[nolok]

SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community.

I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"

[morningsam]

That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.

Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.

It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.

One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.

[suzzer99]

> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"

Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.

Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.

And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.

[the_lucifer]

> And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.

It's validating to see that I wasn't wrong in my assessment. The comments and takes under the post which showed the drop in traffic was eye opening. That website was just a walking corpse if they weren't seeing the plain truth and spinning the drop in traffic as a good thing, because apparently it meant that they were not getting stupid questions anymore and those were going to AI now.

Not realizing the kind of mind share loss here. The next generation of developers aren't going to go through a phase where they rely on SO.

[andai]

My favorite thing was how for half the stuff I Googled, the top result would be a StackOverflow reply telling me to Google it.

[freedomben]

Yep, or the top 10 hits on Google all pointing to a "duplicate" that didn't have the answer (or even the same question). Such a squandering of discoverability it's hard to even fathom who thought that was a good idea.

[nolok]

The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.

[masfuerte]

Yes. There were far too many people with nothing to contribute doing useless (or actively harmful) busywork to earn points.

[no-name-here]

Are you referring to edits? If so, I haven't seen that, and certainly not as a notable issue on the site. Instead, I think I saw closer to the opposite - edits to questions or answers that fixed typos, pointed out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.

[inigyou]

Same on Reddit. Every gamification triggers Goodhart's Law and has a lifespan.

[notatoad]

From my perspective it wasn’t death by a thousand cuts, it all comes back to just one cut: an over-reliance on volunteer moderators. If they paid staff to run their communities, they could have issued a simple “don’t be a dick or we’ll fire you” rule. But because they relied on volunteers, they had to cater to those volunteers to keep them. And the volunteers drove the site into ruin to make it a better experience for moderators.

[tannertech]

Off topic, closed.

[flyingshelf]

> would've been a "newcomer track"

It's there now. Too late I guess. https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground

[benrutter]

>Staging Ground is available to two different types of users on Stack Overflow: > > - Users who are asking their first questions > - Users who want to review and offer guidance on newcomers’ posts

It looks a little different, like a "learn to use stack overflow correctly" type spot. I think what newbies want (I would have loved when I started out) is a "why is my code broken" type spot.

[embedding-shape]

SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people.

Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.

[tokioyoyo]

An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.

[bluedino]

There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.

It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"

[rib3ye]

As noted by others, the initializer for the curt communication culture was "don't ask stupid questions, idiot."

[frollogaston]

Once or twice someone on SO used their chat feature to help me out after I asked a question, back when I was a n00b. That was really kind of them. Eventually, once I actually knew my stuff, I spent some time answering good questions on there. And yeah I had to be discerning.

[faangguyindia]

Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.

Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."

[NordStreamYacht]

Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.

[inigyou]

Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do.

BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.

[mort96]

Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too.

Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.

[embedding-shape]

They're slowly boiling the frog, I've been expecting old. to work for maybe 1-2 more years then it'll also be going away.

Probably in the same way as they're actively removing r/all, at first it just didn't show up in the sidebar on mobile, but you could go to r/all manually by clicking links in the client. Then those stopped working, but r/All (uppercase A) worked. Then that went away. By now I think it's impossible to see r/all at all in the mobile client or the modern website, you can only access it via old.reddit.com.

[cheesecakegood]

I knew reddit was in its terminal phase when I started seeing FarmVille-style ads for some stupid reddit homegrown minigame in the top right of new reddit

[inigyou]

No, they've just enabled it for old.reddit.com as well.

[embedding-shape]

> BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.

I think this may depend on your country, I've never seen this (Spain), not on the new website nor old.reddit.com or anywhere else, NSFW or not.

[macNchz]

Yes this is a blame-your-politicians situation more than anything else.

[b112]

This is right up there with amazon changing imdb.com, so that you need to actually be logged in to read any of the reviews on a movie.

I see that and I instantly go to rotten tomatoes, pure idiocy, pure stupid. You can just tell when those in charge, never ever dog food.

[rienbdj]

And now letterboxed is eating their lunch.

[testdelacc1]

What’s strange is that they’ll try to verify with Persona even after Apple has shared an age range with them.

If you trust Apple, why verify with Persona above that? If you don’t trust Apple, why bother integrating the Apple age check? The answer must be something silly like “we did it because Apple asked us to but we don’t trust what Apple tells us because we’re not sure if it’s compliant”.

It’s too bad, because I trust Apple with my data way more than Reddit and infinitely more than Persona. I hope Reddit comes to their senses because I’m never giving my data to Persona.

[hansvm]

The more obvious answer is that they get different marketing signals from the two companies' offerings and want both.

[Geezus_42]

Not when I open it from a web browser without being logged in. It just ask if I'm 18 and if I click yes, it lets me see the post (including images).

[chuckadams]

Reddit has many different subs that suffer from its problems in different degrees, so there's still islands of relative calm and sanity, usually in low-traffic subs. To some extent this was also true of different sites in the overall StackExchange network, but SO itself always dominated the network, it was designed and run as a monoculture, and that culture was, well ... gestures vaguely in SO's direction

[faangguyindia]

It’s very easy to destroy a specific sub (if it’s not too big and doesn’t have half a dozen mods).

it's like those ddos rings, but works on social networks.

