Stackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom. Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is mainly about asking and answering questions.

Since the trend must go on, we expect StackExchange to now offer answers, and the user responses need to be questions. We could even make a quiz game show out of that! /s

it died

The most toxic, degrading, and insulting forum for people. My questions, as well as my answers, always got poisonous criticism. Good.

I think the disallowing of “controversial” technical questions might have helped as much as the AI boom.

So frustrating to be reading a deeply interesting technically and intense debate to be closed down by an admin.

I'm glad I learned how to program when you could coax useful answers from Google searches.

Whenever a Stack Overflow result comes up now the answer is years old and wrong, you might as well search archive.org.

I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time.

I use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago.

I used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time.

So perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP.

I don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components.

StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me.

Actually I think it never did.

It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account.

And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile.

I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities.

Where will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration.

Before writing the comment I had in my head I did a CTRL+F search for "toxic" in the comment section here. 42 occurences. It says everything about what's happening to SO.

Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be?

The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?

A decline in number of questions asked can also be because most people's questions are already answered in the database.

How would you query this for post views over time?

Now imagine what happens when a new programming language comes along. When we have a question, we will no longer be able to Google it and find answers to it on Stack Overflow. We will ask the LLMs. They will work it out. From that moment, the LLM we used has the knowledge for solving this particular problem. Over time, this produces huge moat for the largest providers. I believe it is one of the subtler reasons why the AI race is so fierce.

Stagnation started around 03/2014 and downward trend started around 03/2017. Looking at dates, it doesn't seem like AI caused those trend changes.

It's a very toxic place, you ask a doubt, and someone will abuse you, down vote you, make you feel you are not for to be a human. Better it's dead.

I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.

It's unfortunate that SO hasn't found a way to leverage LLMs. Lots of questions benefit from some initial search, which is hard enough that moderators likely felt frustrated with actual duplicates, or close enough duplicates, and LLMs seem able to assist. However I hope we don't lose the rare gem answers that SO also had, those expert responses that share not just a programming solution but deeper insight.

Interesting timing. I just analyzed TabNews (Brazilian dev community) and ~50% of 2025 posts mention AI/LLMs. The shift is real. The 2014 peak is telling. That's before LLMs, before the worst toxicity complaints. Feels like natural saturation, most common questions were already answered. My bet, LLMs accelerated the decline but didn't cause it. They just made finding those existing answers frictionless.

Good times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show proof, etc.)

Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting questions and making snark comments.

How is Experts Exchange doing?

SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now.

I used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?

Why did SO traffic halve from it's maximum till the ChatGPT release date? Also, for a long time after initial release, ChatGPT was pretty much useless for coding questions. It only became more or less useful ~2 years ago. So there's about 4x decline from peak to explain with reasons that do not involve LLMs. What these could be?

There's no doubt that generally LLMs are better. In addition SO had its issues. That being said I can't help but worry about losing humans asking questions and humans answering questions. The sentimentality aside, if humans aren't posing questions and if humans aren't recommending answers, what are the models going to use?

Stack Overflow set out to be a better Q&A site but has turned into a user-unfriendly, gatekeeping platform where questions are often marked as duplicates because a similar question was answered 15 years ago. Everything and every question is banned, gatekeep, or marked as a duplicate.

For me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose. Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me.

But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?

I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.

I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.

While I generally agree with the narrative of the negative arc that stack overflow took, I found (and have as recently as a few months ago) that I could have enjoyable interactions on the math, Ux, written language, and aviation exchanges. The OS ones in the middle (always found the difference between Linux and superuser confusing).

Someone needs to archive the entirety of StackOverflow and make it available over torrent so that it can be preserved when the site shuts down. Urgently.

It's amazing to think that in the next few years, we may have software engineers entering the workforce who don't know what StackOverflow is...

Everyone is saying LLMs did this site in, but what if we just asked all the questions already? We should be celebrating how we solved programming!

I misread the title at first and thought it was hacker news questions [comments] that were being graphed. That’s what I would be interested in seeing

Acquired in June 2021 for $1.8 billion usd. Hurts but acquirer Naspers is a prolific tech investor, its stake in TenCent is worth > $150B usd today.

The result is not surprising! Many people are now turning to LLMs with their questions instead. This explains the decline in the number of questions asked.

Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity.

Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their practical value and original intent.

Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing products. As a result, answers from genuine users that recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience were frequently removed altogether.

Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction and discourages broader user participation.

Everyone here talks about LLMs, but for me, the reason why StackOverflow became totally irrelevant is because of dedicated Discord servers and forums.

I really admire that they publicly posted this data, and hope that the platform can find a new type of pivot or draw to bring back a community.

Has AI summarization led to people either getting their answer from a search engine directly, and failing that, just giving up?

Looks like they sold right before the end. Wonder whether the AI deals they've struck make up for the difference

Couldn’t have happened to a meaner community

Maybe the average question will be more "high level" now that all simple questions are answered by LLMs ?

While the decline started a decade ago in 2014 and accelerated in 2020, the huge drop since 2023 is remarkable

Good riddance.

I stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the community was such a pain in the ass to deal with.

Monica has the last laugh it seems

they pretend like everything is fine at HN too wouldn't surprise me looking similar in the future.

It's funny to see people's new year's resolution to learn how to code in the graph

It was a good idea ruined by the compulsively obtuse and pedantic, not unlike Reddit.

It was a good 16 year-ish run.

I've never once asked a question on there Mostly because you can't unless your account has X something-points. Which you get by answering questions.

This threw me off so much when I got started with programming. Like why are the people who have the most questions, not allowed to ask any...?

And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - "too broad". I mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds?

Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well.

Probably similar for google. My first line of search is always chatgpt

Good riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost never being asked on Stack overflow).

The most annoying example I can think of (but can’t link to, alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question, and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn’t answer the question, telling the person to just Google the answer.

When StackOverflow dies, who will train the LLMs?

While SO is mostly dead, narrower stackexchange communities may be very much alive. E.g. the Emacs community is responsive.

Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to. LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact.

And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder.

I'm not sad.

Clicked on the link and got stopped by cloudflare. Guess I won't be giving them any more traffic either.

I am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me as much over the last ten years.

It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I for one will mourn its loss.

I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to be shared.

It makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time as people google questions and get results. It would be interesting to look at the number of comments and views of questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have driven declining engagement and discussion.

There are still airgapped places in the world where transferring information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they’re not worth using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for engineering teams working in these environments.

I think the bigger point we should realize is LLMs offer the EXACT same thing in a better way. Many people are still sharing answers to problems but they do it through an AI which then fine tunes on it and now that problem solution is shared with EVERYONE.

Far better method of automated sharing of content

I wonder what the April 2020 spike is about... maybe lockdowns meant people started learning new stuff?

Wonder if this is a good proxy for '# of Google Searches'. Or perhaps a forward indicator (sign of things to come), since LLMs are adopted by the tech-savvy first, then the general public a little later, so Stack Overflow was among the first casualties.

I recently wrote a blog post similar to this situation: https://ertu.dev/posts/ai-is-killing-our-online-interaction/

I'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often at one time. These days I don't even think about it.

It is always good to see other cultured people who structure their SQL queries the right way.

On what will the LLMs train, now?

Seems like there are "blocked by cloudflare" number of questions per month.

Their blocking of everyone not using chrome/etc from accessing their website probably contributed quite a bit to the implied downturn I'm reading in other comments.

Surprising to see it bottom out so hard.

I imagine at least some of the leveling off could be due to question saturation. If duplicates are culled (earnestly or overzealously) then there will be a point where most of the low hanging fruit is picked.

The SO mission is complete. It's now an LLM training set.

Things would be different if we didn't.

There will be a generation of coders that will never have heard of stack overflow.

When you see AI giving you back various coding snippets almost verbatim from SO, it really makes you wonder what will happen in the future with AI when it can't depend on actual humans doing the work first.

I certainly use it less now that I get a CloudFlare check every time I go and sometimes it fails or loads forever. I usually just go back to search results and look elsewhere after a second or two.

This is a great example of how free content was exploited by LLMs and used against oneself to an ultimate destruction.

Every content creator should be terrified of leaving their content out for free and I think it will bring on a new age of permanent paywalls and licensing agreements to Google and others, with particular ways of forcing page clicks to the original content creators.

What if we filter out all the questions closed as dupes, off topic, etc?

Man after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard, but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I, as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM instead of being able to peruse great answers from different perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.

So it seems all the questions have now been answered– Great!

I suspect a lot of the traffic shift is from Google replacing the top search result, which used to be Stack Overflow for programming questions, with a Gemini answer.

I don't know what you are building, but if a thing doesn't have comprehensive docs it doesn't make it into my stack.

glad I don’t work at any place that would make a professional write this comment

I just typed the literal phrase "mysql error 1095" into ChatGPT with no context, and it gave an answer that was no worse than SO for the same search.

No need to give it anything about my repository, network environment, or even a complete sentence.

Not surprising. It's very often a toxic, unhelpful, stubborn community. I think maybe once or twice in years of use did I ever find it genuinely welcoming and helpful. Frequently instead I thought "Why should I even bother to post this? It'll just get either downvoted, deleted, or ignored."

A death graph.

Kind of sad that they ran out of ideas how to fix SO.

End of an era. :-(

Gee...I wonder why it's almost dead (again)?

I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.

Someone turn off the lights on the way out

I wonder if google search saw a similar hit

LLMs are dogshit in many ways but when it comes to programming they are faster than people, respond instantaneously to further information, and can iterate until they understand the problem fully.

Bonus is that you don’t get some dipshit being snarky.

Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough?

Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.

>This post was not virtue signaling enough and therefore closed as duplicate.

SO had the greatest minds but the shitiest moderation

StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs.

Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of course, but I wanted to do so out of principle.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...

Eternal September is finally over =)

It was impossible to ask certain programming questions. Asking there was truly last resort.

Derivative of S curve

I mean, I kinda of miss it. But man it was a hostile place for newcomers.

Only ever asked one question and I tried to answer more than a handful but never really clicked with the site.

I do wonder if it would have faired better under the original ownership before it was sold in 2021-06-02.

I not even hearing stack overflow survey for 2025

damn bro, its sad how "tradition" is gone now

edit: I know they still doing it but usually there is "viral" post,yt video etc for developer talking about it in my feed

now??? less people talk about it anymore

I’m glad it’s dead. They were super rude.

llm killed stackoverflow

This is incredible. Anyone who claims LLMs aren't useful will need to explain how come almost every programmer can solve 95% of his problems with an LLM without needing anything else. This is real usefulness right here.

EDIT: I'm not saying I'm loving what happened and what is becoming of our roles and careers, I'm just saying things have changed forever; there's still a (shrinking) minority of people who seem to not be convinced.

Now the real question is...

Which AI company will acquire whats left of StackOverflow and all the years of question/answer data?

What an incredible graph

Flag it as off topic

Another note to add here: The whole system was stupid, too! What do you mean, I can only give answers, but not comment?

While there is much more to say about SO's demise, the "interaction" on the platform was definitely not one of its strengths, either.

Cool, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344599

Wonder why my submission wasn't featured and this one went to #1 immediately ... oh wait I actually know :^)!

For those who have historically wondered about or objected to "moderation" (people usually mean curation here; as the overwhelming majority of the actions they're talking about are not performed by moderators) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-picked list of important discussions from the meta site explaining some policy basics:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 If your question was not well received, read this before you post your next question

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254358 Why the backlash against poor questions?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 What is Stack Overflow’s goal?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262446 Are we being "elitist"? Is there something wrong with that?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791 The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high (N.B.: linked specifically for the satire in the top-voted answer)

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 Why is "Can someone help me?" not a useful question?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/309208 Are there questions that are too trivial to answer?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 Why isn't it required to provide comments/feedback for downvotes, and why are proposals suggesting this so negatively received?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366757 On the false dichotomy between quality and kindness

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 Can we make it more obvious to new users that downvotes on the main site are not insults and in fact can help them help themselves?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 Comments asking for clarification or an MCVE are not rude/abusive

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/370792 Is this really what we should consider "unwelcoming"?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (fd: my self-answered Q&A)

Note that IDs are in chronological order. The rate of new meta.stackoverflow.com posts fell off dramatically at some point because of the formation of a network-wide meta.stackexchange.com. The earliest entries listed here are from 2014.

