SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community.
I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.
In an age where we all get the same generic answer from LLMs, SO could have been the place to have meaningful conversations on tech topics. Instead they became irrelevant
The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it.
You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation.
Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022, and frankly wasn't very good originally. The SO decline started occurring almost two years ahead of that, and was already on a sharp decline before ChatGPT shipped, and certainly before ChatGPT actually became good.
This is revisionist history. People told SO that they were leaving for YEARS because of how incredibly toxic it had become. It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately.
Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended."
They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.
Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.
I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
I tried to answer an SO question exactly once, around 15 years ago. Someone asked a question which was covered perfectly by some OSS code I had already published, so I linked to that in my answer (while explaining how the linked code was relevant). My answer was promptly deleted, of course, for linking to code. After that I lost all desire to contribute.
One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed.
The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.
So it's not just me. The "duplicate" thing alone made it hard to use a lot of the time. Other stuff like people just being arrogant didn't bother me so much.
No online community can maintain quality unless there are systems in place to prevent mentally ill internet addicts from gaining power over it. This should have a name. We can can call it Eudaimoniac's Law.
Anything that gives power on a basis of seniority, activity, volunteering, is guaranteed to suck very soon. There are just way too many mentally ill authoritarians permanently online for normal people to stave them off with naive good faith.
Yeah, I think the issue with Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange is one of how too much gatekeeping and elitism tends to eventually be the death knell for a community.
True, you might want people who are more articulate or thoughtful than the majority, but if you go too hard on that, you end up putting a time limit on how long the community will probably last. People won't stick around a community that treats them like crap, and that's a problem because at least some of those amateurs/newbies will become your future experts and power users. The people scared away by bullies like the one mentioned here didn't come back to Stack Exchange once they became the type of expert the site needed. They just shared their knowledge elsewhere.
> That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
The biggest problem was highlighted from day one: StackOverflow was bound to become "DeadOverflow". It couldn't possibly work because the entire notion of having one correct answer to a question in a domain that constantly evolves was broken.
What killed the site was "Ever relevant question" showing up in a Google search (pick other search engine) and pointing to a "Correct and accepted answer" that was wrong with then another answer with more upvotes but which was... Already outdated.
That's why people coined the term "DeadOverflow": the very way the site was conceived would inevitably lead to dead answers.
And people pointed that out early on. Nobody listened, many of the OGs who created that company made a nice exit.
But SO was destined to eventually fail.
The entire karma/gamification/clique of users gate-keeping was bad but the issue of dead answers / DeadOverflow simply couldn't be solved, so it doesn't even matter.
Losing 99.41% of its activity is brutal but it's honestly surprising that a concept that couldn't possibly work even survived that long.
Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content.
They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.
> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation
Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale.
> They slowly killed the site in this manner.
It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy.
> knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question.
It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question.
> I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
I say this every time the topic of SO/AI comes up.
LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response.
There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes to close my question) before I gave up.
It seems to me that AI did SO in, not its moderation culture.
SO is not a place to ask where to get your homework assignment done, that's for sure. The gamification does not necessarily reward the best content, but I didn't experience hostility myself.
(I do find this site fairly hostile. And Wikipedia is the lowest possible hell, I've never in my life experienced anything comparable to the ferocity with which people prosecute their grudges, all the way to IRL doxxing. German language Wikipedia is another whole level of self-appointed officialdom.)
Yes, yes, the usual narrative. They were not welcoming.
I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website:
* Most questions were low effort crap
* Users were mostly divided between only asking questions and only answering questions
* The reputation system favored: 1) easy questions (understood by a larger audience -> more people upvoting), 2) fast answers (before the question dropped from the front page; also answers with more votes got more visibility).
So, contrary to the usual narrative, the incentives and most activity was directed to answering newbie questions. That made up most of the volume, and it was what the reputation system rewarded. Even if a question got closed as a duplicated, by that time there usually were already answers to most easy questions. And deletion could only happen after some time (two days IIRC).
The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system.
The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.
