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.
Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.
Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.
Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!
I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.
Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct
The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
Editing used to be fine, back then like 15-16y ago. Personally I posted mostly everything as community wiki (no reputation gain) as I got the mod-alike reputation anyways.
At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve.
An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"
Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
Being able to edit answers isn't even a mod thing. In fact, for most of SO's life, it wasn't even a 'being logged in' thing (you could just edit an answer anonymously). How they wound up with a Q and A site where you could edit another user's answer far more easily than leaving a comment on it I still will never fully understand.
(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)
I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.
I had a pretty high rank on ruby and java answers, with some high traffic stuff, there were always people trying to completely edit my answers into something else entirely, it was such a shitty experience that I just decided the effort wasn’t worth it.
Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes.
On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.
On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.
I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.
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.
> 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.
I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).
If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.
I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes
1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)
2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"
3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.
They chose being controlled and not being Reddit - I can imagine lots of ways to do both - still they chose the toxic way and now they are dead, goal achieved.
These were all good things about stackexchange (and a precious few other places), yeah. Especially the latter two. Whenever I see people using stuff like linkedin to 'vet' things, I think of this. Reddit is much more cliquey and free-for-all, and has a lot more emotional fighting than the egoistic sort of arguments that sometimes took/take place on SO. I still prefer SO.
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.
I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.
As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.
One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions.
Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".
SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I think is a big part of why everyone stopped using it.
And people stopping using it meant that when a question did actually make it through the gauntlet, it was likely to go unanswered because everyone who knew anything had left the platform.
That’s my only experience. Asking a direct technical question, only for it to be modified to a totally different question filled with essays of non-answers by folks who liked to answer their own questions I guess
During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.
I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
It's not uncommon for me, while debugging, to find that someone has had the exact same problem as me, asked the question on stackoverflow, and that it has been closed a duplicate of a question which is only slightly related to it (and therefore any answers to that question are pretty useless).
Does it matter? A site and community that refuses to allow or accommodate anyone to grow and learn as a new user will quickly run out of users. The gatekeeping on SO is a blockade, not a teaching mechanism.
How else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error message or a big incomplete block of code and say "help". What are you trying to do? What isn't working? How is it not working?
They don't understand that we need information to help them. They will get offended when you ask them to elaborate. They won't understand the answer no matter how much you simplify it. They just want their problem solved with the least possible amount of effort on their part.
Here’s an example: my account on StackOveflow has enough reputation to answer questions on SO, but on other StackExchange sites that are very related I can’t do that just because I spent more time on StackOverflow.
The whole setup is basically repelling you from engaging by design. The site should already know from my SO reputation that I’m trustworthy enough to answer stuff on the other similar tech related stackexchange sites.
It was built for a time when you actually needed to filter out low quality questions and answers, but now that the users have abandoned the ecosystem the bouncer at the door makes a whole lot less sense.
This is why people use AI so heavily. Because no matter how bad or ill formed a question is, it wo answer it the most "caring" way possible, and never berate you for it being a stupid question, common sense, etc (as long as it is about some forbidden topic of course)
If SO wants to be good, it will encourage a back-and-forth: "are you trying X?" but it doesn't want to be good. Private equity doesn't understand going concerns.
I think I’d like to see a site where people posted their chat results that ended in a successful resolution. Just for isolated bugs or library use questions. Would not be useful for a lot of the internal work I do but maybe saving those internally would be useful inside a company
-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.
The answer according to way too many SO mods is that a question should primarily be to contribute to the SO knowledge base. Asking simply to get an answer is selfish.
I wish SO had not been killed by chatbots, because I was looking forward to seeing it die by the gamified hands of its mob of mods.
It felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the same
Never had one closed, only ever bothered posting twice. One obscure tumbleweed issue that slowly turned into something I was quite proud of... And one that was so unpleasant a little experience I never came back. Nothing serious just god why.
What was my point... Oh right. I don't assume anyone's making this stuff up. The pla
Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.
That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
I asked two questions which were both locked as dupes. The referenced questions mine were supposed to have duplicated were not, in fact the same question. After that I didn't bother. If I could find my answer with a search engine, fine, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to engage on the site.
Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.
I think so too, but many people have many oppositions to AI and would prefer knowledge to be in the hands of knowledgeable community, rather than AI companies. SO was poised to be this alternative, but leadership showed they did not see value in knowledge-work for its own sake.
But SO had already been acquired by PE when LLMs went mainstream, so I doubt they would have made any strategic growth bets rather than trying to squeeze all the monetization they could out of the site.
This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.
And in some ways AI "search" works like SO - you ask a question, you get an answer. If you don't understand the answer or something in the answer you ask for clarification and it provides it. And you don't have to wait a day or a week for it. (Ofcourse, the AI gets it answers from human curated info pools like SEs, pirated books etc ... but if these sources shrink / die to AI, it may not be able to provide new and current information, and we'll be back to SEs and Reddits and HNs again).
When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.
The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.
Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.
It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!
But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.
(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)
You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.
This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.
A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.
The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.
But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.
Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.
The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.
Yeah, this is much more accurate to what was actually happening. During that high period they struggled to get people to stop posting low-quality "do my homework" style questions - despite what people on here say the barrier for entry was extremely low and those made up the vast majority of what was posted.
I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.
The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.
The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.
StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.
SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.
> Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020?
The year that Google made "open source contribution" a checkbox on your annual review. That's when almost ALL these types of sites went to dogshit. And then everybody followed Google which then weaponized it even more.
Once Google made Fake Internet Points(tm) worth actual money via your annual review, all holy hell broke loose over the sites.
You’re actually on to something here, and it’s a phenomenon beyond Google that has engendered tons of blogspam and AIslop and manual LinkedIn slop.
Many professional certifications require bearers to earn CEUs. One way these may be earned is by blogging or doing demonstrations. So if you see a bunch of entry-level techbros doing really boring blog entries or posting to LinkedIn, you should know that they intend to earn CEUs for their particular professional certifications, such as CompTIA, et. al.
It’s not their fault... but Lord, how insufferable it can be!
It's the same thing. Why did AI compete so aggressively with them? It's because their system was one that produced confident misinformation from hobbyists while gatekeeping actual experts.
The same thing is not yet happening to wikipedia as you can see with the pageview tool. You may be confusing a covid bump. At most any drop is within an order of magnitude.
Ouch, great, you should show that protocol you used to get causation out of an observational study to the entire scientific community! It's unclear what area will give you a Nobel Prize for that, but several of them will rush to do it first.
There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it.
I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.
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.
It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.
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.
> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.
My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most.
May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.
I did, and it wasn't much better on the other side.
And funnily enough, the questions that I answered that most contributed to getting me through the gauntlet years later were closed at duplicates (they weren't).
I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site).
AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord.
SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.
S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
You created an account one day and the only things you could do were commenting and asking questions; you created it some other day and the only things you could do were asking and answering questions; some other day the only thing you could do was asking questions.
Any day you signed up, asking any question first was a sure way to be downvoted bellow the threshold that would ban you from the site.
I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary.
I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get pointer on how to track that behavior I was seeing. Of course the second I post it I got a -1 plus “can’t reproduce”/“please add minimal example”.
An other time, I had a question that was very similar to an existing one, but different setup and the answer did not solve my problem at all. Mentioned all that, linked the other question and specifically wrote that it was NOT addressing my problem. Posted it, soon after tagged as duplicate with that one answer that did NOT solve the problem.
After that I rarely asked questions again.
Also the points system made it frustrating as a new user: someone 2 years ago asks a basic language question “+50 upvotes”. You asked a similar question, asking extra clarification on an aspect “-2, already answered, read the doc” and so on. And with such a big deal made about reputation it felt like just being born early and being able to be an early adopter meant you got east points. For new users, though luck.
Skill issue to the second paragraph. You can always create a minimal example. I've done it many times. Some of them are quite long.
Start by copying your whole file with the problem into a new file. Delete each part. See if the problem occurs. If not, Ctrl-Z and try deleting the next part. Be extremely aggressive in deleting. Also try refactoring things to be simpler if deleting doesn't work.
In C++, inline #includes not from the standard library by copy-pasting the file contents. At each step, make sure the problem still occurs. Repeat the iterative deletion process.
You should now have a fairly short source file which exhibits the problem. Rename all proprietary identifiers to foo, bar, baz, frob. Submit question to SO.
The one advantage of actually trying to use SO was that the fear of asking a question usually made me do so much research that I'd solve my issue in the process of fully describing it.
