Good riddance!
I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.
Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.
Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!
Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011
The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.
"This is an excellent question, and shows a real attention to detail! Let me walk you through it in detail, with a particular focus on Django version and the evolution of the semantics there.
[...]
Bottom line: it's exactly the same as in Django 1.3 back in August 2011. But by anchoring to a specific version, you make the question unambiguous and much more insightful.m"
Poetic how they were so ridiculous about meticulously curating a database of answers where the ultimate consumer would be LLMs that really don’t care about duplicates.
Stack Overflow had two main value propositions for me. Either questions about standard way/community agreed way to accomplish something which has multiple aproaches, like "what is the most common way to take out the first element or null from a list".
I suspect moderators was very careful of allowing such questions to multiply on the site.
The other value I found was in fringe questions, like how do you access the model object of the value of a django form field from the template environment. If there even is an answer, the answer will hopefully point me to some non-documented way to accomplish what I want, or give hints to what kind of ugly hack I need to create. Those question don't seem to have much moderations applied to them at all.
What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity".
It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.
OMG, so much. I was quite ruthless about rolling back those vandalisms. If I’d have meant X, I’d have said X in the first place. I didn’t, so I didn’t.
While there were many zealots that gave SO this reputation, I don't know if that's the reason it died.
As someone who frequently answered questions in the 'New' queue, the sheer amount of rule breaking, low effort, and obvious duplicates was astounding.
I eventually quit answering questions because 99% of them were not worth interacting with. Just vote close and move on.
Ultimately, I think SO is dead because it got too popular and moderation became untenable.
You sound exactly like an enforcer of the cultural problem the GP was talking about. Group think is healthy in small doses, but overdo it and it kills the group.
It's simply not on a new user to understand whatever group interpretation you have made up on top of the written rules. There is no platonic ideal of a good question, the project was doomed from the start if people take that idea seriously. The UX says submit a question about coding while the unwritten rules say submit a flawless peer-reviewed abstract or we close in 3 minutes.
Ironically those 99% asking low effort questions will gain more than everybody who looks at a "high value" question put together. Truly, nobody on SO learned anything writing those questions, they were just regurgitating their phd/previous work. It was grossly performative and I'm glad it's gone.
When I say "low effort", I don't mean "not perfect". I was quite lax actually as I understood how annoying some users were when I asked my own questions.
I'm taking about entirely unreadable posts (not English, or just nonsensical) or posts that were very clearly a copy paste homework question with no code.
I helped hundreds of people of all skill levels for free, simply because I found it enjoyable. I quit when it stopped being enjoyable. It stopped being enjoyable when the quality of question declined to 99% garbage.
Can you imagine ChatGPT terminating a conversation because it thought your question was "low effort?" The behavior wouldn't be viewed as helpful or aligned, and nobody would use it.
StackOverflow was, all too often, not helpful or aligned. It died because the staff were unable to get the moderators to be helpful.
Well there are new users all the time and can’t expect them to now all of the in’s and out’s of the rules while posted there are still hidden rules. It’s become a toxic site.
The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read
> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.
> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.
Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.
I came here to say something like this (mostly about LaTeX), but you and the posters you're replying to said it better than I could have. I had too many posts treated as "not an appropriate question" or some such, and got tired of posting only to get my post rejected. To be sure, there are some poor posts (my first post was that, because I didn't include enough information), but the "vigilante" term you use was by and large all too appropriate.
I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.
I mostly frequent smaller subreddits with at most a handful of mods for niche subjects and it's great. Then when I occasionally need to ask a question in a bigger one... out come the mods who live for the rules.
Funny thing is I could actually deal with the annoying rules as well as all the rudeness and smugness. It crossed the line for me when it became clear they had degenerated to literal deletionism. As in, they don't just close your question now, they actually delete it straight up alongside any useful information it might have contained.
Tried to go back to one of my closed questions to look up a link someone had dropped in the comments, only to find out some moderator had fucking deleted the question for literally no reason, despite the fact there was actual fucking content in there. It actually drove me over the edge and made me go all in on my own domain and my own website. If I ever post anything there again, it will always be framed as links to my own site where their deletionism will never reach. I simply refuse to be erased.
Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming.
But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time:
If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer).
At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems.
(Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).
Early years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.
They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming.
From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.
Eternal September was never a problem for SO, it was an asset. Duplicate questions was never a problem for those asking or answering questions (I did both), only for a relatively small group of loudmouthed moderators. Now they hardly have any dupes to worry about but they also have no content to moderate!
The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user.
So why does that mean that duplicates are dangerous? Because of updates. When someone answered a question about how to do something in Python (but it was 2008 so it was written in Python2) SO had ways to get a more correct, up-to-date answer to that question written in 2015 (and then again in 2019) and get that upvoted, and moderators could reward that new answer by editing the original etc.
That is why duplicates were a major threat: if the same question is asked and answered thousands of times, no one is going to go do the work to update all of those answers all across the site. Those lurkers are now dependent on the whims of Google as to which of the many answers you get taken to, and whether it has the latest answer or some answer that stopped working years ago.
And that is why they were so hostile to duplicate questions.
To extend this, the eventual problem is that you eventually lose all of your new users, which means you lose the extremely valuable intermediate users (ones that know enough to ask complex questions, but not so much that they can figure out the answer).
But in trying to solve that problem, they threw the baby out with the bathwater!
They were so fixated on solving that that they failed to realize: training all their power users to grief anyone who didn't behave like a power user off the site was detrimental (to having a site with non-power users). Everyone came for a question and answer site, but when it transformed it into a "question and get downvoted and modded into oblivion" site, everyone left.
AI put the final nail in the coffin, but SO was dead before AI arrived ... from this self-inflicted wound.
It doesn't matter because the duplicate is linked to the original, so most visitors coming from Google would still view the actual answer. It works like a soft HTTP 302 response.
Glad to hear about the book. I'll check it out. It would be interesting to read the author's opinions.
Otherwise I don't understand (yet) what point you're making. Who claimed that S.O. "merely got worse?" I see a discussion with many more specifics than that. One commenter in this thread mentioned griefing users. That's a familiar artifact of enshittification. (The white boxes covering up Google Maps, for example. Or the way Quora destroyed its own site in a quest to "improve questions".)
StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.
Ime, math.SE had a much friendlier vibe than most other SE sites. Primarily because you could ask about a problem you were struggling with and get help. No moderator would instantly show up and close the question as a dupe of a ten-year-old question about double integration techniques or some such.
People asking questions mostly wanted help, but most moderators thought they were curating some kind of question-answer form encyclopaedia. Very different perspectives.
I think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.
Agreed for the math one. I went there when I was dealing with game engines and needed something geometry related or the like rather than to stackoverflow and they were far nicer.
Even inside SO each language and topic would have different standards. A C question would not be answered in the same way one about a JS framework would.
I'm curious about the other Stack Exchange sites. Have they seen the same decline as Stack Overflow?
Stack Overflow was the "flagship" product of the Stack Exchange company, and if the company pivots to AI, I wonder what the future holds for the other Q&A sites on the SE network.
All the sites are seeing huge drops in activity. Today only five or six sites get 10 questions per day or more, which was SO Inc's minimum activity level for a beta site before they would "graduate" it. Now most of the network fails that test. (You can see stats for all SE sites at https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday.)
The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.
That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.
It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years”
It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.
Businesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.
I'd disagree that the site wasn't changing. I think they were already trying to sideline job portal possibilities because it wasn't making a high enough worth calculation compared to entirely unrealized estimates. However my reaction to changes was forgiving for the old firm while feeling transactional was basically doom to my using the site as I didn't really need anything from interactions.
It had the possibility of surfacing employers or coworkers with a little more comfort about their ~support competence. The enterprise stuff seems more like the stealing an OSS contributor who can't deny competence to work on internal Jira from now on..
Stack Overflow with all of its shortcomings was a marvel of the internet at it's peak. People especially in early were chasing karma and anything you asked, you were sure to get some answer. Not always right but some answer. While for sure LLMs will give much better answers on average. I feel that it's a piece of humanity we've lost there that should be adequately remembered and the memory cherished.