So... nothing that it wasn't already doing to itself? There's no one drop where "AI got into the market", SO had been declining steadily for years. I actually expected this post to be about how SO survived by selling its internal organs to AI.
Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO.
This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.
SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.
This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before
AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a
peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in
2008, and I would reason it took a few years,
say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to
about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.
It still has some value today, as sometimes you
can find useful information on SO, but its peak
days are long over and I don't see how it can
manage to come back, with or without AI slop.
It would basically require a lot of re-design
and some things that never worked, such as the
karma system, should be changed. Also moderators -
they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave
up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.
They have been. Very aggressively. The community hates it. Their attempts have been ham-handed and offer zero value added over putting your question into chatgpt dot com instead of the SO submission form; but they would be hated anyway.
SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc
And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene.
I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.
162 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] threadI still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
At the same time, this is graph is something that really should not look anything like a bell curve. So the format is probably just a coincidence.
Except if the "all the questions have been asked" hypothesis is correct. What I really doubt.
I asked to see one of the questions from 2024 - it could have been solved with one LLM search.
We have eliminated a whole genre of peer to peer communication.
Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
This is revisionist history. People told SO that they were leaving for YEARS because of how incredibly toxic it had become. It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately.
Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended."
They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.
I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.
Anything that gives power on a basis of seniority, activity, volunteering, is guaranteed to suck very soon. There are just way too many mentally ill authoritarians permanently online for normal people to stave them off with naive good faith.
True, you might want people who are more articulate or thoughtful than the majority, but if you go too hard on that, you end up putting a time limit on how long the community will probably last. People won't stick around a community that treats them like crap, and that's a problem because at least some of those amateurs/newbies will become your future experts and power users. The people scared away by bullies like the one mentioned here didn't come back to Stack Exchange once they became the type of expert the site needed. They just shared their knowledge elsewhere.
The biggest problem was highlighted from day one: StackOverflow was bound to become "DeadOverflow". It couldn't possibly work because the entire notion of having one correct answer to a question in a domain that constantly evolves was broken.
What killed the site was "Ever relevant question" showing up in a Google search (pick other search engine) and pointing to a "Correct and accepted answer" that was wrong with then another answer with more upvotes but which was... Already outdated.
That's why people coined the term "DeadOverflow": the very way the site was conceived would inevitably lead to dead answers.
And people pointed that out early on. Nobody listened, many of the OGs who created that company made a nice exit.
But SO was destined to eventually fail.
The entire karma/gamification/clique of users gate-keeping was bad but the issue of dead answers / DeadOverflow simply couldn't be solved, so it doesn't even matter.
Losing 99.41% of its activity is brutal but it's honestly surprising that a concept that couldn't possibly work even survived that long.
They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.
It was a good resource but absolutely toxic to newcomers.
Good Riddance to SO.
Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale.
> They slowly killed the site in this manner.
It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy.
> knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question.
It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question.
> I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Reading through, for example, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433897 and understanding what is written there is literally all that is required.
LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response.
There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes to close my question) before I gave up.
SO is not a place to ask where to get your homework assignment done, that's for sure. The gamification does not necessarily reward the best content, but I didn't experience hostility myself.
(I do find this site fairly hostile. And Wikipedia is the lowest possible hell, I've never in my life experienced anything comparable to the ferocity with which people prosecute their grudges, all the way to IRL doxxing. German language Wikipedia is another whole level of self-appointed officialdom.)
I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website:
So, contrary to the usual narrative, the incentives and most activity was directed to answering newbie questions. That made up most of the volume, and it was what the reputation system rewarded. Even if a question got closed as a duplicated, by that time there usually were already answers to most easy questions. And deletion could only happen after some time (two days IIRC).The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system.
The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.
Fancy wording but inaccurate. Plenty of long-time users (me included) left when the mods became insane.
I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.
AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.
Now do a graph for the money.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...
Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO.
This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.
SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.
It still has some value today, as sometimes you can find useful information on SO, but its peak days are long over and I don't see how it can manage to come back, with or without AI slop. It would basically require a lot of re-design and some things that never worked, such as the karma system, should be changed. Also moderators - they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.
And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.