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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> A culture develops to create a power structure that favors those who have devoted a large portion of their personal identity to the success of the organization. This culture serves as a moat against anyone who would integrate themselves within the organization and attempt drastic changes that would disrupt the existing power balance or pose an existential threat to the organization.

That pretty much directly describes a once-marvelous Q&A site, where I almost never go, anymore, and which is rapidly declining, in search results.

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I went to answer a questions yesterday, and it had been locked having been marked as a duplicate of an unrelated question. Mind blowing stuff.

That’s what happens when you gamify “moderation” (pushing buttons at people) instead of providing answers. You get what you incentivize.

Honestly, another major deficiency of their approach is the lack of any meta-moderation. If you gamify moderation, it really behooves you to also have some mechanism for gamifying finding and punishing users who abuse that moderation. You’ve created a predator-prey cycle between content generation and content moderation, without some mechanism to drain the “economy” of moderation eventually the predators will exhaust all available prey and then starve. Even HN has the “vouch” button and that’s on top of a generally less toxic culture in the first place.

But it provided the training data for ChatGPT

Real question: Where do you go instead? Or, do you use Google to find blog posts with the answers that you need? I agree that the formerly-great Q&A site (that shall remain unnamed) has fallen from grace with terrible new leadership. The drama seems never to end. I vote to fork the whole thing and bring back Monica. :)

For my areas of interest (plain old Java, Python, C, C++, and JavaScript), the search results are still good. However, I can understand that your areas may be in decline.

Oh, it's still fairly prominent, in searches, but I'm finding the answers to be less and less useful. It's become pretty much worthless, to ask questions, anymore. I end up answering my own questions. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, someone will throw in an insult. If I'm not lucky; without actually helping.

I got used to the insults, as they usually came with useful answers, but that hasn't been the case, in quite a while.

I tend to get most of my actual help from blog posts and Substack articles (even clickbaity ones can be helpful). I'm seldom presented with "the answer," but they usually help to figure out how to get a start.

Do you still tend to answer questions? It feels like there is a drop in quality contributors too because they got invested, but have peers engaging in the behavior you describe as a questioner. They want to take kinder approaches, but that's never going to win over that power user segment.

I have a high reputation that unlocks privileges, but I rarely go back these days to answer questions. If I can snipe someone that's trying to shut down a question prematurely then that's kind of fun.

I've asked about 2X questions to answers. I have contributed some fairly good answers, but I have mainly gone to get questions answered.

Early on, I probably asked them badly, but I learned to ask them better, and the answers came much less frequently. So ask a question badly, and get an insult, but also a useful answer. Ask a question well, and ... crickets. Lately, I usually end up answering my own question, just so there might be something for someone else to find.

I'm usually quite capable of finding the answers; just not quickly. It used to be, I would get good answers, within seconds of asking the question. Nowadays, I usually end up answering it myself, hours or days later.

I used to like getting answers that were "done right." Many of the folks there, have a lot of structural and cultural knowledge, and the answers were often quite valuable; giving me advice on why we should do it this way. I may well find out how to do it wrong, left to my own devices. I didn't mind being told I was doing it wrong. We become right, by being wrong.

Most folks with very high karma, have very few (usually single-digit) question counts (the digit is often "0"). I am not one to ascribe motives, but there must be a reason that invested folks don't want to ask questions on that forum.

    Early on, I probably asked them badly, but I learned to ask them better, and the answers came much less frequently. So ask a question badly, and get an insult, but also a useful answer. Ask a question well, and ... crickets. Lately, I usually end up answering my own question, just so there might be something for someone else to find.

Incredible! This is exactly my experience. So many times, I ask a question, and either "crickets" (no replies), or some replies with zero up votes on my question. So... do they think my question isn't valuable, yet they take the time to answer it? Bizarre. In the last 2-3 years, my usage of the website has largely decayed to read-only.

Are you talking about Quora?

I read it to mean Stack Overflow, whose drop in traffic has been widely discussed. But it could be Quora or other sites--effectively validating OP's original point.

The drop of traffic to SO is due to LLM proliferation. Some people use LLM to get answers (trained on SO etc), other people use LLM to spam SO.

StackExchange has been going downhill since late 2019. A significant number of power users (moderators) have left and the writing has been on the wall for a number of years.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/394772/lets-talk-ab...

Most StackExchange sites are niche and just get fewer users naturally because topics are covered by other forums.

I'm a power user on SO with some moderation capabilities. There's no mods per se I think just people who have different functions enabled to them (editing questions, closing, review etc). Admittedly I don't moderate it much (never did)

I still use it daily as a lazy reference. Haven't noticed any decline apart from it having covered all topics so there's mostly nothing new left to ask. Which is the best thing that can happen to Q&A site

There are definitely actual moderators on the Stack Exchange sites.

And/or Stack

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