[palata]

I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say "in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now we are doing it as it was meant to be".

Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?

[bawolff]

I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity.

Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.

[Karrot_Kream]

The "good" thing is, they're back to 2009 levels of postings. Now obviously that's what the mods let through but my guess is that traffic to the site is down precipitously as well. They can roll back their bureaucracy and head back to a lean path that worked for them in the past.

But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.

[zahlman]

Barely any of the people involved are mods. I said that repeatedly before your post yet you chose to ignore it, despite apparently singling out my posts specifically for consideration.

Objectively, people are nicer now. Informal policies turned into a proper Code of Conduct over time and moderators (the actual moderators) take it very seriously.

Being strict about this is objectively correct and it has absolutely nothing to do with power tripping. Nobody wants to close and delete questions. They want those questions not to have existed in the first place, or rather to have been asked properly in the first place.

The system does not incentivize any of this curation effort; it happens entirely thanklessly and driven purely by intrinsic motivation to produce a specific valuable thing.

This is not a matter of "bureaucracy".

As far as I can tell there is no issue with site traffic:

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov... https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/

[bookofjoe]

Thank goodness dang has so far avoided this path.

[williamDafoe]

Two thirds of the wikipedia article i wrote in 2003 have been deleted by rabid editors. It was a biography of my father, written based on interviews with my mother. I have found that restoring any of the rabid editor deletions results in threats of me being banned from editing my own article.

[zahlman]

... And what, precisely, is the reason why a biography of your father belongs in an encyclopedia?

[zahlman]

>Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?

"Growing" by an utterly irrelevant metric.

Popular != good.

[motorest]

> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?

You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.

[goobie]

AFAICR they've always said these lines about now is about better moderation from the slop. The reality is that the rule of thumb for that moderation was already out of date with advances that preceeded LLMs.. Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few. Content can be triaged from someone who may be human to others who may be human and maybe there's value or maybe you just didn't alienate anyone and some people will still climb to making higher levels of content that is worth condensing.

[zahlman]

> Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few.

The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.

Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.

Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.

So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.

[palata]

> So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.

How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?

I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.

[zahlman]

The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal.

When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.

[palata]

> The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions

I see that you just don't hear the complaints.

I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.

[zahlman]

> I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.

Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers.

Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.

[zahlman]

>the current StackOverflow moderators

Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.

> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing

So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.

> and now it's dying

Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?

> Maybe something was better before

Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?

If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.

The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.

[palata]

> Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators.

I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually).

> Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?

There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".

[zahlman]

>You keep saying everything is great.

I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does.

There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose.

> My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add

... And?

> There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".

If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions.

As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.

[palata]

> ... And?

And as far as I can see, it is dying.

> If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem.

So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.

> it would become easier to find what you want.

It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions. It has happened, though, that I could not find what I wanted because it was not there. And when I added it, I was closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).

Again, I am not saying that it should be forbidden to close questions. What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.

[zahlman]

> And as far as I can see, it is dying.

And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?

> So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.

Yes.

You write this as though you think there is a contradiction here. I genuinely don't understand why. There is no contradiction here.

QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either (https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html).

> It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions.

Back when I was trying to sort out the mess more actively, it happened to me daily. I distinctly recall multiple instances of spending hours at a time tearing my hair out over it, and complaining in the corresponding chat about the terrible questions, the unintentional clickbait, and the sensitivity of search engines to minor variations in the query.

> closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).

This is said by perhaps 90% of people complaining about their question being closed, and trivially shown to be incorrect in perhaps 90% of those cases.

But also, "people can't figure out what you're trying to ask" counts against your question. By design. Because questions are expected to communicate clearly. So that other people who read them don't have to waste their own time making sure they're in the right place.

Of course, there are other reasons a question might not be understood. But it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology". People are, broadly speaking, just not going around the tags for technologies they don't know about in order to close questions. What on Earth would they get out of that?

> What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.

Again: please show a link to an example of a question that you believe was unjustifiably closed, and make sure that you can clearly explain, in terms of existing policy why you believe the closure was invalid.

Do this on https://meta.stackoverflow.com, where it belongs.

Or if you have done this in the past, link me an example of that. That's fine here.

[palata]

> it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology"

Sorry, I hadn't realised I could barely write coherent English.

> QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either

Talking about writing coherent English, what the hell does this have to do with the current discussion?

[bdangubic]

And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?

the reality makes this judgment. something that was worth billions of dollars could probably be bought for $50m (this is too much…). a definition of dead