Ask HN: Why Is Stack Overflow Fading Away?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364798

by cryptography • 2 years ago

88 145 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Stack Overflow has been a cornerstone of developer communities for years, but recently, it seems to be losing its prominence. I’m curious about your thoughts on why this might be happening and what the future holds for this platform. Is it just AI or there're specific issues contributing to its decline?

explodes• 2 years ago

I'm sure there are lots of reasons, but for me it's that so many posts are outdated by now that the gamble isn't worth it. Search results from Google often point me in a more efficient direction.

firecall• 2 years ago

Is it declining?

Spam sites that scraped SO content where a big problem for a while, so that would have certainly pulled traffic from SO.

If I had to guess about other reasons, I'd say we've moved on from giving our knowledge and content away for the benefit of corporations.

What does being an SO contributor actually get you?

Whats the point in monitoring new posts and answering questions?

The economy is hard enough as it is. I dont need to be giving my time away for free to help corporations generate more billions from Ad Revenue.

But whow knows!?

Like I say, is it actually declining by any metrics that are public? (genuine question)

cryptography3• 2 years ago

here's some metrics: https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overfl...

Neywiny2• 2 years ago

I got offered a job (through some automated recruiting methods, I'm not that special) where the concept was to write SO answers with extremely tight style restrictions. I ended up turning it down because I disagreed with their style guide but presumably some alternate me got paid to write SO answers.

Biggest grievance was an example where a question would ask someone like "how do I safely open a file in Python 3.11?" Obviously the answer is a context manager. But they would say that's not generic enough, the answer shouldn't use language specific features. Even though the question was for a specific language. Meaning I'd be spreading bad practice.

ygra• 2 years ago

What does being an SO contributor actually get you?

I had a reason to dive into obscure and esoteric corners of some languages/frameworks/toolkits. I practiced helping people with technical problems, which was likely a major contributor to getting my current job where developers also provide technical support to the customers (who are also software developers). Having this out in the open and being able to point at the fact that I was ranked in the top 100 contributors certainly helped.

However, things have changed since the early days, of course. Basic documentation and tutorials for programming languages and toolkits have become better overall, I'd say. We've got good centralized knowledge bases for certain topics, e.g. MDN where you previously would have had to piece together information from SelfHTML, W3Schools and other partially wrong sources, or go straight to the relevant specification (not for everyone, of course). Stack Overflow has become the repository of answered questions that is pretty searchable and there are a lot of questions that simply don't need to be asked again. LLMs have scraped SO, so ChatGPT and others can answer many programming questions fairly well (with the occasional hallucination or error).

By now I only rarely open SO anymore. But I go through different hobbies every few years anyway, and while I was still studying, I had the time, I learned a lot, and to this day I still like explaining things and helping others.

EricE• 2 years ago

Indeed - the fastest way to learn any technology is answer other people's questions about it. I got to expert status with several techs by doing that.

jokethrowaway• 2 years ago

I agree, and I see similar trends in OSS projects.

The worse the economy is, the greater the inequality between the masses and the top 0.1% the less we can afford to be idealistic and give away our time.

Dunedan2• 2 years ago

IMO it's mainly because of management decisions, like shutting down Stack Overflow Jobs, focusing too much on AI, not listening enough to the needs of the community, ...

bluedino• 2 years ago

Don't forget bad UI decisions. Right now they have a 'Sign in with Google' pop-up on every page, and it doesn't stay gone no matter how many times you close it.

shawn_w3• 2 years ago

Management listens to the community by doing the exact opposite of what most people want to see.

mckravchyk2• 2 years ago

It's worth noting that they re-introduced their jobs platform https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/

Dunedan2• 2 years ago

No, that's a completely different (and in my opinion inferior) product.

Varqu• 2 years ago

It's now just a simple frontend redirecting to Indeed.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

closed as duplicate killed the site. it's important to not have duplicates, but editors got trigger happy with it, so questions that were similar but different were getting closed. even questions that mention the similar one in the question as being similar but distinct get closed. a duplicate question 6 years later where libraries and patterns have been deprecated is closed as a dupe, even though the answer isn't relevant.

anyway, that's one issue, among others, that make the site ossified.

asdajksah2123• 2 years ago

Wouldn't it have been more useful to merge duplicates?

Even framing the same question in different ways is useful. If someone posts a Duplicate, adding that to a list of "alternative questions" that is collapsed by default on the original post might have been a better approach.

It also takes away the whole "your question is worthless" dynamic that closing a question raises.

cpburns2009• 2 years ago

They occasionally merge duplicate questions. The results are awful because half the answers will refer to details not mentioned in the retained question.

al_borland3• 2 years ago

I think that speaking to a larger culture issue and reputation for the site.

I never asked a question on SO, though I used it as a reference often. I had this idea in my head that to ask a proper question that wouldn’t get moderated away or obliterated by the community, I would have to spend significant time and energy researching how to ask appropriate questions, and provide a bunch of supporting details that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did my due diligence before asking.

I guess at the end of the day this means I didn’t actually _need_ to ask a question, but also means some useful discussions and interesting answers to problems I solved, that I’m sure others have, don’t haven’t answers out in the wild.

skydhash• 2 years ago

I tried answering a few questions on SO and it quicly dawned on me that I’d better create a PR to the original docs. SO would have a better appeal for me if it was a Wiki like Arch Wiki. With a comment/question system like Google docs.

bjourne2• 2 years ago

For simple questions you can just ask ChatGPT. For complex questions the Stack Overflow moderators would have closed your question for lack of focus. Unless a question reads like a tech spec it is ambiguous and unanswerable to them.

al_borland3• 2 years ago

How will ChatGPT handle new languages and technologies that don’t have a wealth of old human generated content to train on? Is it smart enough to read the docs and figure it all out?

PeterisP• 2 years ago

This is a use-case where Stackoverflow fails as well - oh so often I have a problem where Stackoverflow has a question with answers that were true some years ago for an earlier version, but is not true anymore, so the existing answers are worse than useless (as in, they're actively misleading and wasting time) but re-asking the question gets closed as duplicate.

Being unable to clearly mark the bounds of relevancy for answers (in a structured way that affects search) is a major weakspot of SO.

gorjusborg• 2 years ago

Yeah, it wont.

