There was already tension in, like, 2011 or 2012. If you check the meta site there's a huge volume of posts from 2014, including probably the majority of the "classics" that experienced curators trot out to try and explain policy to people. A lot of the time I think about how something has been a problem for years, and I search on the meta site for previous discussion, and find someone from 2014 saying that it had already been a problem for a while.
Speaking as someone that was a SO front-page contributor, and at one brief time the top of the pops on the C++ tag, I didn't think it was so bad. And you got a free t-shirt!
What you have to understand is the avalanche of low-quality questions that came in, pushed by "academics" who should have known better, telling students things like "just ask on SO - they will write it for you", which is bad on so many levels.
But when it got really bad was when the new owners, after Jeff & co sold out, took over. Woke nonsense sprouted everywhere, people with no technical knowledge did moderation. And, whoa, if you criticised this, you were banned. That's when I gave up.
Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today. In 10 years what will the LLMs train on?
So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young people feel disillusioned and are increasingly focused on gambling and "investing" in meme stocks.
> "Recently, a graph of the total number of Stack Overflow questions over time started making rounds on the internet"
Isn't that a graph of questions per timeframe, not total questions? If it was total questions, that would imply a massive cull of existing questions, not a decline in usage
That graph is number of questions asked being posted: very often the question already exists (although obviously with technology and frameworks changing over time, things aren't constant, and answers can be out of date at some point), so you don't need to post the question.
Also: Would LLMs be as good for answers if they hadn't been trained on scraping StackOverflow in the first place?
StackOverflow has been in a clear, strong decline for quite a while. LLMs just hammered in the final nail. It's very clear that they caused a substantial drop, but not as impactful as the years of stagnation and rise of competition.
The whole premise of this is kinda wrong. Google killed SO more than anything else. Much like how they’re killing the rest of the web today. AI certainly didn’t help, but it is/was not the root cause, nor was the ‘toxic’ environment
There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime
There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.
StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM
The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. That's why so many people have bad stories about times they went to ask questions on StackOverflow: it was supposed to be very high-friction and there was supposed to be a high standard for the questions asked there.
Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds. They don't need to use Google to find a high-quality StackOverflow question/answer AND they can ask any question even if it's been asked 1,000 times before or is low-quality or would lead to discussion rather than a singular answer.
I was a user of StackOverflow for quite a while. I appreciated the friction. It taught me how to ask better questions to the point where I'd be doing all the research needed to ask a good question and just solve it myself along the way. It's a skill that has made a world of difference in my career relative to my peers. Makes me want to reply to my coworkers simply with "Closed as Duplicate" or "Closed - Needs details or clarity".
I can only speak for myself, but I very much resonate with this.
I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself.
For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that around the edges, but the policy ended up being enforced so strictly that many interesting topics their audience would have found valuable were declared out-of-bounds. Questions I wanted answers to - and that were getting good answers! - would get closed, and so would interesting questions that I wanted to try to answer.
I tried a couple times to push back gently, and got piled on each time.
It stopped being fun, so I stopped going there. Shrug.
I feel this topic is approaching circlejerk status. Basically any mention of StackOverflow on HN/Reddit is just teeing up everyone to go on about how the SO moderators are the worst people ever.
> "Because I can get an answer from an LLM (which does need to be verified) in less than a minute versus the hours or days I would have to wait to get a toxic and potentially useless reply on stackoverflow. They should really downsize or just kill the company it’s a relic of the past and most developers won’t miss it."
To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered. Sure, new questions might be falling off and it might be decreasing in relevance, but that in no way means that a massively resource-intensive LLM regurgitating paragraphs of semi-duplicated text is better enough to justify canning it. (There's also the matter of all the other StackExchange sites, I have no idea what the state of the world is on those but I imagine they also have value in themselves.)
To this day, I find almost all of my low-level questions are still readily answered by StackOverflow, and it holds lots of discussion on higher-level questions that I find useful.
Does StackOverflow have an attitude problem? Absolutely. It is fair to say that most developers won't miss it? No.
I think StackOverflow could have been saved from turning into a toxic hellhole if they'd had AI and LLMs in the mid 2010s. No seriously, hear me out.
SO is infamous for overzealous mods closing questions left and right, calling you an idiot, and being generally unhelpful.
