Stack Overflow Sold to Tech Giant Prosus for $1.8B (2021)

The story of how AI ate stack overflow’s lunch is, to me, way less interesting than the story of how stack overflow managed to kill their own growth with aggressive moderation. The correlation between the sudden end of high growth and the adoption of hostile moderation is strong.

sohex• 2 months ago

Wildly true. Purely anecdotal on my part, but in my experience the cooking stack exchange was just awful to even try to ask something on.

try-working• 2 months ago

SO should create an MCP interface or such, to make real-world context available to agents, the stuff that's not in docs.

dpark2• 2 months ago

Surely all of SO has been ingested by the LLM training at this point.

faangguyindia• 2 months ago

They used to have a lot of ego, specially established mods there would delete whatever you post, mock you, and all. And then there comrades would chear and double the insults.

While it did help me at time, i saw it was hard for average Joe to contribute to it.

znpy• 2 months ago

They used to have a lot of ego, specially established mods there would delete whatever you post, mock you, and all. And then there comrades would chear and double the insults.

Yeah, it was a shitshow.

The thing i hated the most were mods rewriting your posts, because they didn't like the wording. Years after I am still salty and convinced it was a petty way to farm points or whatever.

I'm so glad that StackOverflow is dead.

hashmap• 2 months ago

It was extremely weird to do things like that as a policy, since it was systemic and natural for a user to just post a question and not find what it might be related to. You just put in an automation to link up / coalesce questions together if they have enough similarity and that would catch most of the things they'd turn around and berate people for and completely avoid this issue by a change in structure. Or like, anything else that would have solved it.

Stack Overflow Sold to Tech Giant Prosus for $1.8B (2021)

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