One of the ingredients that made GenAI possible was a massive quantity of public, relatively high quality data (the internet).

We crowd sourced that over decades. If we transition to only interacting with AI agents in private as consumers, the corpus will fail to grow and update.

scarface_744• 2 years ago

Since LLMs came out, I’ve mostly been using ChatGPT to write AWS SDK based Python scripts and infrastructure as code.

If it wasn’t trained on a specific newer API or Cloudformation/Terraform/CDK construct, with 4/4o, I just give it the link to the relevant documentation and tell it to use the links to help it create the right code.

bjourne2• 2 years ago

Short answer, yes. And if a library doesn't have any docs you can just paste the header file into the chat box and ask ChatGPT to write example code for you.

sandspar2• 2 years ago

I assume we'll eventually begin building languages and technologies around what chatbots can use. Like how we rebuilt American cities for cars. "How can Ford's cars work if there are no roads?" Build roads.

langcss2• 2 years ago

1. Someone asks chat gpt. No answer

2. Checks Google/SO and no answer

3. Figures it out themselves

4. Blogs about that

5. AIs that search pick it up first but eventually it ends up in training.

As well as AI teams paying for content for training.

meiraleal• 2 years ago

Most answers are outdated. Reddit took its place.

sunaookami• 2 years ago

closed, marked as a duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870156

Neywiny2• 2 years ago

I appreciate that the linked post is 9 years old. That's usually my problem with duplicates so I have to put in my post every possible duplicate and why it didn't work.

laylower• 2 years ago

Ok, I know I am not adding to the quality of hackernews but your comment does enough of the heavy lifting for both of our comments.

Brilliant! And it does demonstrate at least part of the problem with stackoverflow - overzealous mods.

anotherevan• 2 years ago

Truth in satire.

gryzzly• 2 years ago

too many uninteresting questions, karma chasing which led to stupid moderation and answer-writing-competition for uninteresting questions

photonthug• 2 years ago

Just to identify a different contributor than rehashing the ai stuff. Stack overflow has always picked up the slack for software stacks that are some combination of old, poorly documented, and fiddly, but user appetite for such stacks is dramatically reduced. Jenkins is one example.. people will avoid it if they can. Xwindows is another.. people will just choose their distro based on what works rather than fighting config.

Plus whereas programming language help is at least pretty stable, config details are the least stable anyway

palata3• 2 years ago

When I solved a tricky problem for which I hadn't found a solution on StackOverflow, for years I got the habit of writing a question+answer on StackOverflow.

Until those started to get flagged (as duplicate, off-topic, whatnot) and closed. All of them I could make reopen (but it took time to collect the votes), and all of them eventually got a reasonable amount of upvotes and views.

That's where I stopped contributing to StackOverflow: when quality content I contribute gets refused by the moderators, I'm out.

natdempk3• 2 years ago

Yeah, the moderation is truly broken, along with the "accepted answer" framework, and in general the approach to knowledge curation. Kind of amazing to me that the founders/staff of the site didn't try to turn this around.

To add an anecdote: The last question I bothered to answer was one where the accepted answer was a very-specific fix, and a more generic fix was in a comment below that which was better and more directly addressed the root problem and would work for any user encountering an exception (accepted answer was workable, but working at the wrong layer of abstraction to actually solve the problem). I pulled that out into its own answer. Looking back now at that question, the poor "accepted answer" which won't work for anyone hitting this error because it references a specific class in the user's question which won't exist for any other users is still accepted with -5 and the better answer is below the fold at +16. This is pretty typical across a lot of questions. The fact that SO doesn't automatically handle this case is basically a failure of the site's abstraction model and algorithms over answers.

For a site where the long-term value is ostensibly curating high-quality answers to the maximal number of questions, the best answers languish, and the questions and answers don't get sufficiently refined/updated over time. Arguably you'd want something closer to a wikipedia article about each problem that gets built out and updated over time if you want to provide canonical information about problems. Similarly I think the idea of closing things that are close, but different as duplicates has failed. These are often sufficiently different that the details are interesting and probably would provide value/activity/detail to the site. There should probably be some way to roll these up into a higher level article/topic to cover variants of problems, related cases, etc. This could start to act as pillars or knowledge-hubs within SO to get to a place of more canonical information or a more "tacit/practical wikipedia". Really not sure why things stopped at Q&A and seemed to stagnate where they did.

Though, they seemingly achieved profitability and sold for $1.8B without doing any of this, so what do I know. :) Probably the right move was focusing on other things like launching new communities, and making money for the company.

WorldMaker• 2 years ago

The voting system and accepted answers tools also fail to account for time and always have. A highly voted, accepted answer five years ago might be very wrong today because the frameworks changed or best practices shifted or all sorts of other reasons. There's fundamentally no concept of "these votes are stale over time" or "the accepted answer has changed". There's technically no concept of "this question was asked 4 years, but seems stale, can I get fresh answers?" and in practice a direct antagonism against trying that given the incentives among certain parts of the moderator culture to "close all duplicates quickly".

Many good responders and some of the better heavy handed mods work around the lack of tools for dealing with time with a constant stream of "Update:" and "Update to the Update:" top-level edits to the "accepted answer", but that isn't universal and requires manual intervention, only encourages heavy-handed moderators that heavy-handedness is the "right" approach versus a light touch, ignores what the over-gamified voting system was supposed to represent as the concept of an "answer", and overall sometimes just makes answers look "sloppy" rather than "idempotent".

I think the "moderator capture" by heavy-handed moderators seems an inevitable consequence of the "game" mechanics, where some of the tools have been lacking, and the sorts of people prone to undervaluing their own labor on behalf of companies incentivizing them with "points" over wages. I think the increasing feel of "StackOverflow is stale" is directly for not having time mechanics and a way to refresh answers from time to time as technology changes or shifts. The parts of "StackOverflow" that are as close to "evergreen" as possible are continually edited mini-wikis in a sloppy 90s top-posting USENET thread style that is messy and requires both heavy-handed moderation and works around the tools and the concept that an answer has a single author rather than is enabled by the tools.

