Comment by Pet_Ant
7 hours ago
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.
It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.
It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.
I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
> That’s why it succeeded.
The moderation style in the latter years was very different than at the beginning.
It was always heavily moderated, but after some point it felt like there were more layers of moderation and rules and cultural expectations added every year.
Moderation went from being a background cleanup operation that quietly kept the site in line to being the primary thing I expected to see when following a StackOverflow link from Google. In the later years it felt like every other StackOverflow search result was going to be the question I had followed by a moderator shutting it down for some reason before anyone could answer.
The moderation wore me out and I wasn’t even posting questions, just trying to find answers!
I asked a question about 15 years ago. Lots of responses/engagement and a good answer. I just got an email a month or so back telling me that question got closed as a dupe. I checked...it was not even close to a dupe. Exhausting.
Please show me the link.
> It was always heavily moderated
No, it absolutely very much was not. Even granting that you mean actions of the community (what we call "curation") rather than the small and extremely strained moderation team, way too much stuff historically got through, while people yelled at the OP in the comments and argued over downvotes instead of taking the action that actually matters: voting or flagging to close the question. Worse, people would post answers that acknowledge the problem with the question and asking OP in the answer text to fix things.
I know because I was part of that mess back then, because I didn't know better. That, in turn, was mostly because the entire set of ground expectations was poorly communicated, and the community wasn't given the tools to improve that communication (e.g. couldn't edit the help pages, had their feedback about the discoverability of site documentation ignored, etc.). But it was also because Atwood and Spolsky hadn't refined their intuition about why beginners' bad questions are bad. (Hint: it is not because most of their problems are easy to solve, or "beneath" experts.)
> when following a StackOverflow link from Google
Google got worse at search over the years, so you ended up seeing low-quality versions of the question more often. And the site got way too big (there is no reason why there should be more than three times as many publicly visible questions on Stack Overflow, as publicly visible articles on Wikipedia), such that search results could get diluted with irrelevant low-quality questions that happened to have a lot of keyword overlap with what you wanted. And misleading questions didn't get cleaned up, so you would search for X and find a question where the OP hadn't tried to analyze the situation at all and ended up asking about X when the problem was actually Y, and got the question closed as a duplicate of the main Y "canonical". (I know because I used to lose considerable amounts of hair trying to find the X canonical that I knew was there but stubbornly refused to turn up in searches.)
If "moderation" had actually "always" been "heavy" then you wouldn't have had this problem because this stuff would have gotten hidden from public view, one way or another.
> a moderator shutting it down
Again, these actions are overwhelmingly not taken by moderators, and phrasing things this way reflects a refusal to interact with the community on its own terms and understand its policies. Those who hold an outsider mindset are bound to end up feeling like outsiders.
Yeah, it makes me curious about exactly what thinking was involved in the site going to heck like that. Part of it was questions and answers accumulating and so the question of duplicates thus apparently weighing on the moderators minds more. Part of it might have been an effort to prevent people gaming the system.
Actually, talking to ChatGpt, I found this article: “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.” ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...) and that actually shows what the SO admins didn't get (imo obviously).
They thought the problem was people not being nice. But that actual problem was that SO was "gamified" and it's gamified interface made it impossible to win unless someone was ultra-competitive (and I'd those types burned-out over time as well). People not being nice was real but it was side-effect of the situation (questions answered instantly so a would-be question answered had to be constantly racing).
It's easy to imagine how the admins didn't see the situation. Each up of intensity seemed to up the engagement and so seemed a good thing. The question of whether the process was sustainable didn't appear and when there were problems it was attributed to something else.
I think
> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
Huh. I had the opposite experience. The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
I stopped bothering, after a number of questions went answered only by me (after I found the solution on my own).
It did reduce the insults, but that seemed to be the only gain that I got, for carefully articulating my questions.
LLMs aren't perfect, but they don't imply that I'm being lazy, for not already having the answer, and they do give me an answer, instantly (and, like SO, the answer is not always the best one).
I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.
I have engaged with some younger devs who don't even bother turning the thought into a question. They make statements and expect you to do the work of inferring the question. Which I feel like they got from chatbots since it's faster and LLMs don't care if you make them jump through hoops.
> The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
There is a sweet spot of providing just enough detail but not too much in asking a good question. And even the best only “bat 300”. I've posted answers to my own questions plenty of times when I got no response.
I hear you on the hostility. Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow. The first time I tried asking a question on IRC I got mocked so bad I logged out and never tried again. Most forums were like that.
I gravitated to Ruby back then because it was one of the only forums people would be patient and empathetic with me.
I have heard great things about the Ruby community. I don't use the language, myself, so I wouldn't know from experience.
Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.
Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.