That did also make the community lose out on the answer though.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants
I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:
1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.
2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.
I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.
> 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.
FWIW I haven't had bad experiences on the Godot subreddit, but I haven't tried in three years since the API change. And AI seems laughably bad at Godot for any non-trivial questions, and for those trivial questions, it's better just to peruse the docs.
I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?
Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.
Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
The vast majority of duplicate closures use already answered questions as duplicates. So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. In my observation this is usually the case, though the answer might be more generic.
I have also seen bad duplicate closures that weren't actually exact duplicates. But people talk like this is the only kind of duplicate closure that actually happens. I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, or if people are missing that their question is actually answered in the duplicate.
I was extremely active on SO and other SE sites in the late 00s and early 10s. In those days it wasn't too bad, many duplicates were actually duplicates. However that really did start shifting. This is anecdata of course, but even questions that linked to possibel "duplicates" and pre-expalined why it wasn't the same question were often just closed as duplicates of the exact question that was linked. This happened to me several times before I got fed up and moved on with my life.
SO was a really rewarding place to ask and answer questions in those early days. It really is a crying shame what they did to the community by empowering the worst of the community to be the bosses.
> So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well.
The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not.
> I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed,
Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it. They only looked at the signal "does somebody with points think these questions are similar", and discarded the signal of whether the new user got any value out of the site, and I think that's what did them in.
I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.
Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.
LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
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.
Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.
You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.
> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
thanks in advance,
--
znpy
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.
I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
> 1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
It pissed off znpy so bad that many years later they still recall on HN how irritated that made them! Now you could argue that letting znpy's pleasantries stay would have cumulatively pissed off more people in the long wrong. But I very seriously doubt it would.
>> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.)
I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.
This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.
This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.
as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.
>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
This is significantly under selling it.
Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.
I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable
I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.
His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”
At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive
I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one
In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort.
I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form.
These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine.
In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead?
Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.
> Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over.
I did get over it when I stopped bothering with SO. Sorry, but a community whose ethos is "you need a thick skin to belong" is not one most people even want to belong to.
Yes. And this is exactly my point. The path of least resistance is often preferred. Maybe in most cases this makes sense. But it can also lead to one wading in slop.
Just beware an operating principle based on what "most people" want. Nearly all human societies that I am aware of bake in a caution to this impulse into their grounding philosophies. Because humans have always ultimately recognized that while seductive at first, taking guidance merely from "what most people want" is a path to decay.
Garbage in, garbage out. The inalienable right vs the mob. Three men make a tiger (三人成虎). Does the market always know best? Low quality, low effort questions are ultimately destructive to the ends of something like stackexchange. No need to apologize, they evidently didn't want you there either. Again, it's not personal. They may be gone tomorrow. Zoom out just a little bit farther and you will, in all likelihood, not be far behind.
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"
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.
Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.
It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.
One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"
Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
Yep, or the top 10 hits on Google all pointing to a "duplicate" that didn't have the answer (or even the same question). Such a squandering of discoverability it's hard to even fathom who thought that was a good idea.
>Staging Ground is available to two different types of users on Stack Overflow:
>
> - Users who are asking their first questions
> - Users who want to review and offer guidance on newcomers’ posts
It looks a little different, like a "learn to use stack overflow correctly" type spot. I think what newbies want (I would have loved when I started out) is a "why is my code broken" type spot.
SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people.
Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.
An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.
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.
Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever.
They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.
It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.
It was also the rise of Github and the importance of the software hosted there. More consistent documentation and transparent issue trackers/PRs helped a lot dealing with evolving software.
The data showed Stack Overflow declined from 2017. This followed GitHub's rise distantly.
GitHub made documentation more consistent how? GitHub issues were more transparent how? A PR answered a question I would have asked Stack Overflow never I think.
Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.
Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."
Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too.
Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.
They're slowly boiling the frog, I've been expecting old. to work for maybe 1-2 more years then it'll also be going away.
Probably in the same way as they're actively removing r/all, at first it just didn't show up in the sidebar on mobile, but you could go to r/all manually by clicking links in the client. Then those stopped working, but r/All (uppercase A) worked. Then that went away. By now I think it's impossible to see r/all at all in the mobile client or the modern website, you can only access it via old.reddit.com.
I knew reddit was in its terminal phase when I started seeing FarmVille-style ads for some stupid reddit homegrown minigame in the top right of new reddit
What’s strange is that they’ll try to verify with Persona even after Apple has shared an age range with them.
If you trust Apple, why verify with Persona above that? If you don’t trust Apple, why bother integrating the Apple age check? The answer must be something silly like “we did it because Apple asked us to but we don’t trust what Apple tells us because we’re not sure if it’s compliant”.
It’s too bad, because I trust Apple with my data way more than Reddit and infinitely more than Persona. I hope Reddit comes to their senses because I’m never giving my data to Persona.
Reddit has many different subs that suffer from its problems in different degrees, so there's still islands of relative calm and sanity, usually in low-traffic subs. To some extent this was also true of different sites in the overall StackExchange network, but SO itself always dominated the network, it was designed and run as a monoculture, and that culture was, well ... gestures vaguely in SO's direction
It’s very easy to destroy a specific sub (if it’s not too big and doesn’t have half a dozen mods).
it's like those ddos rings, but works on social networks.
You can create a sub and a Discord group, then ask people in the Discord group to launch a mass report against your competing sub and its moderators. You can use scanners to find questionable stuff that you can report, and more often than not, this will get the mod banned. If the sub doesn’t have multiple mods (with unique IPs, as Reddit tracks fingerprints), the sub is now in the hands of Reddit’s mod team.
Back then it was not this easy, but now with AI and residential IPs you can create lots of fake users and reports etc... and take almost any avg redditor down.
Yup, there was some political bill discussion about some recent issue and others were posting links, so I thought I'd concur with an interesting vote breakdown link showing how each house/party voted. Something anyone I would gather was in good faith.
Nope, instant longtime account shadow permanent ban. Wow.
It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.
I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.
I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.
Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?
Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.
So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.
I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.
The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.
Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.
IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.
But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.
As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.
And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.
SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.
And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.
I stopped posting there around then. Multiple times in a row I asked a question, got it closed as a duplicate/pointed to another thread/met with "why are you even trying to do that" despite being clear about my problem. It was obvious the people answering/closing the question skimmed it and I already gave a ton of context. It just stopped being useful
People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
> SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form
SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.
Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.
Which is exactly why "extended discussion" should have been nurtured in their own way rather than fought against, that's how you get stimulating conversations.
I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]
Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.
I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.
The sale is relevant. The spike in activity right before the sale already shows the management hand and how they actively ran the org to optimize for this sale. The rebound right after is hard, and it was (right) before chatgpt
They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over
No, of course not coincidence. It's just that people didn't have an alternative until 2021-ish. Users hated SO for many years prior, but had nowhere to go other than small niche communities. When LLMs came into play, it was just the obvious choice.
In an alternate universe, where LLMs didn't exist, I bet you SO would be equally dead by this decade. Someone better, with healthier values and a more welcoming community, would come up and steal their lunch.
If stack overflow was universally loved, AI would still kill it.
People here seem to be so emotionally invested in hating stack overflow that they seem to think AI was like ~10% of the reason it died, when it was 95%.
Everyone trumpeting the "bad SO moderation" angle is delusional. Stack Overflow was far better than conventional forums. Without LLMs, SO would have stayed popular, there is no doubt about it. The massive decline was clearly and obviously caused mainly by LLMs.
I see people talking about the negative experiences, and I'm sure they are real, but I also had some very positive experiences.
I remember being amazed that some internet stranger took the time to understand my question and provide some great solution where I was stuck. It gave me a little encouragement and social connection as I plugged away on a project alone.
I miss that feel good human connection when an LLM can quickly get me an answer.
meh, in my experience good quality LLMs are significantly more correct than Stack Overflow ever was and have access to your code and machine to help you diagnose issues.
It's about 50:50 for me. Often times they completely fuck things up and then want to rewrite rather than correct the original issues. That leads to debugging their rewritten code and an afternoon down the drain.
Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.
Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.
Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.
The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.
Sometimes you'd get banned for asking an exact duplicate of a previous question of yours that was closed. They'd tell you to edit the closed question and it would be reopened.
But if you'd edited the closed question instead, it wouldn't be reopened.
Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.
The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.
The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...
> The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.
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.
There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.
> 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.