ETA: Time in both directions, too: sometimes you are stuck in a legacy codebase and need to know "what was the accepted answer to this question 5 years ago?" and want easier tools to wade through legacy answers than trying to archeology dive through years of poorly organized Wiki editing history and comment history scattered across a N answers and M comments to each answer and/or hope that someone preserved somewhere in the middle of the top-posting thread in the current wiki state.

shawn_w3• 2 years ago

One common mistake people unfamiliar with how SO works make is confusing "accepted answer" with "best answer". They're often different; accepted just means the person who posted the question found it useful.

There should probably be some way to roll these up into a higher level article/topic to cover variants of problems, related cases, etc. This could start to act as pillars or knowledge-hubs within SO to get to a place of more canonical information or a more "tacit/practical wikipedia".

There was an attempt to do something like that with the Collectives project but it doesn't seem to have gotten any real momentum going.

BobAliceInATree• 2 years ago

First time I edited an accepted answer a couple years back (the original answer was pretty much correct, I just fixed a compiling issue and one missing flag that now needed to be set, but not originally), it was quickly rejected with nonsensical stock rejection templates.

I guess I learned my lesson to never spend time to make accepted answers better.

And then a year later, someone added a comment to mention that flag that needed to be set.

palata3• 2 years ago

I agree that there is a contradiction in the moderation: on the one hand, you get moderated if you update a question/answer ("because it has to reflect the situation of the author when it happened"), and on the other hand you get moderated when you ask a similar question ("duplicated").

I find it okay to not update the answers: just like a blog post or a newspaper article, I find value in being able to say "this person had this problem in 2012, and this other person provided a fix also in 2012". But then it should be fine to ask the exact same question a couple years later if one expects a different answer. And it should not be marked as a duplicate. If anything, it could be marked as a duplicate after the answer is accepted, if it turns out to be the same (and if the new question has no value). But in reality, when I am stuck on a problem, I don't mind checking 5 similar answers. It's much better to have to find a solution from 5 similar questions than to not find it at all because it was moderated away.

Also it would keep people engaged: the current policy means that for some topics, it's very hard to contribute questions/answers because there are so many already. But in reality, many of the existing ones are more than 5 years old! If people could repost similar questions and get points for answering them (instead of being flagged as "duplicate"), it would probably keep the community more engaged.

Smithalicious• 2 years ago

Part of it is that SO wants to think of itself as some kind of long term knowledge base and is obsessed with the idea of pruning "duplicates", even though whether aqquestion is actually a duplicate and whether the original answer is actually still up to date requires deeply understanding the old question, the old answer, the new question, and what the answer to the new question would be.

A very large part of SO questions is "how to use this poorly documented library feature?" or "what is the idiomatic way to solve X problem?", and answers to these kinds of questions become stale and useless very fast. Even more frustratingly, if you have a question like this and an old answer does exist, there's a good chance that you wouldn't be able to tell if the old answer is applicable without further assistance.

Additionally, hardcore SO contributors and SO senior management are constantly at each other's throats, very stubborn about their own interests and often out of touch with and callous about the question-asker plebs' experience in different and conflicting ways.

For many, SO karma internet points are a CV item.

EDIT with some other points:

I feel like documention of libraries and such has often gotten a lot better. AI is actually really useful and can help solve a ton of problems in the space of things I don't know how to figure out myself by reading docs, but don't need to have an actual human expert look at my situation, which is most of the stuff that ends up on SO. Support chatrooms for libraries have gotten a lot more polite and accessible, with clearly marked streamlined paths for asking your questions and much less "hop into #foobar-support on irc so you can be told to RTFM".

There's a bunch of misaligned interests on something like SO:

- Upper management is running a business, cares about user metrics and actually making money;

- Actual question-answering follows a power law, with a handful of power users being responsible for most answers. Like I said, these people often consider this internet reputation as something important to their livelihood, plus your usual ego stuff;

- Question askers don't care about SO as a platform. They are working on some kind of project, run into some kind of blocking issue, and want to find a way to get that resolved ASAP so they can continue with what they were doing.

isosphere• 2 years ago

I never got around to grinding enough karma points on there so that the platform will let me actually engage with it. Since I can't post answers or even vote on things, there's not a lot of reason for me to bother logging in. As a result I just mooch off what I find and leave.

I can't be the only one. Their walled garden kept me out.

scarface_744• 2 years ago

And the entire stated purpose of SO was not to be like expertsexchange…

g8oz• 2 years ago

Oh God I had forgotten about expertsexchange

nathanasmith• 2 years ago

I stumbled on an obscure question years ago on one of the sub exchange sites that dovetailed precisely with something I'd been working on for years. All the proposed answers were subpar so it was like I was born for this particular question. After cracking my knuckles and preparing to reply I realized I couldn't. I didn't have enough karma or whatever. And that was the end of that.

d0mine• 2 years ago

It doesn't sound right.

I've just checked: you don't even need an account to post an answer.

lbourdages• 2 years ago

Same for me. I have an account with zero karma on it. When I created it I was a total programming novice fresh out of uni and could not really contribute. As time went on, I could definitely have started contributing, but not having any karma became too high a barrier of entry - I'm using it during my work hours, I can't just spend endless time grinding.

mattbrewsbytes• 2 years ago

I think it lost its prominence years ago. Wading through the muck of answers that were not relevant or just too old is a waste of time. I get much better answers from AI these days.

They issue "state of the developer" reports every year that I think are laughable. The answers on SO are mostly for beginners so they can hardly claim they have deep insights into all developers. There is also a huge void of representation around non open-source and vendor specific languages. It should be called "state of the beginner web/js developer" and it would be more accurate.

pkilgore• 2 years ago

IMO when the attitude went from nurture to kill wrt to possibly duplicate questions.

I wish that rather than close a question you were only allowed to link an answer from what you thought was the duplicate and that just becomes another voting game vs. moderator opinion.

Also I suspect a little bit: LLMs aren't dicks, and you can ask them follow up iterative questions quicker than SO users respond.

pmkary• 2 years ago

People are so mean there. I've seen those who say they love Stack Overflow, but to me, it always feels like I ask a real question that has been haunting me for a long time. At times, I reach the point where I think, "to hell with it," and I ask on SO. For example, I once asked a very specific question about how to manually layout text in GTK, and people responded as if they were noob questions (which honestly they were not). They bully you for not having searched the web, even though you did search and found nothing. This bullying makes you feel dumb, and then most of the time, they just give you a look and walk away without helping you.

