in turn made it so that it was harder to find the well asked questions and fewer people were around to answer questions. Note I write "well asked" not "valid" - a lot of people claim to have a valid question but don't ask it in a way that is well suited to the Q&A format.
Combine that again with reductions in staff, various awful "experiments" in the name of improving engagement. That was akin to firing half of a construction team at a house while having them add a new patio... all the while the basement is flooded.
And so you've got what is there today. Very few curators left compared to 2016. Few caring answer new difficult questions. The easy college homework questions (how do you draw a triangle) and the outsourcing of work to free labor is now done with an LLM... and there's no coming back from that. ... And few people believe in the mission goal of Stack Overflow - and those who do, don't believe Stack Overflow corporate believes in that mission goal.
While I never posted much to Stackoverflow I have fond memories of it as a sole developer, finding other people with similar issues and the quality solutions offered that often got me out of a jam.
Picking on SO and the mods in particular is a popular HN pasttime. I'd like to add that I interacted a bit with SO (1k points) and never really had any problems with them. I must be lucky...
This made me browse through my StackOverflow history. Funny to see how I though I was such a skilled developer, though the questions I asked and the answers I gave 16 years ago... cringe.
Had the same thought. Since around 2022-2023, most subreddits insta-ban you or hide your posts unless you have x karma (you gain karma by posting and getting upvotes).
So unless you happen to have an old account with karma from pre-2022, the only new users whose posts are actually getting through are the ones that know the specific subreddits that let you "karma farm" - ie, mostly bots and bad actors.
Also tangentially related, much of the weirdness of Reddit ("Thanks for the gold, kind stranger", fedora-tipping, narwhals baconing at midnight, references to weird memes etc.) also happened to disappear after GPT-3 came out, and get replaced with really strong opinions about politics and investments.
Even without AI, a large part is also that everything easy and relevant has already been asked and answered. 10 years ago, there was still demand for low hanging ”how do I reverse a string in programming language X”. On top of that, languages and libraries today tend to have a lot better documentation.
What’s left to ask now is ”plx fix my homework” - [pastes error log unique to the posters environment]. Something that Claude is very good and very tolerant at.
Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.
Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.
Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
I recall some moves where SO announced they would be revising ToS to disclose their intent to repackage and use the site’s content for sale and/or model training.
Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted.
I can't see any specific "and then AI happened" in this graph? SO made a lot of dumb choices that made it less and less useful for people independent of forcing AI in there, nothing in this graph is a clear indicator that AI was even a blip on the rapid decline of a service intent on making itself as poor an experience as possible for folks wanting to help other folks.
The peak was in 2014, far before any coherent AI became a thing.
As someone with substantial "points" accumulated all a full decade ago, I can easily see why. If you only allow certain opinions and criteria for specific subjects, your user will eventually shrink to only the few that possessed them.
It's a Spartan death. Don't blame it on the Persians or Athens.
ChatGPT was released in November 2022 so only the last decisive blow was dished by AI. Stack Overflow was already 40% below its peek when it was struck.
However looking at the shape of this last drop, I think it wouldn't matter if the SO was in its prime when it happened. SO would die regardless, at the schedule dictated more by strengthening AI rather than its own.
I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.
I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones).
It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing
What I like about AI is that it doesn't close my chats as "duplicate" and link to something unrelated. It doesn't refuse to tell me how to do something just because there's another way to do something else that I am not interested in and didn't ask for.
There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.
My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…
Just like stackoverflow saved developers from experts exchange, it might be able to save us from what is coming from AI being an averaging engine by default and generating average code. Hopefully it's average but always works.
Looks like the decline started before the ai boom.
I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.
I think Ai is not the issue here. SEO on the other hand very much. It’s not like any one ever went to stackoverflow to find a solution, it was just that they were the google results for a lot of things
So many insights in my past came from stackoverflow answers. But it always required reading through tens of discussions and combining solutions. Young engineers will never know the pain.
I've only posted one question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.
They have been. Very aggressively. The community hates it. Their attempts have been ham-handed and offer zero value added over putting your question into chatgpt dot com instead of the SO submission form; but they would be hated anyway.
StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.
Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird.
i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.
SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet.
I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too.
And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes.
Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help.
Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely.
There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high.
Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.
I noticed the same thing. Another thing that seems to have disappear: lunch and learn focusing on the tech stack. And I mean specifically about "how to do this in <programming language", not product/company focused.
Right, there's a lot of schadenfreude about SA not being so popular and serves them right for being mean when I asked them a question... but it was also no doubt a gold mine of AI training data. Stands to reason this may be an agentic AI golding age, as future models just eating their own data.
Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
It wasn't only LLMs it was also the downright user-hostile attitude prevalent on many sites on the SE network: https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX
Yeah, bro, I'm not a statistics professor so I can't provide you with the "details or clarity" you need. I tried my best and if that's not enough, fuck it. Same story on history.SE: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hi... If you're gonna require "evidence of prior research" I won't bother. The bots are way friendlier and just as knowledgeable.
The golden goose were users asking questions, not the anal-retentive content curators. SO let the latter drive away the former.
Stack Overflow abuse and the rage it generated in me is sort of nostalgic. Kind of sad in a way that I can't quite recall the rage anymore.
By the way, at least as far as what it is showing me，SO is an AI site now. Home page Ask a question goes straight to an LLM doing RAG against Stack Overflow.
Edit: actually they tricked me into asking AI. The text box to ask AI is right next to what is actually an Ask A Question button that skips the AI.
It's training data seems limited or out of date because it had no idea what Gemma 4 E2B was. It just said that wasn't in the SO data and could I explain wtf I was talking about please. I guess not Gemma 3 either. And no web search. So it's useless for me today.
Interestingly, the Stack Overflow AI answer is provided by OpenAI, and these may be the most useless responses I have seen any time recently.
Whaddyaknow. Got me a little twinge of the good ole' rage tingles after all!
Perhaps the harshest lesson of stackoverflow is that it represented what happens when you give programmer-types unfettered control of a culture. A bitter pill indeed.
This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before
AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a
peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in
2008, and I would reason it took a few years,
say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to
about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.
It still has some value today, as sometimes you
can find useful information on SO, but its peak
days are long over and I don't see how it can
manage to come back, with or without AI slop.
It would basically require a lot of re-design
and some things that never worked, such as the
karma system, should be changed. Also moderators -
they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave
up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.
I disagree. From what I see, company specific stackoverflow like mailing lists or slack channels are also dead.
The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.
One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.
FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.
AI didn't kill SO, SO was already declining due to toxic users and lack of organization. The toxic users were dunning-krugerian anal-retentive mini-Napoleons who delighted in locking anything slightly off-topic and merging slightly-related questions, and the lack of organization was a tendency for people to give incorrect answers but still get upvoted (due to Google search surfacing the page in the wrong context).
Honestly SO helped me a lot in Uni 10 years ago. However I was banned 5+ times for just asking a normal question with attempts at answering. Can’t say I’m surprised. It was not welcoming, massively exclusive and had a rude community. RIP
Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.
Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.
Somehow I feel that whole idea was 50% broken from start. In field changing as fast as programming you simply cannot have canonical source that is done. There are areas which are constant or slow moving. But too many others are in churn. Trying to apply same rules for both is clearly insanity. And this is really the failure of SO...
Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it might have worked... But can't remove power from those who had it for years...
