Let go of StackOverflow; communities must take ownership | Hacker News Reader

Let go of StackOverflow; communities must take ownership

ahelwer.ca

69 pointstensegrist86 comments

Some of the alternatives that the author suggests (Slack, Discord, Matrix rooms) are so much worse to search for answers in. Stack overflow has many disadvantages, but it is extremely good at being a publicly searchable repository of answers to common questions

Yeah this is the biggest problem with Discord (and similar platforms) as an alternative. Discoverablity sucks. Even if you are aware and have access, finding useful information is a bitch.

>it is extremely good at being a publicly searchable repository of answers to common questions

Closed duplicate of <something that is totally different>

Yeah, even with that it is still better

The "closed duplicate" thing is blown away out of proportion than it actually is. I'm convinced people are just pooping on Stack Overflow, not because it's bad, but because they just like complaining about things.

>The "closed duplicate" thing is blown away out of proportion than it actually is.

I hardly use the site and it's happened to me multiple times. I'm sure people that rely more heavily on it see it all the time. I suppose it depends on the sorts of topics you're looking for help with, much like wikipedia or subreddits, a lot of the little niches are seemingly ran by assholes that would rather delete stuff than actually help people find information.

I believe pretty strongly that almost every company should have some kind of internal SE

I agree, so much so that about 10 years ago I built a product that did this!

I launched to lukewarm reception, actually applied to YC with it and didn't get much of a look, nor an interview :-) and after a bit of (though certainly far too little) further hustle gave up on it due to circumstances leading me on another path.

Anyway, I was a tiny bit vindicated when about a year later I noticed Stack exchange themselves did a similar product, but as far as I know, it never really hit. They would advertise it in the side banner for quite a few years but it eventually seemed to go away.

It's weird that it didn't work, it always did seem like an incredibly good idea to me - just so good, it's obvious. If such a thing existed, it'd add so much to any company onboarding experience at a minimum, and would also have obvious ongoing value.

And it just seemed like a great strategy to get useful and up to date documentation: to gamify it. There's just an inherent incentive to become the 'Jon Skeet' of your organisation as it were, rather than making documentation this largely anonymous, thankless afterthought it often becomes in practice despite best intentions.

If it's any consolation, I feel like I've been pitched 10 different versions of this product over the years and I've encountered a lot of startups trying to do the exact same thing. You probably didn't get any YC traction because they'd seen the same thing so many times before. I wouldn't be surprised if we could find a YC batch or two that already contained this exact idea.

Thanks, and this might be it - it's even more obvious than I ever realised!

I wish your solution was still out there. I’m still running an ancient OSQA site with no way to migrate to anything else.

consider feedback people get like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46086703

companies don't always reward answering questions...

The problem that comes to mind is that every question and answer that’s posted is something you have to maintain as part of your docs as they rot over time.

I’d be curious to hear what the common solutions to that are.

Maybe it can be used as a limbo to gather FAQs that get crystallized into the real docs and then deleted.

I think a reasonable solution is “people who find the answer should observe that the question was asked eight years ago, and certainly double-check the answer”. If it’s a question about company internal codebases or operations, then you should have access to see the code or resources the answer is talking about.

Yeah, our wiki is full of old no longer actual/relevant articles and very little incentive to fix any of that vs go work on the next ticket.

I even pondered adding a bot that would create ticket out of oldest not-updated article for someone to go thru and verify it's still current/relevant

Good documentation, communication channels and a healthy work environment where colleagues can communicate and help each other are much beneficial than an internal SE.

Documentation doesn’t solve the problem of Q/A situations.

Internal Stack Exchanfes are (were? I’m not sure whether they discontinued it…my old company had one but new one doesn’t) is really good at converting chat style communication into a permanent easily searchable record that can also be easily updated.

You can also avoid many of the pitfalls with stack overflow around over aggressive moderation (not really needed since the volume of questions won’t be as high), or inappropriate commenting of any sort (reach out to the individual directly or even to their manager), etc.

They still sell Stack Overflow for Teams (renamed Stack Overflow Internal or something like that), but the cost is pretty astronomical. If you want private Q&A in your company/school/etc and you've got anybody with the tech clues, you're better off downloading and setting up one of the free tools.

