7/18/2026 at 12:04:35 PM
Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
by lynndotpy
7/18/2026 at 3:33:59 PM
Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.
Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!
by DrewADesign
7/18/2026 at 5:31:10 PM
I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
by pygy_
7/18/2026 at 6:02:36 PM
I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correctThe idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
by 20k
7/18/2026 at 6:37:36 PM
Editing used to be fine, back then like 15-16y ago. Personally I posted mostly everything as community wiki (no reputation gain) as I got the mod-alike reputation anyways.At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
by xxs
7/19/2026 at 1:05:26 AM
I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own.Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
by kstrauser
7/19/2026 at 1:54:16 AM
It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain.When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.
The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.
People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.
(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 2:10:25 AM
That's ridiculous and you're wrong. I grant them a CC license to my content to fold, spindle and mutilate it for their own purposes, but not to leave my name attached to the folded, spindled, mutilated version.My answer has my name on it. It's right there saying "kstrauser said these words". If I didn't say them, I don't want the site lying and saying that I did. I don't mind if someone fixes an obvious typo, or updates a URL that had bitrotted. That's fine. They're what I obvious intended to say. But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
That was never a core principle of the site, at least not when I joined it before you. If it'd been an expressed core principle that people could edit my words, attributed to me, so that my user account ends up saying things I never said, I never would have signed up and not many other people would have, either.
by kstrauser
7/20/2026 at 1:04:35 AM
> That's ridiculous and you're wrong. I grant them a CC license to my content to fold, spindle and mutilate it for their own purposes, but not to leave my name attached to the folded, spindled, mutilated version.The choice of license is made clear at https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice..., and the consequences elaborated at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347758/creative-com... . The license itself is at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ . It is one of the BY licenses, so the site is legally required to leave your name on the work. The interface explicitly marks both the original author and the most recent editor on the main facing page; and it offers the ability to click in and see the entire editing history.
> But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
This is overwhelmingly done in good faith, and it's explicitly policy not to change your meaning. In fact, there are many posts on meta where people complained about attempting a good-faith edit and having been judged as falling afoul of that for no reason. See e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/349950 .) But it's also explicitly policy that they can "edit your words, attributed to you" (see e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 ). The people who make these changes, generally, sincerely believe that they are either saying things you intended to say, or at least adding information that you would have added if you'd come back to keep things up to date. There has been a ton of discussion trying to clarify and/or figure out where the line is: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bediting%5D+intent... .
If you saw someone change something that fell afoul of this, there was a meta site where you could raise the objection. But we were constantly inundated with people who thought it was wrong that we took "thank you in advance, my_username" off the end of the their questions or similar (see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ), as if they thought they had a right to that.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 3:37:40 AM
But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be. The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.by DrewADesign
7/20/2026 at 6:58:53 PM
> But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be.Er... yes.jpg ?
You seem to be under the impression that I'm trying to defend all the site's design choices. I'm not. I'm trying to defend a community that did the best it could with what they were given, after all sorts of requests were repeatedly ignored or denied (or preemptively judged unreasonable and not even made) and then new ownership came in and tried to force an unending torrent of even worse ideas on us, even undoing the few things we actually liked about the design.
> The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.
Again, qualification in the subject matter is entirely orthogonal to understanding of what the site is trying to accomplish, what the policies are, and how those policies were designed to align with the objectives.
That was the part we did have control over. But we were making a good faith effort to carry forward the oral tradition of Atwood and Spolsky's vision.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 10:09:32 PM
There can be a collaborative work site and there can be a chain of posts type of site (e.g. forum or reddit or HN here). But trying to mix these concepts without any control or organization procedures is, was and will always be considered ridiculous by a vast majority of humans in all spheres of life. If SO wished to be an iterative collab site, sure it may have done everything it did and allowed mods to pick and copy any answers and parts of answers into a new, better refined answer penned by them. But just allowing random edits of any posts by any author, just twisting what they said is absolutely idiotic and ask any internet user of any age, they will agree with me, not with SO policy.Wikipedia is often brought into comparisons with SO either as something close or as something vastly different. But it doesn't matter atm. What I want to highlight is that SO allowed on it's site to essentially go to the Talks page of Wiki page and allow editing of all user comments to change their words in retrospect, and also allowing to go to the edit history allow edit that history too. This is what SO did, no wonder there are almost no humans who would approve this (after explicitly explained to them, SO is mostly banking of user's lack of full picture knowledge and ignorance).
by Yizahi
7/19/2026 at 7:27:54 AM
Found the SO mod…by eecc
7/20/2026 at 1:07:10 AM
No; editing a post to meet the site's style expectations is not moderation, and I was not a moderator, just like 99.9% of everyone described anonymously and incorrectly as "a mod" in discussions of Stack Overflow on the Internet.It's really annoying to see people insist that they should be the ones who get to decide how Stack Overflow either did, or should have, worked, when they can't even be bothered to understand who the mods were.
by zahlman
7/21/2026 at 1:50:46 AM
Semanticsby DrewADesign
7/18/2026 at 9:24:13 PM
The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve.An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"
Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
by jay_kyburz
7/19/2026 at 2:02:10 AM
> An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more.Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions of Stack Overflow accounts, only a few dozen have ever actually been moderators, and they do a tiny share of curation. Their main job is responding to flags.
> It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be, and often something it was fundamentally trying not to be. It was correct to make such users "feel unwelcome", because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with or explained to. The statistics make it clear that most of them never had any intention of trying to join a community (or, say, ask another question after the one that motivated account creation) in the first place.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 3:27:26 AM
> The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to beMessage received I guess, seeing as how the overwhelming majority left.
by chuckadams
7/19/2026 at 2:46:00 AM
So they have essentially killed the site. Congratulations I guess?by amanaplanacanal
7/19/2026 at 9:37:21 AM
What killed it in truth was RAG, but let's stipulate that it was policy that drove users away.The thing that killed it was the thing that made it prominent.
According to a blogpost i can't find any more about "how to speedrun social media" or similar, it's basically impossible to pivot a community once established given the levers of voting mechanics and mod policy. (I distinguish between Facebook's and Reddit's enshittification and a pivot.)
IOW, the seed of a community property's growth is also the seed of its decline. Analagously, the charming village is attractive to new residents because the existing residents resist the changes that new residents embody.
Very broadly and by no means universally: techies don't like lusers, because lusers don't put effort into understanding, they just want turnkey answers. This is totally counter to the archetypal techie value system.
SO optimised for grumpy misanthropes over bumbling newbies, which, in tech, is roughly congruent with optimising for people with knowledge to share over people who want their homework done for them.
The questions are not the scarce resource - you can browse Microsoft Community Answers to verify that. The answers there are correspondingly useless, which is why "blindly copy from SO" is a meme and "blindly copy from Microsoft Answers" is not.
Here ITT, and more generally on HN, comments are excoriating about the cost of being offputting to new users. Those commenters should recognise that it's not a pure cost, it's a tradeoff, and the upside has been a treasure for a decade. A million projects completed by people who found quality answers, mostly by searching for existing questions.
That resource is still relevant for stacks other than the latest web framework hotness, and i personally still get benefit from it in my archaic hobby of learning to code.
That resource is not still directly relevant for coders deeply plugged into AI, but it did train that AI.
It's one of the most successful endeavours on the web and a towering community achievement. It is a superficially a shame that people experienced gatekeeping, but if "gatekeeper" has only negative connotations in your lexicon, then I advise you to compromise your principles and firewall your network.
by psd1
7/20/2026 at 4:00:15 AM
They have gone along with the site dying, as was always realistically going to happen, even if it took people a while to realize. As one of the people doing a lot of what you (in my view very misguidedly) consider "killing", I'm perfectly okay with that.But I'm upset that my conscious attempts to make a more useful reference for everyone got disrespected from all sides: outside commenters ascribed incorrect and hurtful motives to me while refusing to consider what my real objective might have been; new users cursed me out or wrongly accused me of various things; the site ownership tried to make the task harder in all sorts of ways (while never compensating me for my work in any way); other high-rep users took destructive actions because the reputation system incentivized them (closing and downvoting questions was not incentivized in any way); the reputation system was never meaningfully revised even though everyone knew it was crap; and Google actively and deliberately made their search worse.
by zahlman
7/18/2026 at 10:34:27 PM
Being able to edit answers isn't even a mod thing. In fact, for most of SO's life, it wasn't even a 'being logged in' thing (you could just edit an answer anonymously). How they wound up with a Q and A site where you could edit another user's answer far more easily than leaving a comment on it I still will never fully understand.(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)
by rcxdude
7/19/2026 at 2:05:09 AM
You could not unilaterally edit anonymously; your edit would have been put in a review queue.It is good that leaving comments is hard. First off, because it was learned repeatedly, the hard way, that removing that barrier leads to ungodly amounts of literal spam. Second because even insightful comments detract from the main intended flow of using the site, which is: you find a question from a search engine, read the question and verify that it reflects what you're trying to figure out, then scroll down to the answers and learn something. The entire point is to not be a discussion forum (which is also why comments were not threaded for most of the the site's life). In fact, the site came into existence specifically because of frustration with what ends up happening on a discussion forum where people can discuss endlessly.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 8:25:54 AM
See, what you're saying makes some logical sense in a vacuum but it's so utterly unlike how any other website works that unless you take a huge amount of effort to explain this to people, gently, then it's not at all surprising that people just bounce off of it.by rcxdude
7/20/2026 at 12:56:13 AM
> but it's so utterly unlike how any other website works that unless you take a huge amount of effort to explain this to people, gently, then it's not at all surprising that people just bounce off of it.It is, and that's fine.
It's incompatible with a site becoming large; and that, too, is fine.
A large site was not required to accomplish any of Atwood or Spolsky's goals aside from perhaps making a profit off of ads. Many other choices were also counterproductive to the goals aside from profit.
Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it. We had no access to modify the help pages or do anything about user onboarding flows. Downvotes were the tool provided to de-emphasize things and take them out of the way, and to rate quality; so they were used appropriately. (Despite this, and despite public perception, voting was historically very biased in the positive direction.)
Because new questions were open by default, they had to be closed explicitly and in public in order for them to be dealt with. People walked away with the completely incorrect impression that closing a question is inherently a rejection; the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed. It is done with an explicit expectation that fixable questions will get fixed; but the nature of some problems (in particular: missing information) is such that only the OP can do this. There was a period of time in which "closed" was rebranded as "on hold" in the interface, to try to impress upon people that no, they aren't being turned away, they are being asked to take further action. But this was reverted because it was somehow apparently making things even worse.
But also, yes, after telling countless people the same things daily, sometimes humans lose their ability to be gentle. But nobody who's dealt with roughly ever gets to see what the other side had to deal with earlier. The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs. The evidence shows that the large majority of that sort of content (which explicitly violated the Code of Conduct, and there was a full system in place to deal with this, that pundits often ignore or even lie about) was directed at the curators. One of the most common questions on the meta site is "why aren't people required to explain downvotes?", with the main retort being "why don't you think they should be required to explain upvotes?". But the main answer to that question is because people who stuck out their necks to try to explain the site's standards politely, would frequently get sworn at and even threatened. (I was once openly called sexist for applying these standards, with no evidence beyond the fact that the OP was a woman, which I didn't know at the time).
by zahlman
7/20/2026 at 11:59:49 PM
I'm criticizing the design of the site (and to some extent the rules that were set up) more so than the moderators trying to operate within it. I'm aware of how thankless a job moderating can be, and how a Q&A site can quickly die under a mass of help vampires who will just suck up endless effort if you let them. I think a lot of the site's design really played into it, and realistically it was probably something that needed to evolve as it grew and matured, because the dynamics really change at different stages.> the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed
This is a decision I would question. What is it about a bad question that makes answers undesirable until the question itself is fixed? Especially when the judgement of such badness might be faulty (even if it's encouraged to bias towards leaving it open). Again, the answer may be the moderators doing the best with the tools their given (e.g. lacking good ways to otherwise surface the better questions to potential answers), but this is exactly the kind of issue I think tends to underlie SO's problems.