There's always going to be lots of latent insecurity among amateurs when a pro shows up.
Honestly because of this and the relative lack of actual pros on the site, real pros will get pushed out and the site will actually build a collection of misinformation. That's probably why pros feel that software quality has dropped so much in since stackoverflow.
Did anyone use the site search? Whenever I tried it it was disappointing. After ~two attempts I always went back to Google. Having the answer is of no use if you refuse to give it. LLMs didn't happen overnight. With all the aging questions, perhaps it was always doomed to be replaced by something.
If I want LLMs to belittle and passive-aggressively mock me while providing borderline help, I can prompt them to do that. But I could never turn that off on stackoverflow.
The move the current companies are missing is to have a legislation declaring ai as a person. Just like how corporations are people, if ai is a person then they don’t have to show number of people fired, can argues content creation and engagement is through the roof and so many other possibilities. /s
Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.
I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.
Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.
Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!
I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.
Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
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My 16 year old question was recently closed because it didn't follow the rules. It just seemed really petty.
Edit: just checked it has been deleted so no longer visible to non moderators.
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I had a pretty high rank on ruby and java answers, with some high traffic stuff, there were always people trying to completely edit my answers into something else entirely, it was such a shitty experience that I just decided the effort wasn’t worth it.
I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.
> Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data.
That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The "quality of the site data" is a 100% honest motivation and I don't understand why people are unwilling to accept that. I and others have made countless attempts to explain it.
> I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods
The people you're referring to are not control freaks, and also are not "moderators". Most curation on the site requires consensus between multiple people who are generally not coordinating.
> Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
I can practically guarantee that the person you're referring to was not a moderator. If it was (someone with the diamond icon beside the username, and who appeared on https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators), you should have posted on the meta site about it. The pattern of behaviour you describe is clearly abusive and against the Code of Conduct (and would have been across all versions thereof), and would absolutely been acted upon.
If an "ordinary" (perhaps with higher rep) user was harassing you like this, that is why they put a "flag" link under every question and answer, and icon beside each comment, to raise a flag for moderator attention. This sort of thing is and always has been taken seriously.
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Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes.
On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.
On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.
I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
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> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
Now that's a name I haven't heard about in a long time. haha
The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).
Would you be willing to show questions you attempted to ask? I'd be happy to help explain how policy works/worked there.
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The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.
Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.
It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!
But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.
(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)
You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.
This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.
A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.
The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.
But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.
Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.
The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.
Yeah, this is much more accurate to what was actually happening. During that high period they struggled to get people to stop posting low-quality "do my homework" style questions - despite what people on here say the barrier for entry was extremely low and those made up the vast majority of what was posted.
I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.
> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated
[citation needed]
Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.
The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.
StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.
SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.
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And what was the alternative to stack overflow before AI?
People were desperate for an alternative, and ran with the first semi-viable one that emerged.
AI is arguably worse than SO for precision. It will hallucinate, and agree with you when you're wrong. But stack overflow is so unwelcoming to newcomers that people switched anyway.
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90% of my over 250k rep is from asking questions.
Surely there's some value to asking a well worded question that many other people also have.
And yes, I've had my share of questions closed for some BS, including many in recent times closing 10 year old questions as dupes. Brilliant.
Can you explain? I am read-only there and it seems better than ever. Even in the era of LLMs, Wiki is still an awesome source.
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> Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020?
The year that Google made "open source contribution" a checkbox on your annual review. That's when almost ALL these types of sites went to dogshit. And then everybody followed Google which then weaponized it even more.
Once Google made Fake Internet Points(tm) worth actual money via your annual review, all holy hell broke loose over the sites.
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It's the same thing. Why did AI compete so aggressively with them? It's because their system was one that produced confident misinformation from hobbyists while gatekeeping actual experts.
The same thing is not yet happening to wikipedia as you can see with the pageview tool. You may be confusing a covid bump. At most any drop is within an order of magnitude.
You aren’t downvoted on Wikipedia. And people have been complaining about heavy handed editors and mods there for a long time. Same with SO.
It’s pretty much a meme now.
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Ouch, great, you should show that protocol you used to get causation out of an observational study to the entire scientific community! It's unclear what area will give you a Nobel Prize for that, but several of them will rush to do it first.
One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed.
The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.
I really enjoyed asking questions where I linked a similar answered question, went through the details that caused my problem to be mechanically different or rendered the other answer as not possible, and then having a moderator close it as a duplicate and link the answer half my post had been dedicated to explaining the difference.
So it's not just me. The "duplicate" thing alone made it hard to use a lot of the time. Other stuff like people just being arrogant didn't bother me so much.
If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.
I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes
1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)
2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"
3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.
They chose being controlled and not being Reddit - I can imagine lots of ways to do both - still they chose the toxic way and now they are dead, goal achieved.
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> Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"
This was a bad idea, and worked terribly.
I have over 1800 answers on the site, many of them detailed, well-considered, long answers to difficult problems. But my highest rated answer by far was to someone asking two completely different questions at once (both of which have far better individual versions) in a way that was barely comprehensible even after multiple attempts by the community to rewrite in something approximating proper English.
For reference, the original version, verbatim:
> if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ] and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2 and for the second (2+3)/2 third (3+4)/2 ...... etc
> how can do as that ? like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?
> also how can i sum a list of number ? a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]
> is it:
> b = sum(a) print b
> in i get one number !? it doesn't work with me help me plz
In my opinion, the main thing was toxic moderation and the general lack of effort in creating a welcoming or constructive environment.
Moderation and community accessibility can exist. I think your points have described the early SO, but moderation has definitely gone downhill as the years went on.
I’m not new to communities with their own culture, expectations, and rules.
I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and while you can always find drama everywhere, newbies are welcomed not thrown rule books.
If you make a well meaning edit that was formatted wrong as a newbie, you’d most likely get a welcome note and guidance; not threats or whatnot.
It’s like “Go away until you follow all our rules and we like you” versus “Welcome, thanks for contributing to Wikipedia, here’s our rules, feel free to ask me questions or help”.
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These were all good things about stackexchange (and a precious few other places), yeah. Especially the latter two. Whenever I see people using stuff like linkedin to 'vet' things, I think of this. Reddit is much more cliquey and free-for-all, and has a lot more emotional fighting than the egoistic sort of arguments that sometimes took/take place on SO. I still prefer SO.
> If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.
And why do you think most people (and LLMs) just Google "<what they are looking for> reddit" ??
I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.
Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.
I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
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Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.
That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
I asked two questions which were both locked as dupes. The referenced questions mine were supposed to have duplicated were not, in fact the same question. After that I didn't bother. If I could find my answer with a search engine, fine, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to engage on the site.
Once had a question closed for asking about something explicitly permitted in the site's own rules. Had to quote the rules back at them.
I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.
As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.
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Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.
I think so too, but many people have many oppositions to AI and would prefer knowledge to be in the hands of knowledgeable community, rather than AI companies. SO was poised to be this alternative, but leadership showed they did not see value in knowledge-work for its own sake.
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This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.
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Push factors and pull factors do much more work together than either do on its own.
Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content.
They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.
They'd even delete chats. You'd see, in comments, someone inviting the author to chat, but the link would (in the present) take you to a 404 page. Did the question get an answer? Did chat ever work? Was something useful shared? We'll never know.
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> overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well.
The site has more than three times as many publicly-visible questions as Wikipedia has articles. And that's with the scope restricted to just programming.