Holy shit.

For this occasion, I just logged in to my SO profile; I've been a member for 9 years now.

To me, back when I started out learning web dev, as a junior with no experience and barely knowing anything, SO seemed like a paradise for programmers. I could go on there and get unblocked for the complex (but trivial for experts) issues I was facing. Most of the questions I initially posted, which were either closed as duplicates or "not good enough," really did me a lot of discouragement. I wasn't learning anything by being told, "You did it wrong, but we're also not telling you how you could do it better." I agree with the first part; I probably sucked at writing good questions and searching properly. I think it's just a part of the process to make mistakes but SO did not make it better for juniors, at least on the part of giving proper guidance to those who "sucked".

They had pretty neat infra, maybe it still runs in the same clever way. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...

I fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/

SO peaked long, long before LLMs came along. My personal experience is that GitHub issues took over.

You can clearly see the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022. That was the final nail in the coffin.

I am still really glad that Stack Overflow saved us from experts-exchange.com - or “the hyphen site” as it is sometimes referred to.

Seems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold to a private equity firm.

Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again.

AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with.

When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer.

This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.

Wow. I was expecting a decline but not to that extent.

Whenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246333

Everything we have done and said on the internet since its birth has just been to train the future AI.

I ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000.

I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated.

This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people using R, this seemed like something completely new. So, they just downvoted the question and told me I was wrong.

I ended up answering my own question… but was also told that was wrong and that all points must have the same error interval.

Instead of answering a programming question, people just went around denying experimental physics.

I think that was the beginning of the end of SO for me.

One thing you won’t get with in an LLM is genuine research. I once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code of vim to see how the poster’s question could be resolved. [0]

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619423/backup-restore-th...

Wow, that's not just collapsing, that's collapsed.

People are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also don’t forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push his personal political agenda.

The number of active users at StackOverflow started dropping in the middle of 2020, i.e. long time before ChatGPT release in the end of 2022.

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/192836...

Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.

AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).

SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?

Good riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any alternative.

And that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking questions because they didn't want to run the moderation gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing.

LLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will oblige.

Looking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve.

If nobody is on StackOverflow, What will LLM's train on for new problems?

Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse?

The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.

The corresponding answers graph: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/a...

The founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way that site is worth $1.8 billion now.

Approaching 0 is wild

Spolsky and co. sold SO in 2021 - timing IS everything.

I still would like to get other humans' experiences and perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO doesn't go away entirely.

With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that, but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".

Don't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses?

It should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible.

IMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community.

Assuming these end up in open source code llms will learn about them that way.

I am fully aware that it's split off. My entire point of mentioning it was that even a bit of extra fun got excised from the site.

>The issue is that code golf didn't fit well into the intended design

Exactly! The intended design of SO was to be a hellhole, even though it was able to stave off this fate in its infancy by virtue of having too many optimistic new users.

SO has lost against LLMs because it has insistently positioned itself as a knowledge base rather than a community. The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it.

They basically made a bet because they wanted to be the full anti-thesis of ad-ridden garbage-looking forums. Pure information, zero tolerance for humanity, sterile looking design.

They achieved that goal, but in the end, they dug their own grave too.

LLMs didn’t admonish us to write our questions better, or simply because we asked for an opinion. They didn’t flag, remove our post with no advance notice. They didn’t forbid to say hello or thanks, they welcomed it. They didn’t complain when we asked something that was asked many times. They didn’t prevent us from deleting our own content.

Oh yeah, no wonder nobody bothers with SO anymore.

It’s a good lesson for the future.

Do I read that correctly — it is close to zero today?!

I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.

This is a huge loss.

In the past people asked questions of real people who gave answers rooted in real use. And all this was documented and available for future learning. There was also a beautiful human element to think that some other human cared about the problem.

Now people ask questions of LLMs. They churn out answers from the void, sometimes correct but not rooted in real life use and thought. The answers are then lost to the world. The learning is not shared.

LLMs have been feeding on all this human interaction and simultaneously destroying it.

StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.

Instead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This killed the pub and with it the business.

The most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old timers took when they joined. And duplicates allow anyone with a grudge to take revenge. After all, there are no new questions, and you will always find a duplicate if you want to.

To create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by itself.

SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.

I recall when they disabled the data export a few years ago [0], March 2023. Almost certainly did this in response to the metrics they were seeing, but it accelerated the decline [1].

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-da...

[1] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...

As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0].

I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a discussion site, rather than the Q&A site that it was set out to be.

I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile or that they unfairly closed questions without bringing the citations required. I'm not saying at all that SO was without it's flaws in leadership, moderators, community or anything else that made the site what it was. But if you're going to complain, at least bring examples, especially when you have someone here you could hold somewhat accountable.

The problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Discord chats, StackOverflow or GitHub issues. People still don't know how to ask questions:

* [1] * [2] * [3]

[0]: https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-as... [1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670 [2]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649 [3]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515

One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..?

Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it).

As everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI, and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before looks similar

Also not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?) but that's definitely one of the things that made me default reach for other links instead of SO.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png

Here’s how SO could still be useful in the LLM era:

User asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation to add additional insights and correct mistakes.

If you’re a user that asks a duplicate question, it’ll just direct you to the good conversation that already happened.

A symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS human generated content that dives deeper and provides reassurances in correctness

StackExchange forgot who made them successful long ago. This is what they sowed. I don't have any remorse, only pity.

When Hans Passant (OGs will know) left, followed by SE doing literally nothing, that was the first clue for me personally that SE stopped caring.

That said, it is a bit shocking how close to zero it is.

Stackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck.

I was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but got stuck in one particular function.

It was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I couldn't find anything on Google.

Had no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time. (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I didn't understand the documentation)

It was a fond memory of the site for me.

AI is a vampire. Coming to your corner of the world, to suck your economic blood, eventually. It’s hard to ignore the accelerated decline that started in late 2022/early 2023.

LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls

So the question for me is how important was SO to training LLMs? Because now that the SO is basically no longer being updated, we've lost the new material to train on? Instead, we need to train on documentation and other LLM output. I'm no expert on this subject but it seems like the quality of LLMs will degrade over time.

Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge?

A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources.

However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb.

LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO.

Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?

LLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing.

The steep decline in the early months of 2023 actually started with the release of ChatGPT, which is 2022-11-30, and its gradually widening availability to (and awareness of) the public from that date. The plot clearly shows that cliff.

The gentle decline since 2016 does not invalidate this. Were it not for LLMs, the site's post rate would now probably be at around 5000 posts/day, not 300.

LLMs are to "blame" for eating all the trivial questions that would have gotten some nearly copy-pasted answer by some eager reputation points collector, or closed as a duplicate, which nets nobody any rep.

Stack Overflow is not a site for socializing. Do not mistake it for reddit. The "karma" does not mean "I hate you", it means "you haven't put the absolute minimum conceivable amount of effort into your question". This includes at least googling the question before you ask. If you haven't done that, you can't expect to impose on the free time of others.

SO has a learning curve. The site expects more from you than just to show up and start yapping. That is its nature. It is "different" because it must be. All other places don't have this expectation of quality. That is its value proposition.

For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM"

https://sosimulator.xyz/

Good.

This is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic.

LLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup.

Game over. I didn’t notice all the toxicity mentioned in the other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe. It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its name is part of web history, and there’s no denying that.

They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion".

Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.

StackOverflow cemented my fears of asking questions. Even though there were no results for what I needed, I was too afraid to ask.

Good riddance, now I’m never afraid to ask dumb questions to LLM and I’ve learned a lot more with no stress of judgement.

Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more.

I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board.

With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September).

I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed.

People are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them.

Oh absolutely - when it becomes clear you have high engagement somewhere, adapt that feature to facilitate the engagement! They could have made comments threaded or embedded ways to expand it into the right forum, but instead they literally shut down engagement. Bonkers.

Right now, at the first 15 one has a positive vote, 6 have negative votes, going down to -3.

The 8 at 0 are just taking longer to amass those negative votes. It's incredibly rare that a positive one ever goes somewhere.

If my questions become more open ended and challenging as I become more senior, and I am not allowed to ask them on SO, why would I stay on the website?

So you get junior questions only and no seniors to answers.

The decline started in 2016, not 2026, they killed themselves

The newer questions that LLMs can't answer will be answered in forums - either SO, reddit, or elsewhere. There will be a much higher percentage of relevant content with far fewer new pages regurgitating questions about solved problems. So the LLMs will be able to keep up.

> - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?

To me this shows just how limited LLMs are. Hopefully more people realize that LLMs aren't as useful as they seem, and in 10 years they're relegated to sending spam and generating marketting websites.

I think the interesting thing here for those of us who use open source frameworks is that we can ask the LLM to look at the source to find the answer (eg. Pytorch or Phoenix in my case). For closed source libraries I do not know.

> What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?

That's a great question. I have no idea how things will play out now - do models become generalized enough to handle "out of distrubition" problems or not ? If they don't then I suppose a few years from now we'll get an uptick in Stackoverflow questions; the website will still exist it's not going anywhere.

Specialized research AI agents are coming at which point we'll have numerous LLMs running and verifying experiments and creating a higher quality text corpus than the 2014-2020 halcyon, which is then used for other LLMs to be trained on.

It will be the reverse I suspect. Eventually we will see that LLM quality is lower when it is training data from 2014-2020 and will chalk it up to human limitations and the data not being written with a laser-focused goal of training better AI.

Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means.

Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative.

> SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions

We will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some details/quirks/gotchas.

Example of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more effective than LLMs.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO.

Plus they might find the answer on SO without asking a new question - You probably would expect the # of new questions to peak or plateau even if the site wasn't dying, due to the accumulation of already-answered questions.

We'll get to the point where we can mass moderate core knowledge eventually. We may need to hand out extra weight for verified experts and some kind of most-votes-win type logic (perhaps even comments?), but live training data updates will be a massive evolution for language models.

> will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?

I honestly don't think they need to. As we've seen so far, for most jobs in this world, answers that sound correct are good enough.

Is chasing more accuracy a good use of resources if your audience can't tell the difference anyway?

The LLMs will learn from our interactions with them. That's why they're often free

I stopped because of moderators. They literally killed the site for me.

Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me.

When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim.

And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it.

It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems

Questions asked on SO that got downvoted by the heavy handed moderation would have been answered by LLMs without any of the flak whatsoever.

Those who had downvoted other's questions on SO for not being good enough, must be asking a lot of such not good enough questions to an LLM today.

Sure, the SO system worked, but it was user hostile and I'm glad we all don't have to deal with it anymore.

As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state.

But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute poison.

I'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from Civ4: "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That sums it up exactly. There is a certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up as Reddit mods, for example.

Rules and standards are good up to a point but some people forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselves and having debates about what's a repeated question, how questions and answers should be structured, etc.

This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. And this goes back to the rules and standards being a tool not a goal. My stance was (and is) that shouldn't we solve flame wars when they happen rather than going around and "solving" imaginary problems?

I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider.

Even something that does have a definite answer like "how do I efficiently code a factorial function?" has multiple but different defensible answers. Even in one language you can have multiple implementations that might, say, be compile-time or runtime.

Another commenter here talked about finding the nearest point on an ellipse and came up with a method they're proud of where there are other methods that would also do the job.

Anyway, I'd occasionally login and see a constant churn on my answers from moderators doing pointless busywork as this month they'd decided something needed to be capitalized or not capitalized.

A perfect example of this kind of thing is Bryan Henderson's war on "comprised of" on Wikipedia [2].

Anyway, I think the core issue of SO was that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit and I got a lot of accepted answers on questions that could never be asked today. You'll also read many anecdotes about people having a negative experience asking questions on SO in later years where their question was immediately closed as, say, a duplicate when the question wasn't a duplicate. The moderator just didn't understand the difference. That sort of thing.

But any mature site ultimately ends with an impossible barrier to entry as newcomers don't know all the cultural rules that have been put in place and they tend to have a negative experience as they get yelled at for not knowing that Rule 11.6.2.7 forbids the kind of question they asked.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-c...

Moderation got worse over time

> What do LLMs train off of now?

Perhaps they’ll rely on what was used by people who answered SO questions. So: official docs and maybe source code. Maybe even from experience too, i.e. from human feedback and human written code during agentic coding sessions.