SE sells just such a thing. I think it's where a lot of their income comes from.

The only suitable bit of tech that comes to my mind is Lemmy (the reddit-style activitypub thing).

And we wouldn’t have a use case for Ai without StackOverflow & Google’s broken search.

Can someone parse what this blog is trying to say with the whole Joe story at the top? I’m too deep in post-Thanksgiving travel acquired illness to understand what this story is trying to tell me. The StackOverflow links are 404s because they were deleted, which the article oddly acknowledges after the links but without removing the deleted links.

As far as I can tell, the author of this blog post had their StackOverflow question deleted for some reason, it made them angry, and now they want us all to delete our StackOverflow accounts and moved to Discord, Slack, Matrix, a forum they acknowledge is actually pretty mean to new users, and a lot of other alternatives?

It's claiming "questions on SO are deleted because people don't understand them", as opposed to the reality that moderation is done by the more experienced users (in this case the least-experienced close voter had 5K reputation).

The deleted question (linked twice, once mislabeled as "mailing list" for some reason) is of the form "Where in my IDE is the option to do X?". While questions about IDEs are not entirely off-topic on SO, they face an uphill battle, and this particular question didn't even have any code.

The question might have become a good fit for SO if the asker had bothered to follow the "edit this question to add ..." instructions ... or if anybody who follows the tag had done it either. Note that deletion only happens after a question is closed for 30 days with a negative score and no answers, and is essential to keep search meaningful.

Thanks. Can I ask how you saw the original question? I only get a page saying this question has been removed, but then again I'm not logged into SO on my phone.

I think this confirms my suspicions: Someone didn't read the SO rules, posted a trivial question, encountered moderation, and has taken it so personally that they're on a crusade against the entire website.

Stack Overflow is not without problems, but I don't think this blog post captures any of those. It's just someone with a grudge about having their low-effort question moderated out.

Stack Overflow users with 10,000 or more reputation can see deleted posts. (Only if they're logged in, of course.)

Plus the guy's thesis about "aligned interests" is glaringly contradicted by Reddit, where forums presumably coalesce around a common interest but are often toxic shitholes presided over by maladjusted mods who capriciously ban people for no legitimate reason; and even follow them to other forums and ban them there too.

The use of "toxic" to describe online behavior like this is perfect. Reddit actually and its ilk leave you feeling bad in every way.

Absolutely not.

1) This is a people problem, not a site problem. Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted, and for every singular tech professional who is, there are a dozen horrid maladjusted ones who are unfortunately successful and find themselves with power they aren't mature enough to have.

2) StackOverflow is still a treasure trove of information and a place anyone can go and ask questions about even niche and deprecated technology. Just recently asked a question about InnoSetup on StackOverflow and got a great response from possibly the expert fellow on InnoSetup.

Having an "invested community" requires an inordinate amount of effort from a tiny handful of founders for uncertain reward.

> Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted

Eh, this a pretty stigmatising boring old stereotype that's only vaguely based in reality at best. I've worked in a bunch of different industries over the decades, and there are unsocial and unadjusted people everywhere.

I just had that kind of experience, but with Stack Exchange.

The Ubuntu people seem to have recently pushed to users a new version of the CUPS printer scheduler that doesn't like the syntax of some old cupsd.conf files. This breaks all printing on affected machines.

So where are the bug reports? Stack Exchange. Nobody over there is going to fix it. This needs to be discussed on Ubuntu Forums, where the maintainers might read it. For now, I posted similar discussions on the CUPS forum and Ubuntu's own forum, and linked them to each other. There's a finger-pointing problem coming up - is this a CUPS bug or a Ubuntu bug? (What writes the cupsd.conf file anyway? Ubuntu Settings?) I don't want to file a bug report until the finger-pointing phase has commentary from people who actually know the innards of Linux printing, or I'll get shot down by one side blaming the other. Let those guys fight it out.

"The Ubuntu people seem to have recently pushed to users a new version of the CUPS printer scheduler"

If you don't like breaking changes then you might consider using an Ubuntu LTS and then adding your own changes as required.

I've been using CUPS for roughly 20 years and since I ditched HPLIP and the like some years ago and went all in on IPP Anywhere, its been rock solid for me at home and at work and for quite a few customers.

