HN Reader

There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime

There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.

This may be a controversial take based on the last few years of SO discourse, but the strictness in SO was part of what made it a good resource.

For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise.

For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits.

I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits. People also ask questions unrelated to the sub at all. I've seen so many times people asking questions about some Android specific problem unrelated to the issue. While ideally I'd like to help these people, it pollutes real questions, discussion, and most valuably to future users, the ability to properly search for previous discourse.

SO best acts as library of information. I will say, people on there could benefit from removing the rude tone (this is a trait I see in software engineers frequently, unfortunately). But closing activity when it's inappropriate or duplicate (which despite many testimonials, I have seen is more common than not) is a good habit IMO.

I really don't like this sentiment:

> "Because I can get an answer from an LLM (which does need to be verified) in less than a minute versus the hours or days I would have to wait to get a toxic and potentially useless reply on stackoverflow. They should really downsize or just kill the company it’s a relic of the past and most developers won’t miss it."

To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered. Sure, new questions might be falling off and it might be decreasing in relevance, but that in no way means that a massively resource-intensive LLM regurgitating paragraphs of semi-duplicated text is better enough to justify canning it. (There's also the matter of all the other StackExchange sites, I have no idea what the state of the world is on those but I imagine they also have value in themselves.)

To this day, I find almost all of my low-level questions are still readily answered by StackOverflow, and it holds lots of discussion on higher-level questions that I find useful.

Does StackOverflow have an attitude problem? Absolutely. It is fair to say that most developers won't miss it? No.

Related: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time (1526 points, 3 days ago, 1004 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345

StackOverflow wasn't a toxic hellhole.

I struggle not to see the people describing it as full of exclusionary rants as telling on themselves.

I must be incredibly fortunate, I got a lot of good value from SO and have not experienced any of the toxicity that the author mentions here. I have written questions, comments, and answers.

I can only speak for myself, but I very much resonate with this.

I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself.

For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that around the edges, but the policy ended up being enforced so strictly that many interesting topics their audience would have found valuable were declared out-of-bounds. Questions I wanted answers to - and that were getting good answers! - would get closed, and so would interesting questions that I wanted to try to answer.

I tried a couple times to push back gently, and got piled on each time.

It stopped being fun, so I stopped going there. Shrug.

Anecdotally, I have used SO much less in recent years, but I think a lot of what gets labelled as toxicity is just dedicated curation. I remember asking my first question - I got a quick response that it wasn't well written and was likely a duplicate, and they were totally correct.

The next time I asked I made sure to put the work in beforehand to make sure it was well written and included any relevant info that someone would need, as well as linking potential duplicates and explaining the differences I had to them. That got a much better response and is more useful for future readers.

StackOverflow always wanted less low-quality questions, which is now the case. Whether they still receive some high-quality ones...

But I'm sure the website still receives a lot of views, as it still is highly ranked in Google.

Yeah, I'm fond of this graph personally: https://mastodon.social/@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe/1158357533238...

StackOverflow has been in a clear, strong decline for quite a while. LLMs just hammered in the final nail. It's very clear that they caused a substantial drop, but not as impactful as the years of stagnation and rise of competition.

A couple of thoughts:

That graph is number of questions asked being posted: very often the question already exists (although obviously with technology and frameworks changing over time, things aren't constant, and answers can be out of date at some point), so you don't need to post the question.

Also: Would LLMs be as good for answers if they hadn't been trained on scraping StackOverflow in the first place?

This topic has been beaten to death, but the defenders of the toxic environment (including the SO founders) have never understood why the environment they promoted killed SO.

It's not because people disliked the rudeness, though that didn't help and was never necessary. It's because the toxicity became the only goal. And the toxicity replaced both accuracy and usefulness.

I wanted to learn web development during the lockdown of 2020. First thing I learned was that SO was completely useless. Everything on there was wrong. Everything was wrong due to incompetent moderation that prevented bad information from being corrected. Everything new marked as a dupe even when the other post was wrong or irrelevant.

That killed SO. It was a decision of the founders and the mods. They took great pride in doing it, too.

The correct way to use StackOverflow was not to ask questions there.

You either found your answer coming in from a search engine, or you pretend the site does not even exist.

I don't think it was supposed to be sustainable, but oh well.

A more interesting metric is a steadily declining percentage of answered questions. It used to be above 90% in the first year and since then dropped to 35% but stabilized around this number for the last 2-3 years.

Source: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426250/unanswered-q...

Isn't this a sign that LLMs are self-cannibalizing? What data will LLMs be trained on when sites like StackOverflow die?