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When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.
There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it.
I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.
I say this every time the topic of SO/AI comes up.
LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response.
There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes to close my question) before I gave up.
this for me was one of the truly liberating parts of LLMs for me: simply being able to ask a question and get a straight answer without having to run the gauntlet of why I shouldn't be doing what I am trying to do in the first place. The friction of trying to explain why I still wanted to do it that way deterred me from asking so many questions.
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The math subreddit is awful. Accusing everyone of asking homework questions if they weren’t formatted in perfect math notation.
Then there’s the godot subreddit. Asked 2 questions? That’s a ban.
Imagine a child learning math or game dev coming up against that.
I’d quit. Curiosity extinguished.
The godot github has one of those characters now too. Really anti new user. I worry, I worry.
It's ok, the kids learning this stuff these days are on YouTube and Discord.
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FWIW I haven't had bad experiences on the Godot subreddit, but I haven't tried in three years since the API change. And AI seems laughably bad at Godot for any non-trivial questions, and for those trivial questions, it's better just to peruse the docs.
No online community can maintain quality unless there are systems in place to prevent mentally ill internet addicts from gaining power over it. This should have a name. We can can call it Eudaimoniac's Law.
Anything that gives power on a basis of seniority, activity, volunteering, is guaranteed to suck very soon. There are just way too many mentally ill authoritarians permanently online for normal people to stave them off with naive good faith.
> That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
The biggest problem was highlighted from day one: StackOverflow was bound to become "DeadOverflow". It couldn't possibly work because the entire notion of having one correct answer to a question in a domain that constantly evolves was broken.
What killed the site was "Ever relevant question" showing up in a Google search (pick other search engine) and pointing to a "Correct and accepted answer" that was wrong with then another answer with more upvotes but which was... Already outdated.
That's why people coined the term "DeadOverflow": the very way the site was conceived would inevitably lead to dead answers.
And people pointed that out early on. Nobody listened, many of the OGs who created that company made a nice exit.
But SO was destined to eventually fail.
The entire karma/gamification/clique of users gate-keeping was bad but the issue of dead answers / DeadOverflow simply couldn't be solved, so it doesn't even matter.
Losing 99.41% of its activity is brutal but it's honestly surprising that a concept that couldn't possibly work even survived that long.
The worst stack overflow in this regard was meta. Most pathological corner of the internet I've ever encountered, up there with 4chan if you ask me.
> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.
I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being set up like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki of questions and their answers.
3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?
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I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.
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Ending a question with "thanks" is explicitly forbidden because it is noise.
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The founders of SO had a theory, that irrelevant noise was what drove a site into insignificance over time. Even if it was just polite chit-chat. They took pains to automate out as much as they could, and put in place a culture that actively discouraged and removed it when possible. That culture remains even though the founders are long gone.
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This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.
This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.
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> i got stung by exactly this.
> i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
You came to a place where the terms and conditions state explicitly (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice...) that you license your answer to the community with a Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), and then got upset that someone from the community exercised those rights. Then you (almost certainly) incorrectly described that person as a "mod". Every user of Stack Overflow is entitled to propose edits, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation (about 150,000 accounts, versus 25 currently active moderators and only a handful of retired ones) can make those edits unilaterally.
> dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
And you ignored that it's explicitly site policy (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950 ; https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288160 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ; many others) to remove this exact sort of thing, exactly because posting a question on Stack Overflow is not "a conversation between you and whoever answers". The site, in fact, explicitly started so that people could get answers without having a conversation, by creating an actually searchable resource.
And you didn't even consider that there might be an underlying goal of producing a relatively uniform (at least: direct, but professional) style, because third parties might want to read that. When you ask a question, you can probably only usefully get answered once; the most successful questions get millions of views.
When third parties find a Q&A with a search engine, language like that is wasting their time, and in fact is actually exclusionary. It gives the impression of walking in on someone else's private communication, when in fact the entire point of the exercise is to produce a question that someone else could equally well have asked. (The purpose is so that the other person can read the question, verify they're in the right place, read the answers and be answered instantaneously.)
It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.
> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.
The community arrived at, drafted and enforce policy forbidding AI-generated content; this usually meant answers because that was the obvious use case for LLMs.
(We were getting absolutely flooded from day 1 with really obviously LLM-generated crap, which represented absolutely zero value add over the OP going to chatgpt dot com and copy-pasting the question there instead. Often this came from users who came back to the site after years of hiatus, who had an established track record in previous answers of being barely able to communicate in English at all; and then they would come to the meta site and insist that they hadn't used an LLM, apparently completely unable to understand how blatantly obvious they were being about it.)
The company repeatedly attempt to force shitty AI-powered features on the community, and also tried to intervene with enforcement of that policy, complaining that false positives would be too damaging. These features got roundly rejected again and again, but this was ignored. Again, much of this represented zero value-add over going to chatgpt dot com directly. Some examples:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438910
The intervention against moderator enforcement of policy (an actual moderator action! Ordinary community members can't just delete an answer for being LLM-generated, although they do take almost all the other actions people complain about offsite) got so bad that it led to an actual strike.
Yes, yes, the usual narrative. They were not welcoming.
I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website:
So, contrary to the usual narrative, the incentives and most activity was directed to answering newbie questions. That made up most of the volume, and it was what the reputation system rewarded. Even if a question got closed as a duplicated, by that time there usually were already answers to most easy questions. And deletion could only happen after some time (two days IIRC).
The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system.
The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.
I tried to answer an SO question exactly once, around 15 years ago. Someone asked a question which was covered perfectly by some OSS code I had already published, so I linked to that in my answer (while explaining how the linked code was relevant). My answer was promptly deleted, of course, for linking to code. After that I lost all desire to contribute.
I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.
I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary.
I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get pointer on how to track that behavior I was seeing. Of course the second I post it I got a -1 plus “can’t reproduce”/“please add minimal example”.
An other time, I had a question that was very similar to an existing one, but different setup and the answer did not solve my problem at all. Mentioned all that, linked the other question and specifically wrote that it was NOT addressing my problem. Posted it, soon after tagged as duplicate with that one answer that did NOT solve the problem.
After that I rarely asked questions again.
Also the points system made it frustrating as a new user: someone 2 years ago asks a basic language question “+50 upvotes”. You asked a similar question, asking extra clarification on an aspect “-2, already answered, read the doc” and so on. And with such a big deal made about reputation it felt like just being born early and being able to be an early adopter meant you got east points. For new users, though luck.
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The one advantage of actually trying to use SO was that the fear of asking a question usually made me do so much research that I'd solve my issue in the process of fully describing it.
That did also make the community lose out on the answer though.
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Yeah, I think the issue with Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange is one of how too much gatekeeping and elitism tends to eventually be the death knell for a community.
True, you might want people who are more articulate or thoughtful than the majority, but if you go too hard on that, you end up putting a time limit on how long the community will probably last. People won't stick around a community that treats them like crap, and that's a problem because at least some of those amateurs/newbies will become your future experts and power users. The people scared away by bullies like the one mentioned here didn't come back to Stack Exchange once they became the type of expert the site needed. They just shared their knowledge elsewhere.
My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most.
May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.
I did, and it wasn't much better on the other side.
And funnily enough, the questions that I answered that most contributed to getting me through the gauntlet years later were closed at duplicates (they weren't).
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants
I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:
1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.
2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.