> The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs
I don't get that impression. The perceived toxicity comes from a somewhat inscrutable set of rules and also apparently inconsistent enforcement which created a lot of frustration with the site. None of this requires that the moderation is even impolite. In fact, people can get more frustrated when a result they consider wildly unreasonable is delivered with a cordial tone. The trope of a saccharine sweet but utterly evil bureaucrat exists for a reason, and I think that is the kind of impression people who describe SO as toxic are describing, whatever the underlying cause (which is almost certainly not that a bunch of people spending their spare time moderating a site are just evil for the sake of it).
(And it's not unique to SO. Wikipedia has a lot of the same problems, though with different causes and attempts to solve them)
by rcxdude
7/21/2026 at 12:52:46 AM
> I'm criticizing the design of the site (and to some extent the rules that were set up)So we agree (but the people you're talking about are not moderators). Again:
>Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it.
Onward:
> What is it about a bad question that makes answers undesirable until the question itself is fixed?
Many things.
It was partly about working around other missteps of the system design: closed questions that aren't fixed are supposed to get deleted, but the system automating this was deliberately conservative, and in particular would preserve anything that had an answer.
The more bad questions there are, the greater the chance that a third party trying to find a good question with a search engine will find a bad question instead. Sometimes that can be fixed with duplicate linking, but often not.
When a curator believes that a question is a duplicate, and is trying to find the "canonical" version with the best questions and answers, the more bad questions there are, the greater the chance that the curator fails to find that question. This is because bad questions carry a risk of resembling the desired target while actually being about something else.
Answers written for a bad question might be worse because they misunderstand the situation due to the quality issue; and they might be invalidated when the question gets fixed.
Answering bad, low-effort questions contributes to the incorrect impression that effort isn't expected (because the OP gets a reward that might be seen as far more valuable than abstract reputation points: personalized, possibly-working code). It incentivizes more bad questions, when the goal is to preempt bad questions and get people to understand question quality.
Finally, of course, answering bad questions wastes time and effort that could have been spent on better questions.
See also: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808
> In fact, people can get more frustrated when a result they consider wildly unreasonable is delivered with a cordial tone.
Right. And the site owners would insist that we adopt that cordial tone, and made multiple attempts to shift the Code of Conduct around in a way that they hoped would lead to more cordial tone.
And people reacting badly to commentary, even when given in a cordial tone, led to people not trying to explain their actions at all. Which led to people being upset that actions were taken without explanation (including in a significant fraction of cases where the system's automatic explanation was perfectly clear enough, frankly).
Seriously: there were many people who came to the meta site after asking a question that literally started with words to the effect of "What do you think is the best...", and then presented as if they could not possibly understand why the question was deemed "opinion-based".
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 8:32:08 AM
My 16 year old question was recently closed because it didn't follow the rules. It just seemed really petty.Edit: just checked it has been deleted so no longer visible to non moderators.
by pipes
7/19/2026 at 4:49:21 PM
Was the title "What's wrong with this JavaScript code?"?by pwdisswordfishq
7/19/2026 at 5:40:57 PM
Ha! No it was not :)by pipes
7/18/2026 at 10:20:10 PM
I had a pretty high rank on ruby and java answers, with some high traffic stuff, there were always people trying to completely edit my answers into something else entirely, it was such a shitty experience that I just decided the effort wasn’t worth it.by mlinhares
7/18/2026 at 5:53:45 PM
I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.by TrainedMonkey
7/19/2026 at 1:48:35 AM
> Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data.That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The "quality of the site data" is a 100% honest motivation and I don't understand why people are unwilling to accept that. I and others have made countless attempts to explain it.
> I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods
The people you're referring to are not control freaks, and also are not "moderators". Most curation on the site requires consensus between multiple people who are generally not coordinating.
> Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
I can practically guarantee that the person you're referring to was not a moderator. If it was (someone with the diamond icon beside the username, and who appeared on https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators), you should have posted on the meta site about it. The pattern of behaviour you describe is clearly abusive and against the Code of Conduct (and would have been across all versions thereof), and would absolutely been acted upon.
If an "ordinary" (perhaps with higher rep) user was harassing you like this, that is why they put a "flag" link under every question and answer, and icon beside each comment, to raise a flag for moderator attention. This sort of thing is and always has been taken seriously.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 8:02:07 AM
> That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.If quite literally every person I interact with professionally has an anecdote about this happening, your anecdote about it not happening is not very convincing.
Have you/SO staff/SO mods considered why this impression is so prevalent if you’re confident it’s (as you claim) not actually true?
by digitalPhonix
7/20/2026 at 1:17:14 AM
Your claim is that "quite literally every person you interact with professionally has an anecdote about" the internal mental state of other people.Even if everyone else on the Internet thinks a person has a certain belief or motivation or ideology, that doesn't mean that person actually has that belief or motivation or ideology.
I'm speaking to my own mental state, as well as to my general impression of what other curators told me, and the frustrations they espoused. There were chat rooms where people could have easily spent all day talking about how cool it is to power-trip, if they'd actually been power-trippers. Instead, they talked about how helpless* they felt as new people kept coming in and making the same innocent mistakes; about how they had no tools to deal with this except the ones that left offsite users with a bad impression; about how annoying it was to be constantly aware of that offsite bad impression when they were trying to do things necessary to the site's objective; etc.
What you also seem to be missing is that since the Prosus acquisition, "SO mods" (and the rest of the community, who are much greater in number and take the large majority of the actions incorrectly deemed "moderation" by outsiders) and "SO staff" were in active conflict most of the time. The LLM-content ban policy was against the staff's (really the company, who employ a handful of staff as liaisons) wishes; the fighting over this got so bad that there was an actual moderation strike and an extended period where the site got the amount of spam you'd expect for a site that size instead of the almost miraculously small amount it would normally get. (The spam filtering also involved community-operated automated systems that were suspended in solidarity.) Then we got hit with proposal after proposal for AI-powered features that were obviously terrible half-baked nonsense with no real value ad; we constantly tore into them on the meta site; the company showed zero sign whatsoever of caring in the slightest, while Prashanth Chandrasekhar (the new CEO) would give TedX talks and such demonstrating a complete ignorance of how the community felt about AI in general.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 4:46:18 PM
Many people come to Stack Overflow carrying preconceptions about how the site is supposed to operate and are surprised when reality does not agree with them. Since admitting to being wrong would be too hard, they prefer to come up with quasi-conspiratorial explanations of inflated egos, secret motives and admin cliques. Same thing happens to Wikipedia, really."But you said you want to build the sum of all human knowledge! Why can't you accept this piece of alternative history I just made up?"
"So, Stack Overflow is for the computer stuff, right? I have this Word document that... what do you mean this is not a programming question?"
"Since I have no idea where else I could go with this, you must allow me to post it here!"
I mean, it's not like either project is free from power-tripping moderators and overzealous application of procedure; in fact, it's not even particularly rare... but still rarer than the loudest naysayers keep insisting. I have witnessed plenty of dysfunctions myself, and yet whenever I hear others' complaints, I tend to suspect this is yet another case that boils down to "how dare you delete my stuff". With many such anecdotes, I notice they only speak of the situation in the vaguest of terms, omitting details that would have enabled me to identify the actual problem... which I cannot help but wonder if this is because if I were to see the situation myself, it would have made the complainer look much worse.
by pwdisswordfishq
7/19/2026 at 4:07:28 AM
Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or hierarchy among the people with edit privileges. I’m not going to litigate my case in front of a clique of other officious hall monitors just for the privilege of making that site better. I don’t care if it was against the rules for me to be annoyed by their obnoxiousness, or what their exact role was in the organizational structure. I tried, but it ended up being a completely obnoxious experience because of a user with advanced privileges, and so you lost me.I was the only one with formal education and a professional background consistently answering, and frankly, that site needed my expertise a hell of a lot more than I needed to share it— and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose. If the point system actually represented expertise, it might have worked. I’m fine with being scrutinized by a peer or superior… But it didn’t go down like that.
by DrewADesign
7/20/2026 at 1:27:15 AM
> Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective.If your lack of interest in how the existing community works is that profound, then you could hardly be said to have a good-faith interest in joining the community in the first place. Which means you're actually upset that the site doesn't provide the service you expected it to.
Sites are not required to provide services simply because the people who arrive there believe that's the service the site provides.
If you're sticking around to keep answering questions, and it's because you think the place has a cool concept behind it and you want to become part of something, you owe it to yourself to make sure you understand what the "something" is. And you owe it to the other people there to accept that you are only one voice out of N in deciding that.
> and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose
That is emphatically not what the purpose was. See for example https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 .
The point system was a broken mess. But it was not intended to represent what you appear to mean by "expertise"; it was intended to represent trust and engagement.
By answering questions, you obtained reputation which granted you privileges, which you were expected to use to maintain the site according to the site's objectives. This includes, notably, filtering questions according to what helps build the site as a useful reference for users of search engines, which is the real motivating force behind the standard question-closure reasons (even if it took a while to achieve consensus on that, and to decide how to phrase it all). And to refrain from answering questions which should be closed, because that acts counter to the site's objective.
The design was specifically intended to ensure that you get scrutinized by peers or superiors — in the domain of using the site properly and working towards its goal, not in the domain of the subject matter where you have expertise. I agree that the reputation system utterly failed in effecting this.
by zahlman
7/20/2026 at 9:28:22 PM
You’re trying to lawyer your way around this very plain fact: in the minds of the vast majority of people who knew about it, it was a site to ask questions about relatively obscure topics, and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge. You make it sound like users were supposed to consider using the site as their primary goal, and consider the subject at hand as secondary. If you read what people were saying here in good faith (or really what damn near everyone outside of that insular community has said about it for like a decade and a half) you’d realize that you are in the extreme minority. You can cite all the governance concepts rules you want, but you can’t make users care about something they don’t, and that’s the problem. There was a group of people operating the site like the site itself was the reason it was popular. It was popular because it had a lot of information people wanted, like Wikipedia is. And there are a hundred billion ways it could have pimped its best questions to Google without having the layer of obnoxious, arrogant people playing question police.Yes, the points system was a mess because of the way it made people behave. You can’t look at it in a vacuum or pretend the negative behavioral consequences were somehow different from the purer intentions of the site. When someone that has permission to change what you say and they abuse that, it doesn’t matter if there’s some justification in the site concept — we’re just going to be bothered by the bothersome people, and tell other people about how annoying the experience was. It could have have been structured to prioritize stewarding people’s knowledge, like Wikipedia, but it wasn’t. There could have been a much greater barrier to being able to meddle with other people’s words but there wasn’t. They could have chosen to not reward people for doing exactly that, but they didn’t. Instead, in interface and in the audience of privileged users it attracted, it prioritized gamification, popularity, the ‘erm aactually’ guys that were way out of their depth, and a whole bunch of other shit that everyone else rolled their eyes at. It was successful in spite of the obnoxious governance and self-important pseudo stewardship of other people’s knowledge, not because of it.