I think these mods were/are burned out by dealing with mostly idiotic questions all day. They default to suspicion and hostility.
If they'd had AI weeding out low quality questions before they ever got to a human (and not the rudimentary text classifiers that were the state of the art at the time) I think the mods would be a more helpful bunch.
I get the point of moderating things, try to reduce duplication, low-effort, etc... but it is funny the gut reaction I feel (angry) when my post is auto-deleted (Reddit for example). For SO I remember having questions get blocked and accounts being blocked from downvoted questions. But I understand too, I could have researched more, it's one of those "I want the immediate reward/answer" vs. searching the old questions.
This actually could be a good argument for LLMs, you won't get told your question is dumb.
> This actually could be a good argument for LLMs, you won't get told your question is dumb.
It is.
The consensus in the meta community is basically: we don't want AI on the site (although clearly the owners do); people who would benefit from generative AI can get basically all its benefit by using it off-site, as it's heavily trained on Stack Overflow (and agents can presumably search it) anyway. It's fine if people use that off-site; it keeps out unsuitable questions and is basically filling the role that conventional search used to before Google got so enshittified.
This may be a controversial take based on the last few years of SO discourse, but the strictness in SO was part of what made it a good resource.
For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise.
For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits.
I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits. People also ask questions unrelated to the sub at all. I've seen so many times people asking questions about some Android specific problem unrelated to the issue. While ideally I'd like to help these people, it pollutes real questions, discussion, and most valuably to future users, the ability to properly search for previous discourse.
SO best acts as library of information. I will say, people on there could benefit from removing the rude tone (this is a trait I see in software engineers frequently, unfortunately). But closing activity when it's inappropriate or duplicate (which despite many testimonials, I have seen is more common than not) is a good habit IMO.
> For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise.
There were tons and tons of them anyway. If only we had the Staging Ground in 2012.
> I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits.
My favorite is when searching for something I land on a thread where the only reply is "just search for the answer!"
The gamification was in large part misaligned with the site's objectives. It's a shame Atwood and Spolsky didn't realize the problems and didn't explicitly solicit and incorporate feedback about it basically ever. (Not that random user proposals were ever especially good, but.)
At Codidact we're trying to build systems that hand out privileges based on actions taken that are relevant to the privilege. There's still a reputation system but the per-user numbers are relatively de-emphasized. And posts are by default sorted by Wilson score, with separate up/down counts visible to everyone by default, so that downvotes on an upvoted post (and vice-versa) have meaningful effect and "bad" voting can be more easily corrected. There's also a system of "reactions" for posts so that people willing to put their username behind it can explicitly mark an answer as outdated or dangerous.
I've had countless questions closed and received even more patronizing comments from mods. I wonder who these people were and why were they empowered in such a way by StackOverflow the company.
I must be incredibly fortunate, I got a lot of good value from SO and have not experienced any of the toxicity that the author mentions here. I have written questions, comments, and answers.
This was my experience using StackOverflow. I've commented, asked questions, and received answers. Aside from a few questionable downvotes I received occasionally, I never felt like the community was toxic.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadWhat you have to understand is the avalanche of low-quality questions that came in, pushed by "academics" who should have known better, telling students things like "just ask on SO - they will write it for you", which is bad on so many levels.
But when it got really bad was when the new owners, after Jeff & co sold out, took over. Woke nonsense sprouted everywhere, people with no technical knowledge did moderation. And, whoa, if you criticised this, you were banned. That's when I gave up.
But I'm sure the website still receives a lot of views, as it still is highly ranked in Google.
So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young people feel disillusioned and are increasingly focused on gambling and "investing" in meme stocks.
Isn't that a graph of questions per timeframe, not total questions? If it was total questions, that would imply a massive cull of existing questions, not a decline in usage
Also, this is a new set of "rounds" it's making. Graphs like this have been getting shopped around off and on for a few years now.
Previous rounds of discussion famously include https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433864 . The decline was even noted before ChatGPT, e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/413657.
That graph is number of questions asked being posted: very often the question already exists (although obviously with technology and frameworks changing over time, things aren't constant, and answers can be out of date at some point), so you don't need to post the question.
Also: Would LLMs be as good for answers if they hadn't been trained on scraping StackOverflow in the first place?