This was long before LLMs.
At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"
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It seems to me that AI did SO in, not its moderation culture.
SO is not a place to ask where to get your homework assignment done, that's for sure. The gamification does not necessarily reward the best content, but I didn't experience hostility myself.
(I do find this site fairly hostile. And Wikipedia is the lowest possible hell, I've never in my life experienced anything comparable to the ferocity with which people prosecute their grudges, all the way to IRL doxxing. German language Wikipedia is another whole level of self-appointed officialdom.)
> I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me
Damn. Doesn’t that just sum up so many interactions (and sadly, relationships) in life.
I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site).
AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord.
SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.
You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.
I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?
Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.
Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
The vast majority of duplicate closures use already answered questions as duplicates. So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. In my observation this is usually the case, though the answer might be more generic.
I have also seen bad duplicate closures that weren't actually exact duplicates. But people talk like this is the only kind of duplicate closure that actually happens. I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, or if people are missing that their question is actually answered in the duplicate.
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I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.
Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.
LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
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You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues.
I hope somebody saves it all.
Perhaps not what you intended, but most of it is stored in various models' weights.
Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.
For better or for worse, the contents of Stack Overflow are literally the reason LLM coding has taken over the world.
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They used to publish a regular torrent of everything, not sure if they still do that? Maybe you could grab yourself a copy for posterity.
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>making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site
Fancy wording but inaccurate. Plenty of long-time users (me included) left when the mods became insane.
>StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions
This is significantly under selling it.
Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.
I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable
I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.
His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”
At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive
I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one
> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation
Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale.
> They slowly killed the site in this manner.
It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy.
> knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question.
It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question.
> I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Reading through, for example, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433897 and understanding what is written there is literally all that is required.
I disagree. Stack Overflow was made to succeed, not fail ... originally.
Then the founders left, and meta basically chronicles the echo chamber of mistakes made. It's not the intent: that was to help coders code. Meta was dominated by people who lost the intent, and wanted to build a library.
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as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.
So I guess Wikipedia will eventually face the same fate
Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference. SO was supposed to help programmers program.
The former continues to succeed, with hiccups, because they remember their goal. The latter is dead, and it failed because it tried to be the former, forgetting their goal.
In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort.
I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form.
These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine.
In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead?
Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.
> Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over.
I did get over it when I stopped bothering with SO. Sorry, but a community whose ethos is "you need a thick skin to belong" is not one most people even want to belong to.
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S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
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> aquire comment points to be able to answer
I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
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You have much more eloquently put the same feeling I had about the site.
It was a good resource but absolutely toxic to newcomers.
Good Riddance to SO.
SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community.
I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.
Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.
It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.
One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"
Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
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My favorite thing was how for half the stuff I Googled, the top result would be a StackOverflow reply telling me to Google it.
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The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.
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From my perspective it wasn’t death by a thousand cuts, it all comes back to just one cut: an over-reliance on volunteer moderators. If they paid staff to run their communities, they could have issued a simple “don’t be a dick or we’ll fire you” rule. But because they relied on volunteers, they had to cater to those volunteers to keep them. And the volunteers drove the site into ruin to make it a better experience for moderators.
Off topic, closed.
> would've been a "newcomer track"
It's there now. Too late I guess. https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground
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SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people.
Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.
An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.
There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.
It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"
As noted by others, the initializer for the curt communication culture was "don't ask stupid questions, idiot."
Once or twice someone on SO used their chat feature to help me out after I asked a question, back when I was a n00b. That was really kind of them. Eventually, once I actually knew my stuff, I spent some time answering good questions on there. And yeah I had to be discerning.
Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.
Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."
Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.
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Reddit has many different subs that suffer from its problems in different degrees, so there's still islands of relative calm and sanity, usually in low-traffic subs. To some extent this was also true of different sites in the overall StackExchange network, but SO itself always dominated the network, it was designed and run as a monoculture, and that culture was, well ... gestures vaguely in SO's direction
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It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.
I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.
Can confirm for some dumb joke subs.
You want to blow off some steam, and there is a laundry list of rules to read through.
Yeah, not bothering with all that.
Yup, there was some political bill discussion about some recent issue and others were posting links, so I thought I'd concur with an interesting vote breakdown link showing how each house/party voted. Something anyone I would gather was in good faith. Nope, instant longtime account shadow permanent ban. Wow.
Do you know if those contributors were able to get their accounts back? I was a heavy contributor in a couple of technological subs, and my account was shadowbanned and then removed with no recourse or way to regain access.
my experience with reddit has been much more about its politization rather than anything about quality
"my side is right, the other is wrong" - has been too common of an occurrence, both in comments but also in posts and such frontpages as /r/all
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Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.
Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever.
They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.
It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.
It was also the rise of Github and the importance of the software hosted there. More consistent documentation and transparent issue trackers/PRs helped a lot dealing with evolving software.
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> and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on.
No; answers got outdated because of people not doing what they were supposed to do, which is: post a new answer on the old question. (Assuming that the old answers actually are outdated. It happens all the time that decade-old answers are still perfectly relevant, or even still represent the Right Way to Do It(TM).)
Somehow, people never wanted to do that when it actually mattered, but would constantly post new, repetitive, low-quality answers on popular old questions (often re-combining multiple old answers) even though the solutions hadn't actually become outdated, simply because they were popular questions and they hoped to gain visibility from it (whether from reputation, or because user profile pages had a "number of users reached" metric which literally just sums the view counts of the pages where you have a question or answer, including views that occurred before your post).
That said, there are plenty of cases where an old question got closed as a duplicate of a newer question: either because it went unnoticed before, or because of deliberate action to reverse the direction of closure, with the goal of pointing future viewers to the best possible Q&A. This was explicitly in accordance with policy: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251938 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423085 . As a general rule, policy is "timeless": the timestamp on a post is not relevant to determining the right thing to do with it.
In an age where we all get the same generic answer from LLMs, SO could have been the place to have meaningful conversations on tech topics. Instead they became irrelevant
>"no conversation please"
Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that
It always worked like that
I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.
Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?
Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.
So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.
I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.
The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.
Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.
IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.
But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.
As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.
And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.
SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.
And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.
The anonymity of people giving aggressive and confrontational "answers" to a question reminds me of:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
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I stopped posting there around then. Multiple times in a row I asked a question, got it closed as a duplicate/pointed to another thread/met with "why are you even trying to do that" despite being clear about my problem. It was obvious the people answering/closing the question skimmed it and I already gave a ton of context. It just stopped being useful
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Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI?
I don't buy it.
People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
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How eager people are to find something better IS a factor in the decline of websites/businesses. Not just that there is something better that exists.
I personally left SO because I felt moderation had become toxic, and that was before AI. And I was relatively active, like in the top 5%.
See the decline of the graph even before the spring of ’22?
I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.
A Q&A site where the community asks questions and the community answers them. That doesn't work without a community.
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> SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form
SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.
Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.
I'm used to enjoying your comments here, but this is an unusually bad take, and frankly personally hurtful. None of this was ever about that kind of power or control, and hearing constant accusations to the contrary was one of the things that compounded the stress of curation for me.
I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]
Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.
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[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...
[2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...
I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.
The sale is relevant. The spike in activity right before the sale already shows the management hand and how they actively ran the org to optimize for this sale. The rebound right after is hard, and it was (right) before chatgpt
They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over
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So you think its mostly just coincidence that 4 years after AI is introduced stack overflow is dead?