> "Recently, a graph of the total number of Stack Overflow questions over time started making rounds on the internet"

Isn't that a graph of questions per timeframe, not total questions? If it was total questions, that would imply a massive cull of existing questions, not a decline in usage

Well, I was a top 2%er, and answered more questions than I asked, with about 20k, and I made a point to be nice to newbies

being mean is a personal choice, not a requirement. being courteous and considerate and being experienced or knowledgeable can both co exist

I get the point of moderating things, try to reduce duplication, low-effort, etc... but it is funny the gut reaction I feel (angry) when my post is auto-deleted (Reddit for example). For SO I remember having questions get blocked and accounts being blocked from downvoted questions. But I understand too, I could have researched more, it's one of those "I want the immediate reward/answer" vs. searching the old questions.

This actually could be a good argument for LLMs, you won't get told your question is dumb.

In retrospect they should have allowed dupes so that new wave of moderators (and new users) had place to grow. It's like in that mice utopia. Same way it got killed.

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345

I disliked the pedantic nature of stackoverflow like the next guy but this seems like a naive take.

SO solved a problem, that problem is now gone

The whole premise of this is kinda wrong. Google killed SO more than anything else. Much like how they’re killing the rest of the web today. AI certainly didn’t help, but it is/was not the root cause, nor was the ‘toxic’ environment

SO remains a vital site for providing training data to AI.

I think StackOverflow could have been saved from turning into a toxic hellhole if they'd had AI and LLMs in the mid 2010s. No seriously, hear me out.

SO is infamous for overzealous mods closing questions left and right, calling you an idiot, and being generally unhelpful.

I think these mods were/are burned out by dealing with mostly idiotic questions all day. They default to suspicion and hostility.

If they'd had AI weeding out low quality questions before they ever got to a human (and not the rudimentary text classifiers that were the state of the art at the time) I think the mods would be a more helpful bunch.

Speaking as someone that was a SO front-page contributor, and at one brief time the top of the pops on the C++ tag, I didn't think it was so bad. And you got a free t-shirt!

What you have to understand is the avalanche of low-quality questions that came in, pushed by "academics" who should have known better, telling students things like "just ask on SO - they will write it for you", which is bad on so many levels.

But when it got really bad was when the new owners, after Jeff & co sold out, took over. Woke nonsense sprouted everywhere, people with no technical knowledge did moderation. And, whoa, if you criticised this, you were banned. That's when I gave up.

Completely agree. SO is full of self-proclaimed "experts" who simply are not helpful. It is a toxic site. Amusingly, I have noticed how the most unwelcoming, unreliable, and lone wolf developers (colleagues) in my past five companies used their SO metrics as signs of their worth.

That says plenty.

Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today. In 10 years what will the LLMs train on?

So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young people feel disillusioned and are increasingly focused on gambling and "investing" in meme stocks.

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM

The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. That's why so many people have bad stories about times they went to ask questions on StackOverflow: it was supposed to be very high-friction and there was supposed to be a high standard for the questions asked there.

Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds. They don't need to use Google to find a high-quality StackOverflow question/answer AND they can ask any question even if it's been asked 1,000 times before or is low-quality or would lead to discussion rather than a singular answer.

I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.

Was stack overflow the last stand of web gamification?

The sarcasm and rudeness to rookie questions was unbearable at times. Talking to new comers as if they were stupid. Those new comers become knowledgeable later on and i suspect many did not come back to that platform instead they are on reddit and various other platform where they are welcomed.

The average answer writer on SO is not actually that toxic: really it's the voters.

The top answer will almost always be an explanation of why the asker is wrong to want to do the thing they want to do. But that's not most answers, or most answerers, just the top ones.

The bottom answer will almost always be an honest attempt to write code that answers the question. Sometimes the code doesn't work, or needs explanation: these problems will be solved a couple answers up from the bottom.

My technique for years has been to click the SO link in search results, then hit End on my keyboard to jump to the bottom of the page. This a little slower than reading a cached LLM answer, but faster than waiting for the LLMs to generate something.

one thing that grabbed me right away about chat gpt is how it understood my question. it wasn't obtuse, let alone intentionally so. it wasn't pedantic; it just helped. And without a side dish of attitude.

I've had countless questions closed and received even more patronizing comments from mods. I wonder who these people were and why were they empowered in such a way by StackOverflow the company.

Was it because the platform's communication model based on upvotes and downvotes, or was it because us engineers are arrogant assholes by nature?

I feel this topic is approaching circlejerk status. Basically any mention of StackOverflow on HN/Reddit is just teeing up everyone to go on about how the SO moderators are the worst people ever.