[llbeansandrice]

Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape?

No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?

[cornel_io]

Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything.

I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.

[gfody]

this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences.

SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site

this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...

[mixmastamyk]

Yahoo answers died a lot faster and heavily formed SO policy.

[rileymat2]

It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server, and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid solutions.

There were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the fourth one failed it gave me the first one again.

[CamperBob2]

You can't use the free chat client for questions like that in my experience. Almost guaranteed to waste your time. Try the big-3 thinking models (ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5).

[what]

> this nails it

I assume you’re taking about the ending where gippity tells you how awesome you are and then spits out a wrong answer?

[foobarbecue]

I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer science, programming, geology, and biology.

[wek]

Me too. I learned a lot from people on SO. Sometimes the tone was rude, but overall, I was and am grateful for it and sad to see this chart.

[martin-t]

Y'know how "users" of modern tech are the product? And how the developers were completely fine with creating such systems?

Well, turns out developers are now the product too. Good job everyone.

[llbeansandrice]

Replying to my own comment surprised that everyone is latching on to just poor moderation on a single site and ignoring the wealth of other options for communication and problem solving like slack communities, Reddit, blog posts, running a site like SO but with a better/different moderation policy, the list goes on and on.

I’ve seen this trend a number of times on HN that feels strawman-y. Taking the worst possible example of the status quo but also yada-yadaing or outright ignoring the massive risks of the tech du jour.

The comment I’m replying to hand waves over “legal issues” and totally ignores the fact that this hypothetical (and idealized) version of AI fundamentally destroys core aspects of community problem solving and centralizes the existing knowledge into a black box subscription all for the benefit of a clunky UX and underlying product that has yet to be proven effective enough to justify all the negative externalities.

[QuesnayJr]

I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO, and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite improvement in QoL for me.

[CamperBob2]

The "human touch" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the "robot touch," thanks very much.

[fragmede]

Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"

[zahlman]

No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of "you fucking moron" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been carefully considered and revisited over many years and have clear logic behind them, considering the goals of the site.

It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").

I have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But I have seen many examples (and been subjected to one or two myself) of crash-outs resulting from learning that the site is, by design, much more like Wikipedia than like Quora.

Quite a large fraction of questions that get closed boil down to "here's my code that doesn't work; what's wrong"? (Another large fraction doesn't even show that much effort.) The one thing that helped a lot with this was the Staging Ground, which provided a place for explicit workshopping of questions and explanation of the site's standards and purpose, without the temptation to answer. But the site staff didn't understand what they had, not at all.

[lelanthran]

> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").

This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/

[zahlman]

Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.

That is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them.

[lelanthran]

> Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.

Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information.

From what you are saying, they pretended to give fish when in reality only teaching fishing. Users went their because they were told that they could get fish, and only found out once there that there was no fish, only fishing lessons.

Blame lies squarely on SO, not on users. If SO clarified their marketing as "Not a Q and A site" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange, and this is what it says on the landing page, front and center:

     Stack Exchange Q&A communities are different.

[foobarbecue]

Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?

[threecoins]

Here is one fine example. [1]

The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you. There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

[rob802]

You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here:

> "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them!

> Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR!

[js8]

I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody explicitly articulating that.

It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri).

[zahlman]

There is nothing "passive-aggressive" about closing a question as a duplicate.

It is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the OP: an already-existing answer to a common question is provided instantly.

[CamperBob2]

The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. Far too often, the already-existing answer is years old and either no longer the best answer, or doesn't actually address a major part of the question. Or it simply was never a very good answer to begin with.

What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? If the previous answer really is adequate, it won't attract further responses. If it's not, well, now its shortcomings can be addressed.

Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. It generally means that somebody missed their true calling on an HOA board somewhere.

[foobarbecue]

I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as duplicates several times, but I always understood this as an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's just normal friction of human interaction.

[stackghost]

The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow.

[ambicapter]

The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.

[wtetzner]

Where in the process of "ask question" -> "closed as duplicate" are you interacting with another human?

[pigpop]

Most of SO didn't seem to consist of people talking to each other so much as talking past each other.

[llbeansandrice]

One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other services and spaces before the widespread use of AI doesn’t sound very compelling to me.

Be more creative than AI.

[casey2]

How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service.

Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape.

If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.

[derektank]

Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds.

Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention.