Stack Overflow is almost dead
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.
But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?
And what makes the data outdated? New code? It can train on that. That, or there is simply nothing new to learn, just new ways to express the same thing.
What makes you think we will be doing fundamentally the same thing in the future? Language grow and change, systems change, operating systems change, hardware and specs change..
Nothing in computing is ever static.
State of the art models constantly generate bullshit, even if I find them generally useful. Your blind hype does nothing but make people more skeptical of it.
"Oh sorry, that package doesn't exist yet, but it ought to. One moment... Ok, try installing it now."
Most recently when this happened, I made it write an SF2 loader/parser/player and a MIDI parser/"relay" library compatible with it for javascript to use in a WebGL game. It's familiar enough with ABC notation that you can have it write a song and then write a converter from modified ABC notation to MIDI, too. It can generate coordinates for a xylophone model with individual keys in WebGL with no fuss and wire it up to the SF2 module to play notes based on which key was struck. We can do things like switch out instruments on tracks, or change percussion tracks, or whatever, based on user interactions without fuss.
It's not worth setting up a whole repo for and documenting, because when I make something with it, I inherently prove making it is trivial.
Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.
Hooks and components in React are as different as a limited-edition issue of Radioactive Man and the garbage they stuff in the Sunday comics.
[...]
If you're writing React without understanding this distinction, please, for the love of all that is unholy in Springfield, step away from the keyboard and go read the official React docs. Twice. Maybe thrice.
It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.
It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing.
But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:
"I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there.
"Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658)
"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.
Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
>If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is.
> Either what I was looking for was already there
The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
> That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge.
I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply.
That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter.
> The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly).
This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
> When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
See: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/384711 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254697 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/385343 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205
Not to dismiss you - but it's important to understand what the standard is for "duplication". This has changed over the years because the original (very narrow) interpretation turned out to be unviable - it doesn't scale. (And "it doesn't scale" is a big part of why Stack Overflow was created - where "it" is the traditional discussion forum model.)
>but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
Because your search query is equally suited to find a bunch of garbage questions that should have been closed (and then deleted when they weren't improved) - often ones that are about something completely different, but click-bait because of the words in the title (often a result of OP completely misidentifying the problem and not producing a proper MRE).
>asking a meaningful question takes effort
It does. In fact, when I've written self-answered Q&A to share knowledge, I've often found the question harder than the answer.
The reputation system was very poorly conceived. It incentivizes terrible behaviours, while the best results will come from intrinsic motivation anyway. (Plus it carries the implicit assumption that answering questions demonstrates an understanding of site policy, when the opposite is often true: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357021 )
> my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue
Duplicates are not inherently bad. They help others find the original, and the duplicate count statistics help identify important questions and topics. Furthermore, it's 100% in keeping with policy to close something as a duplicate of a newer question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/258697 ). If you ask something well, and get a good answer, and then someone notices that it was asked before, your version is likely to stand instead. (And the target for a duplicate closure must have an accepted or upvoted answer.)
Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.
We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously.
But none of this seems to make a difference. And people come to the site with expectations about politeness that simply aren't conducive to getting people to stop doing things they aren't supposed to do:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373801 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334870
Meanwhile, a major reason why people aren't required to explain in a comment why they downvoted a question, is because of the history we've had with downright vitriolic replies from OPs who seem uninterested in the rules:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352575
Rudeness happens all around, really:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326494
Related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/309018/523612
(And, of course, all of this really blows up once assumptions start getting made about who is or isn't especially sensitive: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366665)
This is so far from true that it's frankly insulting.
> and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.
I do not object in the slightest to people preferring to use an LLM. I have even explicitly suggested in threads like this that people who prefer to do so should continue to do so.
What I object to is the idea that other people should get to decide how Stack Overflow works, or should get to denigrate Stack Overflow on the basis of their idea of how it ought to work.
Yes. Doing this makes your post better, because it means everyone who reads it later saves time. Your post is not there to talk to people. Your question is there to ask a question. Your answer is there to answer the question.
This is explicit policy:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131009
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/328379
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/behavior ("Do not use signature, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat.")
And it follows directly from it not being a discussion forum (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107).
> Maybe you don't think eliminating gratitude from basic communications qualifies as "dehumanizing"
What you miss is that it is not communication between the person who asks and the person who answers. It is publication of a question and answer so that everyone can benefit.
When you see someone say "thanks for any advice which you can provide" directly to someone else, does that feel welcoming to you? It doesn't to me. It feels like suddenly I'm unintentionally eavesdropping on some conversation, and that I'm not supposed to be there. But I only came to learn (or teach) something.
> BTW - to the guy who called me a "troll". If you can't disagree with a fellow of your species, without branding them a troll, you've just made my point. Thank you
You appear to be making multiple throwaway accounts rather than risking your HN reputation. From the guidelines:
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Let me introduce you to the internet. It's this public access network where literally the entire world comes to exchange information in open forum.
SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.
It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish.
I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing morally wrong here. It's fine if people think I'm "hostile" because I politely tell them what they aren't supposed to do while they think they should be entitled to do it anyway, because them doing it actively harms things I actually care about.
I disagree with the choice of "aggressive", though. This is a purely defensive posture.
Stack Overflow has a community which is trying to create something useful and is not trying to cause harm to anyone. As such, that community is entitled to have and pursue goals that aren't aligned with those of others, and should not be expected to change those goals simply because other people don't share them, or because they want to use Stack Overflow's time, space and other resources to do something different.