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Everyone trumpeting the "bad SO moderation" angle is delusional. Stack Overflow was far better than conventional forums. Without LLMs, SO would have stayed popular, there is no doubt about it. The massive decline was clearly and obviously caused mainly by LLMs.
This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.
Do you mean that curious growth spike in mid 2020? If so, can you think of anything else significant that happened in mid 2020...?
Scrolled looking for this comment the decline appears to be way earlier than LLM agents becoming popular.
But where did all the users go is something that would be interesting
Mostly: Discord, Github issues (as forum), X (twitter at the time), and Discourse! Discourse was growing steadily, even startups like OpenAI and neobanks like nubank (Brazil) had forums for their users because keeping your community active and close was something considered valuable (devrel since then has experienced a rapidly decline).
I didn't know that. Good to see they cashed out in time.
I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
I see people talking about the negative experiences, and I'm sure they are real, but I also had some very positive experiences.
I remember being amazed that some internet stranger took the time to understand my question and provide some great solution where I was stuck. It gave me a little encouragement and social connection as I plugged away on a project alone.
I miss that feel good human connection when an LLM can quickly get me an answer.
But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out.
I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.
meh, in my experience good quality LLMs are significantly more correct than Stack Overflow ever was and have access to your code and machine to help you diagnose issues.
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It is curation process, so when you search you are not overwhelmed by 100 identical answers.
Being stupid in this case is irrational self-(mis)-perception.
Probably they really meant to say you are lazy and shift work on mods.
Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.
Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.
Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.
The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.
Sometimes you'd get banned for asking an exact duplicate of a previous question of yours that was closed. They'd tell you to edit the closed question and it would be reopened.
But if you'd edited the closed question instead, it wouldn't be reopened.
Sometimes? It happened more and more and when every second question was like this, I left. I wasn't going to fight against moderators forever.
That was before AI.
And your second attempt would get closed as a duplicate of your first attempt.
LLM's are the primary cause of SO decline. Largely due to LLM's having scraped SO (and everything else available on the WWW). It's the reason there is a decline in traffic across the web i.e. Wikipedia. LLM's surface the required search query or info directly.
I guess AI sycophancy does contribute to its success.
I feel like I've seen this comment before...
Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.
The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.
The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...
> The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.
The collapse into a ghost town is striking.
Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO.
This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.
SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.
There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.
I remember a time when people were posting their SO link and karma on their resumes. O how have the times changed.
> This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.
Literally describing how academia has worked since time immemorial.
check the graph and superpose the ai adoption curve, you're right to be skeptical
Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.
I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.
AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.
The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.
Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.
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> at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered
I don’t buy this.
Programming as an industry is famous for constantly evolving and changing.
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for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.
- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only"
- Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library
- Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked
- Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs
- Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP
- Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong
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Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision
Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.
I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
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Add it to the list:
- the downfall of junior devs
- bad hiring market
- layoffs in practically every sector
theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.
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It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.
https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073
It's very much a bell curve
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You mean the fall to a thousand questions per month. Now that the volume is low enough someone has a chance of looking at every single one of them, maybe the StackOverflow community can finally collaborate in peace, safe from the onslaught of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation.
I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.
> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years
Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it. AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already largely prior to AI.
Yes.
At the same time, this is graph is something that really should not look anything like a bell curve. So the format is probably just a coincidence.
Except if the "all the questions have been asked" hypothesis is correct. What I really doubt.
this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.
You don't just fit a Gaussian distribution to a timeseries dataset. That's not what a Gaussian curve is designed for at all. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regr...
You are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.
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This isn't really a bell curve.
check my other response, it's very much a bell curve, statistically speaking
https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
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Ironically it gives me: This IP address has performed an unusually high number of requests and has been temporarily rate limited.
That's also something what AI did to the internet :(
I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer.
There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.
It definitely seems like politics ruins everything. Nerds once thought they'd transcended politics and then discovered they hadn't.
"Politics" being another word for "game theory when it's about humans"
> were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities
And the solution turned out to be putting every user in their own safety bubble of recommended conten and expanding the bubble only when user gets adventurous. And TikTok became gold standard for that that everone tries to emulate with varying degrees of success
One thing I wonder, if you look at the comments here it is clear the moderation and the general hostility of the site was a big reason why a lot of people left or didn't engage with it. Yet, I can't recall SO doing anything about this, and its confusing to me why. Was it:
a) They don't acknowledge this was a problem.
b) They are unwilling to tackle this problem.
c) They are unable to tackle this problem.
I'd love to know what the people who run the site (from a business perspective) think about this. It might offer some insight into its cousins that are going down the same path (reddit / wikipedia).
Might be a vocal minority. I used to visit SO every day, several times a day, for like 10+ years, got so much value from it and would not have changed anything to the site. "AI Overview" in Google completely killed it tho and I don't really see what they could do about it other than completely change the site into something else. RIP.
> They don't acknowledge this was a problem.
Most people who came to SO wanted the site to be something it fundamentally wasn't supposed to be; that it in fact specifically existed not to be, to provide an alternative, because the thing that everyone wants (a discussion forum) is actually bad.
When the site was launched, lots of people seemed to agree with Atwood and Spolsky that discussion forums are bad and that they knew better. But in the long run, this still proved to be a minority opinion, by a long shot.
In short, I don't acknowledge that it was a problem because it wasn't. It was expected and okay that lots of people didn't want to engage with the format. The format was not for them. The purpose of the format was to produce an artifact that would benefit them indirectly, for free, by improving Google search results (until Google fucked it up).
But the site (the platform itself, and the people implementing it; not the community) fucked up by failing to recognize that most people really do want a fundamentally unproductive, unfocused social environment (and a help desk!) after all.
More importantly, it fucked up by presenting a UI that misleads people into thinking they could have that experience (post a question and there's space for answers under it; obviously that means that people are answering directly for your benefit and not anyone else! and of course we can go back and forth about this, and they'll help me solve my problem! and there are votes, like Reddit!)
In any case, business perspective prevailed, subject matter experts stopped sticking around. Personally, I think the (slow but steady over many years) switch from b) to c) is what doomed the site.
There was a few noteworthy company post, especially those after the mass layoffs / private equity takeover on the meta site that acknowledged the problem, so its certainly not a), even when you apply a strict standard about the terms in which to acknowledge the problem (which was well-known long before). Those company statements had some rather clear and well-received community commentary below that essentially questioned whether any of the suggestions on tackling the problem should even be tried. The very-much-not-welcoming onboarding experience, while it had great potential for improvements, was yet serving the sites unique needs quite well. Two weeks of persistence and reading the manual were not much of a detrimental filter.. not to those that would eventually go on to contribute back for many years. And those were the ones that ultimately mattered. Not those one-off solve-my-homework posts that only saw indifferent/annoyed moderation action. That probably still wonder why nobody took their hand and spent their evening guiding them through the steps necessary to make their post useful to anyone other than just the original author.
In my opinion:
a) they choose a certain very specific ideal as a target, but utterly failed to convey that to a majority of site visitors;
b) their picked target and path visually and functionally matched by like 90% with a thing already existing for decades previously and very familiar to a majority of internet users - with a regular forum with sections and treads;
c) they make fundamental errors even inside the scope of their own ideal and vision - like for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;
d) while they copied forum structure (failure B) they also failed to envision (or did a mistake in that) how the ideal target result would look like a long time in the future;
e) they failed to acknowledge all of the above, reflect on and fix own mistakes, instead they declared those mistakes "a culture" and persisted in deepening them;
Basically they picked a forum format, known at those times to literally everybody on the internet and decided to use it to make something vastly different, while failing both at communicating that intention and also failing at actually adapting UI and tools to better suit their target.
