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Comment by yannis | Hacker News Reader

Not only Quora, but many other sites including the various "stackexchange" sites started declining I would say from about 2018, so this is not a phenomenon attributed to llms. IMHO I attribute this to the following: a) The overuse of social media conditioning users to provide short answers, rather than long thoughtful write-ups, b) Most topics have been saturated to the limit c) lack of interest from the new generation d) Bad management and moderation.

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You are missing the elephant in the room, the incentives that drive shit content: SEO. Both quora and stack exchange – as businesses – are downstream of Google search in particular. Their main goal is to appease PageRank. All else follows from that.

I think stack exchange’s moderators killed that site. Common complaints were how antagonistic they were toward new users. Hard to grow or sustain a user base if you turn out all the new ones.

Yeah it's a really big problem with StackOverflow. The mods are all crazy. I can't find it now but the StackOverflow Devs proposed actually fixing (or at least improving) question closing by allowing the asker to reopen their question once. I can't remember the exact details, but it sounded like a good first step. Downvoted to hell by the existing mods of course.

They're a bit screwed because they rely so much on volunteer mods but the volunteer mods are crazy...

Doesn't sound like either of you know how SO works. Very little is done by mods, mainly it's votes by normal users. Like I could be voting to close something as a duplicate, off topic etc with my privileges. It's the community doing this, not moderators.

And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework or doing very little effort themselves before asking. Why do these people deserve others spending their time helping them if they can't even bother to search or formulate something coherent?

> And the community is tired of people asking for help with their homework

I don't think anyone objects to closing those questions. That's not really what this is about. My questions are very clearly not asking for help with homework and trivial "how do I write a for loop" or "it doesn't work" questions. Still get downvoted/closed frequently. Most often:

* It gets closed as duplicate because there's a vaguely similar - but different - question. Or sometimes there's a completely different question with an answer that incidentally also answers my question.

* It gets closed as too vague or not clear because it's simply outside the domain of expertise of the voter. It's clear to people that know what I'm talking about.

To be clear when I say "mods" I don't exclusively mean people with official mod power. It's also people that moderate for fun - those that trawl the new questions. Let me know if you have a better name for those people.

You can tell it's them because you very often get a couple of downvotes immediately and then if you check back a month or two later it will have been upvoted by many more people that actually had the same question and arrived there via Google.

Feel free to drop links to your said questions. Often it's just vague allegations with little evidence.

Getting something closed as a duplicate shouldn't be taken as a slight. It's often good that various formulations of a question then can point to the same answer. Or if the answer to the other question answers yours, isn't it just good that you and other people will be directed there? It's a Q&A site, not a forum. Which question stands doesn't matter except for feelings.

Same with your vague or clarity. It's Q&A, not a forum with back and forth discussions. It's just not a right fit. You might think that's not how you'd like the site to be, but it is how it is. It's not overzealous moderators closing it.

I've been on StackOverflow for almost 15 years now, with 100k reputation (mostly from old answers). I can tell you that I routinely run into examples of what GP described while searching for answers - it happens quite often that search engine produces link to an SO question that is about the same exact thing I'm investigating, and it's a well-written question covering the details and various explored avenues... and it's closed as "duplicate" of something that isn't actually relevant.

Not the person you replied to but StackOverflow is ridiculously hostile to new users including formerly me. I have over 2k points on HN and much more on reddit. I've spent much more time on SE than on HN but I don't even bother contributing because the times I tried it, it went nowhere.

And the site is dying as a result. That fact alone makes your point moot.

It's in my real name so I don't want to link any of my questions, but I'll start keeping a list for when this comes up next.

That’s great. You haven’t addressed my point: who do you think is asking questions about their homework? A community needs a steady influx of new users to remain vital. You’re not going to get that with _often incorrect_ references to duplicates.

Fact is, nobody wants to go to Stack overflow anymore for answers because the experience sucks. And they don’t mind using ChatGPT. Thanks for all the training data, Stack!

The internet is a wild place, but there was a time it seemed tamed, Google fixed search and got rid of mail spam with Gmail, FB and Twitter got the feed right, ads became text-only with Adwords instead of animated gifs, ExpertsExchange, SO and various interesting personal websites and blogs had answers and were fun to read.

But just like with antibiotics, bugs were trained on it and they got stronger finding the exploit until spam, scam and greed destroyed it once again. Sigh!

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