That community is a separate entity from the company (Stack Exchange, Inc.). The community owes nothing to the company, as it has been paid nothing, and is exploited to drive traffic and ad revenue while their content feeds AI.
Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.
Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.
There's another common misconception here - one which I held myself for years, and one which the community expressed for years in poorly-conceived close reasons that eventually got fixed. Or you could say: over time, we realized that something didn't work right for the purpose.
As you say, you can't easily evaluate or quantify that research simply by looking at the question. But that's exactly why it doesn't actually matter: because it isn't seen in a properly written question.
The purpose of the research is not to earn the right to ask a question. The purpose, rather, is to optimize the question for the format. If the question meets standards, it meets standards; doing the research is a means to that end, and it's only "expected" because it's usually necessary.
So, for example, if your code doesn't work, you're expected to do your own debugging first, until you find the part that actually causes a problem that you don't know how to fix. And then you're expected to not talk about that debugging process, and not show irrelevant detail from your code. Instead, isolate non-working code as best you can manage into a MCVE, SSCCE or whatever else you like to call it (our documentation includes advice: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), and talk about the example, directly.
>Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate... has been both frustrating and disheartening
Why? Someone just directly pointed you at an already existing answer. You got helped even faster than if someone had to write that answer from scratch. Which is a big part of the point.
Yes, that does mean that you need to apply an explanation of the same problem from an abstracted context, to your specific need. But that was supposed to be part of the expectation anyway. Because we aren't interested in the problem that motivated you to ask - you are not required to have actually had a problem at all, in fact. We're interested in having a question whose answer can help everyone in a similar situation.
But we don't provide a discussion forum, help desk, or debugging service.
> (with seemingly little recourse)
As it happens, I once asked a question that was closed as a duplicate. Here's the advice I'm still shown if I go back and look, in the blue banner at the top:
> This question already has an answer here: (link to the other question)
> Your post has been associated with a similar question. If that question doesn’t answer your issue, edit your question to highlight the difference between the associated question and yours. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.
"Edit your question" is linked to https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-edit... .
> Find out more about duplicates and why your question has been closed.
Links:
https://stackoverflow.com/help/duplicates https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions
Note that even the moderators don't get to control this form message - they can at most petition the company staff for a change. The "closed-questions" link tells me about the close reasons in a fair amount of detail, and eventually links to "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/help/reopen-questions), which also mentions the option of taking the matter to the meta site.
If I were to edit the question, the form now has a checkbox to "Submit for review", with additional popup help including a link to https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-reopen . As described in the above documentation links, the question would be put in a review queue, giving it more attention for those who can cast reopen votes.
(The reveal: actually, I closed it myself, using my gold-badge privileges - either I eventually found what I couldn't before asking, or someone pointed it out to me in a chatroom or something. The title for the Q&A I wanted was reasonable, but very different from the title I came up with. So now it's easier to find.)
Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.)
Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.
No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.
You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).
That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled.
In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.
The users who ask questions that nobody cares to answer aren't particularly attractive.
... No, I am not at all "blind" to the fact that I'm "driving" people like that away, or to the "impact" I'm having. I've read many of their off-site rants, too. It's a popular art form, even. So popular that sometimes people bring links to it back to the meta site. So popular that the company staff occasionally try to lecture us about it. After all, it's bad for the bottom line when people don't stick around and watch ads (and to hell with whatever else they do on the site).
But those documents objectively exist; the standards are established and thoroughly documented; the questions objectively are there to build a reference (this is even described right up front in https://stackoverflow.com/tour , although the wording is still lacking and we aren't empowered to fix it); as an objective matter we don't provide a help desk, debugging service or support forum; and swearing at me is a code of conduct violation.
I guess I would say: look at the big picture, Stack Overflow is almost dead. It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. At least the standards are established and thoroughly documented! The document objectively exists!
Also: I know several kind and smart people who have sworn off Stack Overflow forever, not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site.
I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did.
They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site).
> You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this.
> It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction.
Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive.
But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)
Frankly, it just doesn't matter at this point. The time to have done something about it was several years ago, it's a lost cause at this point. Whether you reflect and recognise your part in that, and learn and grow from it, is up to you.
> We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?
None of you have done anything at all to explain why it somehow isn't, except perhaps to indicate that it isn't how you want the site to work. Or that the company is losing business. (As a reminder, the company has never paid any of us a red cent.)
Why is it "comical" for people you don't identify with to have a vision?
It's sad because most of us remember how much more useful SO used to be.
The only thing that any of you have explained is that the site doesn't measure up to your standards.
You have given me no reason why I should evaluate the site by your standards.
I know why one top contributor left (cancer) and I heard the same about another. I haven't heard what you say about any, except in sweeping statements like yours.
The thing I do is build a knowledge base. If that's it, can you explain why it's a problem? The thing I don't is something you also don't. If that's it, can you explain why you're not part of the problem?
this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)
You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.)
If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design.
If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?)
If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.
If you want to post something that isn't SO's idea of a question, then you're really just posting off-topic. And if you then insist that people should help you with your off-topic posting, you're being overly presumptious.
What does this word mean, in context?
> > Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
So now there is a manageable volume of new questions that allows for enough people to review them properly and apply question standards properly, instead of letting most things seep through and set bad examples for the next batch. And more time to sift through the existing questions to polish up the best.