Very well put. Except they didn't think they were "picking a forum format". Forums with that style of voting were still kinda rare at the time (Reddit was young at SO's date of creation) and the Q&A formatting was supposed to look intentionally different from a "thread", which is also way (at least in the original design) comments were de-emphasized, and moderation policy held that the large majority of comments could be deleted at any time.
Unfortunately, this design comes across to a lot of people as comments being threaded replies, and the "question" format as privileging the OP (which makes it that much worse when the system forces question closure to happen out in the open). And recent redesigns, by new ownership obsessed with "engagement" and profitability and apparent complete apathy towards the original goals, have thoroughly enshittified the original.
I also have no idea what you mean about
> for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;
There were always separate tags for various minor versions of Python, for example, and they were commonly incorrectly applied to questions where the version was not relevant.
Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users
If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did.
What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.
The users being generally unhelpful wasn't an issue for them, since they were still significantly more helpful than users anywhere else on the internet. Reddit was and still is filled with completely unvetted answers (on pretty much all topics not just programming), Quora was/is a joke, Yahoo answers had some funny posts I guess but nothing you could actually learn from, what else really was there? Before AI, Stack Overflow was as good as it gets.
It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
It just accelerated the trend, and I am sure that reddit took over for a lot of new users. The different problems with SO has been well documented.
And they killed maybe one of the most side features of it : https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
So yeah metakill your own brands with stupid policies.
There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
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That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.
My perspective: Stack Overflow was started to be a documentation site, but was implemented as a Q/A site. And that doomed it from the start.
If someone wants to get help, and they end up on Stack Overflow, the structure looks like a Q/A site, and they treat it that way. The people "in the know" then accuse them of being "bad" for posting a question to a documentation site. Combine that with the gamification, and it had to turn into the toxic mess that it did.
When I first heard of the gamification method of moderation, I thought it was a really good idea. But, over the years, it has proven to be a means to enforce an echo chamber, rather than a way to filter out bad posts. I have yet to find a site (HN included), where that isn't true.
It was always intended to be a documentation site, see https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and similar.
Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong:
* Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it.
* Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.
Yeah, I used to mostly answer there instead of ask and was in the top % for several big tags whatever that means / is worth, but then at some point I realized things had changed and I was spending more time fighting rules and guidelines rather than sharing knowledge and having a good time so I just stopped.
It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems
A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community
The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"
I have never actively asked a question on SO either. But for every programming question I ever had (literally!), I always either found the solution to it, or the reason why my question was stupid. (Which usually boils down to me not understanding sthg about the technology I'm working with.)
Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...
SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc
And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
So... nothing that it wasn't already doing to itself? There's no one drop where "AI got into the market", SO had been declining steadily for years. I actually expected this post to be about how SO survived by selling its internal organs to AI.
Now do a graph for the money.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...
> There's no one drop where "AI got into the market"
Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.
It's always slightly amusing to me how SE has the most restrictive cloudflare turnstile config set.
On the rare occasion that I DO want to go there, they greet me with an impossible gate that takes 15+ seconds to pass on Brave and gets invalidated quickly.
If anyone from SE is reading this: you already failed to protect your data from the LLM crawlers, SE is no longer that much interesting to them. The only visitors you're gating today are not bots, they're humans.
>failed to protect from the LLM crawlers
Never meant to be protected. I only contributed there because it specified in no uncertain terms that everything was going to be CC BY-SA licensed and posted in a public archive every now and then, so you do not need to scrape to use & redistribute if you intend to adhere to those terms. That would have been sufficient protection, if only governments had not u-turned from Walt-Disney-Copyright straight to "Open"AI-Copyright.
The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it. You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation.
Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
Some of the pre-ai decline in questions might just be that they had filled out of alot of the question space. What might be more interesting is the traffic graph as it would be possible to have a decline in questions but still have traffic rising to the existing ones.
Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.
Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph
I don’t have some grand theory on SO’s downfall. All I will say is that sometimes us programmers try to optimize every single thing in life and that’s simply not how humans work.
SO tried to optimize the Q/A by eagerly rejecting repeat questions, without considering what the consequences of that were. If you’re in a classroom / lecture hall, your teacher / professor isn’t going to chide you for asking an “obvious” or “repeat” question (bad ones might). Imagine if every time you wanted to talk to a TA or professor you first needed to lookup previously asked questions in a database and then, iff your question hasn’t been asked before, you may ask the professor or TA after hours. Programmers might call this system “efficient” but most people would be pretty unhappy with it.
The graph starts falling shortly after 2020. AI certainly contributed but Stack Overflow was dying without it.
AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene.
I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.
The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.
[dead]
ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022, and frankly wasn't very good originally. The SO decline started occurring almost two years ahead of that, and was already on a sharp decline before ChatGPT shipped, and certainly before ChatGPT actually became good.
This is revisionist history. People told SO that they were leaving for YEARS because of how incredibly toxic it had become. It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately.
Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended."
They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.
Two years before ChatGPT is shortly after Joel and Jeff sold Stack Overflow to private equity.
The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.
For those who don't know what the Monica affair was: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-...
The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?
In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy pro-AI decisions from the admin.
> The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?
The title of this thread is "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph." That's a narrative. At least before the mods change it.
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Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin.
Interesting to compare with MathOverflow which has distinctly different policies (only research-level questions) and professional community: https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/st... - also falling lately, but by a factor of 2-3x from peak rather than 1000x.
Just tried to open stack overflow and was told their site was under maintenance. When I refreshed, it blocked my IP for refreshing too many times. I expect better from SO.
503 and then rate limit here for refreshing once.
Stack overflow was always going to die. AI just sped it up. The misconception that it was a community is surprising. People went there for an answer and left, very few would stick around, not only because there was no incentive, but if you did you'd likely get crapped on by one of the hostile moderators which would ensure you'd leave and never come back, because who wants to willingly be treated badly.
It was basically an imposer syndrome enforcing machine.
Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there.
Funnily enough, there's now a "StackOverflow for Agents": https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent
One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.
I miss Joel Spolsky's writings especially in this dark age of AI.
Discussion in January:
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999125
Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.
Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.
Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.
Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.
Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.
Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?
Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?
The platform in question was openly hostile to people asking questions and made discussions against the rules. That's why people left the moment a better option came along
Yes, it had that problem.
But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels.
Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...
This query is even better: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/c...
Wow, this one really highlights the collapse. Basically no new questions have been asked this year while unanswered questions climbed unabated.
I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.
Yeah, I don't remember when was the last time I even visited stackexchange. AI is so much better, it's not even a contest. The real question is where AI will get its knowledge in 10 or 15 years when there is no training material anymore...
I never understood the point if having the unfathomable churn of thousands of new questions per day. The value of SO to me was always a knowledge base with reputation mechanics, and that did not change. I still default to searching before asking AI.
They didn’t stand a chance. Even in the era where they made a great community etc etc AI would have destroyed them. Other people are just a poor source of information now that we have dramatically good search across all human knowledge.
