StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

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44 pointsstefankuehnel40 comments

I remember the switch from random discussion forum that preceded it to stack overflow, the problem with random forums were that the answer was hidden somewhere down or on page 3. Stack overflow was significant improvement in this regard (to a point that I only searched programming question with site:stackoverflow.com to filter out other methods), the question was curated and updated. Now we have new thing that is even better so there is no going back. The progression was roughly:

1. Random website

2. Random thematic blog, seo'd

3. Random forum

4. Curated question portal like SO

5. Thematic subreddit when it became impossible to ask on SO

6. LLM

> when it became impossible to ask on SO

Can you explain what you mean by that?

At some point they got ultra aggressive about "duplicate" questions.

Technology changes at a fast pace .. so new questions would get asked, and then closed by moderators and pointed to similar questions that might be 5 or 6 years old and no longer relevant.. essentially ending the discussion on many topics and actively preventing progress in certain areas.

Absolutely this. Later in the piece I learned that one of the mods in a place I'd occasionally asking questions on SO was from my local town and would occasionally attend industry social events. It was amusing to let a few people know and watch the "why did you close that question as a duplicate? That vendor module was only released 6 months ths ago but the duplicate was from 5 years back. Make it make sense!".

Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it).

At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.

I can absolutely say that "I couldn't answer the question first" is not a motive people had for closing questions. That would have been abusive and definitely something that moderators would follow up on and deal with to whatever tiny extent it happened.

I can say extremely confidently from years of experience that the people who were always "trying to be the first to answer your question" were, overwhelmingly, the ones trying hardest not to let anyone ever close anything, even harder than the most aggrieved newbies asking questions and not caring about the underlying community. Nobody sits around answering multiple questions a day for years on end, purely on intrinsic motivation. I joined in late 2010 and posted answers all the way until mid-2023, but fully half of those were before the end of 2012. There are reasons for that. Meanwhile, there are people with reputation scores in the seven digits, even though the site awards no further privileges past 25,000. The obvious conclusion is that we're primarily talking about people primarily motivated by Number Go Up, and closing questions is an impediment to Number Go Up, so it must be prevented at all costs.

Questions get closed for the reasons that are listed in the interface for closing questions, which are also described in the Help Center and also explained in detail on meta (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476). When questions don't meet the expected standards, it's important to close them as quickly as possible; because when people answer questions that should be closed, they are actively making the site worse (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808). And since there will always be people around who are motivated by Number Go Up, there was value in preempting them.

Really the system was poorly designed. The Staging Ground was the one shining beacon of hope, because it inherently prevented answers by default, providing only a comment thread with the explicit purpose of fixing issues with the question so that it could meet site standards.

I love how SO lets itself being bullied by 25-30 high-rep users - the very same users who have chased away all the other users from the website.

While AI definitely took away a lot of people from SO, most people are relieved that they don't have to interact with that literally garbage community when they have an IT/CS question. They didn't leave because of the website design, but I also believe that the new design wouldn't have chased many away either.

These users' rule hasn't really worked out so far, as demonstrated by the current state of SO. Maybe it is time to ignore that very small, but very vocal group? Though probably that should have happened years ago, maybe it's just time to cut their losses.

You are complaining about counterfactuals. Nobody is bullying anyone; the people active on meta aren't "chasing away" users (almost no users actually come to meta in the first place, the big names don't do a lot of personal interaction and when they do they don't leave comments unless they can be exceedingly polite about it); all that's happening is that with LLMs people finally have the thing they wanted all along[0] so they no longer have to keep coming to SO demanding it to be that thing when it was very explicitly designed the entire time not to be that thing, specifically so that experts wouldn't have to waste their time when they try to make the world better on a volunteer basis[1].

But most importantly: the site does not even remotely in any imaginable way empower those users. It actively hinders them, the staff have berated them over the years over alleged "unfriendliness"[2] and they constantly dump their ideas on the meta site, then ignore all feedback and push their ideas through anyway.

The main site is noticeably slower now. As far as I can tell, this is because they've taken code paths that the beta uses (especially whatever it is they use to load the code boxes and put a little JS widget at the top of them) and applied them back to the main site that worked perfectly well before.

[0] Basically: a magic robot that can listen to them and try to suggest an answer one on one, without caring about whether literally anyone else on the planet could benefit from that exchange, because the robot can tirelessly do that for the next person.

[1] I.e., so that humans could say something once and actually have it be relevant to many people.

[2] I.e.: the company makes money from views and a lot of people don't want to view a site where they have to actually meet any kind of standard whatsoever to participate; so it's the fault of people who have an actual vision for the site being useful.