If SO was even vaguely still relevant to the conversation, I’d still be telling people that it’s time for a big ego deflation and giant reality check. But it’s not relevant. If preponderance of users were really enamored with the community and governance and rules and site structure and all of that shit, rather than it simple having information on obscure topics and issues where you could get a question answered by someone who knew what they were talking about, then everybody wouldn’t have jumped ship literally the moment they had an alternative. Wikipedia didn’t lose anywhere close to that about amount of traffic. Search results are also barely relevant these days, comparatively, but I’ll bet the people there now are just as overzealous about policing questions for the same justifications.
by DrewADesign
7/20/2026 at 10:43:13 PM
> You’re trying to lawyer your way around this very plain factIt's not lawyering. I'm extremely well aware of the impedance mismatch. It wasn't created by the community. It was created by the site software failing to align with the site's goals.
> in the minds of the vast majority of people who knew about it, it was a site to ask questions about relatively obscure topics, and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge.
Well, no. "The vast majority of people who knew about it" were asking beginner-level questions, as is to be expected, because every field of human endeavour is full of neophytes. They believed their questions to be obscure due to a lack of expertise. They often were obscure; not because of the subject matter but because of a lack of attempt to debug the code (and, often, a lack of general awareness of the concept of debugging). And they were often not coherent questions at all, or else they were multiple questions arising from multiple problems with the same code sample.
But it was a site to ask questions and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge. That is not even slightly inconsistent with anything I've said here.
The problem is, "this is a place to ask and answer questions" is not the same thing as "this is a place to show what's causing you a problem and get someone to help you, specifically" and also not the same thing as "this is a place to help people solve their problems one-on-one".
> You make it sound like users were supposed to consider using the site as their primary goal, and consider the subject at hand as secondary.
Yes, because they were. Just like they are on every other website, e.g. this one. When people come to HN and post things that are counter to the guidelines, other community members use downvotes, flags and polite replies (and, in some cases, emails to the site staff) to address the issue. This much is obvious and I don't understand how it can be a point of contention.
> If you read what people were saying here in good faith (or really what damn near everyone outside of that insular community has said about it for like a decade and a half) you’d realize that you are in the extreme minority.
I have been reading it for most of that decade and a half. I have been flooded with it again and again and again. I literally cannot find an off-site discussion of Stack Overflow that isn't full of it. I am intimately familiar with the argument, and you have said nothing new here.
What I have said over and over again, which everyone outside "the extreme minority" seems unwilling to accept, is that this does not matter. If people come to a place and don't care about how things work in that place, the place is not in any way obligated to change to accommodate them. The people should leave of their own accord, and they should accept that they misunderstood the place, and accept that the place has a right to sovereignty, and find a different place that does work the way they want.
There were countless places that did work the way the typical new SO user wanted. SO existed specifically because of a belief that those places are incapable of producing a useful knowledge base, and cause experts to burn out on repeating basic advice. (SO use patterns demonstrated to me that actually there are more than enough people around who are happy to repeat basic advice and operate a free help desk for beginners; if they get upset, it's because the beginners still fail to understand things after they were explained. But those people were actively interfering with the site's objectives. They were far more destructive than any beginner could ever be.)
> And there are a hundred billion ways it could have pimped its best questions to Google without having the layer of obnoxious, arrogant people playing question police.
You had over a decade and a half to try proposing some on meta.
> Yes, the points system was a mess because of the way it made people behave.
Specifically, it enabled the people I describe in the above parenthetical, yes. But you present this argument as if you think people were downvoting and closing questions, and otherwise trying to uphold policy, in order to gain reputation points.
That is the literal exact opposite of how the system worked. You got reputation for basically everything else, which then enabled you to take those actions. You got 0 reputation for voting to close something, or for "dupe-hammering" it with that specific privilege. You got either 0 or -1 reputation for downvoting something.
You could potentially get 2 reputation points for editing something, if you didn't already have unilateral edit privileges and your edit was accepted (and because the people who could accept your edit could also edit unilaterally, and were doing all of this specifically to try to make the site better by getting good edits in place ASAP, they were therefore incentivized not to give you that reputation.) Plus there was a cap on total reputation you could get that way; you still had to ask and answer questions to reach the unilateral edit privilege.
By contrast, you got +25 for an upvote and accept-mark on an answer, no matter how clearly the question violated site guidelines; versus -2 from an annoyed curator downvoting you for not understanding that you weren't supposed to answer the question and were supposed to help close it instead. (Plus you got a five minute window to post if you'd started, even if the question got closed immediately. Plus you could do this unilaterally while three curators would have to agree to close except for duplicates. Plus only a small fraction of the userbase could cast close votes, while everyone could answer.)
> There could have been a much greater barrier to being able to meddle with other people’s words but there wasn’t.
That would have been an actively bad thing. The editing was by well-considered design, specifically to make the site better. The edits people complain about overwhelmingly do, objectively, obviously make the site better and I'm frankly tired of trying to explain the obvious. I have, over and over, for years, tried to point people at the policy explaining this. Nobody ever even tries to engage with it.
You may have noticed that Wikipedia frowns on signatures on main-space pages, and expects citations for claims, for example. SO policy is roughly analogous.
> If preponderance of users were really enamored with the community and governance and rules and site structure and all of that shit, rather than it simple having information on obscure topics and issues where you could get a question answered by someone who knew what they were talking about, then everybody wouldn’t have jumped ship literally the moment they had an alternative.
Nobody ever tried to say they were, certainly not me.
What I'm saying is that the people who didn't understand this stuff, shouldn't have been there in the first place. Because simply getting questions answered is not how you build a useful Q&A reference, and that is what the creators of the site wanted to have. Which is amply demonstrated by looking at a random sampling of questions (you can do this yourself on data.stackexchange.com with an SQL query, if you like).
I am genuinely happy they found the alternative(s) they wanted the whole time, and should have been using the whole time (well, as they became available).
by zahlman
7/21/2026 at 10:24:24 PM
Sorry, I’m not going to read your >1000 word reply. So far the only thing you’ve convinced me of is that I’d accurately gauged how zealously out-of-touch the people behind that mess were. Have a good one.by DrewADesign
7/19/2026 at 4:26:40 AM
[dead]by cindyllm
7/18/2026 at 5:02:29 PM
Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes.On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.
On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.
I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
by Chris_Newton
7/18/2026 at 8:29:35 PM
Re: quis custodiet ipsos custodes...Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.
by webnrrd2k
7/19/2026 at 12:33:38 AM
Yeah, I really like Slashdot's approach to both regular and meta moderation.I don't understand why it never caught on elsewhere.
by CoastalCoder
7/19/2026 at 12:41:45 AM
The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well informed on a subject doing both in the same discussion!Meta-moderation was an interesting idea, though they seemed to have stopped promoting it much by the time I stopped posting there often. I’m not convinced it’s as effective as having a small pool of “super-moderators” who can not only affect the prioritisation/visibility but also comment themselves to guide contributors in positive directions, but practically speaking, it might be more scalable.
by Chris_Newton
7/19/2026 at 3:54:41 AM
> The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well informed on a subject doing both in the same discussion!I get that, but moderation points carried a lot more weight than they do most places because a randomly code chosen subset of users would only get like 5 points… so you had to choose carefully where you used them. Since it wasn’t super common to get mod points, it’s not like you were limited often.
And the users on that site, frankly, could be downright feral in its heyday, let alone now. I think it needed more structure, not less. If there was even one person that would clean up the garbage, maybe the discussion would be civil enough to allow that. They can’t even be arsed to remove swastika ascii art half the time. That’s what happens when you address fundamentally human problems with purely technical solutions.
by DrewADesign
7/19/2026 at 1:18:58 PM
I actually think the participate XOR vote behaviour of Slashdot was a great feature! It stops people pettily downvoting comments that don't agree with them on the same discussion.by rwmj
7/19/2026 at 9:45:10 AM
OT, but "ferriting” made me think of a steel stoat, or a magnetic mink. (I did also appreciate the insight in your comment.)by psd1
7/18/2026 at 4:16:16 PM
> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
by cs02rm0
7/18/2026 at 5:11:22 PM
Now that's a name I haven't heard about in a long time. hahaby xeromal
7/18/2026 at 10:38:46 PM
The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).by rcxdude
7/19/2026 at 2:07:00 AM
Would you be willing to show questions you attempted to ask? I'd be happy to help explain how policy works/worked there.by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 2:50:00 PM
I love the implication that thousands of people, from a broad spectrum, who all had the same negative experiences with what was obviously a serious endemic problem with the site, all just needed to understand the policy better. That was clearly the issue.by feoren
7/20/2026 at 12:44:46 AM
If thousands of Americans travelled to a tiny country where cars drive on the left, and all tried to drive on the right as they do at home, would that make the country in the wrong? Would it be a "serious endemic problem" with the country?by zahlman
7/20/2026 at 10:14:24 AM
Out of 10 times I asked for this, somebody replied with a link once. Most people do understand that they have violated the rules, they just don't agree with the rules.by Athari
7/19/2026 at 8:17:24 PM
We know how it works. That's why we all eventually gave up on helping people there (years before I knew what an LLM was.)by mh-
7/20/2026 at 6:55:21 PM
If you knew how it worked, you would have understood that answering questions is only indirectly about "helping people", by hopefully building something that third parties can make use of later. The objective is not "the OP's problem was solved", but "the OP's question was answered" (which requires that there is a recognizable question extracted from analyzing the problem; and that there is one such question; and of course, those third parties are better served if they are all routed to the same place where the best answers are already written.)If you were there to volunteer troubleshooting, or the programming equivalent of "tech support", you were in the wrong place. If you were interested in going back and forth with suggestions to help debug a program, you were in the wrong place. All of that is supposed to happen before the question is posted. The question is about why a specific thing works a specific way, or how to accomplish a specific atomic objective.
by zahlman
7/20/2026 at 7:01:31 PM
I believe the disconnect here is you're describing how some wanted it to work vs. how it played out in the real world. In practice, it became an unrewarding place to contribute high quality original content to.by mh-
7/18/2026 at 5:10:18 PM
The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.
It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!
But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.
(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)
by dfabulich
7/18/2026 at 5:52:20 PM
You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.
A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.
The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.
But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.
Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.
The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.
by eterm
7/18/2026 at 5:50:46 PM
Yeah, this is much more accurate to what was actually happening. During that high period they struggled to get people to stop posting low-quality "do my homework" style questions - despite what people on here say the barrier for entry was extremely low and those made up the vast majority of what was posted.I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.
by Izkata
7/18/2026 at 5:49:36 PM
> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated[citation needed]
Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.
The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.
StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.
SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.
by pygy_
7/19/2026 at 12:15:01 AM
> The article creation [...] growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite.Not just because of that, but they also made the process of creating new articles very hostile.
Decades ago, when Wikipedia started, it was possible to create a short article, and as long as no one objected against it, it stayed there, and people could later expand it. That's what "wiki" was supposed to mean.
Today, you need to create an article in a separate "Draft" namespace, then a random Wikipedia editor will judge it, and if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references), it cannot be published. And if you don't fix it by a certain date, it gets automatically deleted. (Rather than leaving it there for someone else to hopefully improve.)
I tried to make an article for an author whose books my kids liked. His books were translated to many languages, he won a few awards, and now some company has bought movie rights for the books. Alas, I have failed to establish notability sufficiently in my short article, so it was rejected. The editor didn't even have to argue that the author is not notable (which would be silly, a google search clearly shows otherwise), only that my article failed to establish it. So the official policy now kinda says that it is better to have no article rather than an imperfect one.