Literally describing how academia has worked since time immemorial.
Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.
Well, a combination of that and understanding human psychology. For any of these common issues, SO usually had an answer of what you were supposed to do, but it was usually very counterintuitive.
yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world
I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer.
There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.
Just tried to open stack overflow and was told their site was under maintenance. When I refreshed, it blocked my IP for refreshing too many times. I expect better from SO.
If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did.
What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.
The users being generally unhelpful wasn't an issue for them, since they were still significantly more helpful than users anywhere else on the internet. Reddit was and still is filled with completely unvetted answers (on pretty much all topics not just programming), Quora was/is a joke, Yahoo answers had some funny posts I guess but nothing you could actually learn from, what else really was there? Before AI, Stack Overflow was as good as it gets.
It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.
I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial. There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI, and strong reason to believe that we would see it with AI. So we have a model that makes testable predictions, and data strongly consistent with those testable predictions, in the form of an acceleration of existing downward trends. What more do you want?
Hiked interest rates cause a decline in Stackoverflow activity?
My answer doesn't change. Against the background of other phenomena already causing various trends, we see acceleration of those trends consistent with a testable hypothesis about the effects of AI adoption in industry. In most fields of science that's good evidence in favor of the model.
And no I didn't ask AI about it, this is my own opinion and my own perspective.
People love simplistic narratives, i usually don't mind but this is just ridiculous. AI hate is gently overtaking AI hype as the most stupid thing around
It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.
You mean the fall to a thousand questions per month. Now that the volume is low enough someone has a chance of looking at every single one of them, maybe the StackOverflow community can finally collaborate in peace, safe from the onslaught of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation.
Just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times.
Are you discarding the utility of Gaussian functions in analysis simply because the independent variable is time? A Gaussian curve can be used as a descriptive model without claiming that the observations themselves are a probability distribution
The fit does not prove causation, but it does show that the decline was already well described by a trend that began years before generative AI. If the claim is that 2023 created a separate structural break, it's different claim then the title describes
I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.
> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years
Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only
need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it.
AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already
largely prior to AI.
That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?
A bell curve is not an "amortised function." Amortization applies to accounting and algorithmic time complexity, not probability distributions. You're likely thinking of a Probability Density Function (PDF). If you are going to police terminology, it helps to use the correct words. Second, fitting a curve with an R^2 of 0.911 is the exact opposite of "making shapes out of clouds.
You are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.
Fitting a mathematical function to a dataset does not implicitly adopt the ontological baggage of probability theory. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of applied mathematics
Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong:
* Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it.
* Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.
Yeah, I used to mostly answer there instead of ask and was in the top % for several big tags whatever that means / is worth, but then at some point I realized things had changed and I was spending more time fighting rules and guidelines rather than sharing knowledge and having a good time so I just stopped.
It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems
A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community
The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"
I have never actively asked a question on SO either. But for every programming question I ever had (literally!), I always either found the solution to it, or the reason why my question was stupid. (Which usually boils down to me not understanding sthg about the technology I'm working with.)
Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...
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.
They didn’t stand a chance. Even in the era where they made a great community etc etc AI would have destroyed them. Other people are just a poor source of information now that we have dramatically good search across all human knowledge.
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.
Some of the pre-ai decline in questions might just be that they had filled out of alot of the question space. What might be more interesting is the traffic graph as it would be possible to have a decline in questions but still have traffic rising to the existing ones.
Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.
I recall some moves where SO announced they would be revising ToS to disclose their intent to repackage and use the site’s content for sale and/or model training.
Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted.
One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.
Stack overflow was always going to die. AI just sped it up. The misconception that it was a community is surprising. People went there for an answer and left, very few would stick around, not only because there was no incentive, but if you did you'd likely get crapped on by one of the hostile moderators which would ensure you'd leave and never come back, because who wants to willingly be treated badly.
It was basically an imposer syndrome enforcing machine.
This made me browse through my StackOverflow history. Funny to see how I though I was such a skilled developer, though the questions I asked and the answers I gave 16 years ago... cringe.
I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones).
It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing
Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin.
Interesting to compare with MathOverflow which has distinctly different policies (only research-level questions) and professional community: https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/st... - also falling lately, but by a factor of 2-3x from peak rather than 1000x.
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.
I never understood the point if having the unfathomable churn of thousands of new questions per day. The value of SO to me was always a knowledge base with reputation mechanics, and that did not change. I still default to searching before asking AI.
I’m surprised the site had that little activity, relatively, around 2010. That’s when I was using it the most. It seemed plenty large to me at the time… I can’t imagine the experience was that great a few years later. I wasn’t really paying attention by the time it reached the peaks later that decade.
I always found the format of the side obtuse and the culture not very welcoming. My most popular answer ever was something about JavaScript from 2008 or 2009, and to this day, people come in and say “this isn’t the way to do it, this is outdated“. No kidding, but every new question about that gets closed as a duplicate.
I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.
Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.
Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there.
There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.
Looks like the decline started before the ai boom.
I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.
I am surprised how early the overall downward trend developed. There is no doubt LLMs put a nail in the coffin, but the 5 years from 2017 to 2022 look to have brought a non trivial decline of their own
My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…
While I never posted much to Stackoverflow I have fond memories of it as a sole developer, finding other people with similar issues and the quality solutions offered that often got me out of a jam.
Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.
Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.
Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.
Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.
Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.
Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?
Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?
The platform in question was openly hostile to people asking questions and made discussions against the rules. That's why people left the moment a better option came along
But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels.
Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...
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.
The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?
In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy pro-AI decisions from the admin.
I think Ai is not the issue here. SEO on the other hand very much. It’s not like any one ever went to stackoverflow to find a solution, it was just that they were the google results for a lot of things
I've only posted one question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.
Honestly SO helped me a lot in Uni 10 years ago. However I was banned 5+ times for just asking a normal question with attempts at answering. Can’t say I’m surprised. It was not welcoming, massively exclusive and had a rude community. RIP
Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.
Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
Picking on SO and the mods in particular is a popular HN pasttime. I'd like to add that I interacted a bit with SO (1k points) and never really had any problems with them. I must be lucky...
Perhaps the harshest lesson of stackoverflow is that it represented what happens when you give programmer-types unfettered control of a culture. A bitter pill indeed.
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.
Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
Yeah, I don't remember when was the last time I even visited stackexchange. AI is so much better, it's not even a contest. The real question is where AI will get its knowledge in 10 or 15 years when there is no training material anymore...
Did anyone use the site search? Whenever I tried it it was disappointing. After ~two attempts I always went back to Google. Having the answer is of no use if you refuse to give it. LLMs didn't happen overnight. With all the aging questions, perhaps it was always doomed to be replaced by something.
Just like stackoverflow saved developers from experts exchange, it might be able to save us from what is coming from AI being an averaging engine by default and generating average code. Hopefully it's average but always works.
Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.
Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.
Somehow I feel that whole idea was 50% broken from start. In field changing as fast as programming you simply cannot have canonical source that is done. There are areas which are constant or slow moving. But too many others are in churn. Trying to apply same rules for both is clearly insanity. And this is really the failure of SO...
Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it might have worked... But can't remove power from those who had it for years...
You also have to think that SO was very early in gamification and changing things around that never got political will afaict - people love their points.
I can't see any specific "and then AI happened" in this graph? SO made a lot of dumb choices that made it less and less useful for people independent of forcing AI in there, nothing in this graph is a clear indicator that AI was even a blip on the rapid decline of a service intent on making itself as poor an experience as possible for folks wanting to help other folks.
What I like about AI is that it doesn't close my chats as "duplicate" and link to something unrelated. It doesn't refuse to tell me how to do something just because there's another way to do something else that I am not interested in and didn't ask for.
StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.
Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.
people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird.
i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.
I noticed the same thing. Another thing that seems to have disappear: lunch and learn focusing on the tech stack. And I mean specifically about "how to do this in <programming language", not product/company focused.
AI didn't kill SO, SO was already declining due to toxic users and lack of organization. The toxic users were dunning-krugerian anal-retentive mini-Napoleons who delighted in locking anything slightly off-topic and merging slightly-related questions, and the lack of organization was a tendency for people to give incorrect answers but still get upvoted (due to Google search surfacing the page in the wrong context).
There's always going to be lots of latent insecurity among amateurs when a pro shows up.
Honestly because of this and the relative lack of actual pros on the site, real pros will get pushed out and the site will actually build a collection of misinformation. That's probably why pros feel that software quality has dropped so much in since stackoverflow.
SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet.
I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too.
And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes.
Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help.
Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely.
There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high.
Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.
It wasn't only LLMs it was also the downright user-hostile attitude prevalent on many sites on the SE network: https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX
Yeah, bro, I'm not a statistics professor so I can't provide you with the "details or clarity" you need. I tried my best and if that's not enough, fuck it. Same story on history.SE: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hi... If you're gonna require "evidence of prior research" I won't bother. The bots are way friendlier and just as knowledgeable.
The golden goose were users asking questions, not the anal-retentive content curators. SO let the latter drive away the former.
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.
I disagree. From what I see, company specific stackoverflow like mailing lists or slack channels are also dead.
The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.
One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.
FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.
The move the current companies are missing is to have a legislation declaring ai as a person. Just like how corporations are people, if ai is a person then they don’t have to show number of people fired, can argues content creation and engagement is through the roof and so many other possibilities. /s
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.
Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.
Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.
Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!
I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.
Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct
The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
Editing used to be fine, back then like 15-16y ago. Personally I posted mostly everything as community wiki (no reputation gain) as I got the mod-alike reputation anyways.
At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve.
An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"
Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
Being able to edit answers isn't even a mod thing. In fact, for most of SO's life, it wasn't even a 'being logged in' thing (you could just edit an answer anonymously). How they wound up with a Q and A site where you could edit another user's answer far more easily than leaving a comment on it I still will never fully understand.
(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)
I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.
I had a pretty high rank on ruby and java answers, with some high traffic stuff, there were always people trying to completely edit my answers into something else entirely, it was such a shitty experience that I just decided the effort wasn’t worth it.
Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes.
On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.
On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.
I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
Re: quis custodiet ipsos custodes...
Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.
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.
> 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.
I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).
Now that's a name I haven't heard about in a long time. haha
If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.
I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes
1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)
2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"
3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.
They chose being controlled and not being Reddit - I can imagine lots of ways to do both - still they chose the toxic way and now they are dead, goal achieved.
These were all good things about stackexchange (and a precious few other places), yeah. Especially the latter two. Whenever I see people using stuff like linkedin to 'vet' things, I think of this. Reddit is much more cliquey and free-for-all, and has a lot more emotional fighting than the egoistic sort of arguments that sometimes took/take place on SO. I still prefer SO.
> If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.
And why do you think most people (and LLMs) just Google "<what they are looking for> reddit" ??
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.
I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.
As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.
One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions.
Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".
SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I think is a big part of why everyone stopped using it.
And people stopping using it meant that when a question did actually make it through the gauntlet, it was likely to go unanswered because everyone who knew anything had left the platform.
Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol.
Do you remember how power users would edit your question just for the gamification of it. Drove me nuts
That’s my only experience. Asking a direct technical question, only for it to be modified to a totally different question filled with essays of non-answers by folks who liked to answer their own questions I guess
I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.
Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.
I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
I went to my old SO account and found these questions that were closed.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-w...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trou...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-gener...
As someone who was a budding programmer, I felt like my questions were decent attempts at laying out my problem but they were closed anyways.
At the second you got an interesting answer, though
It's not uncommon for me, while debugging, to find that someone has had the exact same problem as me, asked the question on stackoverflow, and that it has been closed a duplicate of a question which is only slightly related to it (and therefore any answers to that question are pretty useless).
I just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed.
And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.
How good are the questions?
Does it matter? A site and community that refuses to allow or accommodate anyone to grow and learn as a new user will quickly run out of users. The gatekeeping on SO is a blockade, not a teaching mechanism.
I am happy they are dead. Humanity gets +1 for this one.
How else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error message or a big incomplete block of code and say "help". What are you trying to do? What isn't working? How is it not working?
They don't understand that we need information to help them. They will get offended when you ask them to elaborate. They won't understand the answer no matter how much you simplify it. They just want their problem solved with the least possible amount of effort on their part.
You just described the complete opposite of the StackOverflow experience.
I disagree.
Here’s an example: my account on StackOveflow has enough reputation to answer questions on SO, but on other StackExchange sites that are very related I can’t do that just because I spent more time on StackOverflow.
The whole setup is basically repelling you from engaging by design. The site should already know from my SO reputation that I’m trustworthy enough to answer stuff on the other similar tech related stackexchange sites.
It was built for a time when you actually needed to filter out low quality questions and answers, but now that the users have abandoned the ecosystem the bouncer at the door makes a whole lot less sense.
This is why people use AI so heavily. Because no matter how bad or ill formed a question is, it wo answer it the most "caring" way possible, and never berate you for it being a stupid question, common sense, etc (as long as it is about some forbidden topic of course)
On top of that, the AI will take a plain no-context error message and give it a college try to figure it out. A lot of times it will be right.
On SO that experience is going to be “we closed this because you didn’t form a good question.”
And of course, that’s true, but it demonstrates the wide gulf in user experience between the two platforms.
If SO wants to be good, it will encourage a back-and-forth: "are you trying X?" but it doesn't want to be good. Private equity doesn't understand going concerns.
I think I’d like to see a site where people posted their chat results that ended in a successful resolution. Just for isolated bugs or library use questions. Would not be useful for a lot of the internal work I do but maybe saving those internally would be useful inside a company
Here’s one:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79981854/how-to-run-mode...
-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.
Why do questions need to be good? Often times, you don't know what you don't know.
The answer according to way too many SO mods is that a question should primarily be to contribute to the SO knowledge base. Asking simply to get an answer is selfish.
I wish SO had not been killed by chatbots, because I was looking forward to seeing it die by the gamified hands of its mob of mods.
I have had questions edited and closed and I have also been reticent to ask questions just from my own personal experience.
It felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the same
Never had one closed, only ever bothered posting twice. One obscure tumbleweed issue that slowly turned into something I was quite proud of... And one that was so unpleasant a little experience I never came back. Nothing serious just god why.
What was my point... Oh right. I don't assume anyone's making this stuff up. The pla
Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.
That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
Once had a question closed for asking about something explicitly permitted in the site's own rules. Had to quote the rules back at them.
I asked two questions which were both locked as dupes. The referenced questions mine were supposed to have duplicated were not, in fact the same question. After that I didn't bother. If I could find my answer with a search engine, fine, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to engage on the site.
Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.
I think so too, but many people have many oppositions to AI and would prefer knowledge to be in the hands of knowledgeable community, rather than AI companies. SO was poised to be this alternative, but leadership showed they did not see value in knowledge-work for its own sake.
But SO had already been acquired by PE when LLMs went mainstream, so I doubt they would have made any strategic growth bets rather than trying to squeeze all the monetization they could out of the site.
This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.
Having experienced the SO culture, I like to think the culture caused it - schadenfreude - but it was probably inevitable given AI.
Even if SO was the most wonderful friendly place in the galaxy, would you rather post a question and wait hours for a response, or get one instantly?
If the answers were better, you might.
They weren't. The most common answer was a hyperlink to an unrelated question followed by everyone being banned from answering your question
Very new, beta stuff - AI can be helpful but too creative sometimes
And in some ways AI "search" works like SO - you ask a question, you get an answer. If you don't understand the answer or something in the answer you ask for clarification and it provides it. And you don't have to wait a day or a week for it. (Ofcourse, the AI gets it answers from human curated info pools like SEs, pirated books etc ... but if these sources shrink / die to AI, it may not be able to provide new and current information, and we'll be back to SEs and Reddits and HNs again).
Push factors and pull factors do much more work together than either do on its own.
When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.
The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.
Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.
It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!
But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.
(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)
You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.
This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.
A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.
The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.
But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.
Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.
The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.
Yeah, this is much more accurate to what was actually happening. During that high period they struggled to get people to stop posting low-quality "do my homework" style questions - despite what people on here say the barrier for entry was extremely low and those made up the vast majority of what was posted.
I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.
> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated
[citation needed]
Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.
The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.
StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.
SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.
You aren’t downvoted on Wikipedia. And people have been complaining about heavy handed editors and mods there for a long time. Same with SO.
It’s pretty much a meme now.
> Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020?
The year that Google made "open source contribution" a checkbox on your annual review. That's when almost ALL these types of sites went to dogshit. And then everybody followed Google which then weaponized it even more.
Once Google made Fake Internet Points(tm) worth actual money via your annual review, all holy hell broke loose over the sites.