...or I asked the question (and got an answer) years ago, but forgot because I hadn't worked in that programming language in the interim. (That's my excuse, anyway.)
Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?
LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
Unfortunately the LLMs are concentrated into few providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) so there's a chance they each end up doing their own private (and closed) StackOverflows.
By leveraging their private StackOverflows, their LLMs will be able to short-circuit complex reasoning, saving tokens, time, and money.
> LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged? If by other LLMs, then we run into a problem of infinite descent. If by humans, then you'd need some way to motivate expert or semi-expert humans (so that their ratings are themselves correct) to participate in a massive project of evaluating the correctness of a constant stream of content from content-generators that never sleep.
> How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged?
By LLMs. I think it's possible for agents to infer whether the user was satisfied or not, at least with my usage pattern.
For example if I end the discussion it's a good sign. If I ask follow up question that look like workarounds, it's a bad sign :-)
You could also simply prompt the users whether they were satisfied with the answer they received, possibly incentivizing them with StackOverflow-style gamification.
This and the the other thread that talks about RL and synthetic data seem to suggest that AI can figure out all the technical issues without humans looking into them. I'm not sure if that's true at all.
That assumes there is documentation or examples. A big reason Stack Overflow took off was people struggling with things like the Android API documentation.
Some of those discussions made people go figure out how to do it, and then post it as an answer. The knowledge didn't exist anywhere until they did.
It might make sense for AI companies to throw agents at new technologies to trial-and-error their way to internal documentation which they then provide to their models. On the other hand, the people making tomorrow's APIs have LLMs too and that makes documentation ~free. Hallucinations could still bring you back to the first hand, though.
Sounds nothing like the world we live in. When has there ever been a time where there were an abundance of software documentation? How can plenty of documentation or code be made if AI scraper bots hammer servers that host them, steal content and drive people away from the actual authors?
Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about too. LLMs have basically profited from "stealing" (arguably) user-generated content from a time when there were no LLMs. In the LLM era there won't be a new Stack Overflow to train LLMs on going forward.
We're getting closer to Dead Internet Theory too where a lot of accounts, particularly on Twitter, are just LLMs. I imagine it's a huge problem on Reddit too. Just people farming karma or otherwise involved in influence campaigns or simply grifting to ad revenue.
So we're going to get to a point where the corpus we train LLMs on will itself just be filled with LLM slops. Self-reinforcing slop. Is that the future?
People still like to talk about the interesting problems they solved and how. Issue isn't SO having choked itself out, issue is that even the major search engines are pivoting towards AI answers instead of surfacing small blogs.
I wrote multiple answers to questions that weren't just "point to docs". And even when it is pointing to docs you are providing the reasoning as to why it works one way or another.
Ever since the AI stuff started rolling around on coding i've seen MORE documentation, theres a big incentive to properly document your API endpoints so LLMs can figure it out from specs, and even when not documented the llms can also just read the code and figure it out directly (for libraries and similar). And at least in my experience they tend to document or write it down for future sessions too!
Yeah, sorry, I guess I should be clearer that I'm rather sarcastic. My sad experience unfortunately shows that people less docs (or the docs are now hallucinated AI slop) instead of writing more of them.
on the contrary, theres more of an incentive for apis to have docs for agent discovery. the docs / interfaces themselves can be auto-gened (stainless / mintlify)
How do you convince people to not want an instant answer? Even if SO didn’t result in so many “What have you tried?” responses and immediate closures, most people would still prefer instant feedback.
For me, the strict requirements for posting questions help me to define the problem well, and after writing the question properly, I'd have the solution.
Early Stack Overflow as an amazing "rubber duck" (see "rubber duck debugging").
Unfortunately in recent years it became such a traumatizing experience to post a question there (even if you made a perfectly legit question you'd likely get downvoted and closed ... and god help you if you posted a question with an issue).
It completely changed from "I posted a question I can answer myself, and someone said so in the comments" to "I posted ANY question and everyone on the site teamed up to get rid of that question".
Same here. LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one. The "long tail" of solutions is usually lost due to how tokens are sampled from the LLM's probability distribution.
What I found to help a lot is to ask for e.g. 10 different solutions to a problem and then choosing one of them. Sometimes, this even leads to borderline creative solutions if there aren't 10 different ones.
In theory reasoning tokens should do the equivalent of this - explicitly create options outside of the quick-response probability space, so those can guide future generation.
In practice, models that do this won't be prioritized as much, because the economics of thinking tokens that stop by default at, say, one option plus a bit more planning (short of full alternatives) would be superior as long as billing is per-user instead of per-token. So we'll still need to play games with prompting!
> LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one.
I remember how Stack Overflow would close questions as duplicates just because somebody suggested the wrong answer that is also the right answer to the existing question. The best way to get a correct answer on Stack Overflow (and forums before that) was to post the wrong answer as part of your question.
One thing that SO had was you could see multiple solutions and implementations for something. Sometimes the "best" solution isn't very readable code, sometimes you are able to understand the problem better when you see a bunch of people solving it in different ways and arguing about it like angry monkeys.
SO has always had a pretty strong stance against opinion-based questions, but this is maybe the niche they should be exploring now. Humans still have a lot to say about the "best" solution to a given problem. The whole idea of an "accepted" answer could be removed, for example, since that's what AI will already generate.
I had email correspondence once with a vendor about how to talk to their i2c bus. The documentation was all asm, and I wanted to at least “uplift” to C. They didn’t have any answers, so I sent them my solution which was was the asm calls that the c stdlib decompiled into.
4 years later my company had bought a different company, who happened to be using a newer model of the same board. They asked me how we could use the 12c bus. “Well before you bought us, we emailed the vendor and sent back this C snippet”
It was my code, verbatim. I’ve always wondered how many times they passed that bit of code around.
Claude does it quite a bit when you’re triggering the search tool functions.
It’s fine, and what you would expect for certain prompts, except that the synthesized results often come back communicating more authority than they deserve.
It was funny for me, when I asked it about something specific exotic - and it gave me a confident answer. But checking the sources I discovered it was from my own inquiries on a forum thread about it from the last time I unsuccesfully tried this (before the agents came) And so I knew, that any authorative tone was undeserved.
On the other hand, Claude later nailed this project, where I as a human said before, no, too much extra work.
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
You're right but that site has been sputtering culturally for some time. I put a lot of effort into editing questions and answers on ServerFault (part of SO) but I feel that time was wasted. I think they knew for a while they just wanted to sell it and just stopped caring. A number of editors were allowed to be jerks for too long and it went to their heads. I wish I could take back all that effort.
well, SO is probably the highest quality data source for a language model and the rest of the internet is just diluting the final latent space limited by Jon Skeet.
What you are noticing in a long term is the "community" knowledge and communication which the chatGPT is now kind of destroying. In some sense, it is no different from the difference between studying along and studying with your peers at a university.
You can definitely study alone and achieve perfect grades, but studying with your peers is how you build relationships for future life and take your community forward as a whole.
needed to implement a language feature that was a bit complicated and im not familiar with it so just planned with claude to do it, and after each write/fix cycle it just wouldn't work right.... gave up, went back to SO copy pasted the (not perfect but enough to start from) answer and worked up from there...
at the same time my knowledge grew and im more confident to do this same capability myself whereas reiterating with claude it was just a slog and i didn't learn much...
i think i may be starting to sour on these "do it all for me" usage scenarios for ai... especially for unfamiliar areas...
Agreed. Which is also odd, if you think about it. Surely with the amount of compute Anthropic and others have available, they could test each of the solutions in the SO data they surely have and rank them based on efficiency/elegance/other criteria and remove poor solutions from their training data.
Definitely not better off. SO was fairly mean spirited, but nowhere else has such a vast trove of high quality answers to common software problems been collected. SO likely trained many of these models with its answers, and I don't know what software development will look like when it dies.
No where else has such a vast trove of high quality answers been hidden because the question was closed as duplicate when someone else asked that question later.
I am thinking to make canned encyclopaedia of stackoverflow answers.
Claude/Grok/Gemini/Chatgpt answers are often so… how to say it… misleading? I have to stop the conversation as it leads nowhere (and it is not a skill issue :)
https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...