For me, it has always been about searching Google. If it led to SO, I would check the solutions, but most of the time, they didn't work. There would always be a blog somewhere with someone nice enough to put in the effort and explain things in detail. Once I got used to this, LLMs emerged, which are so much better. They provide solutions and combinations that make wild things easy, even those without documentation. And they do so instantly and pleasantly. No LLM bullies you for not having searched the web and then walks away. I'm kind of glad that SO is fading; there's a lot of bullying that is running into oblivion.

rererereferred2• 2 years ago

I wonder how will LLMs give you the answer when the source, SO, is gone?

highsea• 2 years ago

Once critical mass of programmers relies on LLMs, original code creation and usage will decline, as LLMs will not provide these as suggestions. So entering the “dark ages of programming” will solve for that, as you won’t need to retrain LLMs.

cosmicradiance2• 2 years ago

Why will SO be gone? They are now partners with OpenAI - https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/openai-partne...

itaymoav2• 2 years ago

Read the full documentation of the piece u r working on.

muzani• 2 years ago

If the source was SO, the LLMs would mock you for asking dumb questions and vote to close your question as a duplicate.

acbart• 2 years ago

People on Stackoverflow give you a look?

dr_kiszonka• 2 years ago

Despite all their drawbacks, LLMs don't bully you and I feel comfortable asking them the most idiotic of questions.

DidYaWipe2• 2 years ago

Some SO users just run around downvoting everything, and of course the cowards leave no comments.

If you dare bring this up in the SO forum, perhaps suggesting or asking about a way to mitigate this behavior, pedantic douchebags go apoplectic with "Oh THIS again" as if the problem were solved.

lithos• 2 years ago

AI scrapped the hell out of SO, so I can get anything on it without needing to tiptoe around the obnoxious community.

Closed "duplicate", when the old answer is insanely out of date is a big one.

lucidone• 2 years ago

They should have leaned into becoming a developer community (the developer community) instead of focusing on Q&A. StackOverflow jobs were a great resource. Add an ad-hoc discussion forum and chat and it would have be great, like the modern IRC.

fendy30022• 2 years ago

Disagree, the Q&A format is good, but the moderation isn't.

Instead of current practice, they should make a separate "hall of fame" Q&As that meet their standard, and no more "too broad" "duplicated" closed questions.

Only close / deletes questions that aren't relevant, like jokes and out of topics (careers) questions.

bosch_mind• 2 years ago

Content moderation. Stack overflow will turn into that of Yahoo Answers.

It was great, just like how Yahoo Answers was great. It’s now no longer needed as much.

yulaow• 2 years ago

The main problem is they tried to be a middle way between a forum and a wiki with only correct answer (even if as some other have said, they never wanted to acknowledge that especially in programming the answer is correct or good or valid only for a certain amount of time most often than not)

What we actually need:

- the owner of the question must be the only one capable to say if an answer is good or not for his question

- no other user must be able to modify the question of the owner even if they think it is badly explained. They can always suggest modifies but the owner can decide if to accept them or not

- the moderators can try to suggest "hey we think this is a duplicate of that" but the owner must be the one to accept or reject it. Even if he says "I just want a more current answer, the one you linked is 4 yo" the moderators must accept his decision and keep the question open

- moderators must act aggressively against people (and other moderators) saying things like "this sound like some homework" or "you better use technology y instead of x" or similar

- answers older than a few years should have a visible flag on them signaling that probably that answer is not anymore the best possible one and to be careful using it and, if it doesn't work anymore, to open a new question tagging the old one

klntsky• 2 years ago

SO works in an environment where not all users are well meaning

ForHackernews• 2 years ago

Github added discussion forums. They're usually better places to get informed answers about specific software questions than StackOverflow. I think StackOverflow's gamified score/reputation system works against it.

Bedlow• 2 years ago

Not really. Github can be great to contact the dev directly but useless for bookmarking an issue/discussion bc you can't.

manbitesdog• 2 years ago

According to their own 2024 Developer Survey [1], 61% of people are using AI. I guess it's way less effort to ask your custom tailored question in a dumb way to an AI and get a nice response instantly, then fall back to SO only as a fallback.

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/ai/#1-ai-tools-in-the-d...

palata3• 2 years ago

One question being: are people leaving SO because they are using AI, or are they using AI because they are fed up with SO?

I would guess probably a mix of both?

jononor2• 2 years ago

Google no longer surfaces SO answers as much also plays a huge role.

sdevonoes• 2 years ago

In my experience:

1. GitHub. Many times I have found my answer to a problem with a specific library/framework in GitHub issues.

2. Seniority. As I gain more experience, I tend to ask/answer less in SO. From time to time I still read answers.

3. To a lesser extent, chatgpt. I usually have to double check the outputs, but it works fine some times

jononor2• 2 years ago

GitHub having a separate Discussions board might accelerate 1) over time. There it is more encouraged to ask more open ended questions than on Issues, and they explicitly have Q&A type features like marking as answered.

sidcool• 2 years ago

The community changed after 2017 or so. AI may have been the final nail in its coffin, but the degradation started long before. Closing questions prematurely. Rude responses. Too strict community rules etc.

solarmist• 2 years ago

There is ONE answer regardless of when the question was asked. Knowledge has a shelf life, and programming knowledge's shelf life is notoriously short.

seabird• 2 years ago

There's nothing more frustrating than finding somebody trying to solve a problem with the same constraints you have, clearly explaining the problem and those constraints, and having the answers run along the lines of "in my opinion those constraints aren't reasonable, here's an easy way to do it ignoring what you've explained in your question without even a nod toward how to do it the "wrong" way you're being forced to do this".

petabyt• 2 years ago

This. It's like they need a justification for why you want to do something in order to give you any help.

DidYaWipe2• 2 years ago

ALL THE TIME. Instead of answering, they just badger you about WHY you want to something.

lawgimenez• 2 years ago

SO has no clue what it’s doing for example it’s newly launched Staging Ground is a dud. Or if you read most of their meta posts it’s just sadly weird.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/431399/staging-grou...

tail_exchange• 2 years ago

A few reasons for me:

- Rude and antagonistic moderation.