You’re actually on to something here, and it’s a phenomenon beyond Google that has engendered tons of blogspam and AIslop and manual LinkedIn slop.
Many professional certifications require bearers to earn CEUs. One way these may be earned is by blogging or doing demonstrations. So if you see a bunch of entry-level techbros doing really boring blog entries or posting to LinkedIn, you should know that they intend to earn CEUs for their particular professional certifications, such as CompTIA, et. al.
It’s not their fault... but Lord, how insufferable it can be!
It's the same thing. Why did AI compete so aggressively with them? It's because their system was one that produced confident misinformation from hobbyists while gatekeeping actual experts.
The same thing is not yet happening to wikipedia as you can see with the pageview tool. You may be confusing a covid bump. At most any drop is within an order of magnitude.
Ouch, great, you should show that protocol you used to get causation out of an observational study to the entire scientific community! It's unclear what area will give you a Nobel Prize for that, but several of them will rush to do it first.
There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it.
I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.
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.
It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.
The worst stack overflow in this regard was meta. Most pathological corner of the internet I've ever encountered, up there with 4chan if you ask me.
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.
> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.
My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most.
May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.
I did, and it wasn't much better on the other side.
And funnily enough, the questions that I answered that most contributed to getting me through the gauntlet years later were closed at duplicates (they weren't).
I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site).
AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord.
SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.
> I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me
Damn. Doesn’t that just sum up so many interactions (and sadly, relationships) in life.
S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
This. I left SO before AI because moderators were terrible.
> aquire comment points to be able to answer
I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
The rules changed, a lot.
You created an account one day and the only things you could do were commenting and asking questions; you created it some other day and the only things you could do were asking and answering questions; some other day the only thing you could do was asking questions.
Any day you signed up, asking any question first was a sure way to be downvoted bellow the threshold that would ban you from the site.
I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.
I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary.
I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get pointer on how to track that behavior I was seeing. Of course the second I post it I got a -1 plus “can’t reproduce”/“please add minimal example”.
An other time, I had a question that was very similar to an existing one, but different setup and the answer did not solve my problem at all. Mentioned all that, linked the other question and specifically wrote that it was NOT addressing my problem. Posted it, soon after tagged as duplicate with that one answer that did NOT solve the problem.
After that I rarely asked questions again.
Also the points system made it frustrating as a new user: someone 2 years ago asks a basic language question “+50 upvotes”. You asked a similar question, asking extra clarification on an aspect “-2, already answered, read the doc” and so on. And with such a big deal made about reputation it felt like just being born early and being able to be an early adopter meant you got east points. For new users, though luck.
Skill issue to the second paragraph. You can always create a minimal example. I've done it many times. Some of them are quite long.
Start by copying your whole file with the problem into a new file. Delete each part. See if the problem occurs. If not, Ctrl-Z and try deleting the next part. Be extremely aggressive in deleting. Also try refactoring things to be simpler if deleting doesn't work.
In C++, inline #includes not from the standard library by copy-pasting the file contents. At each step, make sure the problem still occurs. Repeat the iterative deletion process.
You should now have a fairly short source file which exhibits the problem. Rename all proprietary identifiers to foo, bar, baz, frob. Submit question to SO.
The one advantage of actually trying to use SO was that the fear of asking a question usually made me do so much research that I'd solve my issue in the process of fully describing it.
That did also make the community lose out on the answer though.
You can write a self-answered question.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants
I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:
1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.
2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.
This was long before LLMs.
At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"
Because the person who asked the question has accepted the first answer that looked decent enough and moved on.
Usually the most superficial, not that it's always a bad thing.
Oh, also on SO there's this kind of exchange:
Q: "I want to do X because of this and that - or because I simply fucking want to".
A: You should never do X, do Y or Z instead.
The "that's a XY problem" guys always seem to think they're the smartest in the room.
I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.
> 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.
The math subreddit is awful. Accusing everyone of asking homework questions if they weren’t formatted in perfect math notation.
Then there’s the godot subreddit. Asked 2 questions? That’s a ban.
Imagine a child learning math or game dev coming up against that.
I’d quit. Curiosity extinguished.
The godot github has one of those characters now too. Really anti new user. I worry, I worry.
It's ok, the kids learning this stuff these days are on YouTube and Discord.
It's pretty sad that they had to shift to a non-interactive medium to avoid getting smashed. Sad place the world is now in that respect :-(
FWIW I haven't had bad experiences on the Godot subreddit, but I haven't tried in three years since the API change. And AI seems laughably bad at Godot for any non-trivial questions, and for those trivial questions, it's better just to peruse the docs.
I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?
Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.
Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
The vast majority of duplicate closures use already answered questions as duplicates. So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. In my observation this is usually the case, though the answer might be more generic.
I have also seen bad duplicate closures that weren't actually exact duplicates. But people talk like this is the only kind of duplicate closure that actually happens. I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, or if people are missing that their question is actually answered in the duplicate.
I was extremely active on SO and other SE sites in the late 00s and early 10s. In those days it wasn't too bad, many duplicates were actually duplicates. However that really did start shifting. This is anecdata of course, but even questions that linked to possibel "duplicates" and pre-expalined why it wasn't the same question were often just closed as duplicates of the exact question that was linked. This happened to me several times before I got fed up and moved on with my life.
SO was a really rewarding place to ask and answer questions in those early days. It really is a crying shame what they did to the community by empowering the worst of the community to be the bosses.
> So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well.
The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not.
> I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed,
Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it. They only looked at the signal "does somebody with points think these questions are similar", and discarded the signal of whether the new user got any value out of the site, and I think that's what did them in.
I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.
Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.
LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
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.
You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues.
I hope somebody saves it all.
Perhaps not what you intended, but most of it is stored in various models' weights.
Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.
For better or for worse, the contents of Stack Overflow are literally the reason LLM coding has taken over the world.
They used to publish a regular torrent of everything, not sure if they still do that? Maybe you could grab yourself a copy for posterity.
It's still possible to get a dump from the Settings page, just with a checkbox that says "if you use this for AI training we might ban you".
You can automate it with browser automation tools.
You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.
> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being set up like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki of questions and their answers.
3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?
> 1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
It pissed off znpy so bad that many years later they still recall on HN how irritated that made them! Now you could argue that letting znpy's pleasantries stay would have cumulatively pissed off more people in the long wrong. But I very seriously doubt it would.
> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
Yes.
Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Ironically, erasing that kind of stuff is likely very good good for training large language models.
>> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.)
I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.
There was a gold badge given out if you got 100 edits approved. And another if you got 100 edits reversed.
Ending a question with "thanks" is explicitly forbidden because it is noise.
This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.
This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.
I put my name on my professional communications.
Communicating professionally and coming across as polite are not mutually exclusive.
Stackoverflow was not the K&R.
as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.
>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
This is significantly under selling it.
Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.
I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable
I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.
His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”
At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive
I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one
In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort.
I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form.
These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine.
In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead?
Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.
> Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over.
I did get over it when I stopped bothering with SO. Sorry, but a community whose ethos is "you need a thick skin to belong" is not one most people even want to belong to.
Yes. And this is exactly my point. The path of least resistance is often preferred. Maybe in most cases this makes sense. But it can also lead to one wading in slop.
Just beware an operating principle based on what "most people" want. Nearly all human societies that I am aware of bake in a caution to this impulse into their grounding philosophies. Because humans have always ultimately recognized that while seductive at first, taking guidance merely from "what most people want" is a path to decay.
Garbage in, garbage out. The inalienable right vs the mob. Three men make a tiger (三人成虎). Does the market always know best? Low quality, low effort questions are ultimately destructive to the ends of something like stackexchange. No need to apologize, they evidently didn't want you there either. Again, it's not personal. They may be gone tomorrow. Zoom out just a little bit farther and you will, in all likelihood, not be far behind.
And this kind of superior attitude over the unwashed masses is precisely what kept me away.
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"
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.
Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.
It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.
One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"
Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
My favorite thing was how for half the stuff I Googled, the top result would be a StackOverflow reply telling me to Google it.
Yep, or the top 10 hits on Google all pointing to a "duplicate" that didn't have the answer (or even the same question). Such a squandering of discoverability it's hard to even fathom who thought that was a good idea.
The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.
Yes. There were far too many people with nothing to contribute doing useless (or actively harmful) busywork to earn points.
Same on Reddit. Every gamification triggers Goodhart's Law and has a lifespan.