> The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top.

Arguably it does insult even more, just by existing alone.

Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment.

The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere.

I have been highly active in online technical communities since the usenet days in the 1980s and I have never once found myself in a situation where my opinions on sex or gender were solicited, interrogated, or judged.

This really sounds like people were letting their personal flags fly (in avatars or sigs or whatever) and you could not stand to see that because they were not like you. All you have to do is ignore it and look at the content.

This reminds me of someone I worked with, who asked me "why does [Colleague 2] have to shove his gay lifestyle in everyone's face?" after that Colleague 2 put a framed holiday photo with his husband on his desk.

The person who asked this had a photo with his wife on his desk. He was unable to understand (A) how that is "shoving" his sexual orientation in other people's faces to the exact same degree as Colleague 2's photo was; and (B) that the photo was for Colleague 2's own comfort and solace, and for positive engagement with anyone who wanted to engage in same, and that nobody else was required to dwell on it or give it a second glance.

>it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated).

Great observation. Just like friendship, open communities psychologically feel as though there should be some balance. Spending free time contributing to something (even if you don't directly expect anything in return with ulterior motives) to benefit others, then getting an anvil dropped on your head when you dare to ask for a morsel in return, was an awful feeling which occurred too often there. The site and moderation, especially since the late 2010s (and especially in 2020 and beyond), became malignantly predatory.

1.5 years ago Gemini (the same brand!) refused to provide C++ help to minors because C++ is dangerous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39632959

The problem that you worked out is only really useful if it can be recreated and validated, which in many cases it can be by using an LLM to build the same system and write tests that confirm the failure and the fix. Your response telling the model that its answer worked is more helpful for measuring your level of engagement, not so much for evaluating the solution.

You can also turn off the feature to allow ChatGPT to learn from your interactions. Not many people do but those that do would also starve OpenAI for information assume they respect that setting

Indeed, how documentation is written is key. But funny enough, I have been a strong advocate that documentation should always be written in Reference Docs style, and optionally with additional Scenario Docs.

The former is to be consumed by engineers (and now LLMs), while the later is to be consumed by humans.

Scenario Docs, or use case docs, are what millions of blog articles were made of in the early days, then we turned to Stack Overflow questions/answers, then companies started writing documentation in this format too. Lots of Quick Starts for X, Y, and Z scenarios using technology K. Some companies gave away completely on writing reference documentation, which would allow engineers to understand the fundamentals of technology K and then be able to apply to X, Y, and Z.

But now with LLMs, we can certainly go back to writing Reference docs only, and let LLMs do the extra work on Scenario based docs. Can they hallucinate still? Sure. But they will likely get most beyond-basic-maybe-not-too-advanced scenarios right in the first shot.

As for using LLMs to write docs: engineers should be reviewing that as much as they should be reviewing the code generated by AI.

    world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs

I believe the parent poster was clearly and specifically talking about software documentation that was strong and LLM consumption-friendly, not "everything"

Yeah, old news? It's how it is today with humans.

You SHOULD be making things in a human/LLM-readable format nowadays anyway if you're in tech, it'll do you well with AIs resorting to citing what you write, and content aggregators - like search engines - giving it more preferential scores.

That has nothing to do with the fact that this forum exists to promote YC and its associated ventures.

> Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.

Yup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both are still somewhat active.

[0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf

> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.

This problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a "duplicate" is inherently subjective, and therefore mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable).

I think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers interpret close votes as signals that they should give up), cultural (there's not much training/feedback/guidelines about what "duplicate" means for those with voting privileges), and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure, and it takes just as many votes to reopen a question as it does to close it (with the same voter reputation requirement)).

> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates.

The idea was, if there's an answer on the other question that solves your question, your question remains in existence as a signpost pointing to the other one without having to pollute and confuse by having a mixture of similar answers across both with different amounts of votes.

The problem is the people who decide which questions are stupid are misaligned with the site's audience.

Your first example is a public announcement of an llm assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback on an experiment isn't "sneaking" and the replies are a tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of questions so AI review seems like it should be useful.

The top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this, the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just don't do it.

The second top voted answer says "I was able to do a prompt injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug". So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol.

It seems clear these people started from a belief that ai is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why this specific feature is bad.

It's crazy that you are defending this group all over this HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem. I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in years. Those replies are embarrassing for the SO community, not AI.

I think many would agree that this policy was the single biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would Have been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high quality answers were better. Management was wrong.

This is because the real goal was SEO.

Heh, OK, dialogue wasn't the right word. I am a better informed person by the power of internet pedantry.

SO was somewhere people put their hard won experience into words, that an LLM could train on.

That won't be happening anymore, neither on SO or elsewhere. So all this hard won experience, from actually doing real work, will be inaccessible to the LLMs. For modern technologies and problems I suspect it will be a notably worse experience when using an LLM than working with older technologies.

It's already true for example, when using the Godot game engine instead of Unity. LLMs constantly confuse what you're trying to do with Unity problems, offer Unity based code solutions etc.

> Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate?

I think the name "Mixture of Experts" might be one of the most misleading labels in our industry. No, that is not at all what MoE models do.

Think of it rather like, instead of having one giant black box, we now have multiple smaller opaque boxes of various colors, and somehow (we don't really know how) we're able to tell if your question is "yellow" or "purple" and send that to the purple opaque box to get an answer.

The result is that we're able to use less resources to solve any given question (by activating smaller boxes instead of the original huge one). The problem is we don't know in advance which questions are of which color: it's not like one "expert" knows CSS and the other knows car engines.

It's just more floating point black magic, so "How do I center a div" and "what's the difference between a V6 and V12" are both "yellow" questions sent to the same box/expert, while "How do I vertically center a div" is a red question, and "what's the most powerful between a V6 and V12" is a green question which activates a completely different set of weights.

> This comment and the parent one make me realize that people who answer probably value the exchange between experts more than the answer.

I'm more amused that ExpertsExchange.com figured out the core of the issue, 30 years ago, down to their site's name.

> took gamification way too far

I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes.

They literally sold: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-...

He and Jeff made it abundantly clear their mission was to destroy the sex change site because that site was immoral for monetizing the benevolence of the community who answered the questions.

