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Comment by _aavaa_ | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014 (minus a very transient blip from covid).

Then the chagpt effect is a sudden drop in visitors. But the rate of decline after that looks more or less the same as pre-chatgpt.

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StackOverflow was killed by its toxic moderators. I hope it stays online thought because it's massive source of knowledge, although in many cases outdated already.

I always thought StackOverflow was meant to fizzle out over time as more questions get answered and don't need to be asked again. Perhaps the decline is just a necessary part of their rule of having no duplicate questions - keeping it as a clean repository of knowledge rather than a messy forum.

Just the other day a question I asked about 10 years ago got flagged as a duplicate. It turns out somebody else had asked the same question several years later and got a better answer than my question got, so that other one is the canonical one and mine is pushed away. It feels kind of offensive but it makes complete sense if the goal is to provide useful answers to people searching.

Unfortunately, the rule of no duplicate questions also destroyed lots of questions that weren't duplicates... because _someone_ couldn't be bothered to read them and realize it wasn't the same.

Plus, there were a lot of fun questions they were really interesting to start with; and they stopped allowing them.

Yes, this. I've asked a couple of questions where the only responses are from people saying "possible dupe of x" where x is something that has a couple of the same words but no relation to what I'm asking.

Turns out if you design a forum where a high effort, high quality post can be devalued by a low effort response, you discourage high effort, high quality posters.

This is where we need SO's "The Answer" feature, whatever they called it. Never seen it distilled so well.

The problem with this, and why SO’s downfall was completely self-inflicted, is that the correct answer from 2013 is only occasionally still the correct answer in 2018. There are a lot of other issues with SO’s general moderation policy but well and truly it was as idiotic and myopic as it was toxic.

They treated subjective questions about programming methods as if they were universal constants. It was completely antithetical to the actual pursuit of applied knowledge, or collecting and discussing best practices and patterns of software design. And it was painfully obvious for years this was as a huge problem, well before LLMs.

That said, I will say after being traumatized by having my threads repeatedly closed, I got so good at boiling down my problem to minimal reproducible examples that I almost never needed to actually post, because I’d solve it myself along the way.

So I guess it was great for training me to be a good engineer in the abstract sense. but absolutely shit at fostering any community or knowledge base.

> that the correct answer from 2013 is only occasionally still the correct answer in 2018

Exactly! They should have added proper structuring to questions/replies so that it could specifically apply for Language/library version X. Later, such a question could be answered again (either by proving it's still correct for version X+1, or by giving a new answer) - that way people wouldn't have to look at a new reply with 2 votes vs an older, possibly outdated one with 100 and make a decision which to prefer.

The major trouble with StackOverflow is that nominally duplicate questions may have different answers if asked on 2011 vs 2026 - and the trouble is that answer rankings (the thing that determines what answers are in the top) don't decay over time. So if someone try to answer an old question with up to date info, they won't garner enough upvotes to overcome the old, previously correct but now outdated accepted answer at the top. (even with a ranking decay, there is little incentive to give a new up to date answer to a established thread - people are more likely to contribute to brand new threads)

It would be better to allow duplicates in this specific case, but mark the old thread as outdated and link the questions in such a way that one can see the old thread and compare it to the new thread.

This is something I saw all the time. I’d look something up, knowing that there was probably an easy way to do <basic programming task> in modern c++ with one function call.

Find the stack overflow thread, answer from 10+ years ago. Not modern C++. New questions on the topic closed as duplicate. Occasionally the correct answer would be further down, not yet upvoted.

“Best practice” changes over time. I frequently saw wrong answers with install instructions that were outdated, commands that don’t function on newer OS version, etc etc.