Well, I am not getting paid for producing perfect articles for Wikipedia, which means there is no way for me to contribute anymore. Too bad, I have created a few articles long ago.
by Viliam1234
7/19/2026 at 2:15:54 PM
I've had my share of battles on WP to preserve content that was dismissed as fringe by people who didn't understand what they were looking at (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_deletion/2...).The author you mentioned may not have met the inclusion criteria at the time, or maybe you had the misfortune to fall on a zealous admin who gets dopamine kicks from that kind of behavior. That being said, if a cursory Google search was enough to establish notability, it shouldn't have taken much time and effort to add links to reliable sources and save the article.
WP is very sensitive regarding inclusion criteria for biographies of living persons, because of the flood of vanity submission they have to filter out. The notability criteria are not perfect, but the provide a good enough balance to limit the spam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#...).
In my experience, toxic behavior isn't as rewarded as it was on SO, and there are venues to discuss issues.
by pygy_
7/19/2026 at 1:00:42 AM
The old Wikipedia had more information on obscure Pokemon than major politicians, and you could add PowerThirst as an energy drink and not have it reverted for weeks.There was something good and glorious about that, but that era is gone. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are done, finished, cooked - what comes next?
by bombcar
7/19/2026 at 5:06:25 AM
Quora had a lot more arrogant mods, but a much shorter peak when it was useful. Now it’s not even worth for AI models to train on its content, it’s even worse than expert-sex-change, the site that was so bad in incentivized SO’s creation.I still remember when quora was launched and people claimed it was more welcoming for open-ended questions, when it was obvious from day one it was the opposite, extremely hostile to any newcomers. It actually more appeared to be mostly a community of assholes that was expelled from SO.
by wikiiiisksklhll
7/19/2026 at 4:51:16 AM
Q&A sites in the age of LLMs are dead.by wikiiiisksklhll
7/19/2026 at 5:13:12 PM
> if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references)Having references for claims is not "perfect"; it's basics. Which is especially becoming more relevant in the age of ever more rampant misinformation.
Take a look at the list of hoaxes below and wonder what would you have done to prevent them. With Wikipedia being open to editing by anybody, I don't think you could come up with anything better than the system currently in place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...
by pwdisswordfishq
7/19/2026 at 12:50:35 AM
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...by dfabulich
7/19/2026 at 8:20:52 AM
And what was the alternative to stack overflow before AI?People were desperate for an alternative, and ran with the first semi-viable one that emerged.
AI is arguably worse than SO for precision. It will hallucinate, and agree with you when you're wrong. But stack overflow is so unwelcoming to newcomers that people switched anyway.
by ConorSheehan1
7/19/2026 at 10:06:21 AM
> People were desperate for an alternativeSure, why not. They were looking for a community that would let them speak. But that's like complaining your product review on amazon got deleted. It may be part of the amazon experience, but it's not the point.
by psd1
7/19/2026 at 4:48:59 AM
90% of my over 250k rep is from asking questions.Surely there's some value to asking a well worded question that many other people also have.
And yes, I've had my share of questions closed for some BS, including many in recent times closing 10 year old questions as dupes. Brilliant.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk
7/19/2026 at 12:15:30 AM
> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia
by throwaway2037
7/19/2026 at 12:49:00 AM
Wikipedia's traffic (and donations) are collapsing. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...People don't like to think of it this way, but Wikipedia is funded by ads. Except, the ads only advertise one thing: requests for donations. If people don't visit Wikipedia, because the AI regurgitated Wikipedia's answers, they won't see Wikipedia's donation ads, and they won't donate.
Over time, if current trends continue, more and more people won't even know about Wikipedia. They won't have any "warm feeling" towards the project, because they never go there, they never use it, they never see what good it does them.
by dfabulich
7/19/2026 at 1:50:19 AM
Doesn’t WMF hold hundreds of million and growing on their foundation balance sheet, and raise $150M+/year through donations when hosting expenses are $4M/year?Obviously they need staff and more costs than just hosting, but something isn’t adding up for me, so I stopped donating.
by dannyw
7/19/2026 at 4:39:24 AM
I feel exactly the same. I think I saw a blog post on HN with a deep analysis of their financial state of affairs. They don't need my money. They can run for a long time by (1) reducing unnecessary headcount (the org is way too big) and (2) carefully managing their endowment.by throwaway2037
7/18/2026 at 10:11:52 PM
> Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020?The year that Google made "open source contribution" a checkbox on your annual review. That's when almost ALL these types of sites went to dogshit. And then everybody followed Google which then weaponized it even more.
Once Google made Fake Internet Points(tm) worth actual money via your annual review, all holy hell broke loose over the sites.
by bsder
7/18/2026 at 10:21:39 PM
You’re actually on to something here, and it’s a phenomenon beyond Google that has engendered tons of blogspam and AIslop and manual LinkedIn slop.Many professional certifications require bearers to earn CEUs. One way these may be earned is by blogging or doing demonstrations. So if you see a bunch of entry-level techbros doing really boring blog entries or posting to LinkedIn, you should know that they intend to earn CEUs for their particular professional certifications, such as CompTIA, et. al.
It’s not their fault... but Lord, how insufferable it can be!
by ButlerianJihad
7/19/2026 at 1:05:06 AM
Some school somewhere made participation required or heavily encouraged - understandably perhaps; it was a great signal before it got eternal Septembered into worthlessness.by bombcar
7/18/2026 at 6:04:05 PM
It's the same thing. Why did AI compete so aggressively with them? It's because their system was one that produced confident misinformation from hobbyists while gatekeeping actual experts.The same thing is not yet happening to wikipedia as you can see with the pageview tool. You may be confusing a covid bump. At most any drop is within an order of magnitude.
by casey2
7/18/2026 at 5:48:27 PM
You aren’t downvoted on Wikipedia. And people have been complaining about heavy handed editors and mods there for a long time. Same with SO.It’s pretty much a meme now.
by firesteelrain
7/19/2026 at 1:55:40 AM
Wikipedia at least has a culture where (most of the time) if you’re objectively rude or mean, especially to newbies, you’re at least shunned a bit.Strict moderation etc isn’t a bad thing, but the environment and culture you mould is what matters.
by dannyw
7/18/2026 at 5:59:03 PM
Ouch, great, you should show that protocol you used to get causation out of an observational study to the entire scientific community! It's unclear what area will give you a Nobel Prize for that, but several of them will rush to do it first.by marcosdumay
7/18/2026 at 8:46:01 PM
One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed.The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.
by mancerayder
7/18/2026 at 11:50:46 PM
I really enjoyed asking questions where I linked a similar answered question, went through the details that caused my problem to be mechanically different or rendered the other answer as not possible, and then having a moderator close it as a duplicate and link the answer half my post had been dedicated to explaining the difference.by lovich
7/20/2026 at 6:32:44 AM
So it's not just me. The "duplicate" thing alone made it hard to use a lot of the time. Other stuff like people just being arrogant didn't bother me so much.by frollogaston
7/18/2026 at 5:47:32 PM
If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes
1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)
2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"
3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.
by maerF0x0
7/18/2026 at 9:04:37 PM
They chose being controlled and not being Reddit - I can imagine lots of ways to do both - still they chose the toxic way and now they are dead, goal achieved.by democracy
7/19/2026 at 3:03:06 AM
Early o. On some irc channels, forums and usenet groups the greatest trolls, clowns and crazy users were also the most knowlegable and the most helpful. They had to earn the right to misbehave. The secret sause was that anything goes but if something on topic comes along that is the only topic.Also a wonderful formula was to promote your own website in a signature on blogs and forums. If your comment isnt worth having it is just deleted. You had to work for it and the reward was good. If your sig is a giant banner more effort is expected.
Also oddly interesting was moderation depending on how much money you sunk into the product.
by theendisney
7/20/2026 at 6:34:49 AM
It's probably as simple as people stopped going to SO now that there's a chatbot that can answer your question instantly and maybe even run your code. Idk what else they could've done.by frollogaston
7/19/2026 at 2:12:33 AM
> Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"This was a bad idea, and worked terribly.
I have over 1800 answers on the site, many of them detailed, well-considered, long answers to difficult problems. But my highest rated answer by far was to someone asking two completely different questions at once (both of which have far better individual versions) in a way that was barely comprehensible even after multiple attempts by the community to rewrite in something approximating proper English.
For reference, the original version, verbatim:
> if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ] and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2 and for the second (2+3)/2 third (3+4)/2 ...... etc
> how can do as that ? like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?
> also how can i sum a list of number ? a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]
> is it:
> b = sum(a) print b
> in i get one number !? it doesn't work with me help me plz
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 1:45:49 AM
In my opinion, the main thing was toxic moderation and the general lack of effort in creating a welcoming or constructive environment.Moderation and community accessibility can exist. I think your points have described the early SO, but moderation has definitely gone downhill as the years went on.
I’m not new to communities with their own culture, expectations, and rules.
I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and while you can always find drama everywhere, newbies are welcomed not thrown rule books.
If you make a well meaning edit that was formatted wrong as a newbie, you’d most likely get a welcome note and guidance; not threats or whatnot.
It’s like “Go away until you follow all our rules and we like you” versus “Welcome, thanks for contributing to Wikipedia, here’s our rules, feel free to ask me questions or help”.
by dannyw
7/19/2026 at 4:31:38 AM
I’ve had the opposite experience with wikipedia and have stopped posting there forever.My edits at wikipedia, for several different topics, were reverted, for bullshit reasons. One was ”the process here at wikipedia is for edits to be mindlessly reverted, then debated thoroughly, and maybe later rewritten as the mods wants it”. I.e. as a topic expert, just adding information as drive-by is apparently out of the question.
Another reason was adding anything about the future, like information about upcoming, scheduled events, was seen as advertising. It’s of course also not consistently applied across wikipedia but the mods couldn’t care less.
It’s far, far worse than SO. Complaints I’ve seen about SO’s moderation rules have always been to keep assholes away, thank god.
by wikiiiisksklhll
7/19/2026 at 2:17:23 AM
> I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and while you can always find drama everywhere, newbies are welcomed not thrown rule books.I've lost count of the times that other editors insisted that I log into my account and stop posting anonymously, for committing the sin of actually understanding policy (after spending inordinate amounts of time reading back-room pages that most people wouldn't even know how to find). And I've seen countless others yelled at for not understanding it.
But imagine if 99% of people who came to Wikipedia sincerely believed that it was completely appropriate to go to the page for dogs, and edit the main-space page to ask whether Rover needs to see a vet. That's how it felt for me on the inside of Stack Overflow. I went out of my way to place the rulebook neatly in their hands and hardly anyone cared.
But the actual "culture, expectations and rules" of SO are not "if you want to know something, you can come and post as if you were using a traditional discussion forum and are not expected to consider anything or anyone outside of that".
by zahlman
7/18/2026 at 8:40:48 PM
These were all good things about stackexchange (and a precious few other places), yeah. Especially the latter two. Whenever I see people using stuff like linkedin to 'vet' things, I think of this. Reddit is much more cliquey and free-for-all, and has a lot more emotional fighting than the egoistic sort of arguments that sometimes took/take place on SO. I still prefer SO.by jambalaya8
7/18/2026 at 6:45:45 PM
> If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.And why do you think most people (and LLMs) just Google "<what they are looking for> reddit" ??
by kaoD
7/18/2026 at 4:32:32 PM
I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.by rdiddly
7/18/2026 at 5:10:55 PM
As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.by xeromal
7/18/2026 at 5:30:46 PM
One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions.Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".
SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I think is a big part of why everyone stopped using it.
And people stopping using it meant that when a question did actually make it through the gauntlet, it was likely to go unanswered because everyone who knew anything had left the platform.
by cogman10
7/18/2026 at 5:41:52 PM
Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol.Do you remember how power users would edit your question just for the gamification of it. Drove me nuts
by xeromal
7/19/2026 at 2:24:34 AM
> Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol.Meanwhile, I saw so many people come to the meta site apparently completely unable to understand that a question leading off with "what do you think is the best..." (almost literally, in many cases!) is asking for a subjective opinion, that I had to make an artificial meta-canonical for it (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434806).
by zahlman
7/18/2026 at 6:58:38 PM
That’s my only experience. Asking a direct technical question, only for it to be modified to a totally different question filled with essays of non-answers by folks who liked to answer their own questions I guessby dmboyd
7/19/2026 at 2:22:51 AM
> Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".Please show examples. People arguing that XYZ is not a duplicate made up a large fraction of volume on the meta site, and in the overwhelming majority of cases it was very clear that the question was indeed a duplicate per site policy. It absolutely was not something people would do "just because these two questions related to the same library". (If it were really like that, tags would never get more than one question each.)
The goal is not that you can copy and paste code from the answer and have it work as-is. Minimally, we don't know your variable names, constants etc. and any number of other trivial details like that which perhaps shape the problem you are facing but are completely irrelevant to the question.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 2:55:20 AM
Christ, this is actually the SO problem in a nutshell.I'm not going to go dig through SO to refind the examples of improperly "closed as duplicate" questions I stumbled on years ago while looking up a problem.
It's just not that important to me for a dead site. I get it, that means "just trust me bro" is in play. Feel free to completely ignore my comment in that case. You win.
SO was filled with this sort of "technically this is a duplicate and you are just a nasty rule breaker" style comments with litigation that ultimately goes nowhere. I'm not on SO.
Others experienced and are reporting here and elsewhere experiencing the harsh moderation of SO. Trying to make that subjective feeling technically wrong does nothing to rehabilitate SO's reputation.
by cogman10
7/20/2026 at 12:41:21 AM
> It's just not that important to me for a dead site. I get it, that means "just trust me bro" is in play.See, this is the part where I'm actually getting insulted by the invocation of the "bro" language. No; what's happening here is that my lived experience as a curator of the site (which was quite stressful) is being denied, and it is supposed that evidence to counter me is not necessary.
This isn't about "winning"; this is about me wanting you to understand something that you apparently don't understand. Again, it's hurtful to have that motivation ascribed to me.
> SO was filled with this sort of "technically this is a duplicate and you are just a nasty rule breaker" style comments with litigation that ultimately goes nowhere.… Others experienced and are reporting here and elsewhere experiencing the harsh moderation of SO.
First off, I want to make this extremely clear: posting a question that gets closed is not, and was never, considered "breaking the rules". When people close a question, they are not moderating the site, but curating it; which is exactly why the overwhelming majority of such actions are taken by non-moderators. People are wrong and ignorant to call them mods, and it's hurtful that they don't take the time to understand this. I understand perfectly well that people felt that these actions were harsh, or even cruel. Many of them were not executed properly. But nobody ever takes the time to understand my perspective; they assume many false and hurtful things about me (and others) and refuse to be corrected on those assumptions. Worse, the site software, and the company, actively interfered with the intended curation of the site in many different ways over the years (changing according to whatever the company was currently trying in order to be profitable).
There is nothing "technical" about things being marked as duplicates. There is a clear standard for it which was reasoned out according to a very specific purpose: people who search the site should find the best possible version of the Q&A, so that they can directly get the answer to their question.
The only time that "litigation goes nowhere" is when people come to the meta site with the assumption that the rules do and ought to work the way they expected them to, and refuse to accept that they actually work differently. Stack Overflow was (and still is, to the extent that anyone remains) a community, and communities are supposed to have a right to self-determination. It's not the fault of the curators that the site presented a misleading interface, to the extent that that happened; they had no power to modify the interface beyond making more Q&A posts on the meta site.
by zahlman
7/20/2026 at 1:15:24 PM
> a community, and communities are supposed to have a right to self-determination.Your comment can be boiled down to this. And yes, I completely agree with you that a site has the right to operate however it pleases.
But that does not mean a site has the right to be free from outside criticism. Exercising your self-determination in a way that is obviously noxious will get called out, which is the right of an outsider.
Your perspective, frankly, doesn't matter. It won't rehabilitate the reputation of SO. I'm sorry this hurts as you've obviously invested a lot of time there. This isn't a problem of "everyone just doesn't understand the site" or "everyone should understand me".
Sites die when the experience isn't something end users enjoy. That's what happened to SO. No amount of rule litigation and self determination changes the perspective of the users. SO was a Q&A site that bent towards shutting down the Q&A section of the site as much as possible because of "curation". No wonder most people asking and answering questions decided "You know what, what's the point?"
by cogman10
7/20/2026 at 6:33:24 PM
> Exercising your self-determination in a way that is obviously noxiousBut we weren't, and it wasn't.
People were overwhelmingly trying to be polite and factual about what needed to happen for a question to be reopened, the entire time I tried using the site. The yelling and cursing overwhelmingly came from people who imagined that they were entitled to do things that were explicitly against policy, simply because of UI affordances.
We are not the ones who created those UI affordances. We had no control over any detail of the reputation system or the review queues. We had no way to show you the things you needed to read except to link them to you, and we were constantly confronted by people who interpreted any kind of hyperlink to policy in a discussion as inherently rude. We had no control over the onboarding flows that failed to show those things to you. The only access we had was to produce a mini-faq (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251225) out of Q&A on the meta site (which really should not itself have used the Q&A format IMO, but that is also something that was completely out of our control).
And for the cases where people got out of line, there was a flagging system all over the place and moderators who took complaints seriously; and there was also a meta site where people could come to have policy explained in more detail. But it was genuinely rare that people who actually knew better, actually got out of line.
It was far more common for people to complain loudly that they were hard done by because someone downvoted their question (which genuinely merited it, per the purpose of downvotes on the site) and didn't leave a detailed comment explaining why (which is not an expectation ever imposed on Redditors or anyone else, and is an action protected by policy because i) there's hovertext on the down arrow summarizing the general reasons for using it; ii) people who leave those comments often get abusive replies). Or to complain that they were hard done by because their question was closed for being "too easy" (which is not why it was actually closed; an actual closure reason was explicitly labelled in the interface, but a more accurate summary of the typical close reason is "you've identified the symptoms of a problem in your code, but thus far you have not actually distilled this to a question; you just want someone else to make your code work again"). Or to complain that someone had the sheer audacity to pick through a problem description, isolate a single apparent cause, recognize that beginners encounter that issue constantly, and provide an immediate link for free to the existing "canonical" Q&A for it. (After all, why should they have to adapt code that was written against some other abstract example reconstruction of the problem, to their own code? Why should they have to figure out how that pattern applies to their hundred-line code dump, and where?)
> Your perspective, frankly, doesn't matter. It won't rehabilitate the reputation of SO. I'm sorry this hurts as you've obviously invested a lot of time there.
You don't understand. I am not trying to rehabilitate the reputation of SO.
I am trying to rehabilitate the reputation of the Q&A site format.
And I am trying to get people to stop slandering me and other people I made friends with and cared about. In particular, to stop ascribing false and hurtful motivations, and to have some empathy for what we put up with, and to consider the possibility that what we were trying to accomplish might actually be a worthwhile thing to accomplish that serious people might actually genuinely care about.
When people talk about SO, overwhelmingly they talk about me and my friends. And they repeatedly incorrectly describe me and my friends as "moderators", which comes across as sheer apathy.
Of course my perspective matters to how people are treating me on the Internet based on their perception of things that I did.
> Sites die when the experience isn't something end users enjoy.
I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall here. The site was constantly full of people who were fundamentally not apparently interested in the site's goals, not apparently interested in joining or understanding the existing community, not apparently interested in anything but the service they incorrectly believed the site was there to provide. And the constant implication of this discussion — because it always boils down to "the site died and people hated it and hate you and that's bad and reflects badly on you" — is that I'm somehow supposed to feel bad about the fact that they eventually figured out they were in the wrong place and left. (Or perhaps more accurately: LLMs finally provided they place they really wanted to be the whole time; before that, some made do with Reddit I guess.) After I went out of my way to keep my cool volunteering my time against an unending horde, knowing that attempts to "correct the record" off-site would be at best sneered at.
No, I don't feel bad about that. Because feeling bad about that is logically equivalent to rejecting the right of self-determination that you just acknowledged.
by zahlman
7/20/2026 at 8:33:16 PM
I'm ending here. You are too emotional and now you are accusing (I assume myself) of slander.Grow up.
by cogman10
7/20/2026 at 11:25:01 PM
Just throwing this out there: the post you're replying to had a litany of things like "we had no control over the fact that the site's owners and maintainers implemented a completely different UX than our interpretation of the policies would allow for".The site's builders put one set of UX patterns in place. The site's visitors who created things like that linked mini-faq tried to put another in place. When the two are in obvious conflict, as they clearly frequently are, the people who wrote the mini-faq etc. claim it's because the people who built the site are wrong, as is every other non-personally-invested user of the site.
You're not going crazy, or if you are, at least you're not going alone.
by kstrauser
7/21/2026 at 12:40:30 AM
> the people who wrote the mini-faq etc. claim it's because the people who built the site are wrong, as is every other non-personally-invested user of the site.Yes.
Because it's clear that the people who built the site were wrong, based trying to reconcile the design of the site with what the people who built it said they wanted to happen.
It's obvious, for example, that the reputation system, as implemented, could never give the results that it existed to give (roughly: restrict privileges to those who best understood how to exercise them; encourage regular participation from those whose content would help the site achieve its goal while discouraging lower-quality content that buries the gold needles in a bigger haystack). Here's a discussion from 2023 where a huge amount of clear problems were exhibited (including many by myself), with clear reasoning based in the agreed-upon goals, which led to approximately no action:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/
There were countless efforts over the years to try to explain what was wrong and counterproductive about the site design, which fell on increasingly deaf and even antagonistic ears. As far as I can tell, this was simply the result of profit motive. Maintaining quality standards (and gatekeeping people who expect a different experience) is bad for "engagement" (view counts), and therefore for ad revenue.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 2:18:56 AM
> As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question.That's because you were intended to use the site like GP describes, and not by asking simply because you want to know something.
> They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter.
What you consider "minutia" were critically important, because the entire point was to optimize for GP's experience.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 4:10:34 AM
and how did that work out? the site is dead now because of itby dalyons
7/20/2026 at 12:42:48 AM
The site was always going to die. That is completely okay. Things are allowed to exist without chasing a profit motive. Communities are allowed to form on for-profit platforms, and they should not be required to have the platform's commercial interest in mind.by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 9:51:56 AM
- industry pivots to AI - SO traffic tanks - "lol, they killed themselves with their shitty moderation"by psd1
7/19/2026 at 4:43:46 AM
So is wikipedia.by wikiiiisksklhll
7/19/2026 at 12:20:24 AM
> They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.Well said. It was just something I (and I'm guessing other software devs) put up with because that was the only option. The "ask a question" button was radioactive to me having seen the kind of dogpiling onto people who were asking clearly relevant questions but breaking imaginary rules.
Plus with how much "reputation" early users had amassed just for asking basic questions constituting low hanging fruit, there was no way for any new participant to get enough rep or whatever to begin contributing back to the community. IMO they pioneered the first K-shaped economy.
I felt a little bad when I saw the graph of their traffic fall precipitously, just to be replaced with schadenfreude with the insane takes of their community moderators blaming everything but the culture they'd cultivated ("less questions is actually good, because that's the goal of SO").
In short, I'm eagerly awaiting the death of that rotten place.
by the_lucifer
7/18/2026 at 2:36:00 PM
I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
by brap
7/18/2026 at 3:05:20 PM
During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
by Dragas
7/18/2026 at 5:19:55 PM
I went to my old SO account and found these questions that were closed.https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-w...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trou...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-gener...
As someone who was a budding programmer, I felt like my questions were decent attempts at laying out my problem but they were closed anyways.
by xeromal
7/18/2026 at 7:25:30 PM
At the second you got an interesting answer, thoughby lysium
7/18/2026 at 4:09:50 PM
It's not uncommon for me, while debugging, to find that someone has had the exact same problem as me, asked the question on stackoverflow, and that it has been closed a duplicate of a question which is only slightly related to it (and therefore any answers to that question are pretty useless).by rcxdude
7/18/2026 at 3:23:22 PM
I just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed.And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.
by unreal37
7/18/2026 at 3:34:27 PM
How good are the questions?by Sammi
7/18/2026 at 3:53:02 PM
Does it matter? A site and community that refuses to allow or accommodate anyone to grow and learn as a new user will quickly run out of users. The gatekeeping on SO is a blockade, not a teaching mechanism.by evilduck
7/18/2026 at 5:31:37 PM
How else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error message or a big incomplete block of code and say "help". What are you trying to do? What isn't working? How is it not working?They don't understand that we need information to help them. They will get offended when you ask them to elaborate. They won't understand the answer no matter how much you simplify it. They just want their problem solved with the least possible amount of effort on their part.
by sfn42
7/18/2026 at 6:23:03 PM
You just described the complete opposite of the StackOverflow experience.by evilduck
7/21/2026 at 5:21:24 PM
I relate to sfn42. That *is* the stack overflow experience. That is the average programming forum experience when you frequent it for more than just to get your problems solved.by Dragas
7/18/2026 at 6:36:43 PM
I disagree.Here’s an example: my account on StackOveflow has enough reputation to answer questions on SO, but on other StackExchange sites that are very related I can’t do that just because I spent more time on StackOverflow.
The whole setup is basically repelling you from engaging by design. The site should already know from my SO reputation that I’m trustworthy enough to answer stuff on the other similar tech related stackexchange sites.
It was built for a time when you actually needed to filter out low quality questions and answers, but now that the users have abandoned the ecosystem the bouncer at the door makes a whole lot less sense.
by Grombobulous
7/18/2026 at 9:10:36 PM
I am happy they are dead. Humanity gets +1 for this one.by democracy
7/18/2026 at 4:28:19 PM
This is why people use AI so heavily. Because no matter how bad or ill formed a question is, it wo answer it the most "caring" way possible, and never berate you for it being a stupid question, common sense, etc (as long as it is about some forbidden topic of course)by NewsaHackO
7/18/2026 at 6:34:54 PM
On top of that, the AI will take a plain no-context error message and give it a college try to figure it out. A lot of times it will be right.On SO that experience is going to be “we closed this because you didn’t form a good question.”
And of course, that’s true, but it demonstrates the wide gulf in user experience between the two platforms.
by Grombobulous
7/18/2026 at 7:19:59 PM
If SO wants to be good, it will encourage a back-and-forth: "are you trying X?" but it doesn't want to be good. Private equity doesn't understand going concerns.by inigyou
7/18/2026 at 10:43:52 PM
I think I’d like to see a site where people posted their chat results that ended in a successful resolution. Just for isolated bugs or library use questions. Would not be useful for a lot of the internal work I do but maybe saving those internally would be useful inside a companyby smackeyacky
7/19/2026 at 12:22:48 AM
Or another LLM layer that takes a chat and formats it into a StackOverflow style Q/A postby the_lucifer
7/18/2026 at 6:48:02 PM
Here’s one:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79981854/how-to-run-mode...
-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.
by jl6
7/19/2026 at 5:20:47 PM
So, they should allow questions about installing random software?by pwdisswordfishq
7/18/2026 at 5:16:50 PM
Why do questions need to be good? Often times, you don't know what you don't know.by xeromal
7/18/2026 at 8:11:14 PM
The answer according to way too many SO mods is that a question should primarily be to contribute to the SO knowledge base. Asking simply to get an answer is selfish.I wish SO had not been killed by chatbots, because I was looking forward to seeing it die by the gamified hands of its mob of mods.
by chrisjj
7/18/2026 at 3:10:34 PM
It felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the sameby tayo42
7/18/2026 at 5:14:19 PM
I have had questions edited and closed and I have also been reticent to ask questions just from my own personal experience.by lynndotpy
7/18/2026 at 3:49:46 PM
Never had one closed, only ever bothered posting twice. One obscure tumbleweed issue that slowly turned into something I was quite proud of... And one that was so unpleasant a little experience I never came back. Nothing serious just god why.What was my point... Oh right. I don't assume anyone's making this stuff up. The pla
by porksoda
7/18/2026 at 2:56:49 PM
Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
by smallmancontrov
7/18/2026 at 3:47:16 PM
I asked two questions which were both locked as dupes. The referenced questions mine were supposed to have duplicated were not, in fact the same question. After that I didn't bother. If I could find my answer with a search engine, fine, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to engage on the site.by laughing_man
7/18/2026 at 11:26:26 PM
Once had a question closed for asking about something explicitly permitted in the site's own rules. Had to quote the rules back at them.by matheusmoreira
7/18/2026 at 3:56:24 PM
Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.by wisemanwillhear
7/18/2026 at 5:11:08 PM
I think so too, but many people have many oppositions to AI and would prefer knowledge to be in the hands of knowledgeable community, rather than AI companies. SO was poised to be this alternative, but leadership showed they did not see value in knowledge-work for its own sake.by lynndotpy
7/18/2026 at 8:40:12 PM
But SO had already been acquired by PE when LLMs went mainstream, so I doubt they would have made any strategic growth bets rather than trying to squeeze all the monetization they could out of the site.by senderista
7/18/2026 at 4:22:32 PM
This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.by Esophagus4
7/18/2026 at 4:35:58 PM
Having experienced the SO culture, I like to think the culture caused it - schadenfreude - but it was probably inevitable given AI.Even if SO was the most wonderful friendly place in the galaxy, would you rather post a question and wait hours for a response, or get one instantly?
by bananamogul
7/18/2026 at 7:17:12 PM
If the answers were better, you might.They weren't. The most common answer was a hyperlink to an unrelated question followed by everyone being banned from answering your question
by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 1:42:10 AM
I could see SO being helpful for more niche questions where one guy somewhere knows the answer from experience or he wrote the framework.But then over time, those will be absorbed into LLMs anyway, so…
by Esophagus4
7/18/2026 at 9:18:44 PM
Very new, beta stuff - AI can be helpful but too creative sometimesby democracy
7/18/2026 at 4:44:43 PM
And in some ways AI "search" works like SO - you ask a question, you get an answer. If you don't understand the answer or something in the answer you ask for clarification and it provides it. And you don't have to wait a day or a week for it. (Ofcourse, the AI gets it answers from human curated info pools like SEs, pirated books etc ... but if these sources shrink / die to AI, it may not be able to provide new and current information, and we'll be back to SEs and Reddits and HNs again).by thisislife2
7/18/2026 at 4:38:41 PM
Push factors and pull factors do much more work together than either do on its own.by Bratmon
7/18/2026 at 11:10:26 PM
Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content.They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.
by matheusmoreira
7/19/2026 at 1:30:04 PM
They'd even delete chats. You'd see, in comments, someone inviting the author to chat, but the link would (in the present) take you to a 404 page. Did the question get an answer? Did chat ever work? Was something useful shared? We'll never know.by dpkirchner
7/19/2026 at 2:25:31 AM
> overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well.The site has more than three times as many publicly-visible questions as Wikipedia has articles. And that's with the scope restricted to just programming.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 10:21:05 PM
You dare to compare a Wikipedia article (even a short one) to an SE "article," which is, according to SE's own rules, narrowly and up-to-the-point concentrated on an equally narrow formulated question?by witrak
7/20/2026 at 1:38:44 AM
Yes, because there's no reason not to. A Wikipedia article (even a long one) is "narrowly and up-to-the-point concentrated" on a single concept. There maybe a lot to say about dogs, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog only covers things common to all of them, and individual dog breeds get their own pages (as does the concept of a "dog breed").Similarly, SO has good, valid questions about general concepts, which are narrowly scoped about the concept despite the broad applicability of that concept. For example, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26337003 .
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 5:35:55 PM
Is that supposed to somehow excuse the deletionism?by matheusmoreira
7/18/2026 at 3:44:10 PM
When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.by raincole
7/18/2026 at 3:44:13 PM
There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it.I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.
by elgertam
7/19/2026 at 1:48:43 AM
I say this every time the topic of SO/AI comes up.LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response.
There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes to close my question) before I gave up.
by NetOpWibby
7/19/2026 at 3:05:38 AM
this for me was one of the truly liberating parts of LLMs for me: simply being able to ask a question and get a straight answer without having to run the gauntlet of why I shouldn't be doing what I am trying to do in the first place. The friction of trying to explain why I still wanted to do it that way deterred me from asking so many questions.by zmmmmm
7/19/2026 at 7:57:20 AM
I also had to deal with a concerted effort by an ex-employer to downvote all of my questions for several months.I’m not shedding tears over SO. It had a good run.
by NetOpWibby
7/18/2026 at 9:12:14 PM
No online community can maintain quality unless there are systems in place to prevent mentally ill internet addicts from gaining power over it. This should have a name. We can can call it Eudaimoniac's Law.Anything that gives power on a basis of seniority, activity, volunteering, is guaranteed to suck very soon. There are just way too many mentally ill authoritarians permanently online for normal people to stave them off with naive good faith.
by eudamoniac
7/18/2026 at 3:30:30 PM
The math subreddit is awful. Accusing everyone of asking homework questions if they weren’t formatted in perfect math notation.Then there’s the godot subreddit. Asked 2 questions? That’s a ban.
Imagine a child learning math or game dev coming up against that.
I’d quit. Curiosity extinguished.
The godot github has one of those characters now too. Really anti new user. I worry, I worry.
by brador
7/18/2026 at 3:42:22 PM
It's ok, the kids learning this stuff these days are on YouTube and Discord.by hrnnnnnn
7/18/2026 at 4:00:19 PM
It's pretty sad that they had to shift to a non-interactive medium to avoid getting smashed. Sad place the world is now in that respect :-(by freedomben
7/18/2026 at 5:19:22 PM
FWIW I haven't had bad experiences on the Godot subreddit, but I haven't tried in three years since the API change. And AI seems laughably bad at Godot for any non-trivial questions, and for those trivial questions, it's better just to peruse the docs.by lynndotpy
7/18/2026 at 10:53:48 PM
> That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.The biggest problem was highlighted from day one: StackOverflow was bound to become "DeadOverflow". It couldn't possibly work because the entire notion of having one correct answer to a question in a domain that constantly evolves was broken.