Existing questions, by the way, that outnumber Wikipedia articles by more than 3:1. Even though they're only supposed to be specifically about programming rather than about literally anything notable.
9:00am, I check SO. My reputation has decreased by 8 points, a number of self-styled enforcers have left negative comments comparing my issue to other issues which bear a superficial similarity to my posting, and my posting has been closed.
I'm not the most powerful contributor but over several years I've achieved upwards of 1,000 points. So I am by no means a nudnick. I've posted some good ones and I've helped some of my peers along the way. But recently, my experience has devolved to the point where the experience I describe above is the rule, rather than the exception. And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting. So I left. And now we can have the conversation here.
You can have all the justifications in the world for your approach, and you don't need to keep the audience you don't want. But if those of us voicing our displeasure here, are not simply a few malcontents, but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
For starters, if you want a questioner to improve their posting or you have questions about why they posted, is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation? Ask your question, make your point, give the poster the opportunity to remediate or show you why you're the one who's off base (did you ever consider that possibility?) before decreasing someone's reputation.
Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base. Your resistance to AI is somewhat ironic, given all the effort you've devoted toward eliminating all courtesy and gratitude from your knowledge base. Do you want humans communicating on your platform? Let them. Perhaps after a question has been asked, answered, let the posting remain dormant for 30 days and then have some AI process go ahead and scrub the posting. Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.
Just for starters. For now, I'm out of there. Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.
Stack Overflow is by design not there to help you with this:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569
If you come to Stack Overflow for this, you come to the wrong website.
If you expect Stack Overflow to help you with this, it is because you have failed to understand the purpose of Stack Overflow.
We do not provide technical support, a help desk, a debugging service, etc.
> I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't.
Instead of that: if you have code that doesn't work, you should debug the code and look for something specific that doesn't do what you expect it to. Then you should create a minimal, reproducible example of the issue - code that someone else can run directly, without adding or changing anything (i.e., hard-code any necessary input) to see the exact problem, right away (i.e., without interacting with the program any more than necessary; without waiting for other things to happen first unless they have to happen to reproduce the bug). And skip anything that comes after that.
The reason we expect this is because, pause for dramatic effect, answering your question is not about your deadline or the problem you are trying to solve. It's not about you.
It's about the site, and about having a question that everyone can find useful.
> And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting.
Feel free to share the link. I can see deleted posts there.
> but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
We aren't doing anything wrong. The site is better off for the departure of people who have demonstrated a consistent refusal to use the site as intended. Because it is not about them.
> is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation?
It is necessary to mark the question as low quality, so that questions can be sorted by quality and people can prioritize their time, yes.
It is not about you.
> Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base.
A knowledge base inherently lacks humanity. When you look something up in the documentation, do you want the documentation to be written as if it were speaking to you directly? I think that's creepy. The documentation was written possibly years before I read it. It knows nothing about me. It didn't even know that I would use the software in the future.
> Do you want humans communicating on your platform?
No, in fact. It is not social media, either.
Perhaps you've noticed that the comments are not threaded, that you can't have another question post further down the page in between the answers, that all the answers are supposed address the question, and not the other answers. (And, crucially, they address the question, not the person who asked it.)
All of that is deliberate. 2008 wasn't that long ago. Many sites much older than Stack Overflow support all of those modes of interaction.
Stack Overflow does not. By design.
Not only that, but comments can be deleted at any time, because they are "no longer needed". They aren't supposed stick around unless they're explaining something that other people may need to see years later (and even then it may be better to edit into the answer).
By design.
> Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.
You don't realistically get "dinged" for this. Whatever question of yours was downvoted to -4 (since your "reputation decreased by 8 points") certainly had other things wrong with it.
Sure, these things were edited out of your question; the post does not belong to you (in the terms of service, you license it to the community).
> Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.
The site is what it is. Sites on the Internet are allowed to be what they want to be. You are not entitled to them changing to suit you.
How is it vandalism to enforce a quality standard?
> who seem to take glee
Why do you imagine so?
OK. I concede the point. Maybe it's not glee. Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
So, you tell me, vandalism is when you notice that someone's content doesn't meet standards, rate it accordingly using the system that was explicitly designed for that purpose, and it ends up incidentally (because of a system we don't get to change) "damaging the reputation" of its author... ?
By the way, the only thing those reputation points are good for is gatekeeping access to privileges that are supposed to be exercised by people who understand how the site is supposed to work, so that they can help keep the site working as intended.
So it's a little hard for me to get too bent out of shape about it. There are a ton of problems with the design (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356), but this is not one of them.
> Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement
I, personally, often do. But people are not required to, by policy, in part because they get cursed at when they try. Because most of these questions not conforming to standards come from people who don't give a damn about what the site is or what it's trying to accomplish, and feel entitled to a personalized answer about whatever it is.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/
But also because there is a relatively small, specific set of things that can be wrong with a question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/); when your question is closed, you are generally automatically told which applies (it comes from the system according to the close votes), and that's normally all the information you should need if you actually care about the site and have read the policy basics.
It's no wonder LLMs have taken off in this space. They provide that exact service, by design. Stack Overflow does not, by design.
> and let the poster bring the post into compliance?
Nobody has ever been prevented from doing this except for actual spammers and vandals. Even if your question is "deleted" you still have an interface to access it, edit it and nominate it for undeletion. When your question is merely closed, that is explicitly soliciting you to fix it.