You raise an interesting point about decay. I have thought about similar systems myself. One flaw in a simple decay rule would be that some technologies are very stable, e.g., C & POSIX API programming. However, other tech is very fast moving like Python, Ruby, Java, C#, C++, Rust, etc. One idea to overcome this flaw, might be to have moderators (who are specialists on the subject matter) provide a per question decay rule. Example: Something like struct layout or pointer manipulation in C or the fopen() POSIX function might never decay. But something like a parsing JSON in any fast moving language might require annual updates. For example, a question about parsing JSON in Java might decay answers over a one year period to encourage people to revist the topic. I would like to hear Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky debate this topic with other "Internet points" experts for an hour-long podcast. They might brainstorm some very intersting ideas. I would also love to hear what they think about the "moderator problem". Some of the topics had incredibly toxic moderators who scared away newcomers and women. (Women are much less likely to participate in public software forums where public shaming is common.)

> One idea to overcome this flaw, might be to have moderators (...)

> I would also love to hear what they think about the "moderator problem". Some of the topics had incredibly toxic moderators (...)

Yeah having bad moderators and arguably a bad, dysfunctional community is perhaps a even worse handicap. If you go to threads on meta.SE (meta stack exchange, meta discussions on the whole ecosystem) you will see that people mostly believe the site policies are okay, and that's because everyone that didn't believe left years ago.

Maybe better ideas on how to evolve a Q&A site may evolve in a brand new site, unfortunately I think that SO and perhaps the wider Stack Exchange network is done.

Great point, because as the knowledge evolves might need to evolve ranking too by allowing some versioning and somehow ranking or marking the outdated ones

That's what the Bounty system was meant to handle. It could have been done better but it's not like they never considered it.

Overzealous moderator issue was probably the main reason but I think the direct answer and summary from Google directly also had a significant impact on StackOverflow. It took away potential contributors and reduced the incentives for active contribution.

In a way it was a trial and glimpse of what was coming with the AI revolution

> It took away potential contributors

There were multiple times I wanted to contribute to SO but couldn't because I didn't have sufficient "reputation", or something. I shrugged and moved on.

I agree it was a moderation issue, but for me it's Reddit that largely replaced my SO usage starting some years ago. Reddit is pretty similar to SO in design, but the more decentralized nature of the moderation means that questions rarely get "closed as duplicate" and answers tend to be more up-to-date as a result. There's not always a consensus answer and I'm often looking across multiple threads on the same thing, but that's still better than an outdated SO post.

Would AI be as good at coding as it is without the rigorous moderation of a significant training source?

> StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014.

> [0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-... (monthly question asked on Stack Overflow)

"monthly questions asked" is a weird metric to measure the decline of StackOverflow tho. How many times are people gonna ask how to compare 2 dates in python, or how to efficiently iterate an array in javascript? According to the duplicates rule on SO, should be once anyway. So it's just inevitable that "monthly questions asked" will forever decrease after reaching its peak, since everything has already been asked. Didn't mean it was dead tho, people still needed to visit the site to read the responses.

A better metric to measure its decline would be "monthly visits", which I guess was still pretty high pre LLM (100s of millions per month?), even if the "monthly questions asked" was declining. But now I imagine their "monthly visits" is closer to zero than 1M. I mean, even if you don't use Claude and its friends, searching anything about programming on Google returns a Gemini answer that probably comes from StackOverflow, removing any reason to ever visit the site…

Your first point only holds if nothing ever changes in the programming world. People write new languages and frameworks all the time. How do you compare dates in pandas? How about polars? Duckdb? Etc.

Mods made asking questions a very hostile experience since they had a flawed ideal of SO becoming some form of encyclopedia. So no wonder people jumped on another train as quickly as possible, especially since it so often was a mistake to close a question whose next best answer was a long deprecated solution.

It still has some corners where people are better, but this is mostly the smaller niches.

Even someone who hates AI, is likely to hate it less than SO.

I don't know about others, but I switched to Reddit or forums for asking and answering questions because it offered a much smoother experience.

We can only hope reddit shares the same fate. Its only saving grace - as much as it pains me to say it - is that it's still not Facebook

StackOverflow is the next iteration of Yahoo Answers.

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