So, which version of Ubuntu do you rock and can we have some links to discussions please? Or some idea of the issues involved.

OK, details.[1] Discuss there, not here, please.

[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/cant-print-cups-printing-daem...

What? Why'd a software maintainer read Ubuntu Forums but not Ask Ubuntu?

If you want it to be read by a maintainer, submit it to their bug tracker?!

Yes, because StackOverflow is horrible to monitor.

I work on an open source project at $DAYJOB, and as a team it's much easier dealing with a forum or bug report than tracking SO questions.

You can't set up email notifications for watched tags [1] as SO doesn't take that use case seriously. There's no way to see read or unread questions, or e.g. mark them as read (personally or as a team).

To make matters worse, SO tags are often wrongly applied leading to seeing lots of unrelated or low quality questions briefly. These get removed eventually but still show up initially.

And lastly, I think SO has said that generally they don't want to devolve into a vendor support forum. Which is understandable, given that most companies just post boilerplate answers and aren't really helpful. As a company it makes things harder because moderation is completely out of your control.

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25224/email-notific...

> You can't set up email notifications for watched tags [1]

I'm quite sure I had that set up at some point, already many years ago. The thread you're linking to is over 15 years old.

This seems like a totally incoherent complaint. The alleged SO bad-actor is upset that they can't police a community, but the author has the same complaint, just directed at SO.

All platforms with any moderation system can be subverted by bad actors - IDK that much about SO's mechanisms but it strikes me as leaving the "community" far more leverage for getting around entrenched bad actors than discord, reddit, etc.

And what's more... it's software purpose-built for technical Q&A. Some of my SO answers have been updated by others as they became outdated. Not that I have some particular fondness for SO, but what a cool collective intelligence feature.

I have a feeling this was written for an in-group and broke containment, but the straight forward answer here seems to me to be "SO should have a report system for dealing with bad actors," not "boycott the forum I don't like so people use the one I do"

Stackoverflow started failing when Jeff left. While he had a big hand in the whole mantra of being more of a Wiki than just Q&A, I feel his sense of community wouldn’t have let it get so bad.

Then all of the OG engineers left (I hope Nick Craver is doing well, his blog posts were incredible), an investment company took over, and whatever good will and vibe that was left melted away.

I’ll still occasionally find a good answer there. But it has zero future of making answers available for future good questions.

They took the fun away.

So interesting that this post is about putting incentives in the right place.

I distinctly remember the number one fantastic thing about StackOverflow in the beginning was that their incentives were so much better than all the alternatives.

The way SO gave you points for answering questions and gave you more for being the best answer etc etc meant the answers you got there were so much better than anywhere else. This is why the site grew so rapidly and so quickly became the best place to get a great answer.

In the short-term, absolutely. Problem is that the points are permanent- so the first person to answer a question, based on the current standards in 2008 or whatever, got hundreds or thousands of points and that answer is still at the top despite multiple revisions and better options introduced later. For example jquery to JS to ES6.

All SO points should slowly degrade, if an answer is still the best 15 years later it will continue to be upvoted but if newer, better solutions come along, the original solution will eventually fall in karma points and the newer, better solution will overtake it.

That's how the site should have been designed, IMO.

Agreed, sounds like that would be better.

I suppose the questions on SO are probably very varied in terms of the traffic they receive, attention they get etc. But there must be some parameters to make it work.

> Choose ownership by invested communities instead of faceless gamified interlopers.

This is a fair take, I will say as someone who benefited greatly from SO and contributed to it way more than I should have (on paid time) the problem was that people asking question were always new to the site and rules, and so their questions would be shot down in service to high quality content.

Whats happening now is anyone who is asking questions there is even less in tune with the practices of the site and likely with tech in general. It has been consumed by every coding llm, (i don't condone it but it's a fact). So it begs the question, if you have a truly new and novel problem that hasn't yet been solved by Jon Skeet, where do you ask ?

As an ex hardcore user, I don't know the answer anymore but bikeshedding things with an LLM is ironically sometimes more insightful for me personally.

Even if my question has been asked and answered before, what would it take for the site to realize that the answer that references, say, React 15 from 2016 is not useful in 2025?