> do you think that by damaging my reputation
Oh, the other thing is that your reputation starts at 1 and cannot go below 1. So this doesn't matter in the slightest for new users. (There are rate limits, intended to make you pay attention to the guidelines and read the explanations in the Help Center before trying to post again.)
> Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
No, none of this is about punishment. Downvotes apply to the content, not to you.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121350
My community is not special. It has the same right to decide and enforce its standards that everywhere else on the Internet does. The fact that you see a shiny button labelled "Ask a Question" and a text input box does not change what those standards are. You are the one coming to a new space on the Internet; therefore, you are the one responsible for understanding the basics of what is expected in that space.
No, you did nothing of the sort. You asked why people don't do something, and I explained to you that they sometimes do, but aren't required to because, among other things, it attracts abuse from new users. There are more reasons I didn't elaborate upon, that are covered in the meta discussion I linked you.
Meta discussion from 2017 that we have rehashed repeatedly ever since.
Countless people before you have suggested all the exact same things. None of them ever bring any new argument (because there is a small set of coherent arguments that could possibly be made) and none ever show any evidence of having considered, or being aware of, the previous discussion.
I'm not surprised it's on the way out.
I've had 3 deleted by Community bot as abandoned, but since they were over a year old when that happened, I couldn't care less.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgp...
It is not relevant to SO whether an LLM can provide personalized help, write with any particular tone, answer promptly, accept every input prompt as valid and try to make sense of it, discuss back and forth to figure out a problem, etc. Because Stack Exchange is explicitly and by design not for those things.
But also, downvotes work differently on meta anyway, and the community there generally takes a negative view of LLMs. Because, again, the point of SO is for the answer to come from a human expert, and be verified against subject matter expertise rather than simply being evaluated for coherence or generally sounding appropriate in context.
Stack Overflow is explicitly not designed or intended to solve problems or do the decomposition of the problem for you, nor the synthesis of answers. Because the result would never be useful to anyone else. The entire point is to have something searchable, and to allow answer-writers to keep their explanations DRY.
This has spectacularly failed, because no matter how frustrated people get with traditional discussion forums (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_th... among many other typical complaints), they apparently are much more suited to human nature.
Heaven knows how Wikipedia managed to avoid devolving into "Quora but even worse because you can scribble over someone else's post".
I also felt around that time that it became unwelcoming. I didn’t realize they had revamped the moderator tools. That is the time period when I stopped using it too. Now I know why.
How many other websites have also shot themselves in the foot by tweaking things?
It is frustrating not only because you can't get instant help, but also because it shows the futility of even trying to post on there.
some have a tendency to go overboard with this thinking, only to discover that a heavily pruned tree is now a dead tree, now finding themselves in dead tree garden.
Then, with better moderator tools, the "ultimate knowledge base" group set out to achieve the ultimate knowledge base by reducing the amount of people who were just there to talk.
Yes, because the people who were just there to talk had reached a point where they could effectively only pollute the knowledge base. Bad questions make good ones harder to find, simply by existing (since the bad one could potentially be found instead, and because of the broken window effect).
Moderators (actual elected moderators, the two dozen or so that exist for ~29 million user accounts and ~24 million non-deleted questions) went on strike in mid 2023, largely because the site staff/owners interfered with their ability to remove such content (an overwhelmingly popular policy with strong community consensus): https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000 and this decision propagated across the Stack Exchange network (as most SE sites had adopted similar policies): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/
A large fraction of the userbase is explicitly opposed to helping LLMs out in any way whatsoever. I personally have ceased contributing new question or answer content, and only edit existing posts. I contribute new content on Codidact (https://software.codidact.com/) instead (disclosure: I have recently become a moderator there).
You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor. It doesn't. Because none of the average SO contributors did.
It is unclear what algorithmic improvements are required to leverage the available data to get AI to AGI, but a lack of data is definitely not the bottleneck.
One could say that these AI systems aren't sharing their solutions (or questions) with other AI systems and that the world would benefit from it if they did, though. Perhaps it's a good idea to have some shared space for AI systems where they share the validated solutions they synthesized.
Replacing the average SO cobtributor isn't adequate to replace SO, and AI is able to “replace” SO effectively only since major models have gotten not only SO-as-training-data but web search (including SO) for immediate grounding.
And without SO or something like it with active human contributions it’ll have even more trouble replacing the value SO would provide for new questions and new domains where it will neither have SO traijing data nor SO query-time-search-results to use to synthesize answers.
Don't pretend that the current state of LLM training is somehow indicative of a fundamental problem for AI.
Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.
Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.
Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.
So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?
I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
I see that you just don't hear the complaints.
I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers.
Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.
It's all very logical for an older time when global communication was the kind of thing you needed to reserve for the top researchers as your total capacity was less than humanity needed. But now you are just repeating the mantras of older generations in an antisocial way.
I wonder if I can't write coherent English, or if you can't understand it. You keep fighting to not understand what people complain about.
They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions". They say that they don't complain about bad questions being close, you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".
Sure sounds like you don't really know what you are trying to say other than "we are great".
Because they have not shown that they understand what a good question is, or what the standards are. Or because they presume that they are the ones who should get to say what makes a question good or not.
>you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".
????? I said nothing of the sort.
>other than "we are great".
This, too, is your wording, not mine.
But, again. Show concrete examples in a suitable manner, or there is nothing to discuss.
How is this not something of that sort?
> Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted.
You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.
Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.
But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.
Objectively, people are nicer now. Informal policies turned into a proper Code of Conduct over time and moderators (the actual moderators) take it very seriously.