"Knowledge should be free" they said. "You shouldn't make money off stuff like this," they said.

Plenty of links and backstory in my other comments.

> Often, doing what your users want leads to success.

You misunderstand.

People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users".

Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this.

Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why.

> When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside.

I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care. Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made.

> trying to deny the toxicity and condescension

I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context.

As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish?

Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors.

You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other questions first, ensure that your account has enough "clout" to overturn stupid closures of questions, and when you have wasted enough time doing that, then you can finally ask your own question. Or you can just go somewhere else that isn't an intellectual charade and circle jerking and figure it out without wasting tons of time chasing clout and hoping a moderator won't just close the question as duplicate. SO was never the best platform, exactly because of its horrendous moderation. It was good, yes. It had the quality assurance, to a degree, yes. But when just asking a question becomes such a monumental task, people will go elsewhere, to better platforms. Which includes other forums, and, LLMs. So no, what you're attributing to LLMs is merely a symptom of the deeper issue.

It was bad enough that many people resorted to asking their questions in Discord instead which is a massive boomerang back to trying to get help in IRC and just praying that someone is online and willing to help you on the spot. Having to possibly ask your question multiple times before you get some spotty help in a real time chat where it's next to impossible to find again seems unimaginably worse than using an online forum but the fact of it remains and tells us there was something driving people away from sites like SO.

I'm talking here about cases (which is basically all of them) where the first person to ask was simply needlessly specific. Or where the canonical has the list as an incidental detail and the next person insists that the answers won't work because this code has a tuple, you see, and doesn't see the merit in trying them.

If you imagine that the answer should be re-written from scratch to explain that the approach will be the same, you have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of the site. Abstraction of contextually unimportant details is supposed to be an essential skill for programmers.

SO had answers that you couldn't find in the documentation and were you can't look in the source code.

If everything would be well documentated SO wouldn't have being as big as it was in the first place.

I see plenty of old answers that are still very relevant. Suppose it depends on what language/tech tags you follow.

There have been many times I have seen someone complain on the meta site about answers being old and outdated, and then they give specific examples, and I go check them out and they're actually still perfectly valid.

What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.

I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute.

> People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.

Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack.

We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot").

As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt.

Then you're doing it wrong?

I'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git clone the repo and tell it to reference the source.

Apologies for using you as an example, but this is a common theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a specific/complex question with little context and then complain when the answer is wrong.

Usually that's resolved by saying "I want you to use v2" or whatever it is, which you can't really do with a Stack Overflow answer as easily.

Have you tried using context7 or a similar MCP to have the agent automatically fetch up to date documentation?

The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could.

Thank you for being the voice of reason in this comment section!

What points do you get for moderation activity?

Can you explain what you're saying in greater depth?

Are you saying that the reason there is no human expertise on the internet anymore is that everyone with knowledge is now under contract to train AIs?

Fun story: SO officially states comments are ephemeral and can be deleted whenever, so I deleted some of my comments. I was then banned. After my ban expired I asked on the meta site if it was okay to delete comments. I was banned again for asking that.

If you're talking about deleting questions, that's because deleting the question would delete everyone's answers that they potentially worked very hard on and which others might find useful. If you think the answers are bad you can always post your own competing answer.

You can’t delete anything here either… so make sure you don’t say anything awful.

I remember those too! There were seemingly thousands of them!

Reminds me of my most black-hat project — a Wikipedia proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah, perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.

> When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.

One of the bigger problems with the site's moderation systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and unintuitive to new users, 2) the reopen queue was almost useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed questions ever getting reopened, and 3) even if a question did get reopened, it would be buried thousands of posts down the front page and answerers would likely never see it.

There were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system -- better "on hold" UI that would walk users through the process of revising their question, and a revamp of the review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the "triage" queue, which did little to help new users without the several other review queues that were planned to be downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped working on improvements to the site.

Management should have been aggressively chasing metrics like "percentage of closed questions that get reopened" and "number of new users whose first question is well-received and answered". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the outcome is unsurprising.

And that was the core problem with Stack Overflow - they wanted to build a system of core Q&As to be a reference, but everyone treated it as a "fix my very specific problem now".

99% of all the junk that got closed was just dumps of code and 'it doesn't work'. Not useful to anyone.

The amount of docs that have a “Copy as markdown” or “Copy for AI” button has been noticeably increasing, and really helps the LLM with proper context.

   they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web

Yeah that's a charitable way to phrase "perform distributed denial of service attacks". Browsing github as a human with their draconian rate limits that came about as a result of AI bots is fucking great.

LLMs don't experience the world, so they have no reason a priori to know what is or isn't truthful in the training data.

(Not to mention the confabulation. Making up API method names is natural when your model of the world is that the method names you've seen are examples and you have no reason to consider them an exhaustive listing.)

Its karma farming. Number must go up regardless of the human cost. Thats why the same problem is seen here, to a lesser extent.

Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement.

Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter.

There are new technologies, but if you look at the most viewed questions, they will be about Python, JS, Java, C, and C++ without libraries.

You do not find the 2009 jQuery answer satisfying?

> I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script.

You can only get at most 2000 rep from suggested edits.

After you get 2000 rep, your edits aren't "suggested" anymore and require no review... and you don't get any rep for doing them.

But you’re supposed to replace Python with a new language that hasn’t been asked about.

there is no special list rendering in HN markdown. You just have to put extra spaces between each list item so that they are separate paragraphs

Great point, thanks for the reality check.

Speaking of evals the other day I found out that most of the people who contributed to Humanities Last Exam https://agi.safe.ai/ got paid >$2k each. So just adding to your point.

So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my comments. Is deleting comments allowed?"

For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain how that's not toxic?

Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then?

Presumably over time said AI could figure out if your question had already been answered and in that case would just redirect you too the old thread instead.

"But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions."

> "actually answered our questions."

Read carefully.

Yahoo answers

Google answers

And the horrific Quora

>Gen 0: expertsexchange.com

No way.

Very similar to my experience. I never managed to either ask or answer a question on there. Everything I did was "bad" for reasons that were never explained to me in a constructive way that made me feel empowered to get a better outcome.

I used it as a reference when someone had a similar question to mine, but over time the bad taste in my mouth caused me to avoid it in google search results.