I’m surprised the site had that little activity, relatively, around 2010. That’s when I was using it the most. It seemed plenty large to me at the time… I can’t imagine the experience was that great a few years later. I wasn’t really paying attention by the time it reached the peaks later that decade.
I always found the format of the side obtuse and the culture not very welcoming. My most popular answer ever was something about JavaScript from 2008 or 2009, and to this day, people come in and say “this isn’t the way to do it, this is outdated“. No kidding, but every new question about that gets closed as a duplicate.
I am surprised how early the overall downward trend developed. There is no doubt LLMs put a nail in the coffin, but the 5 years from 2017 to 2022 look to have brought a non trivial decline of their own
Often the people curating the questions are also the ones who are answering them.
Their goal (loosely described) was so that if you pulled up the front page of the site, you'd find questions that are interesting to read and answer.
If you, as a professional visiting the site went to it and found the front page with things that were trivially answered by reading the documentation or "how do I draw a triangle with stars?" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960245 ) the ability for the... for lack of a better term "elders" of the site to try to get people to understand how the site worked and its expectations.
Many of the new users expected Stack Overflow to work much like forums - with a back and forth between people and a chat like environment... that wasn't so. The use of the curation tools to try to help onboard a person were deemed as unfriendly and "toxic" started getting tossed around.
Stack Overflow corporate, trying to be sensitive to the broader cultural movements at the time and the "we need to make this a more inclusive space" made it harder to curate and began a campaign of removing or limiting curation tools as part of "welcoming".
During this time, there was one tool that was enhanced in its effectiveness. If you had a gold badge on a tag you could close it as a dup of another question categorically. Rather than "this question is poorly written and it is unclear what you are asking" (requiring 5 close votes from different people - that would never happen if it didn't happen in the first few minutes because few went to the review queues) they could close the question as a duplicate of what it might be.
That didn't help things when it came to the perception of the site. It was a last ditch effort to try to make it so that the front page was the well asked questions.
Combining the reduction of curation tools, labeling their use as gatekeeping, the growing ratio of new users to elders, and corporate quite literally saying that those people who were doing the curation were the bad guys... well, a lot of them left or reduced their activity.
That in turn made it so that it was harder to find the well asked questions and fewer people were around to answer questions. Note I write "well asked" not "valid" - a lot of people claim to have a valid question but don't ask it in a way that is well suited to the Q&A format.
Combine that again with reductions in staff, various awful "experiments" in the name of improving engagement. That was akin to firing half of a construction team at a house while having them add a new patio... all the while the basement is flooded.
And so you've got what is there today. Very few curators left compared to 2016. Few caring answer new difficult questions. The easy college homework questions (how do you draw a triangle) and the outsourcing of work to free labor is now done with an LLM... and there's no coming back from that. ... And few people believe in the mission goal of Stack Overflow - and those who do, don't believe Stack Overflow corporate believes in that mission goal.
While I never posted much to Stackoverflow I have fond memories of it as a sole developer, finding other people with similar issues and the quality solutions offered that often got me out of a jam.
The site looks like it was actually dying since 2014 and AI just turned off the life support.
It was such a hostile environment. It always seemed like you basically had to already know the answer to ask a question.
Picking on SO and the mods in particular is a popular HN pasttime. I'd like to add that I interacted a bit with SO (1k points) and never really had any problems with them. I must be lucky...
This made me browse through my StackOverflow history. Funny to see how I though I was such a skilled developer, though the questions I asked and the answers I gave 16 years ago... cringe.
The Pulse #119: Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134
The Fall of Stack Overflow https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overfl...
Can it please do the same to reddit?
If you made a chart showing real human activity on reddit I imagine there's a big decline. The obviousness of bots and bot upvoting is undeniable
Had the same thought. Since around 2022-2023, most subreddits insta-ban you or hide your posts unless you have x karma (you gain karma by posting and getting upvotes).
So unless you happen to have an old account with karma from pre-2022, the only new users whose posts are actually getting through are the ones that know the specific subreddits that let you "karma farm" - ie, mostly bots and bad actors.
Also tangentially related, much of the weirdness of Reddit ("Thanks for the gold, kind stranger", fedora-tipping, narwhals baconing at midnight, references to weird memes etc.) also happened to disappear after GPT-3 came out, and get replaced with really strong opinions about politics and investments.
Even without AI, a large part is also that everything easy and relevant has already been asked and answered. 10 years ago, there was still demand for low hanging ”how do I reverse a string in programming language X”. On top of that, languages and libraries today tend to have a lot better documentation.
What’s left to ask now is ”plx fix my homework” - [pastes error log unique to the posters environment]. Something that Claude is very good and very tolerant at.
Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.
There is a pretty sharp acceleration of that decline around 2022/2023.
Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.
Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
For me, stackoverflow is dead long before AI.
Questions getting closed for no reason, answers getting deleted randomly.
Don't waste your time asking & answering questions on SO.
I recall some moves where SO announced they would be revising ToS to disclose their intent to repackage and use the site’s content for sale and/or model training.
Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted.
I guess that’s “LLM related”
Does the peak starting in mid-2020 correspond to mass speculative / adversarial / bandwagon hiring by tech companies during the pandemic?
I can't see any specific "and then AI happened" in this graph? SO made a lot of dumb choices that made it less and less useful for people independent of forcing AI in there, nothing in this graph is a clear indicator that AI was even a blip on the rapid decline of a service intent on making itself as poor an experience as possible for folks wanting to help other folks.
The peak was in 2014, far before any coherent AI became a thing.
As someone with substantial "points" accumulated all a full decade ago, I can easily see why. If you only allow certain opinions and criteria for specific subjects, your user will eventually shrink to only the few that possessed them.
It's a Spartan death. Don't blame it on the Persians or Athens.
StackOverflow was on decline due to mismanagement and hostility towards the community. This was well before AI. AI was just the death blow.
ChatGPT was released in November 2022 so only the last decisive blow was dished by AI. Stack Overflow was already 40% below its peek when it was struck.
However looking at the shape of this last drop, I think it wouldn't matter if the SO was in its prime when it happened. SO would die regardless, at the schedule dictated more by strengthening AI rather than its own.
Slightly accelerated their decline. You have a drop around chatgpt release then the slope returns to its previous pace of decline.
RIP Jon Skeet, stack overflow legend, guy must've spent 100k hours answering C# questions! (He's not dead, but SO is)
AI and ridiculously aggressive moderation. If it had been a more welcoming place it probably would have lasted longer.
I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.
I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones).
It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing
What I like about AI is that it doesn't close my chats as "duplicate" and link to something unrelated. It doesn't refuse to tell me how to do something just because there's another way to do something else that I am not interested in and didn't ask for.
There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.
My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…
Wrong, what SO did to themselves in a graph!
You cannot reply to a post to either provide correction or solution because you don't have enough "points" to do so.
You were forced to complete an insane list of requirements just to comment. Let that sink in.
Just like stackoverflow saved developers from experts exchange, it might be able to save us from what is coming from AI being an averaging engine by default and generating average code. Hopefully it's average but always works.
Looks like the decline started before the ai boom.
I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.
I think Ai is not the issue here. SEO on the other hand very much. It’s not like any one ever went to stackoverflow to find a solution, it was just that they were the google results for a lot of things
So many insights in my past came from stackoverflow answers. But it always required reading through tens of discussions and combining solutions. Young engineers will never know the pain.