Unfortunately the sheer scale of updating that is not possible by just the mods etc, it usually comes down to someone who has searched the problem, come across the question, realized it's too old to apply, figured out a fix themselves, and THEN had the decency to update the question with an updated answer.

It's just unsustainable depending on the goodwill of users, especially when SO score means very little these days.

Edit : It might be very doable by AI.. But they would have to sacrifice their "no ai answer" policy. (maybe they have already)

It would take someone who actually knows React writing an answer that explains how it is different. Usually newbies are not in a position to understand when version differences are relevant and when they aren't.

On SO, it's often best if questions are somewhat version agnostic, and different answers address different questions.

> On SO, it's often best if questions are somewhat version agnostic, and different answers address different questions.

Yep, this is their 'way' but what I think @fragmede is getting at is, how can you know your question will be redundant next week. I prefer the 'duplicate' idea, where the user actually links the old question and says "hey this didn't work because X Y Z", then (in most cases) people will engage with the question as it demonstrates a level of effort.

Love the idea but getting people to move to another platform requires both

- "nothing about the new thing is worse"

and

- "some things are better".

Any migration must also defeat social network effects ("I'll wait for everyone else before I migrate")

Still it is exciting to see energy for this.

Would be great to know what (if any) alternatives exist with a similar UI to Stack Overflow - open source or other.

From what I've seen, communities don't migrate; they fragment. It's very hard to get a group to move, even if the new option is clearly better in the ways that matter to the group.

When I left Stack Exchange I joined the Codidact project, which is FLOSS and run by a non-profit foundation (disclosure: I'm on the board). We still have lots of things we want to improve (we're a very small team), but probably our biggest challenge is adoption -- attracting enough people who want to do Q&A and related knowledge-sharing somewhere that puts communities and people first and isn't driven by revenue goals. We've got communities for software development, Linux, and others, and I'd love to see them grow.

> nothing about the new thing is worse

That is definitely not true. There is some complex set of coefficients that play into when people are willing to mass migrate, but needless to say the road to where we are today with platforms was not a linear slope upward. In many cases, like the move from forums to social media platforms, there were obvious problems basically the entire time, but one of those things is surgically good at consuming your attention and one is not.

Very good point. Thinking on this - social network effects almost certainly outweigh better/worse considerations:

“I’ll go where the community is” / “I’ll go where my friends are”

A huge benefit of stackoverflow, perhaps the biggest benefit, is that it is a single place you can go to ask about a wide variety of languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. and interactions between them.

Having to join a separate mailing list, forum, or chat server for every "community" you might have technical questions about, then keeping track of those is incredibly inconvenient. And in some cases it may not be clear which one to ask a question on.

That's not to say that such places for community discussion isn't valuable, but stackoverflow serves a different purpose.

Should have a desktop tool that allows you to subsribe to different communities and interact with them in a more coherent manner. That way people could self host, and as long as the site talks a common protocol, various tools can interact with it.

Then the site itself should have http output for the discoverability.

Since I (and likely everyone else) uses AI to answer technical questions, and AI is taught by stackoverflow, and stackoverflow shuts down because it generates no income, what will the next AI be trained on?

Conversations you're having with the AI to work through problems.

Don't forget the slave labor in low-income countries. They've got translations down so anyone who needs spare change can be hired

I've decided that I am done with all that social media crap. The only way to combat this digital amnesia problem is to selfhost again.

I also decided to build my website from scratch in Go, because this way I can allow people to download, share, and reuse content more easily. If my website goes down, I can offer a peer to peer client. If my wiki goes down, I can offer a prepared ZIM package.

(And yes, I'm also building my own ZIM search client/server hybrid because I don't like the way ZIM's search works)

In my case I had to do a bunch of things before, e.g. writing a Go WebASM bindings framework, fixing the webview/webview bindings, and rewriting my website so it can be hosted locally and in parts, too.

I separated the website, weblog, wiki and (markdown) editor on purpose, so that I can split up the wiki if need be.

The only thing I regret is having invested so much in social media to share knowledge. That time would've been better spent on just persisting it in a wiki.

Also I think LLMs are great tools for discovery and learning, if they would respect the given boundaries, and if the owners of said LLMs would pay for the caused traffic bandwidth. Which leads back to the point of why I'm creating a ZIM server that also has MCP support.

