As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.

Which directly resulted in the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025.

They drove people away, on purpose, who were creating their content. Which was a successful strategy until it wasn't.

I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.

Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwellers got their way and drove everyone else away.

Instead of a rich interaction forum, it became a gamified version of Appease The Asshole. I stopped playing when I realized I’d rather be doing almost anything else with my free time.

For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run, who is empowered to say “I appreciate your efforts but this isn’t how we want to do things here” and veto the ruiners. Otherwise you inevitably seem to end up with a self-elected bureaucracy that exists to keep itself in place, all else be damned.

(Bringing it back to a local example, I can’t imagine HN without dang and the new mods. Actually, I guess I can: it would look a lot like Reddit, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I vastly prefer the quality of conversation here, thanks.)

I would never ask a question on stack overflow because half the time it seemed to be flagged a dupe or for some other reason and it brought you closer to being disallowed to ask. I actually have answered a good amount of stack overflow questions to get a higher score but the overzealous question shutdowns totally had a chilling effect.

I was a user of StackOverflow for quite a while. I appreciated the friction. It taught me how to ask better questions to the point where I'd be doing all the research needed to ask a good question and just solve it myself along the way. It's a skill that has made a world of difference in my career relative to my peers. Makes me want to reply to my coworkers simply with "Closed as Duplicate" or "Closed - Needs details or clarity".

> Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds

Mindless stackoverflow copy-pasting was a scourge of the programming world before. I can't imagine the same low quality stackoverflow answers mashed into slop being the best of any world...

Well put. It's maddening that people still don't get it 17 and a half years later. (It's interesting that Spolsky is giving the talk, since to my understanding Atwood was considerably more hard-line about it, and was always the one blogging about the high concept.)

I mostly chalk it up to UI affordances. The most obvious one: the site constantly presents an "Ask Question" button; it gives you a form to type in a question; people come to the site because they have a question, and it goes live to a general audience[1] as soon as it's posted. No amount of emphasis on search is ever going to override that.

Less obvious but much more important is that the community can't actually put information about community norms in front of new users, except by scolding them for mistakes. No matter how polite you are about giving people links to the tour[2] or to policies[3],

Then of course, they wanted the site to actually grow at the start, so we got that terribly conceived reputation system best described as Goodhart's law incarnate[4]. And it was far too successful at that early growth, such that if anyone actually understood the idea properly at the start, they were overwhelmed by new users (including the experts answering questions) and had no chance to instill a site culture. It took until 2012 or so until a significant chunk of the experts were getting frustrated with... all the same things they were historically frustrated with on actual forums; then we got the "What Stack Overflow is Not" incident[5]. A lot of the frustration was misdirected except for a general annoyance at certain stereotypes of typical users. It took until at least 2014, from my assessment of the old meta posts, for a real consensus to start emerging about what makes a good question, and even then there was a lot of confusion[6].

Newer sites like Codidact[7] have a chance to learn from this mess, establishing ideas about what good questions look like, and about site scope, from the start[8].

1. Notwithstanding more recent efforts, like the Staging Ground and now a new "question type" feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/435293) which seems to have been recently rolled back in preparation for something bigger (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437856), and the various attempts to force AI into the process, etc.

2. https://stackoverflow.com/tour

3. Especially things like 'Under what circumstances may I add "urgent" or other similar phrases to my question, in order to obtain faster answers?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569) and 'Why is "Can someone help me?" not a useful question?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236). See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485817 .

4. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex... ; the anchor is for my own answer but please scroll around and read other points of view.

5. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/137795. Back then I was actively using the site but not active on meta; I pretty well gave up in 2015 for largely unrelated (personal) reasons, then came back in mid 2019, coincidentally shortly before the Monica situation[9].

6. In particular, see 'How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592), originally authored 2013, and especially compare the original answers to newer ones. Notably there were also quite a few deleted answers on this one, for those of you with the reputation to view them. Also see 'How do I ask and answer homework questions?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334822) which largely misses the point: it's not so much about the ethics of someone cheating on homework, but about the question fitting the site model.

7. https://codidact.com , with subdomains for various topics. Notably, "programming" as a topic is not privileged; unlike how the Stack Exchange network started with Stack Overflow which still dominates everything else put together, software.codidact.com is just another section of the site. Full disclosure: I am a moderator for that section.

8. See for example https://software.codidact.com/posts/285035/289176#answer-289... ; https://software.codidact.com/posts/291064 ; https://software.codidact.com/posts/284979 ; https://software.codidact.com/posts/292960 ; https://software.codidact.com/posts/294610 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289910 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/290028 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/291121/291156#answer-291156 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289687 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289951 ; https://meta.codidact.com/posts/284169. Yes, this is a carefully hand-picked list. I have a fairly clear mental image of one more but was somehow unable to search for it.

9. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965 and many others. It's a deep rabbit hole. It's also the triggering incident leading to the creation of Codidact[7].

And they get confident lies back 2/10 times, not enough to make them constantly question the answers, but just enough to _really_ mess with them over time. And not just that, almost no new good questions and answers are created anymore for the next iterations of LLM's to train on, so they'll be consuming more and more AI-centered SEO slop until that ratio becomes so high it becomes useless. But by then most of us who used to answer human questions won't give a s*t anymore. You reap what you sow.

Best of both worlds? I disagree vehemently. At least my job is secure; experts with decades of experience are in high demand, and I can be even more selective who I decide to work for. I'm done contributing for free to the corpo Internet though.

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> StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point.

This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this.

> > The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google.

It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.

I think this is seeing the past with rose tinted glasses, it’s not like SO was on the cutting edge of computer science. The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude.

Why, us of course.

The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data.

Did the user commit the final answer? What changes were made before they did?

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> In 10 years what will the LLMs train on?

Why do people think this is necessary? When you learn new things, like bicycling, you don't start with relearning how to walk.

> . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on?

Hopefully Reasoning is much better that training on original code and API docs are sufficient

StackOverflow was great because it's not like a support forum or a mailing list. It's more like a repository of knowledge. It's been extremely helpful to me when arriving from Google, and I've gotten a couple useful responses to my own questions either. Awesome resource.

Where SO started failing in my opinion is when the "no duplicate questions" rule started to be interpreted as "it's a duplicate if the same or very similar question has ever been answered on the site". That caused too many questions to have outdated answers as the tech changes, best practices change and so on. C# questions have answers that were current for .NET Core 1.0 and should be modified. I have little webdev experience but I know JS has changed rapidly and significantly, so 2012 answers to JS questions are likely not good now.

> For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise.

There were tons and tons of them anyway. If only we had the Staging Ground in 2012.

> I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits.

My favorite is when searching for something I land on a thread where the only reply is "just search for the answer!"

> And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe.

There's a recipe, it's just expensive. Intense moderation, exclude disruptive users, no grand plan for massive growth/inclusion.

StackOverflow did have intense moderation, but it also seemed to want to be a place where anyone could ask a question and that desire for mass inclusion competes with the desire to be moderated/curated and then there's issues.

I’d reckon a set of mods with no superiority complex is one step though lol

There are working recipes, but they're pretty much antithetical to growth.

Shirky's "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" is highly relevant here.

> there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either

Once it became a product there was constant tension between community and management. A 24 year old PM who had never worked in software would come declare a sweeping change and then accuse the community for being toxic uninclusive trolls.

Also Joel violated all rules and norms and used it to promote his personal political platform.

And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic.

Mostly true, but there are exceptions... HN is about as good as I've seen for a publicly accessible forum, but has very active moderation (both from Dang and team and a pretty good vote & flag mechanism).

The other good forums I've seen are all private and/or extremely niche and really only findable via word of mouth. And have very active moderation.

But, yeah, I think you're probably right for any sufficiently large forum. It'll trend to enshittification without very active management.

>And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.

I think a well-moderated community can be non-toxic. Lobste.rs is a good if not extreme example: it's kind of a vouch system for the people you refer and there's pretty good moderation to prevent overly mean discussion.

> To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered.

What made SO no longer useful to me, though, is that far too many of the existing answers are either obsolete or incorrect.

Stupid people hated stack overflow because it didn’t allow them to be lazy.

This was my experience using StackOverflow. I've commented, asked questions, and received answers. Aside from a few questionable downvotes I received occasionally, I never felt like the community was toxic.

If you're interested, a perfect example would be this question here ("should I enable application insights profiling on production Azure web apps"):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77855606/should-we-enabl...

That's an interesting question! It's a question that real programmers might want to have answers to! And I had a very specific answer, based on real-world experience and data. But the question got closed as being off-topic.

Shrug. They get to make the site they want. It doesn't mean it's the site folks want to visit.

Ditto

I mean, HN has a similar ethos. The community downvotes you quickly for nonproductive comments.

Do we know that it's fewer low-quality questions? Or is that just assumed because it's fewer total questions?

I very much disagree with the first point that there had somehow been a critical mass of questions achieved to explain the slowdown. With the change in tech, outdated answer, and increasing population of people writing code, I just don't buy it.

Hyper-cope.

But on your 2nd question,

>Would LLMs be as good for answers [...]

Yes.

The founders have not been around for years.

The remaining community understands perfectly well why people have left. It's just deemed irrelevant.

Way too many people joined the site, way too quickly, based on a false understanding of the intended premise. Gradually they filtered themselves out as they realized the mistake. Those few who saw value in the actual idea remained.