I fell into using an early — and I would say, far superior — form of ChatGPT, which consisted of carefully and clearly laying out my question, point-by-point, in a blank text file, and then usually having an insight as to what my particular stumbling block actually was and thereby being able to move forward.

Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good.

>I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again.

And it was a real gut punch when this would happen (or getting suspended/banned) to long-time users, as well. They largely precipitated their own demise, so I say good riddance.

its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times

I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be posted on Stack Overflow", which was insane to me because Stack Overflow has a "terraform" tag and category. If you visit it, you will see tons of users trying to post valid questions only to have the mods shut them down angrily.

I believe that this tension about what type of questions was baked into the very foundation of StackOverflow.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.

vs

https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

(the emphasis on "good" is in the original)

And this can be seen in the revision history of https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (take note of revision 1 and the moderation actions 2011)

---

Questions that are fun and slightly outside of the intended domain of the site are manageable ... if there is sufficient moderation to keep those types of questions from sucking up all available resources.

That was the first failing of NotProgrammingRelated.StackExchange ... later Programming.StackExchange ... later SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange.

The fun things, while they were fun took way more moderation resources than was available. People would ask a fun question, get a good bit of rep - but then not help in curating those questions. "What is your favorite book" would get countless answers... and then people would keep posting the same answers rather than reading all of them themselves and voting to cause the "good" content to bubble up to the top.

That's why TeX can have https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun and MathOverflow can have https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/soft-question and https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list -- there is a very high ratio for the active in moderation to active users.

Stack Overflow kind of had this at its start... but over time the "what is acceptable moderation" was curtailed more and more - especially in the face of more and more questions that should be closed.

While fun questions are fun... the "I have 30 minutes free before my next meeting want to help someone and see a good question" is something that became increasingly difficult. The "Keep all the questions" ideal made that harder and so fewer and fewer of the - lets call them "atwoodians" remained. From where I sit, that change in corporate policy was completely solidified when Jeff left.

As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.

What remained where shells of rules that were the "truce" in the tension between the atwoodians and spolskyites and a few people trying to fight the oncoming tide of poorly asked questions with insufficient and neglected tooling.

As the tide of questions went out and corporate realized that there was necessary moderation that wasn't happening because of the higher standards from the earlier days they tried to make it easier. The golden hammer of duplication was a powerful one - though misused in many cases. The "this question closes now because its poorly asked and similar to that other canonical one that works through the issue" was far easier than "close as {something}" that requires another four people to take note of it before the question gets an answer from the Fastest Gun in the West. Later the number of people needed was changed from needing five people to three, but by then there was tide was in retreat.

Corporate, seeing things there were fewer questions being asked measured this as engagement - and has tried things to increase engagement rather than good questions. However, those "let's increase engagement" efforts were also done with even more of a moderation burden upon the community without the tooling to fix the problems or help the diminishing number of people who were participating in moderating and curating the content of the site.

   Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes.

   Spolsky: Oh...

   Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know.

    How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question.

> Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers.

Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version, and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers.

> to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers

I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework".

(My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github.

> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.

No, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise.

If you mean "without writing a direct answer to the new question first", that is the exact point of the system. Literally all you have to do is click the link and read the existing answers.

> it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new

Sure. But someone else knew about the old question, found it for you, and directly pointed you at it so that you could get an answer immediately. And did all of this for free.

And, by doing this, now everyone else who thinks of your phrasing for the question, will be immediately able to find the old question, without even having to wait for someone to recognize the duplicate.

It's also disconnected incentives. SO users get numbers to go up by taking moderation actions so of course they do that. Also you literally get banned from reviewing questions if you don't flag enough of them to be closed. These are incentives put in place by the SO company intentionally.

It's not like only slimy people get to use moderator tools like on Reddit, since you need a lot of reputation points you get by having questions and answers voted up. It's more like (1) you select people who write surface-level-good answers since that's what's upvoted, and they moderate with a similar attitude and (2) once you have access to moderator tools you're forced to conform with (1) or your access is revoked, and (3) the company is completely incompetent and doesn't give a shit about any of this.

Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? Do we want this?

We’re talking about how communities can become toxic. How we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to be our intentions.

I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be compensated to not let a community deteriorate.

> outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.

Okay, but who's going to arbitrate that? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.)

The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though.

The other major benefit of SO being a public forum is that once a question was wrestled with and eventually answered, other engineers could stumble upon and benefit from it. With SO being replaced by LLMs, engineers are asking LLMs the same questions over and over, likely getting a wide range of different answers (some correct and others not) while also being an incredible waste of resources.

Surely the fundamental difference is one asks actual humans who know what's right vs statistical models that are right by accident.

I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which.

But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior.

I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.

I’d guess it’s also because it’s not as easy to ask your random question to a coworker when they’re not sitting next to you in the office.

SO had an opportunity to branch out into a thriving community of people helping each other, I can't state with any authority if that would have been a better end goal as they had a nice exit, but maybe if it did then it could have better maintained its energy in the wake of AI.

You say I should have stuck to newsgroups but SO sucked all the energy out of those spaces. I have 25k rep on the site so its not like I wasn't activately engaged and helped a lot of people on there, I just wish it had been more than what it was.

Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.

There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention.

Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now.

If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.

Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.

I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system.

Would you share the link to the answer?

you are missing the point

In 2014, one benefit of Stack Overflow / Exchange is a user searching for work can include that they are a top 10% contributor. It actually had real world value. The equivalent today is users with extensive examples of completed projects on Github that can be cloned and run. OP's solution if contained in Github repositories will eventually get included in a training model. Moreover, the solution will definitely be used for training because it now exists on Hacker News.

Yeah, they didn't even bother to suggest paying you with tokens for the job well done! The audacity!

hehe, damn I did let an AI fix my grammer and they promptly put the classic tell of — U+2014 in there

They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago.

yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the "Top Answer" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by "Recent" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant

Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation.

> There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.

Yeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow "recommendation" questions. So they know that it's an issue but just ignore it for programming questions.

Yuck. I don't know if it's just me, but something feels completely off about the GH issue tracker. I don't know if it's the spacing, the formatting, or what, but each time it feels like it's actively trying to shoo me away.

It's whatever the visual language equivalent of "low signal" is.

