[IshKebab]

They really only have themselves to blame. Yeah AI has massively accelerated the decline but I think it's mainly provided an option that isn't so frustrating to use. ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.

I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many valid questions were closed.

They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.

Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.

[zahlman]

> ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.

Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be trying to ask a question at all), so there's no reason to care about whether other people can understand the question - let alone figure out whether it's something they also want to ask.

> I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.

Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure. The entire point is that when you come to Stack Overflow, you aren't the one who gets to decide what the standards for questions are, or judge whether your question meets those standards. Because if you were, the standards would effectively not exist.

The people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.

> I say that as someone with 100k reputation.

I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work. Famously, a user with over a million reputation once went on a spree of violations (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072) of the best-publicized site policy ever to appear on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/). Many users with 100k+ reputation and/or a 10+ year history have likely never looked at the meta site. (See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224 for someone who first posted on meta after 14 years.)

[IshKebab]

> It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content.

That's fundamentally where SO went wrong. The mods think they're building programming Wikipedia, but normal users are using it as a Q&A forum.

> Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure.

No it doesn't. It's far too easy to close a question and they very rarely get reopened. The suggestion was that users only get to unilaterally reopen it once.

> I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work.

See this is exactly the problem. You have the mods' view of how it is supposed to work, but that isn't how people want it to work!

Mods want it to be this highly curated reference site where only perfectly written questions that exactly fit an FAQ style of questioning. They don't care that that makes it useless (or at least extremely frustrating) as a Q&A forum.

[zahlman]

The short version: Stack Overflow was always, explicitly intended to be the site that you think "went wrong", and is made so by a community that actively discusses policy (and gives detailed reasoning) in the open - not by its tiny, overwhelmed moderation team. There is abundant historical documentation of this, but it took time for that intent to be explained coherently and the site initially grew far faster than it could be properly gatekept. This was aided by a broken and ill-conceived reputation system that never got the rethinking it needs, even after overall feedback was finally explicitly solicited in 2023. It was also aided by several naive ideas about human nature and incentive systems in general.

----

Again, the people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.

I have the view of a curator - an informal role that anyone can adopt by simply reading the meta site, understanding policy, and trying to help out with the process. Granted, it takes 3000 reputation to cast close votes, but anyone can submit edits, and it only takes 5 reputation to participate in meta (waived if it's about your own question being closed), 15 reputation to flag posts, and 50 to comment (and explain what's wrong with a question).

You say you have 100k reputation there. That's more than me. Yet I take all the actions you complain about, and have at times been very active doing so (for example, I added or moved hundreds of duplicate links to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 , and have gone weeks at a time running out of daily close votes). I'm not a mod.

There are 29 million user accounts, of which about 100k may cast close votes. There are 24 moderators.

Questions are in fact much too hard to close. Three separate people - who, by the above stats, are outnumbered almost 300:1 by those entitled to post answers - must agree. The purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from being answered until it meets standards; questions that could in principle meet standards are supposed to get fixed. But anyone can come along and just post whatever in the answer section; getting that deleted (answers can't be "closed" separately) is even harder; and the presence of that answer causes further problems.

The primary reason questions rarely get reopened is because closed questions overwhelmingly come from new users who don't care in the slightest about any of the process or goals, don't read the information that's given to them about what has happened, and thus never make any attempt to fix the question. (They may do this indefinitely, even after "deletion", by the way - and are expected to do so rather than reposting.)

What you think of as "normal users" aren't the ones who should get to decide what the site is or how it works. How people want an already existing site with 16 years of history to work is completely irrelevant. The fact that people have wanted it to work that way for 16 years is also irrelevant given that a) there are countless places already on the Internet that do work that way that they could use instead; b) they have been getting told off all that time, with varying degrees of tact and sophistication.

If people started trying to use actual Wikipedia as a Q&A forum, it would be correct for them to be shut down no matter how many people wanted to do that. I get that people's views on immigration vary a fair bit around here, but I imagine you'd agree that immigrants shouldn't get to write new laws for a country when they arrive.

Stack Overflow, and every Stack Exchange site, is not a forum, by design. The classic explanation of this (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 ; especially see Robert Cartaino's answer) was originally drafted in 2011. Since it is not a forum, it is not a Q&A forum. It is a Q&A site, and people asking questions have always been expected to have a question that meets standards so that others can benefit from it. Of course, those standards have changed over time - as the community started to recognize patterns in questions that were causing a distraction and not helping to build up something useful. But it has always been with the fundamental motivation and understanding: look at what happens on traditional discussion forums; understand what's frustrating about trying to find or contribute information in that environment; be something else.

[IshKebab]

> made so by a community that actively discusses policy (and gives detailed reasoning) in the open - not by its tiny, overwhelmed moderation team.

When I say "mods" I mean the tiny group of people that spend a lot of time moderating question, and discussing things on meta. I'm not literally talking about the people with extra privileges.

You can say "but it was always meant to be overly moderated" as much as you want. Doesn't change the fact that it was popular in spite of that, not because of it.

[zahlman]

You say this as if you expect me to accept implicitly that popular == good.