> would've been a "newcomer track"
It's there now. Too late I guess. https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground
>Staging Ground is available to two different types of users on Stack Overflow: > > - Users who are asking their first questions > - Users who want to review and offer guidance on newcomers’ posts
It looks a little different, like a "learn to use stack overflow correctly" type spot. I think what newbies want (I would have loved when I started out) is a "why is my code broken" type spot.
Off topic, closed.
SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people.
Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.
An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.
There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.
It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"
As noted by others, the initializer for the curt communication culture was "don't ask stupid questions, idiot."
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.
Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever.
They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.
It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.
It was also the rise of Github and the importance of the software hosted there. More consistent documentation and transparent issue trackers/PRs helped a lot dealing with evolving software.
The data showed Stack Overflow declined from 2017. This followed GitHub's rise distantly.
GitHub made documentation more consistent how? GitHub issues were more transparent how? A PR answered a question I would have asked Stack Overflow never I think.
Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.
Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."
my experience with reddit has been much more about its politization rather than anything about quality
"my side is right, the other is wrong" - has been too common of an occurrence, both in comments but also in posts and such frontpages as /r/all
Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.
Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do.
BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too.
Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.
They're slowly boiling the frog, I've been expecting old. to work for maybe 1-2 more years then it'll also be going away.
Probably in the same way as they're actively removing r/all, at first it just didn't show up in the sidebar on mobile, but you could go to r/all manually by clicking links in the client. Then those stopped working, but r/All (uppercase A) worked. Then that went away. By now I think it's impossible to see r/all at all in the mobile client or the modern website, you can only access it via old.reddit.com.
I knew reddit was in its terminal phase when I started seeing FarmVille-style ads for some stupid reddit homegrown minigame in the top right of new reddit
No, they've just enabled it for old.reddit.com as well.
> BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
I think this may depend on your country, I've never seen this (Spain), not on the new website nor old.reddit.com or anywhere else, NSFW or not.
Yes this is a blame-your-politicians situation more than anything else.
Not when I open it from a web browser without being logged in. It just ask if I'm 18 and if I click yes, it lets me see the post (including images).
This is right up there with amazon changing imdb.com, so that you need to actually be logged in to read any of the reviews on a movie.
I see that and I instantly go to rotten tomatoes, pure idiocy, pure stupid. You can just tell when those in charge, never ever dog food.
And now letterboxed is eating their lunch.
What’s strange is that they’ll try to verify with Persona even after Apple has shared an age range with them.
If you trust Apple, why verify with Persona above that? If you don’t trust Apple, why bother integrating the Apple age check? The answer must be something silly like “we did it because Apple asked us to but we don’t trust what Apple tells us because we’re not sure if it’s compliant”.
It’s too bad, because I trust Apple with my data way more than Reddit and infinitely more than Persona. I hope Reddit comes to their senses because I’m never giving my data to Persona.
The more obvious answer is that they get different marketing signals from the two companies' offerings and want both.
Reddit has many different subs that suffer from its problems in different degrees, so there's still islands of relative calm and sanity, usually in low-traffic subs. To some extent this was also true of different sites in the overall StackExchange network, but SO itself always dominated the network, it was designed and run as a monoculture, and that culture was, well ... gestures vaguely in SO's direction
It’s very easy to destroy a specific sub (if it’s not too big and doesn’t have half a dozen mods).
it's like those ddos rings, but works on social networks.
You can create a sub and a Discord group, then ask people in the Discord group to launch a mass report against your competing sub and its moderators. You can use scanners to find questionable stuff that you can report, and more often than not, this will get the mod banned. If the sub doesn’t have multiple mods (with unique IPs, as Reddit tracks fingerprints), the sub is now in the hands of Reddit’s mod team.
Back then it was not this easy, but now with AI and residential IPs you can create lots of fake users and reports etc... and take almost any avg redditor down.
Yup, there was some political bill discussion about some recent issue and others were posting links, so I thought I'd concur with an interesting vote breakdown link showing how each house/party voted. Something anyone I would gather was in good faith. Nope, instant longtime account shadow permanent ban. Wow.
It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.
I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.
Can confirm for some dumb joke subs.
You want to blow off some steam, and there is a laundry list of rules to read through.
Yeah, not bothering with all that.
>"no conversation please"
Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that
It always worked like that
I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.
Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?
Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.
So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.
I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.
The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.
Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.
IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.
But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.
As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.
And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.
SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.
And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.
The anonymity of people giving aggressive and confrontational "answers" to a question reminds me of:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
For anyone else who's maliciously IP-address-blocked from Penny Arcade, the link is just to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
I stopped posting there around then. Multiple times in a row I asked a question, got it closed as a duplicate/pointed to another thread/met with "why are you even trying to do that" despite being clear about my problem. It was obvious the people answering/closing the question skimmed it and I already gave a ton of context. It just stopped being useful
Happened to me as well. People would close it as duplicate when it clearly was different, they just did not understand the question themselves.
Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI?
I don't buy it.
People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
Reddit is full of bots instead of actual humans. Arguably, so is HN.
SO doesn’t even have bots.
I personally left SO because I felt moderation had become toxic, and that was before AI. And I was relatively active, like in the top 5%.
How eager people are to find something better IS a factor in the decline of websites/businesses. Not just that there is something better that exists.
See the decline of the graph even before the spring of ’22?
> SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form
SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.
Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.
I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.
A Q&A site where the community asks questions and the community answers them. That doesn't work without a community.
Community won't stick around if the questions they're shown aren't stimulating, either.
Which is exactly why "extended discussion" should have been nurtured in their own way rather than fought against, that's how you get stimulating conversations.
I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]
Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.
---
[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...
[2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...
I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.
The sale is relevant. The spike in activity right before the sale already shows the management hand and how they actively ran the org to optimize for this sale. The rebound right after is hard, and it was (right) before chatgpt
They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over
Are we talking about the large Covid spike in early 2020? I don’t think that has anything to do with the sale.
So you think its mostly just coincidence that 4 years after AI is introduced stack overflow is dead?
No, of course not coincidence. It's just that people didn't have an alternative until 2021-ish. Users hated SO for many years prior, but had nowhere to go other than small niche communities. When LLMs came into play, it was just the obvious choice.
In an alternate universe, where LLMs didn't exist, I bet you SO would be equally dead by this decade. Someone better, with healthier values and a more welcoming community, would come up and steal their lunch.
If stack overflow was universally loved, AI would still kill it.
People here seem to be so emotionally invested in hating stack overflow that they seem to think AI was like ~10% of the reason it died, when it was 95%.
Everyone trumpeting the "bad SO moderation" angle is delusional. Stack Overflow was far better than conventional forums. Without LLMs, SO would have stayed popular, there is no doubt about it. The massive decline was clearly and obviously caused mainly by LLMs.
I didn't know that. Good to see they cashed out in time.
This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.
Do you mean that curious growth spike in mid 2020? If so, can you think of anything else significant that happened in mid 2020...?
Ironically it gives me: This IP address has performed an unusually high number of requests and has been temporarily rate limited.
That's also something what AI did to the internet :(
I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
I see people talking about the negative experiences, and I'm sure they are real, but I also had some very positive experiences.
I remember being amazed that some internet stranger took the time to understand my question and provide some great solution where I was stuck. It gave me a little encouragement and social connection as I plugged away on a project alone.
I miss that feel good human connection when an LLM can quickly get me an answer.
But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out.
I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.
meh, in my experience good quality LLMs are significantly more correct than Stack Overflow ever was and have access to your code and machine to help you diagnose issues.
It's about 50:50 for me. Often times they completely fuck things up and then want to rewrite rather than correct the original issues. That leads to debugging their rewritten code and an afternoon down the drain.
It is curation process, so when you search you are not overwhelmed by 100 identical answers.
Being stupid in this case is irrational self-(mis)-perception.
Probably they really meant to say you are lazy and shift work on mods.
Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.
Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.
Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.
The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.
Sometimes you'd get banned for asking an exact duplicate of a previous question of yours that was closed. They'd tell you to edit the closed question and it would be reopened.
But if you'd edited the closed question instead, it wouldn't be reopened.
Sometimes? It happened more and more and when every second question was like this, I left. I wasn't going to fight against moderators forever.
That was before AI.
And your second attempt would get closed as a duplicate of your first attempt.
I feel like I've seen this comment before...
Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.
The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.
The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...
> The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.
The collapse into a ghost town is striking.
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.
There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.
> 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.
Literally describing how academia has worked since time immemorial.