StackOverflow has been in a clear, strong decline for quite a while. LLMs just hammered in the final nail. It's very clear that they caused a substantial drop, but not as impactful as the years of stagnation and rise of competition.
There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.
Shirky's "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" is highly relevant here.
The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. That's why so many people have bad stories about times they went to ask questions on StackOverflow: it was supposed to be very high-friction and there was supposed to be a high standard for the questions asked there.
Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds. They don't need to use Google to find a high-quality StackOverflow question/answer AND they can ask any question even if it's been asked 1,000 times before or is low-quality or would lead to discussion rather than a singular answer.
That's a psychopathic take on the matter, I'm sorry.
Nothing or no one forced anyone to be harsh to other human beings. That was a deliberate choice by a bunch of sociopaths
You either found your answer coming in from a search engine, or you pretend the site does not even exist.
I don't think it was supposed to be sustainable, but oh well.
But I'm not sure that Atwood and Spolsky (especially Atwood) realized that nature.
I struggle not to see the people describing it as full of exclusionary rants as telling on themselves.
I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself.
For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that around the edges, but the policy ended up being enforced so strictly that many interesting topics their audience would have found valuable were declared out-of-bounds. Questions I wanted answers to - and that were getting good answers! - would get closed, and so would interesting questions that I wanted to try to answer.
I tried a couple times to push back gently, and got piled on each time.
It stopped being fun, so I stopped going there. Shrug.
> "Because I can get an answer from an LLM (which does need to be verified) in less than a minute versus the hours or days I would have to wait to get a toxic and potentially useless reply on stackoverflow. They should really downsize or just kill the company it’s a relic of the past and most developers won’t miss it."
To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered. Sure, new questions might be falling off and it might be decreasing in relevance, but that in no way means that a massively resource-intensive LLM regurgitating paragraphs of semi-duplicated text is better enough to justify canning it. (There's also the matter of all the other StackExchange sites, I have no idea what the state of the world is on those but I imagine they also have value in themselves.)
To this day, I find almost all of my low-level questions are still readily answered by StackOverflow, and it holds lots of discussion on higher-level questions that I find useful.
Does StackOverflow have an attitude problem? Absolutely. It is fair to say that most developers won't miss it? No.
SO is infamous for overzealous mods closing questions left and right, calling you an idiot, and being generally unhelpful.
I think these mods were/are burned out by dealing with mostly idiotic questions all day. They default to suspicion and hostility.
If they'd had AI weeding out low quality questions before they ever got to a human (and not the rudimentary text classifiers that were the state of the art at the time) I think the mods would be a more helpful bunch.
This actually could be a good argument for LLMs, you won't get told your question is dumb.
It is.
The consensus in the meta community is basically: we don't want AI on the site (although clearly the owners do); people who would benefit from generative AI can get basically all its benefit by using it off-site, as it's heavily trained on Stack Overflow (and agents can presumably search it) anyway. It's fine if people use that off-site; it keeps out unsuitable questions and is basically filling the role that conventional search used to before Google got so enshittified.
For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise.
For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits.
I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits. People also ask questions unrelated to the sub at all. I've seen so many times people asking questions about some Android specific problem unrelated to the issue. While ideally I'd like to help these people, it pollutes real questions, discussion, and most valuably to future users, the ability to properly search for previous discourse.
SO best acts as library of information. I will say, people on there could benefit from removing the rude tone (this is a trait I see in software engineers frequently, unfortunately). But closing activity when it's inappropriate or duplicate (which despite many testimonials, I have seen is more common than not) is a good habit IMO.
There were tons and tons of them anyway. If only we had the Staging Ground in 2012.
My favorite is when searching for something I land on a thread where the only reply is "just search for the answer!"
At Codidact we're trying to build systems that hand out privileges based on actions taken that are relevant to the privilege. There's still a reputation system but the per-user numbers are relatively de-emphasized. And posts are by default sorted by Wilson score, with separate up/down counts visible to everyone by default, so that downvotes on an upvoted post (and vice-versa) have meaningful effect and "bad" voting can be more easily corrected. There's also a system of "reactions" for posts so that people willing to put their username behind it can explicitly mark an answer as outdated or dangerous.