2 replies →
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting
I have repeatedly had this experience in trying to craft The perfect question for a consultant who was also a mathematics professor, in finding the essence of the question the answer becomes clear and I never even have to send the email
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.
Yes, that was part of the point. I hope you posted anyway (after checking for a duplicate, and assuming the underlying problem wasn't just a typo), and provided your own answer for it. That is an explicit part of how the site is supposed to work (but an incredibly poorly communicated one).
> Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow.
SO actually considerably improved on that axis over time. It's just that tons of people erroneously think that being expected to meet certain standards in asking a question (in particular, doing the necessary debugging work to locate and reproduce a problem, or the necessary contemplation to properly specify a task), is the same thing as yelling at people for not knowing answers to easy things. That goes both ways: people get upset when their question is closed, and people think they're helping by excluding easily answered questions because they're easily answered. In reality, the main problem is questions that are easy but complex, i.e. which really break down into multiple separate easy questions or require digging through a code dump to find a trivial error.
I found that Stack Overflow, like Reddit, rewired my perception of what "good" is and made me view bad things as good.
60000 rep btw
Was it a better question for skimming and quickly replying,
or just a great form of your question if someone genuinely wanted to answer it, not pump their score, dopamine etc?
It certainly didn't start that way, having been there and followed them on their podcast -- pre-launch. It became more and more hostile. It was initially positive, even when questions didn't fit the mold. Then successive waves of pedantic moderators chased out the altruism. There never seemed to be a suitable mechanism to slap down the haters, then years pass, you need to ask a question, and find out that it is causing you anxiety to just post a question..
> That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new.
And _then_ it became so much more hostile to users - and lost a lot of what made it so wonderful. It became very common that asking a new, good question would be marked as a duplicate because there was something it wasn't a duplicate of.
My experience with the late SO was, that the original question used to be ten years old and filled with responses that were no longer relevant to the current state.
What amazes me is that an LLM can actually make sense out of all this crappy training data and often produces meaningful answers. (maybe that's a sign that we already have AGI)
You'd also get people downvoting completely valid rule abiding questions, and the site heavily punished being downvoted. So you'd get hit with a stick repeatedly for trying to engage with the site, it's no wonder everyone left as soon as there was an alternative.
I think the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application of the "hacker" mindset (more or less) to a lot of fields that do not benefit from the hacker mindset.
From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between "broadly applicable" and "too specific". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my homework by posting pictures of my WIP and citing Youtube videos I'm trying to follow but, apparently, this is already toeing the line. I honestly don't know what the mods expect of a good question there. Of course, there will be an appreciable degree of case-specificity in my questions because if the YT tutorials could already answer my problem, I would have no need to ask for help and advice!
Then we have sites like Literature SE which has been languishing in their sandbox since literally forever. Like most SE sites, the guidelines bid you to "avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussions" and "be specific" but I find that untenable in a Literature site. Notably, sister site SF&F is comparably thriving but there is a fair amount of open-ended speculation going on in there.
Lastly, IMO, it just suffers because at its core its problem is human and social, not technical. In an effort for better curation we ended up with Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Science. For some posters, finding the right SE site already introduces a huge wall to overcome for posting. This hampers a lot of the out group: students who might be seeking homework guidance or looking to supplement their own readings and lectures, amateurs who are just curious about something in the field. I've had a question in one of the Science SEs outside my field that was well-received by the community but one mod kept "tagging to delete" (I forgot the exact term) almost every year. This mod action has a prescriptive period and, boy, he kept at it. Honestly, I don't care in the end. I asked the question out of sheer curiosity and got a satisfactory answer. Yet I wonder how exactly they expect to foster a community this way.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
At the start moderators worked with you, after 2014 they worked against you.
When Attwood and Spolsky founded it, they commented on it being because Experts Exchange was hostile to users. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656581
If StackOverflow is being considered hostile now it's big ... well, Google the three stages of enshittification I suppose.
Ah I miss the old days of expert sex change.com
To be fair not really but it’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time and all it took was to scroll down to the end of the page to get your answer.
Real 20 year ago internet there.
Agreed, being a n00b in the open source & hacker community I recall asking half assed question on forums and IRC and would get the infamous RTFM.
I detested it but quickly realized that I needed to put in work and learn and only when I understand can I ask valid questions to real problems…not just asking for someone to spoon feed me an answer.
I really appreciate that experience…
> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.
Really? Because I only ever asked three things, technically two I suppose, and the only significant interaction I got from there was a guy saying they thought the third question was a duplicate but they only didn't mark it that way because they saw it was me asking again.
This dude straight up admitted to be on the hunt for marking things as duplicate and only put brainpower into doing not-that because something felt off in is gut.
Then someone else did.
No, he didn't actually answer my question. No one did.