I hope you get traction and I also hope you can survive the bombardment with requests by AI scrapers without getting anything in return. Self hosting needs some problems addressed in the era we live in before it becomes something sustainable.

This is a very good point - but isn't this solved by dropping the requests from AI scrapers with your firewall?

This comes some years too late. Who is really using StackOverflow to ask questions? I know that ChatGPT can answer all questions that StackOverflow can answer in a fast, friendly and nearby as correct way. It has limitations, but the most people on StackOverflow are jsut doing the same than ChatGPT, just repeat after other people. All this things will be gone soon.

I don't remember where I read this, but will tell this story every time ChatGPT is mentioned as a replacement of StackOverflow.

> I asked chatgpt how do I do X. Chatgpt replied with the accepted answer from stack overflow, thus saving me 1 second. In theory. In practice, what Chatgpt did NOT tell me was that the top voted comment on that accepted answer said "Do not do this, doing X in this way creates a security vulnerability of type Y because of Z"

Honestly, in this scenario I’d lean toward the LLM providing the better answer. Whoever shared this parable didn’t understand that ChatGPT isn’t just a search engine that regurgitates the top voted accepted comment from Stack Overflow. An LLM is probably more likely to parse the entire page and all of the comments if it pulls an URL. It would also be more likely to pull multiple URLs. It would also be more likely to pull from accumulated embedded knowledge. Unfortunately for this fabricated example, the casual visitor to Stack Overflow is most likely to be duped by an incorrect accepted answer if they don’t scroll down and read the fine print (which isn’t that common, a fact that surprises people who always read the comments and all answers).

ChatGPT can provide the same answers SO can because it mined SO as part of its training data.

From my experience, the majority of answers (accepted or highest voted) are wrong/outdated, with the second or third being the correct answer.

Ironically, that's where LLMs seem to have an advantage.

They're not regurgitating the top Stack Overflow answer. They've scraped the entire Stack Overflow page, including context in additional answers, and they've also been trained on the same question from countless other parts of the internet.

An advantage over what? Reading an SO page "scrapes" the whole page with your eyeballs.

Anyway, I didn't say anything about which is preferable to use, I merely commented on where the information comes from, so your response is non sequitur. If sources like SO go away, it will affect the quality of LLM responses. "the same question from countless other parts of the internet" is a figment of your imagination when it comes to the kind of content SO accumulated. I've been in this industry for a very long time (my name appears in RFC #57) and I know what it was like to try to get answers to technical questions before SO showed up.

Then your experience is extremely limited or you're misreporting it.

Or, the context of your use, for a site that covers many thousands, is different than mine, leading to a different experience.

The most-being-wrong applies very reliably for any API, library, or language that isn't stable through time. You probably work C, or similar, where backwards breaking changes, or shifts in "the correct way", are rare. I'm jealous!

The answer being wrong at any point in time is probably < 10%, in my experience.

You've basically confirmed what I said.

Yes. Giant disorganized piles of atomized information are less useful than optimized integrated data representations queryable by LLMs.

As a ConTeXt user I use to ask questions on SO from time to time because (1) the wiki can be outdated or incoherent; and (2) I get lost on the mailing list, which is the other way you can ask stuff or get help about ConTeXt. I don't see ChatGPT or something like that catching up about something so niche fairly soon, though

I still use SO to ask questions. In fact, just asked a question couple days ago which ChatGPT couldn't answer, nor has anyone on SO been able to:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79831192/multi-line-titl...

Well, SO is only read by scrapers these days so no answers doesn't mean much. Could be the question is unsolvable, could be lots of people know the answer and won't see it because you've written it in a graveyard.

edit: thought I'd try to check that belief but the process for getting SO to show me any information involves enough layers of question boxes and captions that I've kind of got the confirmation by giving up in annoyance.

I asked a somewhat niche question once. The single answer made it clear that the answerer had not read the question. At least my question wasn't immediately closed, I guess. I totally understand why people are seeking alternatives.

I pay $10 a month to a small forum I frequent. If you're not willing to support the websites you use, it all leads to the same end.

Wholeheartedly agree that moderation on Stack Overflow is nuts but email lists, Slack channels and Discord are poor solutions.

