PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620
At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on top.
SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though.
But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior.
I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.
They are not "threads" and are not supposed to be "threads". Thinking about them as if they were, is what leads to the perception of toxicity.
That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture. It's everywhere.
Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement.
Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter.
The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc) and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.
The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without hesitation and producers just also don't do actual documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which works in the moment, but terrible for future team members to even know what questions to search/ask for.
If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.
Typical response:
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I know how your system is not functioning as desired! Rest assured, I am here to help you resolve this today.
Please follow these steps in order. Do not skip any steps.
Step 1: Reboot your computer Step 2: Reinstall windows Step 3: Contact Microsoft support
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If this helped, please mark this as the Answer and give me a 5-star rating so I can continue providing high-quality, scripted responses to other users!
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A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented.
If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that.
Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc.
Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.
2020 there was new CEO and moderator council was formed: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-o...
It was bad enough that I got back in the habit of buying and building a library of serious reference books because they were the only reliable way to answer detailed technical questions.
I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid moderation.
I agree the toxic moderation (and tone-deaf ownership!) initiated the slower decline earlier that then turned into the LLM landslide.
Tbf SO also suffered from its own success as a knowledgebase where the easy pickings were long gone by then.