I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...
Clicking through to the query for the first chart, I see the peak of ~300k in May of 2020, and it was ~3k in April of 2026 (the last complete month). I’m flabbergasted.
It makes sense to me. There's literally no use for Stack Overflow anymore. LLMs, for all their faults, are a far better way to get answers to coding problems.
It's just rare to see something accelerate to zero like that. I feel like most dying products have a fade out over time where there still remains a niche use for them, they don't nosedive to almost nothing.
Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views.
Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.
Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.
I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions.
I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.
What’s crazy is with the current gen of LLMs you could 100% rein in the abusive mods. SO could reinvent itself as a place for coding agents to get clankermotiomal support after they ‘hear’ ‘WHY THE F DID YOU DO THAT’. (Seriously a hook could draft a submission and then set up a listener for responses. Who would be answering is an interesting question tho)
Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.
That basic 90's sitcom level-1 sarcasm is not helpful in any adult discussion, it's very common on engineers and technical people, and it's probably the reason SO and similar sites were being abandoned by the regular internet users before LLMs.
Just say what you intent to communicate, dude. If funny is not your forte, don't force it.
Don't forget the other way of sidetracking what you're asking for: "Why are you doing this, do something else instead."
I think most of my questions ended up with this, when I had very good reasons for doing it the way I was doing it. I typically wasn't showing it because I had isolated the problem I was facing into the minimal amount of code to duplicate it, or I was stuck with the particular tech I was using and we had 12 years of code built on top of it and I couldn't switch.
Oh, yes, I remember these kinds of answers distinctly frustrating. But it was not singular to SO. Reddit had a similar vibe at times. I remember I was studying some C things back when and asked about speed and what was essentially loop unrolling. Tip answer was why do you care about speed. Bruh, I am trying to get a mental model of how this thing works.
They also neglected to solve the problem of differentiating answers to previous generations of software. How many python2 answers does one have to sift through to get a python3 answer - maybe the weight of answers finally tilted over the probabilities. Even just adding the right tags would have made it easier, but it wasn't ever solved in any way as far as I could tell. And the old answers are there like potholes to fall into.
Is it possible this is survivorship bias? Maybe other forums with much less strict moderation simply wouldn’t have survived long enough to complain about.
Ironically i'm probably a better dev purely because after a few experiences on SO, I would rather waste days/weeks banging my head against problems and learning from them than to actually post on SO. It was a miserable experience generally. For context this was probably ~15 years ago now.
This isn't necessarily to say that SO made me a better developer. Rather i'm just saying that i value (correctly or not) those extremely hard fought lessons. Those lessons where it was considerable pain, effort, time, misery, etc. Are they efficient ways to learn? I doubt it. But in my many trips down that road i developed intuition that i'd probably not have otherwise.
So ironically i guess SO made me a better developer by avoiding using SO at all cost. Conversely, i imagine i'd lack this value that i speak of entirely if i was 20 years younger and starting fresh today. Not sure i'd be better off though.
edit: By "using SO" i should be saying posting on SO. I of course searched and used data found on SO as often as i could. So to that end i am grateful for SO existing.
Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
> Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
Fourteenth clear as imagined in their head XY problem of the day.
By far most of the "XY problems" I saw, on SO or elsewhere, were actually "XY problem problems" - i.e. a responder having so limited imagination and character (or, to be charitable, just running very low on energy and focus), that upon coming across a question they couldn't comprehend, they would assume the person asking the question must be confused instead.
If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.
I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.
Again: the "less abrasive alternative" is built off the labor and knowledge of those abrasive folks. They're a large part of the reason it knows what to less-abrasively suggest.
Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters.
This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison.
For better or for worse, people are cursed with ego, and we need to account for that when communicating with others. It is a failing of the platform (and a tragedy, because it is healthier to learn from a human) that it was unable to foster a positive environment.
> This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison.
People flock to heroin, too.
> Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters.
This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week.
Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...
Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems.
There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect.
The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.
X in an XY problem is almost always possible, like "how do we make ship canals and harbors with nukes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) or "I'd like to amputate my hand to fix a hangnail".
I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.
But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens.
There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.
The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.
It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.
It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job.
if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise).
I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
I found this often for C# (and sometimes Typescript) related stuff... redirected to a question with a wrong/useless answer.
For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.
I'm all for a heavily moderated forum (that's why I like HN) but SO was clearly on the decline (from the graphs in this post) before LLMs came onto the scene. It peaked around 2017 (not counting COVID numbers) and was in a steady decline. ChatGPT just pushed it off the cliff (figuratively and literally).
Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency.
Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves.
It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.
Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so.
It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
Yeah, as I understand it, they wanted to optimize for Google search. This meant having "canonical" answers. This killed the site in the long term. In the short term, it worked wonderfully, and the founders made a (well deserved) killing.
Agree. But I asked a couple questions about a year ago and got zero response. It's not just people asking questions who deserted SO, it is also people answering them (probably a chicken and egg problem - reversal of network effects).
I had a work SO account with many questions/answers - everything fine. Later I created a SO account for use with my private projects and happened to have answered a couple questions without getting upvotes. The algorithm banned me from answering questions with the remark that I should improve the quality of my answers. You can bet that I never answered a question again on SO with any account.
if the mismoderation did not kill stackoverflow, it at the least made people who might otherwise have supported the site feel like nothing of value was lost.
LLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway).
Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc.
But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment.
Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.
There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"
And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.
Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.
There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.
When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.
I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.
I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
It could be there's a fork in the road for reddit.
Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.
While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.
Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.
Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.
Reddit in a way is about finding an echo chamber with people who share your beliefs, not necessarily finding facts. Great for spreading misinformation and smelling your own farts.
Just look at the graph, Covid peak aside its previous peak was in 2016 and it was in continuous decline since then. All LLMS this was increase the slope.
The current owners have sure been trying to turn it into one with half-assed "features" like open ended questions and the thankfully killed off (for now) beta redesign.
A forum records free-form conversations between specific people, where every post can be edited at most by its original author (if even that). SE sites are libraries of questions that may be generalized beyond the original author's circumstances, and if someone's post does not fit the rigid Q&A form, it may be moderated away.
> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertize.
This is just dead man kicking. This will be less and less valuable thing as all sort of info go out of date.
But if it this, and IT WILL go out of date, what will be new learning data for all of those models?
Previously with SO people just enjoyed helping other people. But if they will be helping primarily multibillion dollar "AI" companies, then why would they? If nobody will be doing that then how this knowledge will be shared? There is open source projects and docs but they are blocking stuff more and more and some point I wont be surprised if you will have to log in into Debian or Arch Linux system to be able to read those docs.
But then if those companies and OSS will be not adding to training data what will? Will it be that programmers will be just writing new code for llms, for the money till they will make themselves obsolete?
Or at some point those "AI" companies will use anything they can to get ahead of the competition, even if this is against contracts or the law?
The longer I think about the future the more grim it looks.
I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero.
You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.
So the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?"
For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property does.
For others -- which I think HN falls into -- it's just word of mouth about a cool place to hang out, so it will die when there's a cooler place to hang out.
Not sure about SaaS, For nearly all our SaaS AI's just made it easier to work with, we haven't got rid of a single SaaS product, but via APIs, we've integrated and automated a LOT more of our existing SaaS products.
Stack Overflow had been a zombie even before they sold to Prosus in 2021. It became over-moderated and calcified.
Amongst even simple stuff, they refused to update basic library questions when said libraries had new releases with additional calls and performance enhancements.
Sometime in 2018 I went so far as to blacklist the domain so it wouldn't inadvertently pollute research.
Yea, I abandoned it before then too - it was clearly over-filled with old answers with no context as to if they're still valid.
Everyone has had the experience where the top response was right for 3 months, but is now impossible to fix, so you have to just somehow know that you need the 19th answer with only 6 upvotes (versus 387). That was a problem early on, and afaict has exclusively worsened over its whole lifetime. They seem to be proud of it as if it was a major feature, and have afaict never built anything at all to try to address it.
(Yes, editing answers is "a solution", but you can't do that as a newcomer who knows better. You've got to commit to the ecosystem for months... when it had just failed you. Of course most visitors don't do that!)