- Closing topics too aggressively. Very often in favour of topics that are too old, no longer relevant, or don't fully address the question.

- Ignoring the constraints of the asker. For example, asking how do I do X with Y framework, and having someone telling you to switch to B framework instead. Even worse when it's a mod hellbent on shutting you down for not being able to change your constraints.

Reddit, in all its chaos, seems to be faring better at being a support community than SO.

paulmd• 2 years ago

If you can imagine it, the collective response to being told this in as many words was “are we so wrong? no, it’s the users who are the problem”.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

granted, framing it as a sexism issue etc was probably a doomed effort from the start even if it’s true in a sense.

markus_zhang• 2 years ago

Reddit and discord are way more friendly than SO. It's very good for searching for answers but horrid for asking one.

jeffwask• 2 years ago

I don't think Reddit is mentioned enough as a reason, but the focused Reddit communities are much better than SO for finding answers and asking questions.

This isn't to say that Reddit doesn't have its own issues and overzealous moderators, but I would hit r/sysadmin for info on an outage or bug before I thought of SO.

I would also throw Slack in with Discord. A lot of my vendors have public Slack instances where I can ask the same question with a much better audience.

immibis• 2 years ago

Since the end of 2019, Stack Exchange staff have repeatedly pushed away big contributors in the pursuit of increasing profit. Most recently they shut down the public data dumps that were the insurance in case Stack Exchange turned fully profit-driven. But if you're an AI company, you can buy access to them! I'm not enthused with their policy on Palestine, either (this is relevant because of the politics.se site, not on SO itself).

david_allison• 2 years ago

* Significant loss of moderation, core contributors and goodwill of power users since 2020 [Monica incident, firing Community Managers, Code of Conduct changes]

* LLMs

CM30• 2 years ago

It's difficult for newcomers to get their answers accepted there, or their questions not closed/merged with irrelevant ones. As a result, the new contributors the site needs to stay relevant are not sticking around, and not replacing anyone who moves on.

And that's something just about every site and community and social media platform has to deal with. People don't stick around forever, and you can't rely on the same old people who've been there for the last decade to keep things going for the next two. So you need new users to get involved and become active, and for that you need a community that's somewhat welcoming to them and their efforts.

Feels like Wikipedia is going down a similar path to StackOverflow as well.

sandspar2• 2 years ago

I've noticed that many of my searches now show several other websites before they show Wikipedia. If I'm not mistaken, search engines bury Wikipedia more than they used to.

amai2• 2 years ago

Is it? Or a you just too lazy to do at least some research before posting a question there? I never had problems with my questions or answers being valued on Stack Overflow. But you have to put in some work. People who are complaining about their question or answer not being accepted are mostly just too lazy.

hotelsinger• 2 years ago

I think your perspective exemplifies the moderation atmosphere on Stack Overflow. If you're not currently a moderator there, you should apply. I think you might fit the culture. Cheers.

amai2• 2 years ago

I‘m not in any way related to Stack Overflow. I just ask questions there and sometimes write answers. And you might not like it, but my experience is that questions and answers that show some effort are always welcome on Stack Overflow.

mckravchyk2• 2 years ago

From my experience it must be ChatGPT. I am getting much less upvotes for past answers since 2023. Even the reputation (t) curve visible on the profile reflects that, up to 2023 it was a straight line at around 30 degrees, start of 2023 and it's at about 15 degrees.

cryptography3• 2 years ago

Thank you all for the insightful comments. I appreciate how this community shares its thoughts with such care and knowledge. I agree that while GPTs handle simpler tasks effectively, complex questions have never been Stack Overflow's strong suit.

A project I’ve been working on started as a web annotation tool and has evolved into a visual task manager called JustBeepIt (https://justbeepit.com). Considering many of our users are developers, we observed that Stack Overflow wasn’t among the sites where users create tasks. This led me to question why it seems to be losing its prominence.

NobodyNada• 2 years ago

Most of the responses here say "because the moderation is too strict" -- but this is only a symptom of a real problem: the site has been in feature-freeze maintenance mode for about 10 years, with very little new development or improvement since then. The moderation system has aged very poorly -- the tools are inadequate for handling the volume of traffic SO receives, and the process is incredibly opaque and Kafkaesque for new users to navigate.

In its early days, the site had a vibrant community, and was actively being improved by a team that pretty much entirely consisted of power users. The whole team was active on the site and available in Meta and chat -- you could report a bug or propose a new feature and it would often be fixed/implemented and live on the site within a couple hours. The site was expanding and constantly being updated; the staff was focused on expanding the Stack Exchange platform, making the user experience better, and building up the community.

But around 2016, the company abruptly stopped most new development on the core platform. They announced a sweeping "Quality Improvement Project" [0] that was supposed to bring badly-needed improvements to the moderation system, asking the community for ideas and suggestions; announcing some major overhauls that were in progress...and then radio silence. For the next several years, there were no changes to the core platform except bugfixes, minor tweaks, and several UI overhauls that nobody asked for. The company shifted nearly all of its development resources to side projects that were universally failures: Teams, Documentation, video tutorials, another product called Teams, etc. Stack Overflow was (and still is) nowhere near profitability, so they were cutting costs and desperately trying to find some way to monetize the site, while neglecting their core platform and laying off staff.

Over the next few years, the team became more distant and unreachable as staff left and were replaced with new employees who were not engaged users of the platform, and largely didn't interact with it at all. Most of the company's hiring was in sales and marketing; the company is now largely run by the sales department rather than engineering. The site started to decline during this era, and the fun, friendly atmosphere of the early days gave way to with a more grumpy, corporate, and bureaucratic vibe.

Then in 2019...a lot of stuff happened. The company published a blog post blaming the userbase for the site's unwelcoming reputation, rather than the broken moderation process. The company made an announcement that they would no longer be engaging with the community and seeking feedback on new products and features, because they were tired of reading negative reactions to products that weren't useful and changes like UI redesigns that compromised usability. (Infamously, an executive quipped that the users who participate in Meta discussions represent "0.015%" of the site's visitors, and therefore weren't worth listening to -- despite these users contributing around 80% of the site's content). The company also announced plans to illegally change the licensing terms of user-submitted content, fired a volunteer moderator with no warning or explanation over a blatantly false allegation of transphobia [1], issued false and defamatory statements about that moderator to The Register; and fired two staff members who were just about the only employees who still engaged with the community and pushed back internally on the company's bad decisions [2]. A huge chunk of the community (including myself) stopped participating after everything that happened in 2019, and the site has seen a massive decline in quality and engagement since then.