Being strict about this is objectively correct and it has absolutely nothing to do with power tripping. Nobody wants to close and delete questions. They want those questions not to have existed in the first place, or rather to have been asked properly in the first place.
The system does not incentivize any of this curation effort; it happens entirely thanklessly and driven purely by intrinsic motivation to produce a specific valuable thing.
This is not a matter of "bureaucracy".
As far as I can tell there is no issue with site traffic:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov... https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/
Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing
So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.
> and now it's dying
Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
> Maybe something was better before
Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?
If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.
The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.
I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually).
> Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does.
There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose.
> My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add
... And?
> There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions.
As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.
And as far as I can see, it is dying.
> If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem.
So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
> it would become easier to find what you want.
It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions. It has happened, though, that I could not find what I wanted because it was not there. And when I added it, I was closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
Again, I am not saying that it should be forbidden to close questions. What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?
> So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
Yes.
You write this as though you think there is a contradiction here. I genuinely don't understand why. There is no contradiction here.
QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either (https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html).
> It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions.
Back when I was trying to sort out the mess more actively, it happened to me daily. I distinctly recall multiple instances of spending hours at a time tearing my hair out over it, and complaining in the corresponding chat about the terrible questions, the unintentional clickbait, and the sensitivity of search engines to minor variations in the query.
> closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
This is said by perhaps 90% of people complaining about their question being closed, and trivially shown to be incorrect in perhaps 90% of those cases.
But also, "people can't figure out what you're trying to ask" counts against your question. By design. Because questions are expected to communicate clearly. So that other people who read them don't have to waste their own time making sure they're in the right place.
Of course, there are other reasons a question might not be understood. But it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology". People are, broadly speaking, just not going around the tags for technologies they don't know about in order to close questions. What on Earth would they get out of that?
> What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
Again: please show a link to an example of a question that you believe was unjustifiably closed, and make sure that you can clearly explain, in terms of existing policy why you believe the closure was invalid.
Do this on https://meta.stackoverflow.com, where it belongs.
Or if you have done this in the past, link me an example of that. That's fine here.
the reality makes this judgment. something that was worth billions of dollars could probably be bought for $50m (this is too much…). a definition of dead
Sorry, I hadn't realised I could barely write coherent English.
> QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either
Talking about writing coherent English, what the hell does this have to do with the current discussion?
I was clearly referring to different kinds of questions, not to your writing.
> Talking about writing coherent English, what the hell does this have to do with the current discussion?
"Growing" by an utterly irrelevant metric.
Popular != good.
As far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven't even gone to the site for a couple of years now.
The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.
And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration."
It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach.
The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.
(Mostly im just trying to say these things depend on the details, and the anti-AI crowd tend to handwave the details away. They might still be right, but its far from an obvious slam dunk)
> ... and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to ...
(As someone who is all too often hired tomorrow, at a fraction of the before rates, to clean up this mess)
And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess.
Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.
Notably, after getting completely humiliated with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 in June 2023 (right after a moderator strike had just started, protesting the staff trying to prevent them from removing AI content from the site), and getting embarrassing feedback on the feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162), they came back last November with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 and have been forcing it through.
Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.
These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there.
Before GH boomed it was often SO doing this job.
This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.
There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.
Yes.
They belong on the existing question - unless the existing question is poorly asked and the new one is better asked.
New answers can, by default, be added at any time - and should, if existing answers are actually out of date rather than simply being old. (Many 10+ year old answers really do still apply.)
Asking the question again is not how the site is designed or intended to work.
Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.
(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)
Stack Exchange sites are designed to nuke duplicates, help people before they post a new question. It seems a natural conclusion that the number of original questions decreases over time.
I won't pretend that some people live their lives inside and LLM but many of us still use search engines and SO.
Looking at my profile since 14 years ago, the most upvoted answer that I solved was about a basic question of how to specify fields properly when you serialize JSON into a C# class.
I do believe the value of StackOverflow was only about people who were lazy enough to read the documentation of the language/framework they were trying to use. I used to be active on StackOverflow back in the days, but in the last 10 years the only value I saw in it was if I needed to get back to some language to just find an answer on how to write a for loop in that specific language (swift vs go vs ...).
I personally do not believe there is much knowledge base on StackOverflow. In most of my questions to "google" for the last 10 years, very rarely would I be directed to StackOverflow for the right answer.
There are a lot of complicated questions on StackOverflow, but the site was flooded by people asking and answering basic questions about programming. And people who are there just to get some karma.
A big reason why AI is replacing these things. A big part is the experience itself. There are quite a few people who have have been repulsed due to the smugness, or other wise having their questions marked duplicate/irrelevant/stupid etc.
AI is also pretty much instant. You can also talk to it like you are talking to a person.
The killer AI feature!---> AI listens, without judging you.
There was a belief, sometimes unstated but often explicit, that no more (serious) discussion is really to be had, and further wondering how can one stop people from asking. It became difficult to discuss anything if there was even something vaguely related asked before. It was not possible to discuss something you knew the answer to, but did not know why, or wanted to hear arguments for which of 5 ways might be best. All (to me) very worthwhile technical discussions. Totally shut down.
There is nothing to do with unstated belief here.
It is explicit policy that we don't have discussion at all.
We have answers to questions.
Which is why there's a question (explicitly labelled as such, and not just "help me") at the top of the page, and every post below it is labelled as an answer (and is explicitly not a response to anything else but is simply there to answer the question).