Where do we go now for the answers validated by the community? How do we build knowledge? The answers that Claude gives might look good, but without community edits, votes, and comments it's a lot harder to evaluate.
I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.
One thing I've been curious about is how the other sites on StackExchange have fared. A lot of those are pretty interesting. Anecdotally the few that I check occasionally also seem to have declined a lot.
I was wondering the same thing! I was pretty involved in the graphic design SE to get it out of beta, and even back then you could kind of tell that the format can start to struggle once the lower-hanging fruit has been picked.
> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models.
What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ?
Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need data from real humans figuring stuffs out.
Within a couple of years, LLMs or equivalent AI engines will have the ability to generate factual knowledge themselves using their "outdated" knowledge and their reasoning mechanisms.
For example, one of the classical requests from S.O. questions and GitHub issues is a "minimal reproducible example " of the question/problem.
So a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write that, run it, see the issue , go to the library/related-system code or documentation (for closed source) and derive a solution
There have been studies where an ai that feed on its own data become dumber and dumber. I don't think it's just going to 'generate factual knowledge' Ad vitam æternam.
Once I looked up how to add placeholder text on a textbox with Swing and someone on Stack Overflow said to add a random JAR file into my project but the DuckDuckGo AI gave me the correct answer. So good riddance I guess.
I recently had a look at my stats (last time I checked was maybe 10 years ago) and I noticed the SO and security line stagnating fir a good few years. They used to be the one raising steeply, but at some point the sites because so toxic, with unsufferable downvoters that I completely gave up.
But other sites rised steadily. There are wonderful sutes in the SE network where you get great answers from very helpful people.
SO and a few other sites are dragging the whole idea to the bottom.
If you want to see unhinged psychopaths in action have a look at SE or SO Meta. Or maybe not.
one of the interesting properties of public forums like SO is that the maintainers of software packages get visibility into the problems and frustrations that their users experience
we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models
Not really surprised tbh, the goal of stack overflow was to essentially help out in unique problems that users have, but ever since the advent of AI, I personally have had less and less need to go to stack overflow. The one advantage of stack overflow though, is that unlike AI where once you find the answer, its gone, in stack overflow, it can help the next guy along. Kinda feels like we are losing a bit more of the humanity aspect in engineering.
i haven't been on stackoverflow for maybe 6 months, haven't seen it on google search, or needed to ask much on google either. Maybe they did a web search. On the plus side, its still used by AI agents
where is all the future SO-type content for LLMs going to come from, with all the little "gotchas" that people discovered, or, more importantly, corrections of incorrect info
I never posted on SO, but I did search it a lot; great resource
I never looked at it as a "community", just a place to find info
There are a lot of reasons why that forum is dead. I loved answering questions on it in the heyday, it was fun and I learned a ton. The owners let a bunch "admins" run it into the ground first though.
Another user that "outranks" you, but knows nothing about subject matter, has changed the content of your post. The great news is, it's still attributed to you. They removed the words "please" and "thank you" and other kind words to make you seem like a dick. Or they may have changed the wording completely to match their completely arbitrary tone and style. Have a nice day and kindly piss off, there's nothing you can do about it, hah, loser.
Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.
Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.
Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!
"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"
Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011
The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.
Now:
"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"
"This is an excellent question, and shows a real attention to detail! Let me walk you through it in detail, with a particular focus on Django version and the evolution of the semantics there.
[...]
Bottom line: it's exactly the same as in Django 1.3 back in August 2011. But by anchoring to a specific version, you make the question unambiguous and much more insightful.m"
You can just... ask it not to do that
No it isn’t.
Poetic how they were so ridiculous about meticulously curating a database of answers where the ultimate consumer would be LLMs that really don’t care about duplicates.
In fact, duplicates with different approaches over time and different ways of being asked is REALLY good for LLMs
And they made it easy by linking duplicates together
Stack Overflow had two main value propositions for me. Either questions about standard way/community agreed way to accomplish something which has multiple aproaches, like "what is the most common way to take out the first element or null from a list".
I suspect moderators was very careful of allowing such questions to multiply on the site.
The other value I found was in fringe questions, like how do you access the model object of the value of a django form field from the template environment. If there even is an answer, the answer will hopefully point me to some non-documented way to accomplish what I want, or give hints to what kind of ugly hack I need to create. Those question don't seem to have much moderations applied to them at all.
What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity".
It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.
OMG, so much. I was quite ruthless about rolling back those vandalisms. If I’d have meant X, I’d have said X in the first place. I didn’t, so I didn’t.
While there were many zealots that gave SO this reputation, I don't know if that's the reason it died.
As someone who frequently answered questions in the 'New' queue, the sheer amount of rule breaking, low effort, and obvious duplicates was astounding. I eventually quit answering questions because 99% of them were not worth interacting with. Just vote close and move on.
Ultimately, I think SO is dead because it got too popular and moderation became untenable.
You sound exactly like an enforcer of the cultural problem the GP was talking about. Group think is healthy in small doses, but overdo it and it kills the group.
It's simply not on a new user to understand whatever group interpretation you have made up on top of the written rules. There is no platonic ideal of a good question, the project was doomed from the start if people take that idea seriously. The UX says submit a question about coding while the unwritten rules say submit a flawless peer-reviewed abstract or we close in 3 minutes.
Ironically those 99% asking low effort questions will gain more than everybody who looks at a "high value" question put together. Truly, nobody on SO learned anything writing those questions, they were just regurgitating their phd/previous work. It was grossly performative and I'm glad it's gone.
When I say "low effort", I don't mean "not perfect". I was quite lax actually as I understood how annoying some users were when I asked my own questions.
I'm taking about entirely unreadable posts (not English, or just nonsensical) or posts that were very clearly a copy paste homework question with no code.
I helped hundreds of people of all skill levels for free, simply because I found it enjoyable. I quit when it stopped being enjoyable. It stopped being enjoyable when the quality of question declined to 99% garbage.
It is dead because everybody is asking LLMs now.
Can you imagine ChatGPT terminating a conversation because it thought your question was "low effort?" The behavior wouldn't be viewed as helpful or aligned, and nobody would use it.
StackOverflow was, all too often, not helpful or aligned. It died because the staff were unable to get the moderators to be helpful.
Well there are new users all the time and can’t expect them to now all of the in’s and out’s of the rules while posted there are still hidden rules. It’s become a toxic site.
The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read
> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.
> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.
Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.
I came here to say something like this (mostly about LaTeX), but you and the posters you're replying to said it better than I could have. I had too many posts treated as "not an appropriate question" or some such, and got tired of posting only to get my post rejected. To be sure, there are some poor posts (my first post was that, because I didn't include enough information), but the "vigilante" term you use was by and large all too appropriate.
[flagged]
I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.
I mostly frequent smaller subreddits with at most a handful of mods for niche subjects and it's great. Then when I occasionally need to ask a question in a bigger one... out come the mods who live for the rules.
Funny thing is I could actually deal with the annoying rules as well as all the rudeness and smugness. It crossed the line for me when it became clear they had degenerated to literal deletionism. As in, they don't just close your question now, they actually delete it straight up alongside any useful information it might have contained.
Tried to go back to one of my closed questions to look up a link someone had dropped in the comments, only to find out some moderator had fucking deleted the question for literally no reason, despite the fact there was actual fucking content in there. It actually drove me over the edge and made me go all in on my own domain and my own website. If I ever post anything there again, it will always be framed as links to my own site where their deletionism will never reach. I simply refuse to be erased.
... and I wonder if this culture won't be baked into the LLMs using this dataset for training ...
... and of course, this wondering applies to other training sets, like usenet ...
Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming.
But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time:
If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer).
At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems.
(Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).
Early years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.
a.k.a enshitification
That's not what we mean when we say that phrase.
They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming.
From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.
Eternal September was never a problem for SO, it was an asset. Duplicate questions was never a problem for those asking or answering questions (I did both), only for a relatively small group of loudmouthed moderators. Now they hardly have any dupes to worry about but they also have no content to moderate!
The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user.