I remember a time when people were posting their SO link and karma on their resumes. O how have the times changed.
check the graph and superpose the ai adoption curve, you're right to be skeptical
Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.
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.
The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.
Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.
Well, a combination of that and understanding human psychology. For any of these common issues, SO usually had an answer of what you were supposed to do, but it was usually very counterintuitive.
> at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered
I don’t buy this.
Programming as an industry is famous for constantly evolving and changing.
Yet the most viewed questions are about how to undo git commit, how to sort an array, how to select stuff in jquery, how to group by in SQL and so on.
General questions about programming languages, SQL and git don't change that much.
for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.
- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only"
- Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library
- Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked
- Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs
- Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP
- Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong
Usually #1 actually works, most cases, and missing discord, several healthy communities on Discord nowadays
yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world
SO allows questions that are specific to a library.
I like that out of all of them, that was the most false to you.
SO closes your question for being a duplicate of some other random question that has nothing to do with yours. That would be true.
You’re using your mom for rubber duck debugging, then. An LLM can work for that as well, usually better because it knows a lot more than your mom.
It's fictional, I never actually got burned by a tech lead nor been put on PIP either, nor asked my mom to help me with programming :)
That's not really relevant, the point is LLMs are actually pretty good for the scenario you described.
So is IRC, the relevance being that none of what I wrote in my initial comment is actually serious or my actual beliefs.
I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer.
There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.
It definitely seems like politics ruins everything. Nerds once thought they'd transcended politics and then discovered they hadn't.
"Politics" being another word for "game theory when it's about humans"
Just tried to open stack overflow and was told their site was under maintenance. When I refreshed, it blocked my IP for refreshing too many times. I expect better from SO.
Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users
If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did.
What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.
The users being generally unhelpful wasn't an issue for them, since they were still significantly more helpful than users anywhere else on the internet. Reddit was and still is filled with completely unvetted answers (on pretty much all topics not just programming), Quora was/is a joke, Yahoo answers had some funny posts I guess but nothing you could actually learn from, what else really was there? Before AI, Stack Overflow was as good as it gets.
It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
It just accelerated the trend, and I am sure that reddit took over for a lot of new users. The different problems with SO has been well documented.
And they killed maybe one of the most side features of it : https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
So yeah metakill your own brands with stupid policies.
There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
Definitely this. The moderators seemed to have the Lock Question button connected to their dopamine pathways.
That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.
Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision
Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.
I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
Right around the time Google rolled out new search results removed many information based sites.
"How AI precipitated SO's downfall" would be a correct title then
Add it to the list:
- the downfall of junior devs
- bad hiring market
- layoffs in practically every sector
theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.
I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial. There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI, and strong reason to believe that we would see it with AI. So we have a model that makes testable predictions, and data strongly consistent with those testable predictions, in the form of an acceleration of existing downward trends. What more do you want?
>I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial
I think if you actually look at the data for these trends rather than asking AI what it thinks you might experience some cognitive dissonance.
>There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI
It's called hiked interest rates. The economy is not doing so great for several reasons but the main one is wars.
Hiked interest rates cause a decline in Stackoverflow activity?
My answer doesn't change. Against the background of other phenomena already causing various trends, we see acceleration of those trends consistent with a testable hypothesis about the effects of AI adoption in industry. In most fields of science that's good evidence in favor of the model.
And no I didn't ask AI about it, this is my own opinion and my own perspective.
People love simplistic narratives, i usually don't mind but this is just ridiculous. AI hate is gently overtaking AI hype as the most stupid thing around
AI hype is still a million miles ahead and a million times dumber, especially thanks to online astroturfing.
By volume sure, a part of the anti AI crowd is pretty extreme though, death threads, bomb threads, etc.
Yes.
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.
It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.
You mean the fall to a thousand questions per month. Now that the volume is low enough someone has a chance of looking at every single one of them, maybe the StackOverflow community can finally collaborate in peace, safe from the onslaught of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation.
https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073
It's very much a bell curve
Just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times.
> just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve
I'm going to assume this is bait...
Bell curves are probability distributions. This is a time series, so it can’t be a bell curve. It just has the same shape.
Are you discarding the utility of Gaussian functions in analysis simply because the independent variable is time? A Gaussian curve can be used as a descriptive model without claiming that the observations themselves are a probability distribution
The fit does not prove causation, but it does show that the decline was already well described by a trend that began years before generative AI. If the claim is that 2023 created a separate structural break, it's different claim then the title describes
Do you mean "just because it's a bell curve, doesn't make it a normal distribution"?
No, I meant what I said.
Those graphs look nothing alike, except for "going up and then vaguely going down."
I don't know what to say other than learn math
I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.
> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years
Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it. AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already largely prior to AI.
this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.
This isn't really a bell curve.
check my other response, it's very much a bell curve, statistically speaking
https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
> statistically speaking
That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?
A bell curve is not an "amortised function." Amortization applies to accounting and algorithmic time complexity, not probability distributions. You're likely thinking of a Probability Density Function (PDF). If you are going to police terminology, it helps to use the correct words. Second, fitting a curve with an R^2 of 0.911 is the exact opposite of "making shapes out of clouds.
> A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standard deviation.
The general notion of a bell-shaped curve is broader than that. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function
> “typically continuous or smooth, asymptotically approach zero for large negative/positive x, and have a single, unimodal maximum at small x.”
You don't just fit a Gaussian distribution to a timeseries dataset. That's not what a Gaussian curve is designed for at all. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regr...
You are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.
> No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.
You are doing that implicitly by fitting a Gaussian curve.
Fitting a mathematical function to a dataset does not implicitly adopt the ontological baggage of probability theory. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of applied mathematics
Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong:
* Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it.
* Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.
Yeah, I used to mostly answer there instead of ask and was in the top % for several big tags whatever that means / is worth, but then at some point I realized things had changed and I was spending more time fighting rules and guidelines rather than sharing knowledge and having a good time so I just stopped.
It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems
A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community
The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"
I have never actively asked a question on SO either. But for every programming question I ever had (literally!), I always either found the solution to it, or the reason why my question was stupid. (Which usually boils down to me not understanding sthg about the technology I'm working with.)
Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...
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.
Now do a graph for the money.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...
> There's no one drop where "AI got into the market"
Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.
They didn’t stand a chance. Even in the era where they made a great community etc etc AI would have destroyed them. Other people are just a poor source of information now that we have dramatically good search across all human knowledge.
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.
Some of the pre-ai decline in questions might just be that they had filled out of alot of the question space. What might be more interesting is the traffic graph as it would be possible to have a decline in questions but still have traffic rising to the existing ones.
Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.
The graph starts falling shortly after 2020. AI certainly contributed but Stack Overflow was dying without it.
Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph
I recall some moves where SO announced they would be revising ToS to disclose their intent to repackage and use the site’s content for sale and/or model training.
Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted.
I guess that’s “LLM related”
One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.
Stack overflow was always going to die. AI just sped it up. The misconception that it was a community is surprising. People went there for an answer and left, very few would stick around, not only because there was no incentive, but if you did you'd likely get crapped on by one of the hostile moderators which would ensure you'd leave and never come back, because who wants to willingly be treated badly.
It was basically an imposer syndrome enforcing machine.
Does the peak starting in mid-2020 correspond to mass speculative / adversarial / bandwagon hiring by tech companies during the pandemic?
This made me browse through my StackOverflow history. Funny to see how I though I was such a skilled developer, though the questions I asked and the answers I gave 16 years ago... cringe.
The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.
I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones).
It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing
StackOverflow was on decline due to mismanagement and hostility towards the community. This was well before AI. AI was just the death blow.
Hug of death? Doesn’t seem to load for me
Yes, still down. The HTML loads eventually with the query contents, but no CSS, much less query results
I miss Joel Spolsky's writings especially in this dark age of AI.
Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin.
Interesting to compare with MathOverflow which has distinctly different policies (only research-level questions) and professional community: https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/st... - also falling lately, but by a factor of 2-3x from peak rather than 1000x.
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.
I never understood the point if having the unfathomable churn of thousands of new questions per day. The value of SO to me was always a knowledge base with reputation mechanics, and that did not change. I still default to searching before asking AI.
I’m surprised the site had that little activity, relatively, around 2010. That’s when I was using it the most. It seemed plenty large to me at the time… I can’t imagine the experience was that great a few years later. I wasn’t really paying attention by the time it reached the peaks later that decade.