It was always going to be relatively few people who truly want to participate in something like that. And that's fine. Ideas don't have to be popular to be worthwhile or valid.

Exactly. I dare to say that it was a matter of UX. The experience i got was that you arrived at a SO question from Google and the accepted answer was from years ago and irrelevant at the present time.

They did a quick patch by letting you sort answers by some attribute, but darn, that's low effort product/ux dev. What did those teams do in 10 years??

I have always wondered this. As more and more content on the internet becomes AI generated, does it become some kind of feedback loop where the hallucinations amplify themselves? Maybe someone smart can come along and help me understand the plan for this, if there is one.

You are now often debugging problems directly in an LLM context window, providing back console output, error logs, etc. there is an absolute mountain of data to mine from developer chat logs.

"New questions over time", I suppose, was the intended phrasing; and yes.

Also, this is a new set of "rounds" it's making. Graphs like this have been getting shopped around off and on for a few years now.

Previous rounds of discussion famously include https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433864 . The decline was even noted before ChatGPT, e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/413657.

> This actually could be a good argument for LLMs, you won't get told your question is dumb.

It is.

The consensus in the meta community is basically: we don't want AI on the site (although clearly the owners do); people who would benefit from generative AI can get basically all its benefit by using it off-site, as it's heavily trained on Stack Overflow (and agents can presumably search it) anyway. It's fine if people use that off-site; it keeps out unsuitable questions and is basically filling the role that conventional search used to before Google got so enshittified.

The gamification was in large part misaligned with the site's objectives. It's a shame Atwood and Spolsky didn't realize the problems and didn't explicitly solicit and incorporate feedback about it basically ever. (Not that random user proposals were ever especially good, but.)

At Codidact we're trying to build systems that hand out privileges based on actions taken that are relevant to the privilege. There's still a reputation system but the per-user numbers are relatively de-emphasized. And posts are by default sorted by Wilson score, with separate up/down counts visible to everyone by default, so that downvotes on an upvoted post (and vice-versa) have meaningful effect and "bad" voting can be more easily corrected. There's also a system of "reactions" for posts so that people willing to put their username behind it can explicitly mark an answer as outdated or dangerous.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/08/21/stack-exchange-machine...

They were on it in 2012! And no, it didn't help. The site's value was in providing users with answers to their questions, but that was never on the radar of the folks running SO. I guess they just assumed the free labor of the people that built the place would continue forever.

Edit: I even told them at the time that this was not the right way to proceed. They had no reason to close questions or even review them. All they needed was a holding pen where first-time questioners posted questions, and they needed to be promoted by users viewing them as worthy of an answer.

Guess what. They deleted my comment.

It was explicitly supposed to be a thing that turns out to be inherently unsustainable.

But I'm not sure that Atwood and Spolsky (especially Atwood) realized that nature.

How on earth did wokeness even come up there? You’d have zero notion of my political leanings if you only read the words I’d written there. How badly do you have to phrase a question or answer to have it downvoted for being not-woke? “So I’m trying to write a GET route in FastAPI, which has a great ass, by the way, amirite?, and I’m getting the error that…”

This is a prime example of why I prefer HN’s moderation. On SO, even though you’re objectively wrong — this is a link to a completely different site and discussing it from a different angle — your active participation on the site would probably have given you the ability to close this conversation and ruin the discussion for those interested. I’m glad that HN doesn’t allow that, so we can roll our eyes at the obviously incorrect tag and get back to participating without having the rug yanked out from under us.

I'm not. A lot of moderators on SO thought that technology stayed the same from 2014 onward. So I'd often see questions that were exactly the same as the one I asked, but they'd be closed as a duplicate of a question that was subtly different in wording but totally different in technical content. And you would have had to be intimately aware of the systems the question was about to recognize the difference. Most of the moderators doing that did not know enough to be moderating. And so SO became a place where obsolete solutions got cemented in time and where once a question was answered somehow nobody ever tried to answer it again.

The chart is questions posted. Almost all my SO usage was looking at answers already posted. I only posted questions when I couldn’t find anything. I wonder if the pre-2023 decline is just because more and more of the questions people had were already covered.

There was already tension in, like, 2011 or 2012. If you check the meta site there's a huge volume of posts from 2014, including probably the majority of the "classics" that experienced curators trot out to try and explain policy to people. A lot of the time I think about how something has been a problem for years, and I search on the meta site for previous discussion, and find someone from 2014 saying that it had already been a problem for a while.

Me too. It does appear a bit more dramatic around when LLMs hit the scene but the was already a clear peak/decline starting well before.

It may just feel that way because we're less likely to look at SO directly now that there are better alternatives.

lol true. It is like "problematic".

Please show an example of a question following this pattern. That is radically different from my experience.