No Boilerplate recently said "writing is thinking"[0], and suggested links are the ultimate knowledge graph organizational tool--not tags, not folders--links[1].
StackOverflow tried to prevent all duplicate questions. This was stifling and reduced writing, reduced thought, and most importantly, reduced user engagement.
The people who wanted to write their problems and ask their questions stopped going to StackOverflow. The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow.
Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over. Let the people write their questions, and write their answers and give advice. Instead of preventing duplicates, link duplicate questions together.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqm4-B07LsE [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0yAy2j-9V0
Duplicates are not forbidden on Stack Overflow. Duplicate questions are linked together - that's what "duplicate" means in the system. Beyond that, logged-out users who land on a duplicate question that doesn't have its own answers, will be automatically redirected to the target.
When duplicate question are linked on Stack Overflow (and everywhere else on Stack Exchange), they are automatically closed, which merely prevents new answers. The purpose is to allow high-quality answers to be gathered in one place - on the duplicate target, which in turn is ideally a high-quality version of the question (and a focus for curators to improve further, when they notice that it becomes a common duplicate target).
Deletion of duplicates (and posts in general) is not very well understood and people are not all on the same page - see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214 . But normally duplicates should not be deleted unless they are actively harming the search results (i.e.: it causes people to find the wrong target, because it was written in a way that fools keyword search).
Nobody gets formally sanctioned for posting a duplicate. You just get your question closed, and maybe asked to search a bit more carefully in the future (or shown how to do so).
> The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow. Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over.
People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow. That action is actively counterproductive to what Stack Overflow is trying to accomplish. There are countless discussion forums (and as you say, Discord and IRC channels) already where that behaviour is valued. The Internet should be allowed to have one place where it is not valued - especially when it's a place that was specifically created to accommodate people who want search engines to be useful; who want to write high quality answers once and get many people to read them; etc.
> People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow.
I think it's worth asking, why do people give answers on the internet at all? Maybe it's because of internet points, but more often people just like interacting with other humans and teaching.
In the beginning, StackOverflow was a place for people who wanted to interact with other humans, and also a place for people who wanted to build the ultimate knowledge base--for a time their incentives were aligned.
But then over time the space for interacting with other humans got smaller and smaller, and now StackOverflow is almost entirely about maintaining the knowledge base that has been built.
And yeah, like you say, it's okay if StackOverflow isn't the place for human interaction. StackOverflow has built its knowledge base, and some still maintain it, and the long term success of that knowledge base is becoming ever more apparent--which is to say, not very successful--the day may soon come that StackOverflow isn't even hosted anymore.
(Also, I want to ward off the claims that this is because of AI. StackOverflow was in steady decline long before AI was competent at answering questions; even in 2025 the competence of AI is still in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000118)
> Maybe "answered by duplicate" would have been a more friendly way to say it
That's why the current banner template starts off with "This question already has answers here:" and the link.
> more often people just like interacting with other humans and teaching.
Most people eventually get fed up of troubleshooting for others with the same basic problems, and trying to decipher their overall poor communication, and noticing that they never pick up basic skills when those services are available to them.
This is the failure mode of trying to teach on discussion forums: you don't get to teach because the humans you're interacting with don't actually come to learn.
The few who want to learn, rarely need much interactivity. That's bad for getting basic ground covered, but it's good for actually producing something of value.
> the day may soon come that StackOverflow isn't even hosted anymore.
I'm absolutely confident that the company will make something of the information in the long run. But more importantly, they have been releasing data dumps (mostly as promised - check out https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-dump ) that others may pick through in the future, and maybe even re-host. The content is under Creative Commons license; and while the company may reserve additional rights, they can't take those rights away from others.
But beyond that - alternatives exist. I'm a moderator now at https://software.codidact.com/ and while it's been slow going I continue to believe in the project.
> StackOverflow was in steady decline long before AI was competent at answering questions
This is true, but the data trends show clearly that LLMs were an "aggravating" (I would say the opposite; it relieves curators who can now do something more important) factor, and the meta archive shows clearly that it's been a policy flashpoint.
> even in 2025 the competence of AI is still in question
I see only two possible futures: the one where it's always in question, and the one where it's in question right up until shortly before the apocalypse and/or rapture. And I don't consider the latter because there would be no meaningful way to prepare (and I'm a skeptic anyway).
Certainly LLMs are a huge factor, but I feel that LLMs rarely give good (and trustworthy!) answers to the things I would check on Stackoverflow. Just like LLMs are no good replacement for API references because they get the details wrong all the time.
One of my top StackOverflow questions for years was around the viability of ECMAscript 6. It's now essentially irrelevant because it's found wide adoption in browsers etc. but at the time a lot of people appreciated the question because they wanted to adopt the technology but weren't sure what its maturity was.
It's also true that some technology stacks mature to a point where there isn't much more to be asked but I think there will continue to be a place for forums of discussion where you can ask and get answers around newer, bleeding edge technologies, use cases etc.
- Documentation - Open source projects using it - Github issues - Source code - Blogs - Youtube videos
The list goes on
LLMs probably sped things up, but it seems like it was inevitable that it would fall into disuse and eventually be overtaken one way or another.
When you earn enough reputation please come back and re-post your comment.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236/why-is-can-s...
Really aggressive moderation, people trying to score points for a worthless achievement system by spamming comments like "You should narrow the scope of this question"
Having to grind achievements to be able to comment, like or dislike.