You can create a sub and a Discord group, then ask people in the Discord group to launch a mass report against your competing sub and its moderators. You can use scanners to find questionable stuff that you can report, and more often than not, this will get the mod banned. If the sub doesn’t have multiple mods (with unique IPs, as Reddit tracks fingerprints), the sub is now in the hands of Reddit’s mod team.

Back then it was not this easy, but now with AI and residential IPs you can create lots of fake users and reports etc... and take almost any avg redditor down.

[infecto]

It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.

[naet]

I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.

[smitty1e]

Can confirm for some dumb joke subs.

You want to blow off some steam, and there is a laundry list of rules to read through.

Yeah, not bothering with all that.

[jofla_net]

Yup, there was some political bill discussion about some recent issue and others were posting links, so I thought I'd concur with an interesting vote breakdown link showing how each house/party voted. Something anyone I would gather was in good faith. Nope, instant longtime account shadow permanent ban. Wow.

[ewwhite]

Do you know if those contributors were able to get their accounts back? I was a heavy contributor in a couple of technological subs, and my account was shadowbanned and then removed with no recourse or way to regain access.

[NooneAtAll3]

my experience with reddit has been much more about its politization rather than anything about quality

"my side is right, the other is wrong" - has been too common of an occurrence, both in comments but also in posts and such frontpages as /r/all

[sobellian]

Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.

[mort96]

Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever.

They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.

It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.

[heisenbit]

It was also the rise of Github and the importance of the software hosted there. More consistent documentation and transparent issue trackers/PRs helped a lot dealing with evolving software.

[pseudalopex]

The data showed Stack Overflow declined from 2017. This followed GitHub's rise distantly.

GitHub made documentation more consistent how? GitHub issues were more transparent how? A PR answered a question I would have asked Stack Overflow never I think.

[zahlman]

> and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on.

No; answers got outdated because of people not doing what they were supposed to do, which is: post a new answer on the old question. (Assuming that the old answers actually are outdated. It happens all the time that decade-old answers are still perfectly relevant, or even still represent the Right Way to Do It(TM).)

Somehow, people never wanted to do that when it actually mattered, but would constantly post new, repetitive, low-quality answers on popular old questions (often re-combining multiple old answers) even though the solutions hadn't actually become outdated, simply because they were popular questions and they hoped to gain visibility from it (whether from reputation, or because user profile pages had a "number of users reached" metric which literally just sums the view counts of the pages where you have a question or answer, including views that occurred before your post).

That said, there are plenty of cases where an old question got closed as a duplicate of a newer question: either because it went unnoticed before, or because of deliberate action to reverse the direction of closure, with the goal of pointing future viewers to the best possible Q&A. This was explicitly in accordance with policy: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251938 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423085 . As a general rule, policy is "timeless": the timestamp on a post is not relevant to determining the right thing to do with it.

[juanpicardo]

In an age where we all get the same generic answer from LLMs, SO could have been the place to have meaningful conversations on tech topics. Instead they became irrelevant

[Havoc]

>"no conversation please"

Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that

[lima]

It always worked like that

[bartread]

I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.

Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?

Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.

So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.

I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.

The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.

Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.

IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.

But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.

As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.

And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.

SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.

And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.

[walrus01]

The anonymity of people giving aggressive and confrontational "answers" to a question reminds me of:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

[inigyou]

For anyone else who's maliciously IP-address-blocked from Penny Arcade, the link is just to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

[lilbigdoot]

I stopped posting there around then. Multiple times in a row I asked a question, got it closed as a duplicate/pointed to another thread/met with "why are you even trying to do that" despite being clear about my problem. It was obvious the people answering/closing the question skimmed it and I already gave a ton of context. It just stopped being useful

[palata]

Happened to me as well. People would close it as duplicate when it clearly was different, they just did not understand the question themselves.

[amelius]

Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI?

I don't buy it.

[baq]

People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.

[inigyou]

Reddit is full of bots instead of actual humans. Arguably, so is HN.

[frollogaston]

Reddit was full of fake users even day 1, they admitted to bootstrapping the website that way.

[baq]

SO doesn’t even have bots.

[unreal37]

How eager people are to find something better IS a factor in the decline of websites/businesses. Not just that there is something better that exists.

[palata]

I personally left SO because I felt moderation had become toxic, and that was before AI. And I was relatively active, like in the top 5%.

[Jolter]

See the decline of the graph even before the spring of ’22?

[sevenseacat]

I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.

[mort96]

A Q&A site where the community asks questions and the community answers them. That doesn't work without a community.

[skillina]

Community won't stick around if the questions they're shown aren't stimulating, either.

[nolok]

Which is exactly why "extended discussion" should have been nurtured in their own way rather than fought against, that's how you get stimulating conversations.

[Aurornis]

> SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form

SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.

Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.

[zahlman]

I'm used to enjoying your comments here, but this is an unusually bad take, and frankly personally hurtful. None of this was ever about that kind of power or control, and hearing constant accusations to the contrary was one of the things that compounded the stress of curation for me.