So why does that mean that duplicates are dangerous? Because of updates. When someone answered a question about how to do something in Python (but it was 2008 so it was written in Python2) SO had ways to get a more correct, up-to-date answer to that question written in 2015 (and then again in 2019) and get that upvoted, and moderators could reward that new answer by editing the original etc.
That is why duplicates were a major threat: if the same question is asked and answered thousands of times, no one is going to go do the work to update all of those answers all across the site. Those lurkers are now dependent on the whims of Google as to which of the many answers you get taken to, and whether it has the latest answer or some answer that stopped working years ago.
And that is why they were so hostile to duplicate questions.
Perfectly said.
To extend this, the eventual problem is that you eventually lose all of your new users, which means you lose the extremely valuable intermediate users (ones that know enough to ask complex questions, but not so much that they can figure out the answer).
But in trying to solve that problem, they threw the baby out with the bathwater!
They were so fixated on solving that that they failed to realize: training all their power users to grief anyone who didn't behave like a power user off the site was detrimental (to having a site with non-power users). Everyone came for a question and answer site, but when it transformed it into a "question and get downvoted and modded into oblivion" site, everyone left.
AI put the final nail in the coffin, but SO was dead before AI arrived ... from this self-inflicted wound.
Did they consider removing old questions?
The best was when the duplicated question was ranked higher on Google haha
It doesn't matter because the duplicate is linked to the original, so most visitors coming from Google would still view the actual answer. It works like a soft HTTP 302 response.
"We"?
Yes. There's a whole book explaining what enshittification means, and it's not merely "gets worse".
Glad to hear about the book. I'll check it out. It would be interesting to read the author's opinions.
Otherwise I don't understand (yet) what point you're making. Who claimed that S.O. "merely got worse?" I see a discussion with many more specifics than that. One commenter in this thread mentioned griefing users. That's a familiar artifact of enshittification. (The white boxes covering up Google Maps, for example. Or the way Quora destroyed its own site in a quest to "improve questions".)
enshitification is not a synonym of "went bad"
StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.
Ime, math.SE had a much friendlier vibe than most other SE sites. Primarily because you could ask about a problem you were struggling with and get help. No moderator would instantly show up and close the question as a dupe of a ten-year-old question about double integration techniques or some such.
People asking questions mostly wanted help, but most moderators thought they were curating some kind of question-answer form encyclopaedia. Very different perspectives.
I think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.
Agreed for the math one. I went there when I was dealing with game engines and needed something geometry related or the like rather than to stackoverflow and they were far nicer.
Even inside SO each language and topic would have different standards. A C question would not be answered in the same way one about a JS framework would.
I'm curious about the other Stack Exchange sites. Have they seen the same decline as Stack Overflow?
Stack Overflow was the "flagship" product of the Stack Exchange company, and if the company pivots to AI, I wonder what the future holds for the other Q&A sites on the SE network.
All the sites are seeing huge drops in activity. Today only five or six sites get 10 questions per day or more, which was SO Inc's minimum activity level for a beta site before they would "graduate" it. Now most of the network fails that test. (You can see stats for all SE sites at https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday.)
Most are reasonable and not so heavy handed.
There are a few outliers
Fair point! I suspect the toxicity/usefulness has a linear relationship with how well trod the particular community is.
Like the Internet, it got less friendly the more popular it got. And there were no measures in place to retain and reward the friendliness.
Jeff Atwood thought a lot about this when he subsequently created Discourse. Nudge people to treat their community members nice.
The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.
> Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm.,
That is great to hear. I am glad that the original creators of StackOverflow got their liquidity event and are well off financially I suspect.
That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.
Joel sold his projects to various investment firms that essentially killed them all.
Joel Spolsky sold Trello to Atlassian in 2017, so he was already rich before the Stack Exchange exit.
A firm is sold when its owners believe they will get the best price. The selling itself is more of a symptom than a cause.
It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years”
It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.
And some (Broadcom) see a product in decline, but with some amount of stickiness/lock-in. They cut R&D and extract value as it withers away.
Yes. And gut support too. The only consolation is that the software still exists.
Businesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.
Correct. I believe the desire to start a new company or to retire would be higher on the list.
What did they change?
1.8bln
I always associated SO issues with the unpaid moderators, who were not "bought" but rather inherited I suppose.
I don't think so. StackOverflow itself didn't really change for any of that period. Any changes in users must have been due to external factors.
hmm, I got rid of WhatsApp the day it was sold to Facebook and never touched it since. I don't think anything in the app changed that day.
You think a significant number of people started boycotting SO after the sale?
I'd disagree that the site wasn't changing. I think they were already trying to sideline job portal possibilities because it wasn't making a high enough worth calculation compared to entirely unrealized estimates. However my reaction to changes was forgiving for the old firm while feeling transactional was basically doom to my using the site as I didn't really need anything from interactions.
I agree that ditching the job adverts was a super weird move. But it didn't actually affect users at all.
It had the possibility of surfacing employers or coworkers with a little more comfort about their ~support competence. The enterprise stuff seems more like the stealing an OSS contributor who can't deny competence to work on internal Jira from now on..
Stack Overflow with all of its shortcomings was a marvel of the internet at it's peak. People especially in early were chasing karma and anything you asked, you were sure to get some answer. Not always right but some answer. While for sure LLMs will give much better answers on average. I feel that it's a piece of humanity we've lost there that should be adequately remembered and the memory cherished.
getting a wrong answer in a public forum can be great to motivate corrections :p
I am also going to miss searching for something, finding a stack overflow thread and noticing that I wrote that answer years ago. :)
That was always fun! And a few times, coworkers told me they asked a question there and found that I'd answered it. That was kinda nice.
That was always fun! And a few times, coworkers told me they searched a question there and found that I'd answered it. That was kinda nice.
...or I asked the question (and got an answer) years ago, but forgot because I hadn't worked in that programming language in the interim. (That's my excuse, anyway.)
I rather have the myriad of phpBB powered forums that used to exist all over the place, instead of StackOverflow.
The irony is that StackOverflow kind of killed them all, and eventually also became a victim of the next wave.
Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?
We unironically need an StackOverflow for LLMs.
LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
Unfortunately the LLMs are concentrated into few providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) so there's a chance they each end up doing their own private (and closed) StackOverflows. By leveraging their private StackOverflows, their LLMs will be able to short-circuit complex reasoning, saving tokens, time, and money.
> LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged? If by other LLMs, then we run into a problem of infinite descent. If by humans, then you'd need some way to motivate expert or semi-expert humans (so that their ratings are themselves correct) to participate in a massive project of evaluating the correctness of a constant stream of content from content-generators that never sleep.
> How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged?
By LLMs. I think it's possible for agents to infer whether the user was satisfied or not, at least with my usage pattern. For example if I end the discussion it's a good sign. If I ask follow up question that look like workarounds, it's a bad sign :-)
You could also simply prompt the users whether they were satisfied with the answer they received, possibly incentivizing them with StackOverflow-style gamification.
This actually reminds me of the MCP concept. Similar?
Plenty of documentation, and plenty of code that the AI can read itself.
E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.
This and the the other thread that talks about RL and synthetic data seem to suggest that AI can figure out all the technical issues without humans looking into them. I'm not sure if that's true at all.
That assumes there is documentation or examples. A big reason Stack Overflow took off was people struggling with things like the Android API documentation.
Some of those discussions made people go figure out how to do it, and then post it as an answer. The knowledge didn't exist anywhere until they did.
It might make sense for AI companies to throw agents at new technologies to trial-and-error their way to internal documentation which they then provide to their models. On the other hand, the people making tomorrow's APIs have LLMs too and that makes documentation ~free. Hallucinations could still bring you back to the first hand, though.
When I talk about code it can learn from, I'm talking about GitHub etc.
Even if stuff isn't in the official documentation, eventually there are projects that use it.
And if the library in question is open-source, then the LLM's can just ingest and read that directly.
Sounds nothing like the world we live in. When has there ever been a time where there were an abundance of software documentation? How can plenty of documentation or code be made if AI scraper bots hammer servers that host them, steal content and drive people away from the actual authors?
The only way I could see this being surfaced the same is if the code essentially had a SO answer written into the doc comment.