I used it for a year or so back in 2013?, went back to posting in forums like XDA developers, Codeguru and Reddit.
Let's say for the sake of argument that 95% of humanity perished. Is humanity then dead? It isn't.
Hey, if it all crashes and burns, at least it’s the so-called smartest guys in the room going down with the ship. Just a bunch of VCs learning the hard way that they had no idea how to actually run or grow the company they bought. “Look at how well we optimized it!” Yeah — right into the ground.
For community viability: people will keep using it where LLMs fail. For new problems. It's still the place to go for undocumented workarounds.
Traffic and voting activity is certainly down but there is still immense value and new valuable questions are asked and answered there.
Feels natural that after 16 years of refinements, most normal questions are already there. I use it every week, but can count on one hand the number of questions I asked (0 through my account) over 12 years of having an account. ~All my questions were already asked.
Now ChatGPT for SO is a Band-Aid on top of a Band-Aid on top of a mistake!
I really don't believe in the elitist policy to qualify for being able to answer stack overflow questions ... Whenever I have a better answer than all the existing ones stack overflow says I'm not qualified to answer so shut up! To hell with SO - I answer more questions at my company than anybody else and SO is run by elitst fools ...
Maybe the future involves LLMs asking questions on something like SO when it routinely fumbles a particular topic. People could get paid to answer them and provide more training data. Who knows at this point
If it were up to me, moderation would have been overhauled. But it wasn't up to me.
The best thing about SO is seeing the competing solutions, the discussions, meaning with some discernment you can find that peer-reviewed high quality code snippet. Why would people prefer whatever the AI spits out?
Fortunately I see a few blips on SO so hopefully people are coming back now that the shine has worn off AI.
What is the value of SO to the world economy? Billions. Like the internet archive, it should be some sort of government funded (UN?) library
I had to resort to reddit to ask those questions, which is ironic given the focus of SO.
And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don't recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.
It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I noticed that SO started getting more strict from 2014 onward, I wouldn't know immediately what to do about the content quality issue.
My take is that, like most things, the medium of the old will be appreciated the way it wasn't in 2014. As the Brian Eno quote goes: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." People will yearn for the human forums the same way they did years past when people tire of the LLM slop. (If they do.)
In any sort of IRL community, if some person decided they had the authority to prevent people from answering others' questions, unilaterally decide people aren't welcome, etc. everyone would think they had gone insane.
However there is the problem where any unmoderated public forum will eventually contain only scam artists and Nazis. Moderators address the Nazi spam problem, but now you have the moderator problem. It's been a mental side project of mine lately to find ways to solve the moderator problem, which I can't talk too much about as there is money to be made by doing so.
What happens when the forum gets overrun by Nazi spam? We'll install a set of moderators who remove it. But what happens when the moderators start removing useful information? We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the moderators. But aren't the snakes even worse? Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Then we're stuck with gorillas! No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
It has helped me in the past but yet, I could not reply nor post anything back to help others when I knew the solution because of the way how it works.
To make matters worse while working in IT, I worked with a guy that didn't know anything, if there was no SO post about the problem, the guy couldn't fix the problem.
I have been using Perplexity AI and it has been awesome, and it does provide all the sources it used making it easy to cross check the answers. It has helped me to speed my python learning curve, I am not using search engine anymore, and SO has the problems mentioned above so I have zero interest in using it.
Also, the website layout is a mess, I have to use uBlock Origin with a ton of element picker to stop loading half of its crappy.
I'm pretty sure you can get a stack overflowy experience out of an llm with the right system prompt, but the human factor might not be the same. Not wanting to be berated by others on the internet is maybe underrated as a motivational tool. How are we going to get that back?
I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.
Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don't waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.
> I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.
Yeah fuuuuck that. It's so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can't pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA/Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.
However servers aren't the sort of thing you can just plugin and forget when running a major website. Things go down, users trigger edge cases, people try and DOS you, disks fill up, etc. You do still need some staff to take care of things
In short before we Ctrl+Copy our way to StackOverflow or Forums or IRC and we got collection of responses between good and ugly. But made us think and read or talk to others.
Now we Ctrl+Copy into LLM into a room of hell.
If LLM function is useful but don't get addicted to like honey.
I'm assuming the owners of stack felt similar? Don't know anything about them so could be easily wrong
Still, it may find its place as a last resort.
I wonder what developers started using during that time.
I think it may answer most questions from five years ago, but I would phrase it as “it has answers for most questions, but many are outdated and there’s no easy way to tell whether an answer is outdated”
[0] https://openai.com/index/api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...
Additionally, it's not just the owners... it's the millions of people who contributed.
How will technology advance without research sharing?
Something like 1000x more views than posts/comments… I wonder if that statistic has changed over the years?…
But also, the culture of Stack Overflow has changed significantly over the years. It used to be a place where anyone could ask a question and get help with a problem ... and it was amazing.
Today, you're far more likely to have your question downvoted, flagged as a duplicate (of an unrelated question), or attacked in the comments by overzealous responders (and once that happens, good luck on actually getting help). Your odds of actually getting help on the site are only a fraction of what they once were.
And I'm not just saying this as some SO newbie: I've been using the site since beta! As someone who has used it that long, the change in quality is undeniable.
As someone who has extensive experience modding an niche SE I see this sentiment quite often but honestly, the people making these complaints are just arrogant _and_ wrong about the topic they needed help with.
unless LLMs can be instantly trained on all new software frameworks and languages that come out, im not worried stackoverflow will still have a place
Some get superseded.