Meanwhile, what AI did to arxiv: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981206
I've only posted one question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.
They did that to themselves. Posting a question on SE was the hardest task I've had to endure back when i was a junior developer.
If there is not allowed to be duplicate questions isn't it by design that as the site and industry matures the number of posts go down.
Wikipedia will suffer the same fate if they don't reform soon. Their "editors" are worse than SO's.
Wow!! I checked for English learners, Artificial Intelligence and GenAI as well and even they suck :D
Guess where these people went? Reddit?
AI was the final nail but SO was already on a downward trajectory imo. Too much angry rule setting and confident jerks.
Hehe, I'm so glad I blew the lid on this thing some time ago.
Mods were so shitty I always wanted to have my schadenfreude on them.
When an ecological shoes company pivot to AI, I wonder why StackOverflow executives don't pilot for AI now.
They have been. Very aggressively. The community hates it. Their attempts have been ham-handed and offer zero value added over putting your question into chatgpt dot com instead of the SO submission form; but they would be hated anyway.
They are trying I guess: https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/10/announcing-stack-overf...
There's still a question of what that would do for them. I haven't used SO in years because I haven't needed it in years.
That's primarily due to AI answering my technical questions.
Hug of death? Doesn’t seem to load for me
Yes, still down. The HTML loads eventually with the query contents, but no CSS, much less query results
StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.
Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
I will miss their yearly developer survey. Otherwise I won’t miss them. What a frustrating experience it was.
They still have it, and just sent it out
We could fix this graph using AI: make AI post 250k questions each month, problem solved?
people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird.
i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.
The Irony here is what Hacker News did to this page. 503 Service Unavailable :D
Looks like StackOverflow was already declining by the time ChatGPT came out
Didn't Stack Overflow have a similar impact on Experts Exchange?
SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet.
I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too.
And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes.
Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help.
Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely.
There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high.
Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.
The company my friend works for has a slack channel for help with code, like an internal stackoverflow. It’s almost inactive now.
I asked to see one of the questions from 2024 - it could have been solved with one LLM search.
We have eliminated a whole genre of peer to peer communication.
I noticed the same thing. Another thing that seems to have disappear: lunch and learn focusing on the tech stack. And I mean specifically about "how to do this in <programming language", not product/company focused.
Where will AI's get the training data to answer questions now?
AI is smart enough to figure out many answers from docs or code prototypes.
Smaller fraction of novel questions are still submitted on SO, github discussion and mailing lists.
Right, there's a lot of schadenfreude about SA not being so popular and serves them right for being mean when I asked them a question... but it was also no doubt a gold mine of AI training data. Stands to reason this may be an agentic AI golding age, as future models just eating their own data.
Should read what Google did to remove sites from search results.
Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
just today I googled "convert PDF to Jpg" and the first stackoverflow answer was a hit on google and the question was "CLOSED, NOT APPROPRIATE".
It wasn't only LLMs it was also the downright user-hostile attitude prevalent on many sites on the SE network: https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX
Yeah, bro, I'm not a statistics professor so I can't provide you with the "details or clarity" you need. I tried my best and if that's not enough, fuck it. Same story on history.SE: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hi... If you're gonna require "evidence of prior research" I won't bother. The bots are way friendlier and just as knowledgeable.
The golden goose were users asking questions, not the anal-retentive content curators. SO let the latter drive away the former.
Stack Overflow abuse and the rage it generated in me is sort of nostalgic. Kind of sad in a way that I can't quite recall the rage anymore.
By the way, at least as far as what it is showing me，SO is an AI site now. Home page Ask a question goes straight to an LLM doing RAG against Stack Overflow.
Edit: actually they tricked me into asking AI. The text box to ask AI is right next to what is actually an Ask A Question button that skips the AI.
It's training data seems limited or out of date because it had no idea what Gemma 4 E2B was. It just said that wasn't in the SO data and could I explain wtf I was talking about please. I guess not Gemma 3 either. And no web search. So it's useless for me today.
Interestingly, the Stack Overflow AI answer is provided by OpenAI, and these may be the most useless responses I have seen any time recently.
Whaddyaknow. Got me a little twinge of the good ole' rage tingles after all!
AI didn't start the decline, it just finished it.
They had a good run!
Perhaps the harshest lesson of stackoverflow is that it represented what happens when you give programmer-types unfettered control of a culture. A bitter pill indeed.
This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in 2008, and I would reason it took a few years, say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.
It still has some value today, as sometimes you can find useful information on SO, but its peak days are long over and I don't see how it can manage to come back, with or without AI slop. It would basically require a lot of re-design and some things that never worked, such as the karma system, should be changed. Also moderators - they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.
I disagree. From what I see, company specific stackoverflow like mailing lists or slack channels are also dead.
The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.
One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.
FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.
joining the space and getting to know this site in 2015ish it was toxic af, well deserved
AI didn't kill SO, SO was already declining due to toxic users and lack of organization. The toxic users were dunning-krugerian anal-retentive mini-Napoleons who delighted in locking anything slightly off-topic and merging slightly-related questions, and the lack of organization was a tendency for people to give incorrect answers but still get upvoted (due to Google search surfacing the page in the wrong context).
Honestly SO helped me a lot in Uni 10 years ago. However I was banned 5+ times for just asking a normal question with attempts at answering. Can’t say I’m surprised. It was not welcoming, massively exclusive and had a rude community. RIP
Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.
Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.
Somehow I feel that whole idea was 50% broken from start. In field changing as fast as programming you simply cannot have canonical source that is done. There are areas which are constant or slow moving. But too many others are in churn. Trying to apply same rules for both is clearly insanity. And this is really the failure of SO...
Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it might have worked... But can't remove power from those who had it for years...
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The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.
That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.
Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.
The trend might've stalled or even reversed if it weren't for AI, we can't just assume the same end was written in stone.
Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.
Careful - the LLM companies are also modern day dictators and pharoahs.
There's always going to be lots of latent insecurity among amateurs when a pro shows up.
Honestly because of this and the relative lack of actual pros on the site, real pros will get pushed out and the site will actually build a collection of misinformation. That's probably why pros feel that software quality has dropped so much in since stackoverflow.
that must be depressing to the owners and the investors.
Did anyone use the site search? Whenever I tried it it was disappointing. After ~two attempts I always went back to Google. Having the answer is of no use if you refuse to give it. LLMs didn't happen overnight. With all the aging questions, perhaps it was always doomed to be replaced by something.
The site for lazy code monkeys is dead.
Now that Stack Overflow is mostly dead, what's the experience of asking a question there? Will you still get berated or are people chilled out?
By now I’m more and more starting to wonder how this graph looks for Google itself
Honestly i'll take LLMs over SO any day.
If I want LLMs to belittle and passive-aggressively mock me while providing borderline help, I can prompt them to do that. But I could never turn that off on stackoverflow.
Stackoverflow deserved to die
lol. Error 503.
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The move the current companies are missing is to have a legislation declaring ai as a person. Just like how corporations are people, if ai is a person then they don’t have to show number of people fired, can argues content creation and engagement is through the roof and so many other possibilities. /s
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same story for blogs
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Sadge
I tried looking it up but "“sadge” The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary." Care to say more than whatever slang I presume this is?
I think they meant https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sage
Are you a X-ennial? I've only ever heard my little brother say that. Just curious.
Wikipedia seems to be going the same way.
As others said it wasn't just AI but their excessive moderation