What killed the site was "Ever relevant question" showing up in a Google search (pick other search engine) and pointing to a "Correct and accepted answer" that was wrong with then another answer with more upvotes but which was... Already outdated.
That's why people coined the term "DeadOverflow": the very way the site was conceived would inevitably lead to dead answers.
And people pointed that out early on. Nobody listened, many of the OGs who created that company made a nice exit.
But SO was destined to eventually fail.
The entire karma/gamification/clique of users gate-keeping was bad but the issue of dead answers / DeadOverflow simply couldn't be solved, so it doesn't even matter.
Losing 99.41% of its activity is brutal but it's honestly surprising that a concept that couldn't possibly work even survived that long.
by TacticalCoder
7/18/2026 at 3:43:31 PM
The worst stack overflow in this regard was meta. Most pathological corner of the internet I've ever encountered, up there with 4chan if you ask me.by timcobb
7/18/2026 at 1:57:08 PM
> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
thanks in advance,
--
znpy
I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
by znpy
7/18/2026 at 3:28:08 PM
1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being set up like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki of questions and their answers.
3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?
by no-name-here
7/18/2026 at 4:52:56 PM
> 1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?It pissed off znpy so bad that many years later they still recall on HN how irritated that made them! Now you could argue that letting znpy's pleasantries stay would have cumulatively pissed off more people in the long wrong. But I very seriously doubt it would.
by bjourne
7/18/2026 at 3:47:06 PM
> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?Yes.
Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Ironically, erasing that kind of stuff is likely very good good for training large language models.
by znpy
7/18/2026 at 3:54:22 PM
>> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.)
by no-name-here
7/18/2026 at 2:57:37 PM
I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.by eknkc
7/18/2026 at 3:29:00 PM
There was a gold badge given out if you got 100 edits approved. And another if you got 100 edits reversed.by NoMoreNicksLeft
7/18/2026 at 7:31:39 PM
Ending a question with "thanks" is explicitly forbidden because it is noise.by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 3:14:21 AM
This sounds similar to the people who think that using normal pleasantries in conversation wastes everybody's time.by amanaplanacanal
7/19/2026 at 5:41:54 AM
SO questions aren't really intended as a messaging or conversation forum - they are closer to a wiki of questions. Wikipedia also doesn't allow pleasantries or signatures in articles either.by no-name-here
7/20/2026 at 3:48:20 AM
That's the crux of it, though. What conversation?Stack Overflow was created specifically to avoid conversation. Hence the treatment of comments, and the fact the posts on the page consist of one question and everything else being a candidate answer (and not part of a help-desk or troubleshooting process). It was created by people expressing a common frustration with discussion forums, where you scan ungodly long threads without even knowing whether an answer got posted, have to ignore back-and-forths that are completely irrelevant to you as a knowledge-seeker, and perhaps ultimately end up at a "never mind, solved it" post with no elaboration.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 2:30:36 AM
The founders of SO had a theory, that irrelevant noise was what drove a site into insignificance over time. Even if it was just polite chit-chat. They took pains to automate out as much as they could, and put in place a culture that actively discouraged and removed it when possible. That culture remains even though the founders are long gone.by mark-r
7/19/2026 at 2:45:48 AM
The founders left, and it went downhill as a result.by hungryhobbit
7/20/2026 at 3:49:40 AM
I think I replied to you earlier about it, but to reiterate: the site was going downhill for years before the founders left, and there is abundant evidence that the founders wanted exactly what mark-r claims.by zahlman
7/18/2026 at 5:32:09 PM
This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.
by Noumenon72
7/18/2026 at 9:04:07 PM
Communicating professionally and coming across as polite are not mutually exclusive.Stackoverflow was not the K&R.
by znpy
7/18/2026 at 8:05:19 PM
I put my name on my professional communications.by sethops1
7/20/2026 at 3:53:51 AM
When you submit a documentation PR to an open-source project, do you put your name (real, screen or otherwise) in the section of documentation that you add? No; you let Git put it in the commit history. (And if you have to discuss it, you put it in the discussion, or let a forum system such as GitHub's put it there for you.)Stack Overflow is the actual document being worked on, not the discussion thereof. (That's why there's a separate meta.stackoverflow.com domain.) And analogously to the Git commit history, your name is automatically stamped onto your posts, along with a link to your site profile, in a box at the bottom of the post.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 5:45:55 AM
It depends on the medium - SO is closer to a wiki of questions, and Wikipedia has similar rules against pleasantries or signatures on article pages. (They do allow it on "talk" pages, and SO similarly has less restrictive rules in places other than their primary questions and answers.)by no-name-here
7/20/2026 at 3:44:06 AM
> i got stung by exactly this.> i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
You came to a place where the terms and conditions state explicitly (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice...) that you license your answer to the community with a Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), and then got upset that someone from the community exercised those rights. Then you (almost certainly) incorrectly described that person as a "mod". Every user of Stack Overflow is entitled to propose edits, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation (about 150,000 accounts, versus 25 currently active moderators and only a handful of retired ones) can make those edits unilaterally.
> dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
And you ignored that it's explicitly site policy (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950 ; https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288160 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ; many others) to remove this exact sort of thing, exactly because posting a question on Stack Overflow is not "a conversation between you and whoever answers". The site, in fact, explicitly started so that people could get answers without having a conversation, by creating an actually searchable resource.
And you didn't even consider that there might be an underlying goal of producing a relatively uniform (at least: direct, but professional) style, because third parties might want to read that. When you ask a question, you can probably only usefully get answered once; the most successful questions get millions of views.
When third parties find a Q&A with a search engine, language like that is wasting their time, and in fact is actually exclusionary. It gives the impression of walking in on someone else's private communication, when in fact the entire point of the exercise is to produce a question that someone else could equally well have asked. (The purpose is so that the other person can read the question, verify they're in the right place, read the answers and be answered instantaneously.)
by zahlman
7/18/2026 at 5:05:13 PM
It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.by warumdarum
7/19/2026 at 2:08:07 AM
Yes, yes, the usual narrative. They were not welcoming.I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website:
* Most questions were low effort crap
* Users were mostly divided between only asking questions and only answering questions
* The reputation system favored: 1) easy questions (understood by a larger audience -> more people upvoting), 2) fast answers (before the question dropped from the front page; also answers with more votes got more visibility).
The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system.
The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.
by cataphract
7/18/2026 at 3:15:31 PM
> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.
by chuckadams
7/20/2026 at 1:59:13 AM
The community arrived at, drafted and enforce policy forbidding AI-generated content; this usually meant answers because that was the obvious use case for LLMs.(We were getting absolutely flooded from day 1 with really obviously LLM-generated crap, which represented absolutely zero value add over the OP going to chatgpt dot com and copy-pasting the question there instead. Often this came from users who came back to the site after years of hiatus, who had an established track record in previous answers of being barely able to communicate in English at all; and then they would come to the meta site and insist that they hadn't used an LLM, apparently completely unable to understand how blatantly obvious they were being about it.)
The company repeatedly attempt to force shitty AI-powered features on the community, and also tried to intervene with enforcement of that policy, complaining that false positives would be too damaging. These features got roundly rejected again and again, but this was ignored. Again, much of this represented zero value-add over going to chatgpt dot com directly. Some examples:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438910
The intervention against moderator enforcement of policy (an actual moderator action! Ordinary community members can't just delete an answer for being LLM-generated, although they do take almost all the other actions people complain about offsite) got so bad that it led to an actual strike.
by zahlman
7/18/2026 at 8:36:06 PM
I tried to answer an SO question exactly once, around 15 years ago. Someone asked a question which was covered perfectly by some OSS code I had already published, so I linked to that in my answer (while explaining how the linked code was relevant). My answer was promptly deleted, of course, for linking to code. After that I lost all desire to contribute.by senderista
7/18/2026 at 12:44:54 PM
S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to surviveby executivevice
7/18/2026 at 1:23:28 PM
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.by baq
7/18/2026 at 2:54:39 PM
This. I left SO before AI because moderators were terrible.by palata
7/19/2026 at 1:06:22 AM
SO collapsed twice - first when everyone stopped contributing, and then AI stopped anyone even reading.by bombcar
7/18/2026 at 5:09:51 PM
> aquire comment points to be able to answerI thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
by gs17
7/18/2026 at 6:10:19 PM
The rules changed, a lot.You created an account one day and the only things you could do were commenting and asking questions; you created it some other day and the only things you could do were asking and answering questions; some other day the only thing you could do was asking questions.
Any day you signed up, asking any question first was a sure way to be downvoted bellow the threshold that would ban you from the site.
by marcosdumay
7/20/2026 at 2:13:46 AM
> The rules changed, a lot.No, they didn't. I joined in late 2010 to post a question, and posted multiple answers within an hour of that. As far as I can research, it has always been like that.
50 reputation is required to comment, except under your own questions (which is meant to facilitate figuring out what's wrong with a problematic question, so that it can be fixed).
Nobody ever got "banned from the site" for asking questions. There are algorithms that implement rate limits on questions and answers, some of which are oppressive (the so-called "Q-ban" limits you to one question per 6 months; and the insiders on meta who are doing all the question closing and downvoting that everyone objects to all hate it and have complained many times). There is in fact no proper facility for banning users available to moderators: they can only "destroy" accounts that were used by spammers or suspend ordinary users for increasing lengths of time (in practice, bans are implemented by suspending for 99999 days, which is about 273 years). These algorithms kick in because of a pattern; I have never been shown evidence of the Q-ban kicking in because of a single question (the details are internal to the company; even actual moderators don't and can't know) and the initial rate limits are honestly pretty gentle (unless you imagine that you're entitled to prompt answers; but you're supposed to get those by searching). Note that self-deleting poorly-received questions is generally believed not to help with this. (The goal was to prevent people from making lazy attempts at asking questions and then disclaiming any interest in fixing them; I think this was a misstep, as people should be lauded for coming to an understanding about how the site works, and for deleting things that aren't actually fixable.)
Important references:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164899 ("the complete rate-limiting guide")
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271542 (rate-limit implementation)
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 (Q-ban warning)
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/255583 (Q-ban implementation)
by zahlman
7/18/2026 at 9:55:04 PM
Yeah, I think the issue with Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange is one of how too much gatekeeping and elitism tends to eventually be the death knell for a community.True, you might want people who are more articulate or thoughtful than the majority, but if you go too hard on that, you end up putting a time limit on how long the community will probably last. People won't stick around a community that treats them like crap, and that's a problem because at least some of those amateurs/newbies will become your future experts and power users. The people scared away by bullies like the one mentioned here didn't come back to Stack Exchange once they became the type of expert the site needed. They just shared their knowledge elsewhere.
by CM30
7/18/2026 at 2:02:35 PM
I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.by duchenne
7/18/2026 at 3:59:15 PM
I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary.I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get pointer on how to track that behavior I was seeing. Of course the second I post it I got a -1 plus “can’t reproduce”/“please add minimal example”.
An other time, I had a question that was very similar to an existing one, but different setup and the answer did not solve my problem at all. Mentioned all that, linked the other question and specifically wrote that it was NOT addressing my problem. Posted it, soon after tagged as duplicate with that one answer that did NOT solve the problem.
After that I rarely asked questions again.