Others accelerate their decline through self-foot-shooting and/or enshittification.
Stack Overflow's journey into obscurity is via a mix of private equity indifference, better docs elsewhere, and a lack of leadership over its moderators. It was in decline long before LLMs.
It is not a new story - but it does help map out the modes of platform senescence.
Wasn't the first; won't be the last.
I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many valid questions were closed.
They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be trying to ask a question at all), so there's no reason to care about whether other people can understand the question - let alone figure out whether it's something they also want to ask.
> I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure. The entire point is that when you come to Stack Overflow, you aren't the one who gets to decide what the standards for questions are, or judge whether your question meets those standards. Because if you were, the standards would effectively not exist.
The people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
> I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work. Famously, a user with over a million reputation once went on a spree of violations (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072) of the best-publicized site policy ever to appear on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/). Many users with 100k+ reputation and/or a 10+ year history have likely never looked at the meta site. (See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224 for someone who first posted on meta after 14 years.)
That's fundamentally where SO went wrong. The mods think they're building programming Wikipedia, but normal users are using it as a Q&A forum.
> Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure.
No it doesn't. It's far too easy to close a question and they very rarely get reopened. The suggestion was that users only get to unilaterally reopen it once.
> I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work.
See this is exactly the problem. You have the mods' view of how it is supposed to work, but that isn't how people want it to work!
Mods want it to be this highly curated reference site where only perfectly written questions that exactly fit an FAQ style of questioning. They don't care that that makes it useless (or at least extremely frustrating) as a Q&A forum.
----
Again, the people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
I have the view of a curator - an informal role that anyone can adopt by simply reading the meta site, understanding policy, and trying to help out with the process. Granted, it takes 3000 reputation to cast close votes, but anyone can submit edits, and it only takes 5 reputation to participate in meta (waived if it's about your own question being closed), 15 reputation to flag posts, and 50 to comment (and explain what's wrong with a question).
You say you have 100k reputation there. That's more than me. Yet I take all the actions you complain about, and have at times been very active doing so (for example, I added or moved hundreds of duplicate links to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 , and have gone weeks at a time running out of daily close votes). I'm not a mod.
There are 29 million user accounts, of which about 100k may cast close votes. There are 24 moderators.
Questions are in fact much too hard to close. Three separate people - who, by the above stats, are outnumbered almost 300:1 by those entitled to post answers - must agree. The purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from being answered until it meets standards; questions that could in principle meet standards are supposed to get fixed. But anyone can come along and just post whatever in the answer section; getting that deleted (answers can't be "closed" separately) is even harder; and the presence of that answer causes further problems.
The primary reason questions rarely get reopened is because closed questions overwhelmingly come from new users who don't care in the slightest about any of the process or goals, don't read the information that's given to them about what has happened, and thus never make any attempt to fix the question. (They may do this indefinitely, even after "deletion", by the way - and are expected to do so rather than reposting.)
What you think of as "normal users" aren't the ones who should get to decide what the site is or how it works. How people want an already existing site with 16 years of history to work is completely irrelevant. The fact that people have wanted it to work that way for 16 years is also irrelevant given that a) there are countless places already on the Internet that do work that way that they could use instead; b) they have been getting told off all that time, with varying degrees of tact and sophistication.
If people started trying to use actual Wikipedia as a Q&A forum, it would be correct for them to be shut down no matter how many people wanted to do that. I get that people's views on immigration vary a fair bit around here, but I imagine you'd agree that immigrants shouldn't get to write new laws for a country when they arrive.
Stack Overflow, and every Stack Exchange site, is not a forum, by design. The classic explanation of this (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 ; especially see Robert Cartaino's answer) was originally drafted in 2011. Since it is not a forum, it is not a Q&A forum. It is a Q&A site, and people asking questions have always been expected to have a question that meets standards so that others can benefit from it. Of course, those standards have changed over time - as the community started to recognize patterns in questions that were causing a distraction and not helping to build up something useful. But it has always been with the fundamental motivation and understanding: look at what happens on traditional discussion forums; understand what's frustrating about trying to find or contribute information in that environment; be something else.
When I say "mods" I mean the tiny group of people that spend a lot of time moderating question, and discussing things on meta. I'm not literally talking about the people with extra privileges.
You can say "but it was always meant to be overly moderated" as much as you want. Doesn't change the fact that it was popular in spite of that, not because of it.
What a miserable future to look forward to
Respectfully: outsiders like the author of this piece are not the ones entitled to decide whether a question is "legitimate", or "valid" (another term I see used all the time by people who have no understanding either of Stack Overflow's standards or its goals).
Reference reading:
What is Stack Overflow’s goal? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770)
How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592)
Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476)
How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263)
A satirical answer to "The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/_/309018#309...)
What is the point of closing questions for details and clarity, debugging details, needs more focus, or very low quality? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405519)
Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808)
Why is the rate of positively scoring questions and answers steadily declining? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393032)
When is Stack Overflow going to stop demonizing the quality-concerned users who have made the site a success? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366858)
Is ChatGPT and LLM killing Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430994)
This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.
But it's also possible it's pivoting to a Wikipedia-like model where it becomes a repository for answers, and less about contributions. In which case, this is not the same as it dying. As seen with Wikipedia, it can still get a lot of traffic and revenue even if few people contribute to it anymore.