I don't know how anyone has enough patience to use Stack Overflow in 2025. Any LLM, even the one in Google Search, will give you a better answer than some stack overflow user that didn't read or understand your question fully.

Try as I might, I could not actually understand what the author’s point was.

What is so bad about SO?

I guess the point is that SO encourages deletionism to a harmful degree.

For the context: on SE for 13+ years, north of 400k cumulated rep.

I hate what SO became. It is true that they get heaps of junk, but a carefully crafted question from a high rep user that gets downvoted almost systematically is a problem. With me or with the massive egos of the readers.

It used to be nice and friendly. Today it is not and Meta is full of inbread psychopaths. If you want to see a brain under cocaine go there.

In contrast there are wonderful sites in SE at large. Cooking, Tex, Law, Travel, even Academia -- you get good, terse, sensible answers there.

As an atheist I love to read the Jewish SE. The amount of effort Jews are putting into making their life a jungle is popcorn worthy (I am thinking about everything not directly related to god, but rather the innumerable rules for everyday life). And yet everyone is fine, friendly, people are not trying to downvote or close as of it was a competition.

Nobody gets credit for their high rep in Cooking. People use SO for work or to show off - maybe the problem is in this dichotomy.

I don't know what TLA+ is, but thanks for an entertaining rant, and the excerpt from Heller's timeless book.

Took me a while to realize that it is an actual thing, rather than used as a placeholder (“three letter acronym”)

Usually temporal logic of actions. Lamport's thing. Extremely worth a look.

The other day I saw an answer on StackOverflow which was very detailed, well researched, and grounded in decades of experience.

It was also heavily downvoted, because it did not directly answer the user's question. (The user had already selected a winning answer, so this was in some sense unnecessary.)

It struck me that a single scalar for quality was inappropriate here. It was the best post I'd read in a long time, but by the site's rules indeed "deserved" the downvotes.

I had to wonder if a multidimensional system (tags like "answers question" and "general context" etc.) would work better. You know... the stuff every social media site figured out twenty years ago? ;)

---

Tangential but the more I think about it, the more I think we had the web basically right twenty years ago...

You subscribed to what you wanted to see.. and then sometimes you'd find really cool new things through mentions or the comments section.

I was thinking about signal to noise ratio and taste recently and realized I'd reinvented RSS from first principles...

I think the only place I'd seen voting that wasn't just up or down was Slashdot, and all that did was let the user adjust weights for the dimensions. I do miss their voting though.

Isn't that all you need? What you want to see depends what you're looking for! e.g. to extend my example, perhaps you've found the literal answer and now you're looking for context, or usage examples, or gotchas, or...

Do you have a link?

> I had to wonder if a multidimensional system (tags like "answers question" and "general context" etc.) would work better.

Same for HN. You're supposed to vote based on "contributes to the discussion" but if someone posts something that's false, that can be a common misconception that others will have as well and is explained in replies. Does it need to be downvoted for a honest mistake? You know people will.

There's a bunch of dimensions you could vote for but something close to "I disagree with this" is what people mostly use. If that were a separate metric from "contributes to the conversation", they could each affect ranking/grayness appropriately

Another forum I'm on lets you classify posts from "troll" (-1) through "irrelevant" to "fine", "good", and "exceptional" (+3). It then takes the median value of all votes, biasing/tie-breaking towards "fine". There is no limit on how many posts you're allowed to mark as exceptionally good, but if you abuse it, your voting rights are taken away. It's far from perfect (if you have behind-the-scenes knowledge of something, you can see where the hive mind goes wrong) but I like it better than what HN does, also because it's public and you can filter for the exceptionally good replies. They're most often by people who post additional sources and information that the article could/should have had. On HN, the only time we get to see vote count is when something gets grayed out for being super bad...

And the gray stuff is often the most interesting comments, it just says it in a way people don't like! (Or says something they aren't willing to hear...)

Well, not the majority, obviously, but some real gems do get lost in there.

I guess an "I am psychologically unprepared to confront the implications of this post" button wouldn't get much use though ;)

The downvotes are so funny though. I posted a bad joke yesterday (it was very on the nose) and got my deserved downvotes. Then I posted the same thing in Latin and got a bunch of upvotes. Form over function...

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