In the wake of this, the company did start to make some changes -- they started engaging more with the community, and started working again on new features and changes, including moderation improvements -- but it's clear that people in the company working on the core site and engaging with the community have limited resources and very little influence with the company, and their work is too little, too late.

Then, the company got bought out by a private equity firm. The new CEO seems convinced that AI is the solution to monetizing Stack Overflow, somehow. This started with implementing half-baked AI features that didn't work, and the latest iteration seems to be trying to convince AI companies to pay for access to the site's content -- never mind that it's all available for free under a creative commons license. He's been trying to lock down the site's data dumps in an attempt to restrict AI companies from being able to download them, most recently with another attempt at illegally relicensing CC-BY-SA content [3]. Never mind that the drastic decline in engagement over recent years means whatever value the site has for AI training comes from its historical content which has long been freely available; not its new content [4]. (The most entertaining part of this debacle is that whenever the company announces some misguided new initiative, droves of ex-employees show up on Meta to tell them what a bad idea it is.)

So, TL;DR: the company neglected their core platform for years, lost or fired their most experienced staff, and lost most of their userbase and engagement. Now they're burning money, running an outdated platform that's not up to the task, and are caught off-guard by ChatGPT.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965

[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342039

[3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/401324

[4] https://fosstodon.org/@JasonPunyon/112792203373096690

daotoad• 2 years ago

This is the answer. It needs the big green checkmark from OP.

cryptography3• 2 years ago

Wow! Such a detailed response. That makes everything much clear. Thanks for sharing and the references!

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

Toxic hellhole. Moderators so arrogant closing questions they basically don't like or think are stupid (they cannot answer them, but he). It worked when it did but putting just random 'smart' people 'in power' really did make them bullies. How weird.

andyjohnson0• 2 years ago

Weighed down by stale information with no tools to deal with change.

Next iteration syndrome: this time we'll succeed in turning all that stuff back into $$$ knowledge.

Toxic moderators desperately hanging onto their faded glory.

Shog9• 2 years ago

So many of the responses here are effectively identical to complaints folks had about Stack Overflow 3 months, 6 months, a year after it was launched.

They were valid complaints then, and they've valid now.

But... They don't answer this question, which is predicated on SO losing prominence - if poor moderation, rude answers or "duplicates" were enough to torpedo the site, why did it ever gain any prominence at all?

To understand this, we need to look at the state of the 'Net back in 2008, when the idea behind Stack Overflow was conceived and when the first version of the site launched[1].

16 years ago...

- ...USENET was still (barely) around and in use. A non-trivial number of folks hanging around on SO in the early days were old newsgroup regulars for various platforms / tech. SO offered them a welcome reprieve from the by-then-crushing tedium of spam and endless repetition that had pretty much killed USENET by then, as well as a larger audience.

- ...General-purpose "programming sites" (forums, blogs, article repositories, snippet sites) were still very much a thing. CodeProject, CodeGuru, w3schools, etc. For the most part, they had inherited all the problems of USENET and introduced new problems of their own. Again, SO offered a reprieve.

- ...Then as now, special-purpose forums / mailing lists / IRC rooms were collecting an awful lot of "original expertise" for various projects. Then as now, these were mostly useless for disseminating this information; that job fell on folks willing to spend crazy amounts of time soaking it up and then summarizing it in documentation, tutorials, FAQs, or actual books. Most of which didn't get read by the folks who most needed it[2]. So the actual dissemination was handled by the handful of people who did read these resources, via answers to questions on USENET or other major programming sites. The same questions, over and over and over again, until finally years into it some bit of critical information finally entered the public consciousness and questions tailed off.

- ...Google was really, really good at finding information. But information was often not structured in a way that was friendly to Google. Yes, as crazy as it sounds, 2008 was still on the other side of "Peak SEO". This was particularly true for programming information, which tended to live in dense, hard-to-crawl and thus poorly-indexed databases or in some cases (Experts Exchange[3]) actively obfuscated. Google was still leaning heavily on the old DejaNews archive (and Google Groups that had swallowed it) for a lot of more obscure questions, but... had kinda broken all of those in various ways. Stack Overflow's format was very friendly to Google, and Q&A quickly acquired very good ranking, with Google introducing a microformat[4] based on SO's layout for sites willing to present information in this manner.

- ...Reddit was popular, but also kind of a trash fire. Ok, maybe there are a few constants in life. There were good programming communities there, but, uh, not where the unwary would think to look.

- ...There were good, helpful programming communities on IRC too. So I'm told by people I trust. Maybe there was a secret knock or something. Anyway, there were also plenty of the other sort of channel, where asking a question would get you mocked at best or given a script to wipe your harddrive. As crazy as it sounds, a site where you might be brusquely asked to clarify your question and then given a working answer or nothing at all was much nicer than the status quo for an awful lot of folks stumbling around looking for help.

- ...GitHub barely existed. git support on Windows was iffy. Google Code was still a thing, Subversion was king, Mercurial looked like it might be the next king. Normal programmers used pastebin waaaaay too much. Stack Overflow was arguably the most "put together" site at the time.

I wanted to end with that last one, because I think it points out the real answer to your question: Stack Overflow of 2024 is still... Pretty close in terms of what it offers to Stack Overflow in 2008. Meanwhile, GitHub, GitLab, Discord, Slack, Google, even Reddit not to mention thousands of other services (most recently a lot of GenAI-based stuff) have spent the last 16 years trying to outdo each other in various ways with the intent of grabbing the attention and loyalty of programmers / tech-workers.

If I'm running a little project now, I can set up a GitHub repo w/ wiki, forum, online collaboration (including hosted build system) and if I need more a little Discord or Slack server will probably do the job. I can moderate all of that myself, or lock it down, or appoint other folks in roles to moderate. I can pick a license that suits the project, a Code of Conduct that suits its growing community, use Markdown or something similar pretty much everywhere... That's all so far beyond what was available anywhere in 2008, and so much easier and less restrictive than what SO provides...