As someone who had a fast high engagement for some time and then have dropped away, asking very few questions in that time, I disagree. I have seen far to many marked as duplicate for things that aren’t, nagging about rules and unsuitable questions instead of helpfulness and general allowing of some users to despise beginners without any consequences.

When I ask someone for an example, 90% just can't provide even one. From the remaining 10%, about two thirds are cases where it's very clear why the question was moderated. In another third it's questionable and can go either way.

Remember that SO is moderated by SO users.

I never had a desire to post questions there. Comments or answers only if it were something I felt a personal stake in (community that we were trying to bring up) or the rare case where I would come across something uncommon that was unanswered that I had recently ran into and figured out. It's not the users there who kept me away, I just that I like quiet (high signal to noise) developer spaces. ;)

I imagine a huge number of people were just browsing for quick answers and then bailed as I did.

Yes, and it's good that you found some quick answers. That was the point of the expectations placed on questions. A good question that can help other people is often fundamentally hard to ask, even for trivial topics.

I am not a high-rep user and I am still very much relieved that they got rid of the horrible redesigned website.

I one time had an actual answer for a question that nobody else had answered in 5 years... but because I didn't have enough ridiculous "reputation" I couldn't post it, so everyone else couldn't actually be helped. That's when I was done with SO.

> a question that nobody else had answered in 5 years... but because I didn't have enough ridiculous "reputation" I couldn't post it

This is frankly impossible. By default, anyone with an account can post an answer to a question (https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-posts).

Question protection sets a barrier at 10 reputation, which you can get from a single upvote on an existing answer, or from five approved edits to existing questions or answers. Further, it would only be applied to questions that had already been answered repeatedly, specifically because the question was attracting redundant answers that weren't adding any more value.

Here is a hard question - how could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta? I mean obviously the new CEO and leadership has been total trash and has squandered their goodwill and user loyalty, but if I was CEO instead I don't know how I would save the ship.

Doubling down on how it was done in the 'good old days' probably wouldn't work because you would slowly bleed user to AI. Selling data to AI companies might work for a bit, but I would guess that the sales value of SO's data has quickly diminishing returns. So what is their path forward?

It will turn into a meme subreddit and/or die. What else is there?

That's a hard one. SO's hostile community to newbies, like any expert community, comes from the longstanding users having seen the basic questions 1000s of times and understandably not wanting to answer variations of them over and over, while for the newbies those questions genuinely are there and they don't have the routine knowledge yet of where to look or how to even look for solutions in the first place.

In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions. LLMs seem to be getting pretty good at those as well though, so I don't know where that leaves us.

SO for discussions of taste? I have these two options to build this, how should i approach this? They tried to sell their own GPT wrapper for a while, didn't they? The use case I can see for that is: User asks question - LLM answers it - user is unsure about the answer - it gets posted as a SO thread and the rest of the userbase can nitpick or correct the LLM response.

Edit: I also seem to remember they had a job portal in the sidebar for a while, what happened to that? Seems like a reasonable revenue stream that is also useful to users.

> In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions.

I think the deeper question is how SO would get paid for that.

Historically, SO has been funded by advertising. Users would google their question, land on SO, get an answer, and SO would get paid by advertisers. (The job portal was a variation on the advertising product.)

Even in your ideal world, newbies and experts would first ask their questions to an LLM. The LLM might search SO and find the answer there, but the user would get the answer without viewing an ad, so SO wouldn't get paid for that.

The same issue is facing Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't funded by commercial advertisers, but they are funded by donations, which are driven by ads. If LLMs just answer the questions based on Wikipedia data, the user won't see the Wikipedia ad asking them to donate; they may not even know that Wikipedia was the source of the information, so they may not even develop a fondness for Wikipedia that's necessary to get users excited to donate.

This is why you see people shouting about how LLMs are "killing the web." I think it's more correct to say that LLMs are killing free web resources. Without advertising, not even donation-funded resources can remain available for free.

Oh, I was thinking more of user enters question into SO -> LLM answer on SO -> user evaluates whether LLM answer was sufficient (or system itself judges whether answer is also interesting to other users?) -> question + answer combo made public, judged by other users.

There are of course several huge issues with this, but thats why I prefaced it with ideal world hahaha

the biggest of which is why most users would want their questios publicized if the ChatGPT answer not on the stackoverflow platform will be enough or even better

Or how existing users and question-answering volunteers feel about just being cleanup and training data after LLMs

Allow AI to ask questions. Since the point of the site is to build a knowledge base you don't really need humans to be that involved. Humans running into problems and then asking question was just one way to do this in the pre AI era. Now with AI we can reevaluate if we really need humans as much as we did.