I think most relevant data that provides best answers lives in GitHub. Sometimes in code, sometimes in issues or discussions. Many libs have their docs there as well. But the information is scattered and not easy to find, and often you need multiple sources to come up with a solution to some problem.

A lot of valuable information lived/lives in email threads that might or might not be publicly archived.

At this point SO seems harder to publish into than arxiv.

If I had kept a list of such questions I would have posted it (which would be a very long one). But no, I don't have that list.

> use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly.

Respectfully, no. It is meaningless. If you just look at comments in this thread (and 20 other previous HN posts on this topic) you should know how dysfunctional stackoverflow management and moderation is. This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time. Nobody should waste their time and expect anything to be different.

Why disallow AI input? Is it that poor? Surely it isn't.

Thanks; lots of great information here.

Regarding duplicates and deletion you may be interested in my thoughts: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-a... ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434215/where-do-the... ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421677/closing-a-qu... seem relevant here, browsing through a search of my saved posts.

Having duplicates should make the search better, by pointing people who phrase the same problem in different ways to the same place. But low-quality questions often don't produce something searchable for others, and they cover topics relevant to people who lack search skills.

It's because I was involved with a large volunteer-based project that was a literal 24/7/365 operation for several years (dozens of volunteers at any given time and tens of thousands of concurrent users) and can speak first hand as to the differences.

I didn't say it's not worth doing but it will bring challenges that wouldn't exist with employees. Paying people adds a strong motivator to keep toxic behaviour at bay.

Your experiences will heavily depend on the type of project you're running but regardless, you can't hold volunteers, especially online, to the same expectations or standards as employees. The amount of time and effort they can invest will wax and wane and there's nothing you can do about it. Anonymity and lack of repercussions will eventually lead to drama or power struggles when a volunteer steps out of line in a way that they wouldn't in paid employment. There is no fix that'll stop occasional turbulence, it's just the way it is. Not all of your volunteers will be there for the greater good of your community.

Again, that is absolutely not to say that it can't be worth the effort but if you go into it eyes open, you'll have a much better time and be able to do a better job at heading off problems.

I've seen other people express similar opinions to yours and it wasn't until they experienced being in the driver's seat that they understood how difficult it is.

StackOverflow is famously obnoxious about questions badly asked, badly categorized, duplicated…

It’s actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit from AI A LOT.

Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and creating public records for them.

You can save an open source + open weights model, which is frozen in time. That’s still very useful for some things but lacks knowledge of current data.

So we’ll end up with a choice of low-performing stale models or high-performing enshittified models which know about more current information.

Doesn't help when the ads are a layer above the model.

Yup. Like Claude 3 Opus.

Really? I thought you could only do that with open source models. Can you teach me how to checkpoint the current version of Claude Code so I can keep it as-is forever?

Nice, that worked. It's even faster.

                 yours  yours+opt  claude
  ---------------------------------------
  Time (ns)        40.9      36.4    38.7
  sqrt/iter           3         2       1
  Instructions      207       187     241

Edit: it looks like the claude algorithm fails at high eccentricities. Gave chatgpt pro more context and it worked for 30min and only made marginal improvement on yours, by doing 2 steps then taking a third local step.

https://gist.github.com/achille/23680e9100db87565a8e67038797...

To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.

I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.

An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up.

It just goes back to first principles.

The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.

My heuristic is that if your interlocutor asks follow-up questions like that with no indication of why (like “why do you want to do X?” rather than “why do you want to do X? If the answer is Y, then X is a bad approach because Q, you should try Z instead”) then they are never going to give you a helpful answer.

How do I add a second spout to this can?

...

Well, the pump at the gas station doesn't fit in my car, but they sold me a can with a spout that fits in my car.

...

It's tedious to fill the can a dozen times when I just want to fill up my gas tank. Can you help me or not?

...

I understand, but I already bought the can. I don't need the "perfect" way to fill a gas tank, I just want to go home.

Tbf the problem there is probably FIPS more than anything else.

I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project.

To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite.

May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource.

Discord isn’t just used for tech support forums and discussions. There are loads of completely private communities on there. Discord opening up API access for LLM vendors to train on people’s private conversations is a gross violation of privacy. That would not go down well.

> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.

Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?

Yes, people have done this

I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points.

What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake, as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated.

For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on.

>> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.

Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble.

May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.

Great idea! https://paste.voklen.com/wiki/Main_Page If people start using it I'll get a proper domain name for it.

An algolwiki is a great idea, but I just wanted to say I got a good chuckle from this, thanks :)

> May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

> To some extent that was Stack Overflow

Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?

Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.

There is https://www.wikifunctions.org/

> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably.

I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.

A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable.

Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc).

Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc.

PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem.

(See the thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315)

There is the Journal of Open Source Software perhaps:

https://joss.theoj.org/

Hhhhmm. Ok. So I invented this solution in 2009 at what you might call a "peak mental moment", by a pool in Palm Springs, CA, after about 6 hours of writing on napkins. I'm not a mathematician. I don't think I'm even a great programmer, since there are probably much better ways of solving the thing I was trying to solve. And also, I'm not sure how I even came up with the reduction; I probably was wrong or made a typo (missing the +1?), and I'm not even certain how I could come up with it again.

2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is that provable?

Primes take too much time.

The thing I was trying to solve was: I had written a bitcoin poker site from scratch, and I wanted to determine whether any players were colluding with each other. There were too many combinations of players on tables to analyze all their hands versus each other rapidly, so I needed to write a nightly cron job that collated their betting patterns 1 vs 1, 1 vs 2, 1 vs 3... any time 2 or 3 or 4 players were at the same table, I wanted to have a unique signature for that combination of players, regardless of which order they sat in at the table or which order they played their hands in. All the data for each player's action was in a SQL table of hand histories, indexed by playerID and tableID, with all the other playerIDs in the hand in a separate table. At the time, at least, I needed a faster way to query that data so that I could get a unique id from a set of playerIDs that would pull just the data from this massive table where all the same players were in a hand, without having to check the primary playerID column for each one. That was the motivation behind it.

It did work. I'm glad you were curious. I think I kept it as the original algorithm, not the reduced version. But I was much smarter 15 years ago... I haven't had an epiphany like that in awhile (mostly have not needed to, unfortunately).