SO got big because the 'Net was a shit place for programmers. It's shrinking now because the 'Net has gotten so much better that SO looks like shit in comparison[5].

[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/15/then-a-miracle-occurs-...

[2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198

[4] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41371512

darrelld• 2 years ago

AI is definitely a big part of it. When I would search Google with a technical question and land on StackOverflow I was looking for an answer. Sometimes you get a post which is similar, but not quite right, or the answers are only 95% of answering your actual questions.

AI of course just answers it. I can ask it follow ups, I can give it loose code and it just gets it. My grammar can be riddled with spelling errors and it still gets it. I can go back and forth with it and get a fine tuned answer.

When I used SO I had always just wanted an answer, but had to accept answers that were close, but not quite what I needed.

God forbid if I needed to post a question. I'd immediately get hit with over moderation, or someone closing the question for whatever reason.

I used to be an avid SO contributor up until around ~2015. I saw the mod community turn snarky. AI is just a better way to get stuff done.

dv_dt• 2 years ago

Besides the many other comments (esp. wrt. the moderation gauntlet problem), Stack Overflow never introduced a systematic way to differentiate answers that were good at the time for a version of software/environment, but become outdated over time. The users work around it on an ad-hoc basis, but often you end up reading through multiple generations of answers before getting to an answer for the current world.

randomlurking• 2 years ago

Im afraid this will get buried, but I‘ll try anyway since I haven’t seen this angle yet: I’m at a point in my career where I now feel „ready“ to answer questions on SO and want to help others. So my question turns into another direction: where should people eager to provide help go to? Is it still SO or are there other places?

- Reddit: I only stumble upon questions by accident, and often on mobile where I’m not in the mood of typing long answers or code. - GitHub: I’m mainly here looking for answers myself, is there a nice way to look over all issues for a couple of projects so that I can easily see whether I could help somewhere? - discourse, discord, …: usually framework-specific, so not as ideal/comfortable as SO I imagine

Are others on the same situation? Where do you answer questions nowadays?

beretguy• 2 years ago

A lot of SO users migrated to codidact.com

wojciii2• 2 years ago

Thanks. This site looks quite useful.

ravenstine• 2 years ago

I've definitely been using it a lot less because garbage-collection seems to be nonexistent on this platform. So many accepted answers are woefully outdated and so many non-accepted answers are, in my opinion, not acceptable. For some reason, the Stack Exchange team doesn't see this as a problem. It's definitely hindered my use of their site. AI plays a role a little bit because it can answer a lot of basic programming questions, but theoretically Stack Overflow should still be a good place to find good information on cutting edge topics – and yet that seems to no longer be the case. It's easy to blame AI, but Stack Overflow has been in decline for several years before GPT became public.

There's also a lot of petty nonsense that goes on with that site. Not as badly as somewhere like Wikipedia, but there's still lots of... peculiar personalities on Stack Overflow who participate in ways that are not constructive.

bsoles• 2 years ago

I have closed all of my Stack Exchange accounts (including Stack Overflow) after the Monica event and after a number of contributors that I liked left the platform.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...

It seems that I am getting more and more sensitive to the politics and policies of companies before I (continue to) use their services, even if their services would be useful for me if I had only ignored their wrong doings.

giantg2• 2 years ago

I'll read it, but I won't write to it. Too much work and shitty reactions. It seems like it's all one-ups-manship now... and not due to some engineering excellence cultural reason, but for the fucking points/rep. There's no sense of community there.

krageon• 2 years ago

It was really good 15 years ago, but in those 15 years (and I'd say especially the last 5 or so) the community has become more hostile to new contributions. Once I've been told a few times my contribution is not wanted, I stop participating in that community (assuming that on reflection I'm not being an asshole).

In a significant way, that's probably due to how incredibly toxic the managing company has become. An aim for profit eventually ruins everything, including what used to be one of the best knowledge sharing sites around.

solardev• 2 years ago

The moderation sucks there. They keep closing the really useful questions/answers in favor of some super rigid idea that they have (but which no user understands or cares about). It went from useful discussions to fighting the mods and junior mods all the damned time...

heelix• 2 years ago

Forget the answers, Stack Overflow is just a toxic place to ask a question. You might get lucky from searches where others had a similar question, but god help the poor soul who makes an ask. I've ASKED AI more things this week then the last decade+ with SO, and get what I'd consider comparable quality of answers for my very specific questions. At this point, why bother with SO?

curry798• 2 years ago

Whenever I run into a problem these days, I just ask AI directly.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

Because of its systems filter for toxic rule lawyers as a free workforce and that sort of company becomes a filter for new things,approaches and viewpoints?

kinderjaje• 2 years ago

sgift• 2 years ago

For the same reason Wikipedia suffers: People who are really good at writing factual content / good answers are not automatically good at moderation, often they are even some of the worst people for it. Moderation needs empathy, thinking about edge cases, dealing with emotions and so on. Making the people who have the most points on a Q&A site your moderators was always a recipe for disaster.

For a long time, the sheer usefulness of SO overshadowed all of this. People were willing to suffer for the sake of getting a result. But over time the quality couldn't keep up with the pure agony of having to deal with petty dictators. And finally, people just stopped going there, which means the chance that the best answer will be on SO is getting smaller, which means even less people bother with it and so on.

ssss11• 2 years ago

Whenever I google a code problem the first hit is usually a good SO answer to my question. That isn’t going away.. what exactly is fading away?

Do you mean there are less new answers than there used to be?

wojciii2• 2 years ago

This is not the case for me. I used some time on SO today and found only bad answers and gave up and started reading the source code of the examples from the library that I'm using.

I think that people stopped contributing. I stopped some time ago as the site stopped motivating me to contribute.

csomar• 2 years ago

I recently visited the site from Google and seen a notification. One of my questions was "closed" in favor of another newer question. The person (mod) who closed the question answered the newer question, despite the existence of several replies and a marked answer. He also somehow bumped his answer all the way to the top.