Be chatbot first ig. I had envisioned a portal where you land on the front page and drop your question in the box. It would do some rag thing over the SO question database then try to answer your question. You could chat back and forth with it. If you figured out your problem then you would have the option to turn it into a question answer pair with help from the ai. If you didn't figure out your problem, then it would turn it into just a question, which would then show up for the experts of SO to answer. Something like that.

I’m not aware of SO’s plans to remain profitable and relevant, but I do know they have an enterprise offering. I’ve seen ads on LinkedIn recently for MCP functionality tied to the enterprise SO offering that lets you use it as a knowledge base. I could see that potentially being a path to stay relevant.

The place I work at tried using an SO enterprise instance and it was quite ineffective. We didn't have the toxicity of the public instance, but generally having a Q&A forum double as a knowledge base is an oddball format that doesn't work out. Adding AI integration is not likely to compensate for that.

They should focus on high-quality expert answers.

Now that we have LLMs I don't need basic questions answered. I do still need hard questions answered by experts and AI has normalized paying money for QA.

I would definitely pay for a "human ChatGPT" service where the answers are written by experts who get paid per answer, e.g. grad students. Then they can resell this data to AI companies. Or maybe the economics are such that they can take enough money from AI companies to pay the experts and I don't need to pay anything at all.

This won't bring in as much money as advertising used to, but that business model is dead anyway. There's no future for a QA site at the low end.

ideally, slowly grinding down duplicates into canonicals, keeping the ones whose answers are subject to change (with developments in languages and tools) up-to-date, removing cruft and making it more like a library (à la Rosetta Code) that's easy to find things in

and a change of form from (questions being asked primarily as a means to an end for one person) to (Q&A pairs being written as reference materials)

and requests for comment on which approach would be the most idiomatic or whether one has fallen into an XY trap or other things that rely on human 'taste' rather than LLMs' blithe march of obedience

> How could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta?

As a data source for LLMs, and by becoming the place someone goes where ChatGPT can't produce a sufficient answer.

Depends what you mean by "succeed". Commercial viability for anything remotely approaching the design intent of SO is probably impossible. But anyone can just start building a useful Q&A database and hope others stumble on it. The point is that experts, who have been through many years of trying to help beginners in the pre-LLM era, also know what questions to ask, and how to phrase them, and how to disentangle the concerns that beginners have.

Or at least they should. I think too many people get into a routine of letting themselves get angry about the repetitiveness of the questions they're answering, and then somehow getting addicted to that.

The Beta Site is at https://beta.stackoverflow.com

To me, it looks like more like Digg from the old days.

It looks like a clone of present-day Reddit to me.

I wasn’t aware there was a beta. For those familiar, what were its issues?

My problem with it was that it looked truly disgusting and I don’t say that lightly. They had essentially cloned the Reddit “new” theme that has the all too common obnoxious overuse of white space over content.

That's the very first thing which came to my mind too. I thought "wow, they really did copy Reddit design which I hate".

I don't care about the visuals of Reddit, but copying the design of "this is a site for commenting, answers are just top-level comments with no distinction" seemed like they did not see the difference between Stack Overflow and a subreddit.

The beta site was a horrible redesign. It hid information that was previously visible, the layout was confusing, comments were harder to read, and it just made no sense.

Lol, what a massive trainwreck.

There's a big chance SO is used more by AIs than real humans, nowadays.

Out with the old, in with the new.

The site is populated exclusively with die-hard fanatics with no real-world third space using that community to fulfill their personal social needs. They'll do that all the way to its complete and utter death due to uselessness. Change would be anathema to them so there is no path for the site but death.

There is no utility it fulfills except as a watering hole for those unfortunate souls who built their village there.

every *Overflow site other than the main one for asking coding questions has been very good to me. StackOverflow was a terrible experience. What LLMs got right was when asking seemingly stupid questions, or simple questions, or RTFM-answerable questions didn't get responses of "RTFM", or "Duplicate", or the like.

If for want of the Astronomy overflow and math overflow and others to remain I will not wish that StackOverflow go the route of Ask Jeeves (and wither away into irrelevance) but I'm hoping they take a look inside and see why they failed.

They destroyed this experience years ago because they couldn't monetize or own 3rd party networks, and when they shut them down and stole those with any traction, people who cared stopped participating, and the community left or more commonly just evaporated. The parenting one is a good example.

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