What documentation?
lots of undocumented gotchas that only surfaced because someone used it and posted about it
I don't think its much of an issue
- Rl envs + synthetic data + human annotated
- Usage data from codex/claude code/cursor
Most of the model abilities in coding come from post-training, not pretraining
A better question is what's left for those who don't have access to that. We went from publicly available to vacuumed from private users
Open source models
unfortunately all the incentives right now are for repos to be private
Open source models are for rich people: only they can afford the hardware needed to run them.
Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about too. LLMs have basically profited from "stealing" (arguably) user-generated content from a time when there were no LLMs. In the LLM era there won't be a new Stack Overflow to train LLMs on going forward.
We're getting closer to Dead Internet Theory too where a lot of accounts, particularly on Twitter, are just LLMs. I imagine it's a huge problem on Reddit too. Just people farming karma or otherwise involved in influence campaigns or simply grifting to ad revenue.
So we're going to get to a point where the corpus we train LLMs on will itself just be filled with LLM slops. Self-reinforcing slop. Is that the future?
It's happening here too, I saw dang hint that they're not even responding to a lot of questions about it anymore because of the volume of the problem.
If you browse with showdead on you'll be seeing a lot more of what look like reasonable comments greyed out.
It's been studied,LLM that feed on its own data regress and it becomes very bad after a few generations.
People still like to talk about the interesting problems they solved and how. Issue isn't SO having choked itself out, issue is that even the major search engines are pivoting towards AI answers instead of surfacing small blogs.
I'm sure the AI companies will continue to pirate textbooks and papers, like always.
Careful, you can't point out that the AI emperor has no clothes or you'll get called a Luddite.
Yes. Very.
Pointing them to docs? Which is anyway what stack overflow answers did?
I wrote multiple answers to questions that weren't just "point to docs". And even when it is pointing to docs you are providing the reasoning as to why it works one way or another.
What docs? Who writes docs now that AIs answer everything?
Ever since the AI stuff started rolling around on coding i've seen MORE documentation, theres a big incentive to properly document your API endpoints so LLMs can figure it out from specs, and even when not documented the llms can also just read the code and figure it out directly (for libraries and similar). And at least in my experience they tend to document or write it down for future sessions too!
I know you're being facetious but there may well be docs. It's just that the same AI most likely wrote _them_, too.
Did anyone (person or competing LLM) bother to verify that they're correct, though? Who knows! Let the next generation of models worry about that.
Yeah, sorry, I guess I should be clearer that I'm rather sarcastic. My sad experience unfortunately shows that people less docs (or the docs are now hallucinated AI slop) instead of writing more of them.
I've heard this is now most of some CS jobs now. Just writing documentation for AI.
on the contrary, theres more of an incentive for apis to have docs for agent discovery. the docs / interfaces themselves can be auto-gened (stainless / mintlify)
How do you convince people to not want an instant answer? Even if SO didn’t result in so many “What have you tried?” responses and immediate closures, most people would still prefer instant feedback.
For me, the strict requirements for posting questions help me to define the problem well, and after writing the question properly, I'd have the solution.
Early Stack Overflow as an amazing "rubber duck" (see "rubber duck debugging").
Unfortunately in recent years it became such a traumatizing experience to post a question there (even if you made a perfectly legit question you'd likely get downvoted and closed ... and god help you if you posted a question with an issue).
It completely changed from "I posted a question I can answer myself, and someone said so in the comments" to "I posted ANY question and everyone on the site teamed up to get rid of that question".
Call me crazy but sometimes I still find a better solution on StackOverflow than what Claude Code insists to do.
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
Same here. LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one. The "long tail" of solutions is usually lost due to how tokens are sampled from the LLM's probability distribution.
What I found to help a lot is to ask for e.g. 10 different solutions to a problem and then choosing one of them. Sometimes, this even leads to borderline creative solutions if there aren't 10 different ones.
In theory reasoning tokens should do the equivalent of this - explicitly create options outside of the quick-response probability space, so those can guide future generation.
In practice, models that do this won't be prioritized as much, because the economics of thinking tokens that stop by default at, say, one option plus a bit more planning (short of full alternatives) would be superior as long as billing is per-user instead of per-token. So we'll still need to play games with prompting!
Without continuous feedback from real world, lower-probability token (and soon high-probability ones as well) will be complete garbage.
> LLMs are great at spitting out well-known solutions to problems instead of the best one.
I remember how Stack Overflow would close questions as duplicates just because somebody suggested the wrong answer that is also the right answer to the existing question. The best way to get a correct answer on Stack Overflow (and forums before that) was to post the wrong answer as part of your question.
One thing that SO had was you could see multiple solutions and implementations for something. Sometimes the "best" solution isn't very readable code, sometimes you are able to understand the problem better when you see a bunch of people solving it in different ways and arguing about it like angry monkeys.
It really could be bad though.
The bot can do that kind of thing, too.
"Show me 6 very different solutions, and present arguments for/against each one as if a bunch of angry monkeys."
SO has always had a pretty strong stance against opinion-based questions, but this is maybe the niche they should be exploring now. Humans still have a lot to say about the "best" solution to a given problem. The whole idea of an "accepted" answer could be removed, for example, since that's what AI will already generate.
Much of what Claude insists you do probably came from SO.
Or Reddit. I don't know about Claude but Gemini has given me answers that are verbatim comments from Reddit.
I've gotten my own answers given back to me for problems I forgot I already had.
I had email correspondence once with a vendor about how to talk to their i2c bus. The documentation was all asm, and I wanted to at least “uplift” to C. They didn’t have any answers, so I sent them my solution which was was the asm calls that the c stdlib decompiled into.
4 years later my company had bought a different company, who happened to be using a newer model of the same board. They asked me how we could use the 12c bus. “Well before you bought us, we emailed the vendor and sent back this C snippet”
It was my code, verbatim. I’ve always wondered how many times they passed that bit of code around.
Somebody posted a similar comment above yours (somewhere...). I don't think your experience is unique!
Claude does it quite a bit when you’re triggering the search tool functions.
It’s fine, and what you would expect for certain prompts, except that the synthesized results often come back communicating more authority than they deserve.
It was funny for me, when I asked it about something specific exotic - and it gave me a confident answer. But checking the sources I discovered it was from my own inquiries on a forum thread about it from the last time I unsuccesfully tried this (before the agents came) And so I knew, that any authorative tone was undeserved.
On the other hand, Claude later nailed this project, where I as a human said before, no, too much extra work.
I've gotten this too a lot. If you ask AI to cite where it got info you can lose a lot of confidence in it pretty quickly.
I have seen it quote my own code back at me, including comments word for word.
Yeah, that's basically it.
In robotics there is no free lunch dataset. You'll have to gather it yourself, but if you do that, you run into an obvious problem: labeling.
With SO, you literally have the best possible scenario, because the data is clearly structured and separated into prompt and answer (aka label).
Your objective function is literally "Say what he said".
I've seen chatgpt word for word plagiarise stack overflow answers
i've seen it plagiarize personal blog posts too, almost verbatim code line by line.... kind of shocking...
Well, it's a plagiarizing machine after all and most of the time it remixes it well enough so most people can't tell.
I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
You're right but that site has been sputtering culturally for some time. I put a lot of effort into editing questions and answers on ServerFault (part of SO) but I feel that time was wasted. I think they knew for a while they just wanted to sell it and just stopped caring. A number of editors were allowed to be jerks for too long and it went to their heads. I wish I could take back all that effort.
well, SO is probably the highest quality data source for a language model and the rest of the internet is just diluting the final latent space limited by Jon Skeet.
What you are noticing in a long term is the "community" knowledge and communication which the chatGPT is now kind of destroying. In some sense, it is no different from the difference between studying along and studying with your peers at a university.
You can definitely study alone and achieve perfect grades, but studying with your peers is how you build relationships for future life and take your community forward as a whole.
was just gonna post the same thing
needed to implement a language feature that was a bit complicated and im not familiar with it so just planned with claude to do it, and after each write/fix cycle it just wouldn't work right.... gave up, went back to SO copy pasted the (not perfect but enough to start from) answer and worked up from there...
at the same time my knowledge grew and im more confident to do this same capability myself whereas reiterating with claude it was just a slog and i didn't learn much...
i think i may be starting to sour on these "do it all for me" usage scenarios for ai... especially for unfamiliar areas...