I always found the format of the side obtuse and the culture not very welcoming. My most popular answer ever was something about JavaScript from 2008 or 2009, and to this day, people come in and say “this isn’t the way to do it, this is outdated“. No kidding, but every new question about that gets closed as a duplicate.
I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.
This query is even better: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/c...
Wow, this one really highlights the collapse. Basically no new questions have been asked this year while unanswered questions climbed unabated.
Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.
There is a pretty sharp acceleration of that decline around 2022/2023.
Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there.
Funnily enough, there's now a "StackOverflow for Agents": https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent
Can it please do the same to reddit?
If you made a chart showing real human activity on reddit I imagine there's a big decline. The obviousness of bots and bot upvoting is undeniable
There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.
Looks like the decline started before the ai boom.
I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.
I am surprised how early the overall downward trend developed. There is no doubt LLMs put a nail in the coffin, but the 5 years from 2017 to 2022 look to have brought a non trivial decline of their own
My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…
While I never posted much to Stackoverflow I have fond memories of it as a sole developer, finding other people with similar issues and the quality solutions offered that often got me out of a jam.
Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.
Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.
Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.
Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.
Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.
Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?
Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?
The platform in question was openly hostile to people asking questions and made discussions against the rules. That's why people left the moment a better option came along
Yes, it had that problem.
But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels.
Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...
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.
Two years before ChatGPT is shortly after Joel and Jeff sold Stack Overflow to private equity.
The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.
For those who don't know what the Monica affair was: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-...
The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?
In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy pro-AI decisions from the admin.
> The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?
The title of this thread is "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph." That's a narrative. At least before the mods change it.
Ah you're right, that's totally on me. I don't know how I missed that
The site looks like it was actually dying since 2014 and AI just turned off the life support.
It was such a hostile environment. It always seemed like you basically had to already know the answer to ask a question.
I think Ai is not the issue here. SEO on the other hand very much. It’s not like any one ever went to stackoverflow to find a solution, it was just that they were the google results for a lot of things
Looks like StackOverflow was already declining by the time ChatGPT came out
I've only posted one question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.
Wow!! I checked for English learners, Artificial Intelligence and GenAI as well and even they suck :D
Guess where these people went? Reddit?
I will miss their yearly developer survey. Otherwise I won’t miss them. What a frustrating experience it was.
They still have it, and just sent it out
AI was the final nail but SO was already on a downward trajectory imo. Too much angry rule setting and confident jerks.
Where will AI's get the training data to answer questions now?
AI is smart enough to figure out many answers from docs or code prototypes.
Smaller fraction of novel questions are still submitted on SO, github discussion and mailing lists.
Honestly SO helped me a lot in Uni 10 years ago. However I was banned 5+ times for just asking a normal question with attempts at answering. Can’t say I’m surprised. It was not welcoming, massively exclusive and had a rude community. RIP
Didn't Stack Overflow have a similar impact on Experts Exchange?
Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.
Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
AI and ridiculously aggressive moderation. If it had been a more welcoming place it probably would have lasted longer.
When an ecological shoes company pivot to AI, I wonder why StackOverflow executives don't pilot for AI now.
They are trying I guess: https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/10/announcing-stack-overf...
There's still a question of what that would do for them. I haven't used SO in years because I haven't needed it in years.
That's primarily due to AI answering my technical questions.
asking why SO declined is itself a question that would get closed as a duplicate on SO
As others said it wasn't just AI but their excessive moderation
Picking on SO and the mods in particular is a popular HN pasttime. I'd like to add that I interacted a bit with SO (1k points) and never really had any problems with them. I must be lucky...
Perhaps the harshest lesson of stackoverflow is that it represented what happens when you give programmer-types unfettered control of a culture. A bitter pill indeed.
just today I googled "convert PDF to Jpg" and the first stackoverflow answer was a hit on google and the question was "CLOSED, NOT APPROPRIATE".
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.
Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
Should read what Google did to remove sites from search results.
AI didn't start the decline, it just finished it.
Yeah, I don't remember when was the last time I even visited stackexchange. AI is so much better, it's not even a contest. The real question is where AI will get its knowledge in 10 or 15 years when there is no training material anymore...
Did anyone use the site search? Whenever I tried it it was disappointing. After ~two attempts I always went back to Google. Having the answer is of no use if you refuse to give it. LLMs didn't happen overnight. With all the aging questions, perhaps it was always doomed to be replaced by something.
Just like stackoverflow saved developers from experts exchange, it might be able to save us from what is coming from AI being an averaging engine by default and generating average code. Hopefully it's average but always works.
They had a good run!
Discussion in January:
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345
And previously in 2025:
Stack overflow is almost dead
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999125
Slightly accelerated their decline. You have a drop around chatgpt release then the slope returns to its previous pace of decline.
no wonders, this will keep going on same trend
Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.
Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.
Somehow I feel that whole idea was 50% broken from start. In field changing as fast as programming you simply cannot have canonical source that is done. There are areas which are constant or slow moving. But too many others are in churn. Trying to apply same rules for both is clearly insanity. And this is really the failure of SO...
Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it might have worked... But can't remove power from those who had it for years...
You also have to think that SO was very early in gamification and changing things around that never got political will afaict - people love their points.
The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.
That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.
Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.
The trend might've stalled or even reversed if it weren't for AI, we can't just assume the same end was written in stone.
The site for lazy code monkeys is dead.
Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.
Careful - the LLM companies are also modern day dictators and pharoahs.
lol. Error 503.
I can't see any specific "and then AI happened" in this graph? SO made a lot of dumb choices that made it less and less useful for people independent of forcing AI in there, nothing in this graph is a clear indicator that AI was even a blip on the rapid decline of a service intent on making itself as poor an experience as possible for folks wanting to help other folks.
What I like about AI is that it doesn't close my chats as "duplicate" and link to something unrelated. It doesn't refuse to tell me how to do something just because there's another way to do something else that I am not interested in and didn't ask for.
Hehe, I'm so glad I blew the lid on this thing some time ago.
Mods were so shitty I always wanted to have my schadenfreude on them.
StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.
Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.
If there is not allowed to be duplicate questions isn't it by design that as the site and industry matures the number of posts go down.
By now I’m more and more starting to wonder how this graph looks for Google itself
people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird.
i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.
same story for blogs
joining the space and getting to know this site in 2015ish it was toxic af, well deserved
that must be depressing to the owners and the investors.
The company my friend works for has a slack channel for help with code, like an internal stackoverflow. It’s almost inactive now.
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.
I noticed the same thing. Another thing that seems to have disappear: lunch and learn focusing on the tech stack. And I mean specifically about "how to do this in <programming language", not product/company focused.
AI didn't kill SO, SO was already declining due to toxic users and lack of organization. The toxic users were dunning-krugerian anal-retentive mini-Napoleons who delighted in locking anything slightly off-topic and merging slightly-related questions, and the lack of organization was a tendency for people to give incorrect answers but still get upvoted (due to Google search surfacing the page in the wrong context).
There's always going to be lots of latent insecurity among amateurs when a pro shows up.
Honestly because of this and the relative lack of actual pros on the site, real pros will get pushed out and the site will actually build a collection of misinformation. That's probably why pros feel that software quality has dropped so much in since stackoverflow.
SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet.
I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too.
And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes.
Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help.
Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely.
There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high.
Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.
Now that Stack Overflow is mostly dead, what's the experience of asking a question there? Will you still get berated or are people chilled out?
It wasn't only LLMs it was also the downright user-hostile attitude prevalent on many sites on the SE network: https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX
Yeah, bro, I'm not a statistics professor so I can't provide you with the "details or clarity" you need. I tried my best and if that's not enough, fuck it. Same story on history.SE: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hi... If you're gonna require "evidence of prior research" I won't bother. The bots are way friendlier and just as knowledgeable.
The golden goose were users asking questions, not the anal-retentive content curators. SO let the latter drive away the former.
Stackoverflow deserved to die
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.
I disagree. From what I see, company specific stackoverflow like mailing lists or slack channels are also dead.
The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.
One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.
FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.
The move the current companies are missing is to have a legislation declaring ai as a person. Just like how corporations are people, if ai is a person then they don’t have to show number of people fired, can argues content creation and engagement is through the roof and so many other possibilities. /s
Sadge
I tried looking it up but "“sadge” The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary." Care to say more than whatever slang I presume this is?
Are you a X-ennial? I've only ever heard my little brother say that. Just curious.
Wikipedia seems to be going the same way.