[crispyambulance]

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.

Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.

Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!

[kstrauser]

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"

Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011

The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.

[rich_sasha]

Now:

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"

"This is an excellent question, and shows a real attention to detail! Let me walk you through it in detail, with a particular focus on Django version and the evolution of the semantics there.

[...]

Bottom line: it's exactly the same as in Django 1.3 back in August 2011. But by anchoring to a specific version, you make the question unambiguous and much more insightful.m"

[hbn]

You can just... ask it not to do that

[Gud]

No it isn’t.

[Waterluvian]

Poetic how they were so ridiculous about meticulously curating a database of answers where the ultimate consumer would be LLMs that really don’t care about duplicates.

[sockaddr]

In fact, duplicates with different approaches over time and different ways of being asked is REALLY good for LLMs

[firesteelrain]

And they made it easy by linking duplicates together

[belorn]

Stack Overflow had two main value propositions for me. Either questions about standard way/community agreed way to accomplish something which has multiple aproaches, like "what is the most common way to take out the first element or null from a list".

I suspect moderators was very careful of allowing such questions to multiply on the site.

The other value I found was in fringe questions, like how do you access the model object of the value of a django form field from the template environment. If there even is an answer, the answer will hopefully point me to some non-documented way to accomplish what I want, or give hints to what kind of ugly hack I need to create. Those question don't seem to have much moderations applied to them at all.

[torben-friis]

What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity".

It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.

[kstrauser]

OMG, so much. I was quite ruthless about rolling back those vandalisms. If I’d have meant X, I’d have said X in the first place. I didn’t, so I didn’t.

[MrZander]

While there were many zealots that gave SO this reputation, I don't know if that's the reason it died.

As someone who frequently answered questions in the 'New' queue, the sheer amount of rule breaking, low effort, and obvious duplicates was astounding. I eventually quit answering questions because 99% of them were not worth interacting with. Just vote close and move on.

Ultimately, I think SO is dead because it got too popular and moderation became untenable.

[casey2]

You sound exactly like an enforcer of the cultural problem the GP was talking about. Group think is healthy in small doses, but overdo it and it kills the group.

It's simply not on a new user to understand whatever group interpretation you have made up on top of the written rules. There is no platonic ideal of a good question, the project was doomed from the start if people take that idea seriously. The UX says submit a question about coding while the unwritten rules say submit a flawless peer-reviewed abstract or we close in 3 minutes.

Ironically those 99% asking low effort questions will gain more than everybody who looks at a "high value" question put together. Truly, nobody on SO learned anything writing those questions, they were just regurgitating their phd/previous work. It was grossly performative and I'm glad it's gone.

[MrZander]

When I say "low effort", I don't mean "not perfect". I was quite lax actually as I understood how annoying some users were when I asked my own questions.

I'm taking about entirely unreadable posts (not English, or just nonsensical) or posts that were very clearly a copy paste homework question with no code.

I helped hundreds of people of all skill levels for free, simply because I found it enjoyable. I quit when it stopped being enjoyable. It stopped being enjoyable when the quality of question declined to 99% garbage.

[skywalqer]

It is dead because everybody is asking LLMs now.

[ComplexSystems]

Can you imagine ChatGPT terminating a conversation because it thought your question was "low effort?" The behavior wouldn't be viewed as helpful or aligned, and nobody would use it.

StackOverflow was, all too often, not helpful or aligned. It died because the staff were unable to get the moderators to be helpful.

[firesteelrain]

Well there are new users all the time and can’t expect them to now all of the in’s and out’s of the rules while posted there are still hidden rules. It’s become a toxic site.

[Olumde]

The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read

> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.

> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.

Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.

[mcswell]

I came here to say something like this (mostly about LaTeX), but you and the posters you're replying to said it better than I could have. I had too many posts treated as "not an appropriate question" or some such, and got tired of posting only to get my post rejected. To be sure, there are some poor posts (my first post was that, because I didn't include enough information), but the "vigilante" term you use was by and large all too appropriate.

[marcuschong]

I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.

[jamesfinlayson]

I mostly frequent smaller subreddits with at most a handful of mods for niche subjects and it's great. Then when I occasionally need to ask a question in a bigger one... out come the mods who live for the rules.

[trumpdong]

That's dangerous. If you get banned from a large subreddit you often get banned from the site, even if you mod other subreddits, which are then banned for being unmoderated.

[matheusmoreira]

Funny thing is I could actually deal with the annoying rules as well as all the rudeness and smugness. It crossed the line for me when it became clear they had degenerated to literal deletionism. As in, they don't just close your question now, they actually delete it straight up alongside any useful information it might have contained.

Tried to go back to one of my closed questions to look up a link someone had dropped in the comments, only to find out some moderator had fucking deleted the question for literally no reason, despite the fact there was actual fucking content in there. It actually drove me over the edge and made me go all in on my own domain and my own website. If I ever post anything there again, it will always be framed as links to my own site where their deletionism will never reach. I simply refuse to be erased.

[golem14]

... and I wonder if this culture won't be baked into the LLMs using this dataset for training ...

[golem14]

... and of course, this wondering applies to other training sets, like usenet ...