Agreed. Which is also odd, if you think about it. Surely with the amount of compute Anthropic and others have available, they could test each of the solutions in the SO data they surely have and rank them based on efficiency/elegance/other criteria and remove poor solutions from their training data.
Definitely not better off. SO was fairly mean spirited, but nowhere else has such a vast trove of high quality answers to common software problems been collected. SO likely trained many of these models with its answers, and I don't know what software development will look like when it dies.
No where else has such a vast trove of high quality answers been hidden because the question was closed as duplicate when someone else asked that question later.
I am thinking to make canned encyclopaedia of stackoverflow answers.
Claude/Grok/Gemini/Chatgpt answers are often so… how to say it… misleading? I have to stop the conversation as it leads nowhere (and it is not a skill issue :)
And, the AI trained on Stack Overflow. So if no one is posting new questions, and new answers. What will AI train on next, for the next thing.
Stack Overflow and Reddit are still getting threads. And as AI gets smarter, the questions will also expand.
your prompts, and the code you have it review.
Maybe.
I thought point was on Stack Overflow, there were community voting on 'best' answer.
If it is just me and the AI. Then the AI training data, is just whatever I approved the AI to do. Just my opinion.
We may need to create a community driven version of SO. Hard for it to be a successful business these days.
https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...
thanks, that's exactly what I was imagining.
What are you looking for and finding on stack overflow that isn't begginer to intermediate level?
agreed; sometimes the most useful info on SO wasn't in the replies, but the follow-up comments to the replies
I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...
Clicking through to the query for the first chart, I see the peak of ~300k in May of 2020, and it was ~3k in April of 2026 (the last complete month). I’m flabbergasted.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/193252...
For perspective, 300k per month is one new question every 9 seconds.
3k per month is one question every 15 minutes.
Nah.... surely not. [looking at the link] Holy shitsnacks... I gotta be reading this wrong. Is it really dying? Like seriously, wtf.
The Ghost of Expert Sexchange gets its revenge.
It makes sense to me. There's literally no use for Stack Overflow anymore. LLMs, for all their faults, are a far better way to get answers to coding problems.
It's just rare to see something accelerate to zero like that. I feel like most dying products have a fade out over time where there still remains a niche use for them, they don't nosedive to almost nothing.
Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views.
There's more than one reason that forum is dead.
Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.
Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.
I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions.
I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.
What’s crazy is with the current gen of LLMs you could 100% rein in the abusive mods. SO could reinvent itself as a place for coding agents to get clankermotiomal support after they ‘hear’ ‘WHY THE F DID YOU DO THAT’. (Seriously a hook could draft a submission and then set up a listener for responses. Who would be answering is an interesting question tho)
Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.
That basic 90's sitcom level-1 sarcasm is not helpful in any adult discussion, it's very common on engineers and technical people, and it's probably the reason SO and similar sites were being abandoned by the regular internet users before LLMs. Just say what you intent to communicate, dude. If funny is not your forte, don't force it.
This isn't an adult discussion it's an internet comment forum and cringe policing it is also childish.
Don't forget the other way of sidetracking what you're asking for: "Why are you doing this, do something else instead."
I think most of my questions ended up with this, when I had very good reasons for doing it the way I was doing it. I typically wasn't showing it because I had isolated the problem I was facing into the minimal amount of code to duplicate it, or I was stuck with the particular tech I was using and we had 12 years of code built on top of it and I couldn't switch.
Oh, yes, I remember these kinds of answers distinctly frustrating. But it was not singular to SO. Reddit had a similar vibe at times. I remember I was studying some C things back when and asked about speed and what was essentially loop unrolling. Tip answer was why do you care about speed. Bruh, I am trying to get a mental model of how this thing works.
They also neglected to solve the problem of differentiating answers to previous generations of software. How many python2 answers does one have to sift through to get a python3 answer - maybe the weight of answers finally tilted over the probabilities. Even just adding the right tags would have made it easier, but it wasn't ever solved in any way as far as I could tell. And the old answers are there like potholes to fall into.
Is it possible this is survivorship bias? Maybe other forums with much less strict moderation simply wouldn’t have survived long enough to complain about.
Exactly.
Ironically i'm probably a better dev purely because after a few experiences on SO, I would rather waste days/weeks banging my head against problems and learning from them than to actually post on SO. It was a miserable experience generally. For context this was probably ~15 years ago now.
This isn't necessarily to say that SO made me a better developer. Rather i'm just saying that i value (correctly or not) those extremely hard fought lessons. Those lessons where it was considerable pain, effort, time, misery, etc. Are they efficient ways to learn? I doubt it. But in my many trips down that road i developed intuition that i'd probably not have otherwise.
So ironically i guess SO made me a better developer by avoiding using SO at all cost. Conversely, i imagine i'd lack this value that i speak of entirely if i was 20 years younger and starting fresh today. Not sure i'd be better off though.
edit: By "using SO" i should be saying posting on SO. I of course searched and used data found on SO as often as i could. So to that end i am grateful for SO existing.
IMO it was a combination of moderators and users
Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
> against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem
Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
> Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
Fourteenth clear as imagined in their head XY problem of the day.
By far most of the "XY problems" I saw, on SO or elsewhere, were actually "XY problem problems" - i.e. a responder having so limited imagination and character (or, to be charitable, just running very low on energy and focus), that upon coming across a question they couldn't comprehend, they would assume the person asking the question must be confused instead.
That's the thing though, it was voluntary.
If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.
I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.
> If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.
That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
And also part of the decline from the asker side, once a less abrasive alternative became available
Again: the "less abrasive alternative" is built off the labor and knowledge of those abrasive folks. They're a large part of the reason it knows what to less-abrasively suggest.
Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters.
This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison.
For better or for worse, people are cursed with ego, and we need to account for that when communicating with others. It is a failing of the platform (and a tragedy, because it is healthier to learn from a human) that it was unable to foster a positive environment.
> This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison.
People flock to heroin, too.
> Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters.
This applies to asking questions, too.
This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week.
Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...
It's hard for me to imagine a user base more pedantic and judgy than reddit. It must have been really bad.
Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems.
There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect.
The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.
Could've been a good rule: Unless the XY problem is so severe that X is impossible, you can't heckle or post Y solution unless paired with X solution.
X in an XY problem is almost always possible, like "how do we make ship canals and harbors with nukes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) or "I'd like to amputate my hand to fix a hangnail".
> but it always was that way.
I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.
But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens.
There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.
The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.
It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5
It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise).
I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
I found this often for C# (and sometimes Typescript) related stuff... redirected to a question with a wrong/useless answer.
For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.
It was always strict, that was its feature. But it was dying well before ChatGPT came along, due to going from strict to unusably over-moderated.
I'm all for a heavily moderated forum (that's why I like HN) but SO was clearly on the decline (from the graphs in this post) before LLMs came onto the scene. It peaked around 2017 (not counting COVID numbers) and was in a steady decline. ChatGPT just pushed it off the cliff (figuratively and literally).
Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency.
Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves.
It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.
Why are you trying to do that? You should do this totally different thing that I do because I know how to do it.
Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so.
It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
Question askers got lazier and lazier.
yeah, everyone seems to just ellide over the ability of LLM's to scrape all of stack overflow and do the same hack and slash response.
Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.
StackOverflow's extremely strict moderation was probably the #1 reason it turned into a high quality resource rather than a dumpster fire like reddit.
Yeah, as I understand it, they wanted to optimize for Google search. This meant having "canonical" answers. This killed the site in the long term. In the short term, it worked wonderfully, and the founders made a (well deserved) killing.
Agree. But I asked a couple questions about a year ago and got zero response. It's not just people asking questions who deserted SO, it is also people answering them (probably a chicken and egg problem - reversal of network effects).
I had a work SO account with many questions/answers - everything fine. Later I created a SO account for use with my private projects and happened to have answered a couple questions without getting upvotes. The algorithm banned me from answering questions with the remark that I should improve the quality of my answers. You can bet that I never answered a question again on SO with any account.
