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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.

The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes.

The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions.

Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.

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Also: the bigger the corpus of already answered questions, it’s more likely that you can just look up an answer instead of asking.

Eventually SO becomes a site exclusively for lurkers instead of a platform for active participation

On the other hand, another week another JavaScript framework, amirite? There continues to be new stuff to ask questions about, but stack overflow failed to be the default location for new stuff. I guess now there's more discussion directly on GitHub and discord.

The JavaScript ecosystem has mostly stabilised. React is 12 years old for example.

> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.

This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.

> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.

This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.

I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier".

The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.

I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.

No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute experts, you also need answer often for something trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.

> No, you don't.

When someone says "I feel like" and you answer "No, you don't", you're most certainly wrong :-).

I do feel like the parent.

If you read parent's comment it's not "I feel like" comment even though he mentioned it. I have been in software engineering for long and the queries to stackoverflow/chatgpt combined haven't decreased for me.

> I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel

Are you being serious here?

> I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself

I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in the way. So I stopped.

I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced.

I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.

The more experienced I got, the subtler my questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this and that questions, but it is not", only to see my question get closed as duplicate by moderators.

If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?

Here's my brilliant idea: the longer it takes for an answer to be marked correct, or the more answers there are before one is marked correct, the more points that answer deserves.

The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if you could retroactively years later re-award it to a newer answer. Since the gamification angle was so prominent, that might rob the decade-old author of their points for their then-correctness, so idk if they even allowed it.

I noticed a similar thing for Python 3 questions, closed as a duplicate of a Python 2 response. Why they weren't collated and treated as a living document is beyond me.

My feeling is that many times the moderators are not competent to decide correctly.

They could go with "when in doubt, keep the duplicate", but they chose the opposite. Meaning that instead of happy users and duplicates, they have no duplicates, and no more users.

How about if people with a higher reputation contribute an exponentially higher score when voting? Like, someone with ten top-rated answers has a 1,000-point vote (more nuanced than that, obviously).

Remember when the R developers would ask and answer their own basic questions about R, essentially building up a beginner tutorial on stack overflow? That was a cool time

Human psychology is fascinating. If I say I'm cool, I'm full of myself. If someone else says that I'm cool, that hits different. So is reverse psychology.

Hey fragmede, you are cool.

This has been my experience.

My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as time went on, and they became unanswered, almost always (I often ended up answering my own question, after I figured it out on my own).

I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I encountered, were the types of things that people who ship, encounter; not academic exercises.

Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on there, don't ship.

LLMs may sometimes give pretty sloppy answers, but they are almost always ship-relevant.

That might be true on Stackoverflow but not on other network sites like Cross Validated, which was killed by splitting the community into multiple SE sites and longtime users quitting in protest over various policies and not being replaced.

I think there's a basic problem that the original revenue model for the site just didn't work (I mean, they wouldn't have shut down Stack Overflow Jobs if that actually made them any money) and anything they were able to do to fix that pissed people off.

Stack Overflow Jobs was a superb, uncluttered, direct interface to the hiring manager, with accurate details about a position. So when they canned it (but kept their advertising revenue stream plus started "SO for Teams" in 2018), that was a major canary that the whole revenue model wasn't viable, at least for independent developers.

Well I think part of the problem here is that, by all accounts, developers loved it, but they're not the actual paying customer.

If SO wanted to keep experienced developers on their site and contributing content for free, it shouldn't have been unthinkable to find some model to fund SO Jobs. Yahoo is one cautionary tale of what happens when a site pursues more or lower-quality advertising revenue without regard for losing users.

"Sunsetting Jobs & Developer Story" 3/2022 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...

The point of SO Jobs was to fund the rest of the site. You're saying they should have subsidized what was meant to be the revenue driver too?

Don't distort my words. If SO Jobs was one of the key engagement features bringing thousands of experienced developers to SO to contribute free content (and the site was valued at $1.8bn in the acquisition), then any reasonable accounting would find those features were cash-positive.

(That seems comparable to arguing that Facebook shouldn't subsidize posting baby photos).

But if it was the case that SO mgmt decided (2017-2020) that they didn't care to keep experienced users engaged, and just let the site degenerate into new users posting bigger volumes of duplicates, questions without code, etc., then that would be on them. You don't have to assume their actions were rational; look how badly they mismanaged moderation in that period and how many experienced users that lost them.

I think that it is simultaneously the case that 1) SO Jobs had job-seekers who loved it 2) it was not actually a major draw to the site 3) it didn't make money, despite 4) being primarily intended as a monetization mechanism. You are starting from different premises you didn't bother stating and then accusing me of being dishonest for not divining them.

Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I still pop into SO when in learning a new language or trip into new simple questions (in my case, how to connect and test a local server). But when you're beyond the weeds, SO is as best an oasis in the desert. Half the time a mirage, nice when it does help out. But rare either way.

I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.

Wasn't there a "bounty" program where if it had a lot of views but no answers, the answer rewarded more internet ego points?

Not automatically. You could add a bounty using your own points if the question didn't get an accepted answer in 2 days.

Which is kinda cool, but also very biased for older contributors. I could drop thousands of points bounty without thinking about it, but new users couldn't afford the attention they needed.

Maybe there's a key idea for something to replace StackOverflow as a human tech Q&A forum: Having a system which somehow incentivizes asking and answering these sorts of challenging and novel questions. These are the questions which will not easily be answered using LLMs, as they require more thought and research.

There is also github issues discussions now which also helped in asking these niche questions directly to the team responsible. I dont ask questions about a library on SO I just ask it on the github of the library and I get immediate answers

> the more experienced you become, the less useful it is

This is killer feature of LLMs - you will not became more experienced.

>toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes

>zombie community

Like Reddit post 2015.

Stack Overflow moderation is very transparent compared to whatever Reddit considers moderation.

For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not quite comparable because the more subjective questions are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the direction of adding many more libraries than most people should).

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