Also the points system made it frustrating as a new user: someone 2 years ago asks a basic language question “+50 upvotes”. You asked a similar question, asking extra clarification on an aspect “-2, already answered, read the doc” and so on. And with such a big deal made about reputation it felt like just being born early and being able to be an early adopter meant you got east points. For new users, though luck.
by AStrangeMorrow
7/18/2026 at 7:30:05 PM
Skill issue to the second paragraph. You can always create a minimal example. I've done it many times. Some of them are quite long.Start by copying your whole file with the problem into a new file. Delete each part. See if the problem occurs. If not, Ctrl-Z and try deleting the next part. Be extremely aggressive in deleting. Also try refactoring things to be simpler if deleting doesn't work.
In C++, inline #includes not from the standard library by copy-pasting the file contents. At each step, make sure the problem still occurs. Repeat the iterative deletion process.
You should now have a fairly short source file which exhibits the problem. Rename all proprietary identifiers to foo, bar, baz, frob. Submit question to SO.
by inigyou
7/18/2026 at 5:06:13 PM
The one advantage of actually trying to use SO was that the fear of asking a question usually made me do so much research that I'd solve my issue in the process of fully describing it.That did also make the community lose out on the answer though.
by DrSiemer
7/18/2026 at 7:30:26 PM
You can write a self-answered question.by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 1:07:51 AM
Knowing SO you’d get marked as a duplicate of your own question, then deleted.by bombcar
7/19/2026 at 10:54:03 AM
A question can't be a duplicate of itself. There is no reason to make up reasons why SO is bad when there are plenty of real reasons.by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 1:27:36 PM
Reminds me that they also seem to really not like sarcasm/humor.by bombcar
7/18/2026 at 5:21:04 PM
My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most.May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.
by totalizator
7/18/2026 at 5:33:35 PM
I did, and it wasn't much better on the other side.And funnily enough, the questions that I answered that most contributed to getting me through the gauntlet years later were closed at duplicates (they weren't).
by cogman10
7/19/2026 at 2:06:20 AM
It seems to me that AI did SO in, not its moderation culture.SO is not a place to ask where to get your homework assignment done, that's for sure. The gamification does not necessarily reward the best content, but I didn't experience hostility myself.
(I do find this site fairly hostile. And Wikipedia is the lowest possible hell, I've never in my life experienced anything comparable to the ferocity with which people prosecute their grudges, all the way to IRL doxxing. German language Wikipedia is another whole level of self-appointed officialdom.)
by t0mpr1c3
7/18/2026 at 2:58:16 PM
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participantsI used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:
1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.
2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.
This was long before LLMs.
by nottorp
7/18/2026 at 3:08:08 PM
At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"by suzzer99
7/18/2026 at 4:23:06 PM
Because the person who asked the question has accepted the first answer that looked decent enough and moved on.Usually the most superficial, not that it's always a bad thing.
Oh, also on SO there's this kind of exchange:
Q: "I want to do X because of this and that - or because I simply fucking want to".
A: You should never do X, do Y or Z instead.
by nottorp
7/18/2026 at 6:05:05 PM
The "that's a XY problem" guys always seem to think they're the smartest in the room.by badc0ffee
7/19/2026 at 1:14:14 AM
imo this was the single worst problem with SO, people always searching for the XY problem in every question instead of taking it at face valueby blt
7/21/2026 at 12:50:19 PM
Mostly I'd say their downfall was that they encouraged copypasta material and actively discouraged any kind of behaviour that would have built a community.by nottorp
7/18/2026 at 3:18:58 PM
I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.by puchatek
7/18/2026 at 5:01:21 PM
I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site).AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord.
SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.
by benrutter
7/18/2026 at 4:37:20 PM
> I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand meDamn. Doesn’t that just sum up so many interactions (and sadly, relationships) in life.
by astockwell
7/18/2026 at 4:12:52 PM
You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.by formerly_proven
7/18/2026 at 3:19:33 PM
I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.
Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
by fenomas
7/18/2026 at 3:32:39 PM
The vast majority of duplicate closures use already answered questions as duplicates. So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. In my observation this is usually the case, though the answer might be more generic.I have also seen bad duplicate closures that weren't actually exact duplicates. But people talk like this is the only kind of duplicate closure that actually happens. I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, or if people are missing that their question is actually answered in the duplicate.
by fabian2k
7/18/2026 at 3:58:40 PM
I was extremely active on SO and other SE sites in the late 00s and early 10s. In those days it wasn't too bad, many duplicates were actually duplicates. However that really did start shifting. This is anecdata of course, but even questions that linked to possibel "duplicates" and pre-expalined why it wasn't the same question were often just closed as duplicates of the exact question that was linked. This happened to me several times before I got fed up and moved on with my life.SO was a really rewarding place to ask and answer questions in those early days. It really is a crying shame what they did to the community by empowering the worst of the community to be the bosses.
by freedomben
7/18/2026 at 5:02:27 PM
> So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well.The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not.
> I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed,
Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it. They only looked at the signal "does somebody with points think these questions are similar", and discarded the signal of whether the new user got any value out of the site, and I think that's what did them in.
by fenomas
7/20/2026 at 3:04:28 AM
> The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not.The site is not about solving your problem. The site is about answering your question.
By policy, whether a question is a duplicate depends on whether answers at the target answer the question that is actually present in the "question" post. The details required to adapt that Q&A to the originally motivating situation are irrelevant.
In fact, there doesn't need to be an originally motivating situation in order to ask a valid question.
In fact, you don't actually need to know an answer in order to ask a valid question. It is perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged, to ask a question you know how to answer already, and provide the answer. (But both question and answer must meet standards, which are independent of who is asking and who is answering.)
> Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it.
This fundamentally can't be measured. Especially not when the claim of "bad duplicate" usually comes from people who are demonstrably not interested in what the policy is.
by zahlman
7/18/2026 at 3:25:48 PM
I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.
LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
by unreal37
7/19/2026 at 1:12:49 AM
Without Quora we can’t get masterpieces like this: https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFgby bombcar
7/18/2026 at 2:08:50 PM
You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues.I hope somebody saves it all.
by b112
7/18/2026 at 2:26:03 PM
Perhaps not what you intended, but most of it is stored in various models' weights.by includenotfound
7/18/2026 at 5:50:22 PM
Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.by 3eb7988a1663
7/18/2026 at 3:20:47 PM
For better or for worse, the contents of Stack Overflow are literally the reason LLM coding has taken over the world.by qingcharles
7/19/2026 at 3:15:35 AM
No, that's been mainly due to RLVR.by ivankra
7/18/2026 at 4:17:49 PM
They used to publish a regular torrent of everything, not sure if they still do that? Maybe you could grab yourself a copy for posterity.by danparsonson
7/18/2026 at 5:15:16 PM
It's still possible to get a dump from the Settings page, just with a checkbox that says "if you use this for AI training we might ban you".by gs17
7/18/2026 at 7:31:13 PM
You can automate it with browser automation tools.by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 1:42:41 AM
> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participationOnly in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale.
> They slowly killed the site in this manner.
It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy.
> knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question.
It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question.
> I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Reading through, for example, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433897 and understanding what is written there is literally all that is required.
by zahlman
7/19/2026 at 2:38:21 AM
I disagree. Stack Overflow was made to succeed, not fail ... originally.Then the founders left, and meta basically chronicles the echo chamber of mistakes made. It's not the intent: that was to help coders code. Meta was dominated by people who lost the intent, and wanted to build a library.
by hungryhobbit
7/20/2026 at 1:35:27 AM
Atwood and Spolsky were quite explicit, on multiple occasions, about what they wanted the site to be. That vision was not compatible with having a site with millions of users and millions of questions, because the masses simply aren't interested in the kind of interaction that the vision required. They may not have understood this at the time. But it's clear that the early community attempted a lot of gatekeeping, much of it misguided in the details (you want lots of questions that address beginner-level problems, because most people in a field are beginners at any given time for any given field, so that's what's most useful) but directionally correct (most of the time, you don't want the question that a beginner asks, because the beginner is not adept at asking useful questions and lacks the perspective needed for a proper Q that allows for presenting a useful A).The intent was very much to build a library. It's literally on the tour page at the top:
> Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.
That is not something inserted by people on the meta site. We literally did not have access to make that kind of change. Believe me, there are so many other things we would have fixed if it had been made possible.
Most of the important policy was established around 2013 or 2014 and those are the dates of the most important posts on meta that get brought up again and again (and used as duplicate targets, and cited in arguments). That was also right around when site activity was peaking. Atwood and Spolsky didn't leave until the acquisition in 2019.
by zahlman
7/20/2026 at 1:58:42 PM
https://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/Jeff had stepped away in 2012.
While there was some lingering activity in 2013 and 2014, it was way down from when he was part of the company. https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/1/jeff-atwood?tab=answe...
I would suggest this marked a change from an "Atwoodian" philosophy of curation to a "Sploskian" philosophy.
From https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of *good* programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
to
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...
What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/ was the start of it - a year after Jeff left.
I believe that Joel was responsible for the direction of Stack Overflow from 2012 to 2019... including the "direction" of those policies of 2013 and 2014. The "every question can be fixed" and "every answer should remain if it was an attempt to answer the question" stem from his philosophy.
However, (again, I believe) that is what ultimately contaminated Google's search and you were more likely to hit a duplicate ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) than the correct answer because of the lack of culling of duplicates and the golden dup hammer making that the path of least resistance for closing a question if it was slightly related.
by shagie
7/18/2026 at 2:03:22 PM
as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.by globalnode
7/19/2026 at 12:02:30 AM
So I guess Wikipedia will eventually face the same fateby iwontberude
7/19/2026 at 2:44:20 AM
Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference. SO was supposed to help programmers program.The former continues to succeed, with hiccups, because they remember their goal. The latter is dead, and it failed because it tried to be the former, forgetting their goal.
by hungryhobbit
7/18/2026 at 3:53:09 PM
>StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questionsThis is significantly under selling it.
Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.
I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable
I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.
His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”
At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive
I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one
by AndrewKemendo
7/20/2026 at 3:57:07 AM
>making it inclusive to the long-time users on the siteFancy wording but inaccurate. Plenty of long-time users (me included) left when the mods became insane.
by moralestapia
7/18/2026 at 5:13:39 PM
In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort.I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form.
These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine.
In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead?
Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.
by godwinson__4-8
7/18/2026 at 6:01:42 PM
> Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over.I did get over it when I stopped bothering with SO. Sorry, but a community whose ethos is "you need a thick skin to belong" is not one most people even want to belong to.
by chuckadams
7/18/2026 at 6:40:10 PM
Yes. And this is exactly my point. The path of least resistance is often preferred. Maybe in most cases this makes sense. But it can also lead to one wading in slop.Just beware an operating principle based on what "most people" want. Nearly all human societies that I am aware of bake in a caution to this impulse into their grounding philosophies. Because humans have always ultimately recognized that while seductive at first, taking guidance merely from "what most people want" is a path to decay.
Garbage in, garbage out. The inalienable right vs the mob. Three men make a tiger (三人成虎). Does the market always know best? Low quality, low effort questions are ultimately destructive to the ends of something like stackexchange. No need to apologize, they evidently didn't want you there either. Again, it's not personal. They may be gone tomorrow. Zoom out just a little bit farther and you will, in all likelihood, not be far behind.
by godwinson__4-8
7/18/2026 at 7:29:32 PM
And this kind of superior attitude over the unwashed masses is precisely what kept me away.by chuckadams
7/19/2026 at 1:30:37 AM
[dead]by dannyw
7/19/2026 at 12:59:17 AM
You have much more eloquently put the same feeling I had about the site.It was a good resource but absolutely toxic to newcomers.
Good Riddance to SO.
by zurtri