This has been my experience. Glad they got what they finally deserved.
if the mismoderation did not kill stackoverflow, it at the least made people who might otherwise have supported the site feel like nothing of value was lost.
The SO podcast was fun when it was running
LLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway).
Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc.
But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment.
Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.
to paraphrase a bad movie: what does a qa site need with 1.8 billion dollars?
agree, best way to preserve the original goal imoThis is happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.
I feel reddit is having a near death moment.
There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"
And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.
Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.
There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.
When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.
I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.
I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
It could be there's a fork in the road for reddit.
Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.
While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.
Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.
Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.
The government shills in /r/worldnews get paid the same if their conversation partner is a bot or a human
Every other post too. At this point it is quite challenging to find a genuine human interaction on popular online sites.
Reddit in a way is about finding an echo chamber with people who share your beliefs, not necessarily finding facts. Great for spreading misinformation and smelling your own farts.
Just look at the graph, Covid peak aside its previous peak was in 2016 and it was in continuous decline since then. All LLMS this was increase the slope.
My speed was already declining on the highway after I let off the gas, all the brick stopped truck did was increase the slope.
Forum? What forum? When has Stack Overflow ever been a forum?
The current owners have sure been trying to turn it into one with half-assed "features" like open ended questions and the thankfully killed off (for now) beta redesign.
How is it not a forum? Sure, it has some search features and a "comments/answers" dichotomy, but at the root it's just phpBB with fancier formatting
A forum records free-form conversations between specific people, where every post can be edited at most by its original author (if even that). SE sites are libraries of questions that may be generalized beyond the original author's circumstances, and if someone's post does not fit the rigid Q&A form, it may be moderated away.
> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertize.
This is just dead man kicking. This will be less and less valuable thing as all sort of info go out of date.
But if it this, and IT WILL go out of date, what will be new learning data for all of those models?
Previously with SO people just enjoyed helping other people. But if they will be helping primarily multibillion dollar "AI" companies, then why would they? If nobody will be doing that then how this knowledge will be shared? There is open source projects and docs but they are blocking stuff more and more and some point I wont be surprised if you will have to log in into Debian or Arch Linux system to be able to read those docs.
But then if those companies and OSS will be not adding to training data what will? Will it be that programmers will be just writing new code for llms, for the money till they will make themselves obsolete?
Or at some point those "AI" companies will use anything they can to get ahead of the competition, even if this is against contracts or the law?
The longer I think about the future the more grim it looks.
Wow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off.
That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?
I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero.
You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.
> You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage
Slashdot is firmly in this stage of its existence, and honestly it's kinda fun
I wonder what stage of the loop HN finds itself in.
So the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?"
For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property does.
For others -- which I think HN falls into -- it's just word of mouth about a cool place to hang out, so it will die when there's a cooler place to hang out.
> What else can AI make decline all the way to zero?
Human facing web search. Most SaS.
Not sure about SaaS, For nearly all our SaaS AI's just made it easier to work with, we haven't got rid of a single SaaS product, but via APIs, we've integrated and automated a LOT more of our existing SaaS products.
Some of my favourite SO posts (not all funny):
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa...
https://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-audito...
I hope they stay with us. I don't much care for the company or what's left of the community.
Stack Overflow had been a zombie even before they sold to Prosus in 2021. It became over-moderated and calcified.
Amongst even simple stuff, they refused to update basic library questions when said libraries had new releases with additional calls and performance enhancements.
Sometime in 2018 I went so far as to blacklist the domain so it wouldn't inadvertently pollute research.
Yea, I abandoned it before then too - it was clearly over-filled with old answers with no context as to if they're still valid.
Everyone has had the experience where the top response was right for 3 months, but is now impossible to fix, so you have to just somehow know that you need the 19th answer with only 6 upvotes (versus 387). That was a problem early on, and afaict has exclusively worsened over its whole lifetime. They seem to be proud of it as if it was a major feature, and have afaict never built anything at all to try to address it.
(Yes, editing answers is "a solution", but you can't do that as a newcomer who knows better. You've got to commit to the ecosystem for months... when it had just failed you. Of course most visitors don't do that!)
Where do we go now for the answers validated by the community? How do we build knowledge? The answers that Claude gives might look good, but without community edits, votes, and comments it's a lot harder to evaluate.
I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.
Discussion when the source article is from: January.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345
One thing I've been curious about is how the other sites on StackExchange have fared. A lot of those are pretty interesting. Anecdotally the few that I check occasionally also seem to have declined a lot.
I was wondering the same thing! I was pretty involved in the graphic design SE to get it out of beta, and even back then you could kind of tell that the format can start to struggle once the lower-hanging fruit has been picked.
Does anyone even remember that foursquare was once a social media app?
People pivot and leverage what they previously were to become something new all the time.
> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models.
What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ?
Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need data from real humans figuring stuffs out.
Within a couple of years, LLMs or equivalent AI engines will have the ability to generate factual knowledge themselves using their "outdated" knowledge and their reasoning mechanisms.
For example, one of the classical requests from S.O. questions and GitHub issues is a "minimal reproducible example " of the question/problem.
So a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write that, run it, see the issue , go to the library/related-system code or documentation (for closed source) and derive a solution
There have been studies where an ai that feed on its own data become dumber and dumber. I don't think it's just going to 'generate factual knowledge' Ad vitam æternam.
Once I looked up how to add placeholder text on a textbox with Swing and someone on Stack Overflow said to add a random JAR file into my project but the DuckDuckGo AI gave me the correct answer. So good riddance I guess.
Title of this could be more informative: Working with Stack Overflow Data to Investigate its Decline
Few hundred k rep here, across Stack Exchange.
I recently had a look at my stats (last time I checked was maybe 10 years ago) and I noticed the SO and security line stagnating fir a good few years. They used to be the one raising steeply, but at some point the sites because so toxic, with unsufferable downvoters that I completely gave up.
But other sites rised steadily. There are wonderful sutes in the SE network where you get great answers from very helpful people.
SO and a few other sites are dragging the whole idea to the bottom.
If you want to see unhinged psychopaths in action have a look at SE or SO Meta. Or maybe not.
one of the interesting properties of public forums like SO is that the maintainers of software packages get visibility into the problems and frustrations that their users experience
we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models
Not really surprised tbh, the goal of stack overflow was to essentially help out in unique problems that users have, but ever since the advent of AI, I personally have had less and less need to go to stack overflow. The one advantage of stack overflow though, is that unlike AI where once you find the answer, its gone, in stack overflow, it can help the next guy along. Kinda feels like we are losing a bit more of the humanity aspect in engineering.
i haven't been on stackoverflow for maybe 6 months, haven't seen it on google search, or needed to ask much on google either. Maybe they did a web search. On the plus side, its still used by AI agents
To be honest, I stopped using SO with the advent of AI, I completely forgot about it.
I don't care about being sold, bad moderation or other aspects of its decline. AI gives me all answers I need.
> Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertise.
One has to appreciate the irony on the use of the word "trust" there ...
where is all the future SO-type content for LLMs going to come from, with all the little "gotchas" that people discovered, or, more importantly, corrections of incorrect info
I never posted on SO, but I did search it a lot; great resource
I never looked at it as a "community", just a place to find info
I'm curious if they could pivot into a site where LLMs post questions and answer problems posted by other LLMs.
There are a lot of reasons why that forum is dead. I loved answering questions on it in the heyday, it was fun and I learned a ton. The owners let a bunch "admins" run it into the ground first though.
Another user that "outranks" you, but knows nothing about subject matter, has changed the content of your post. The great news is, it's still attributed to you. They removed the words "please" and "thank you" and other kind words to make you seem like a dick. Or they may have changed the wording completely to match their completely arbitrary tone and style. Have a nice day and kindly piss off, there's nothing you can do about it, hah, loser.
They never liked my answers. Not once. So they can eat dust!
Good work everyone. We gave our labour freely and see how we all profited!
Did the founders have an exit or liquidity from Stack Overflow? I hope so.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/launching-the-rural-guaranteed...
Are all of them dead or just the programming exchange?
Wow, has it really gone all the way down to zero?
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