All of this, apparently, because he is advertising his profile as an "xxx" expert. I am not going to point the person here publicly but if someone from SO is interested, I can send it over email.

itaymoav2• 2 years ago

I have been around for sometime, and used Stackoverflow since the beginning. In the last 3-4 years I stopped using it as the rules it has un-promoted discussion (which is sometimes needed to hash a question or explain the logic behind what u ask). It promotes unpleasant responses from the newer users (I do not remember the last question I asked without getting snappy responses or downvotes with no explanation as to the "why") It just became annoying, and looks like ChatGPT is doing much better and/or just reading the full documentation when I have the time.

gperkins978• 2 years ago

Has no one used the word enshittification yet? Google, Stack Overflow, Amazon, ..., it is like every useful website twenty years ago is now literally a steaming pile of excrement. I find myself using books again to look things up because it is often easier. I never thought Bing would be the best option, but now it often is, but not because it got better, but simply because everything ese got so much worse.

Stack Overflow is how I learned to do almost everything. Now I never use it anymore. Mostly because it has become useless. I love that it does not have video (I hate video), but the good answers are no longer there, but there is far more attitude. I never recall being insulted or degraded before, but that sure is common now. I increasingly think that real internet ID's are a wonderful idea, just so twerps can get beaten again, as is just.

Any anonymous tool will trend towards soft, whiny bitch in the absence of leadership or subtle forms of norm enforcement. Male spaces tend to be enjoyable because of swift, brutal norm enforcement. This is missing at Stack Overflow and pretty much everywhere online, so behavior converges towards 13-year-old teen cheerleader behavior. We need to make it more of a high school male locker room environment (silent unless you have something valuable to say, with consequences if you misbehave).

In summary, the judicious use of the appropriate level of violence is the solution to everything.

Glawen• 2 years ago

The norm is enforced, it's just that it is not the needed norm.

I see it more as missing a sound authority stopping the fight of siblings.

I'm surprised noone is seeing an analogy at work. I switched teams recently, from an engineering team to a software engineering team, and it was obvious that they applied the SO attitude at work: bullying, berating questions, avoid facing the truth etc...

burgerguyg2• 2 years ago

A question I asked 14 years ago on ways to sanitize database queries in JavaScript was moderated two weeks ago as violating rules. I lost reputation points for the moderation and more for having the points from the question deducted.

First, why aren't they simply archiving anything over X years old? The fact that this question from 14 years ago was open for moderation is crazy. Second, who has so little to do that they're hunting down ancient questions to moderate?

I edited it to ask, instead of for the best way, some ways. The edit was rejected. I gave up and have no interest in ever asking or answering questions there again. It's just too random.

burgerguyg2• 2 years ago

FWIW, I haven't been active there since 2021. When I was on the Amazon Alexa Developer Education team during lockdown, I used to answer Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) questions between breakfast and morning stand-up. But since I left the team, I haven't worked on a product with that kind of question volume there.

mattm• 2 years ago

The last time answered a question on Stack Overflow it got rejected.

I was using an unpopular Google API which was returning an unexpected error with a weird code. There was an unanswered SO question about the exact issue from years ago.

I found the answer to the problem in some open source library and added an answer to the SO question with a couple sentences and a link to the source code. My answer was immediately rejected.

There was a way to flag it to ask for review which I did but got no response. I ended up going to meta.stackexchange to ask for an explanation. Finally, after multiple people discussed about it the answer was approved. When I asked why a valid answer was rejected in the first place the response was "links on old questions are often spam and mods just auto-reject".

I won't bother contributing in the future if it takes that much effort to answer. BTW I had something like 20k karma.

MeetingsBrowser• 2 years ago

My top question (most views and upvotes) was marked as a duplicate almost immediately after being asked. It went on to get hundreds of thousands of views and multiple answers with tons of votes. It is still marked as a duplicate to this day.

My top few answers are similarly on questions marked duplicate, off topic, etc.

Seems the culture of stack overflow is that everything useful has been answered elsewhere. Therefore, if a question is useful, it must be a duplicate or pff topic.

Jugurtha• 2 years ago

Answers that claim that the question is a duplicate, then OP pleading that they have read the several "original questions" but were unable to fix the issue, or they're talking about something else entirely.

People not even fixing your answer but introducing a minor edit. I think I recall someone listed as a co-author or something with zero change (not even a character was changed).

Bullying OP. The darn person tells you their question is not yet answered, and people persist: nope, comment below answered the question, or that it's a duplicate. Bullying or gaslighting someone into denying a technical problem still exists is fucking wild.

I mean, Quora has become absolutely useless a long time ago, but StackExchange has become harder to read. The amount of focus not to register some dip-shit trying to close a thread because they haven't really understood the problem, the problem you are very aware about, and getting the frustration of the OP because they're talking about the very problem you're looking to solve, is just tremendous.

tony2016• 2 years ago

What are the evidence that it's fading away? The questions and the answers here do not mention why people think it's fading away.

I still get answers when I post a question. Do you mean the number of questions in general? Who cares? All I care about are my questions getting answers.

rozenmd• 2 years ago

I started blogging instead, and I imagine a fair few other developers did too

ronnieoverby• 2 years ago

I may be a rare-bird type of user on StackOverflow. I started using StackOverflow to ask primarily ask questions from the earliest days, I have an ultra high reputation, my question count dwarfs my answer count by more than 3:2.

My answer to this question is that I simply got better at solving programming problems on my own without having to ask for help. That increase of skill coupled with the the overly aggressive moderation that acted as a deterrent for me to ask questions has led to a point where I have practically no need for the platform.

I have even noticed that I will typically bypass stack-overflow when researching a problem, preferring other resources first (official documentation).

stephenr• 2 years ago

The people who went to S/O for something they can copy and paste because they don't want to read the manual now just ask a predictive text model for something they can copy and paste.

zandor_zz• 2 years ago

I have been recently posted a question, but it seems that there is no longer track of it. Neither in my activities log. The post concerned the internals of the Javascript engine and I don't think it was silly enough to cancel it out anyway. And prior to this circumstance, I was blamed (or even mocked up) to have shared some code which, thought it was correct and it fixed the posed problem, was flawed because of including variable prefixed by the underscore! I can live with it, but honestly, as some of you say, I am discouraged to send comments. Moderators look as being pretty much into their role.

Ask HN: Why Is Stack Overflow Fading Away?

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