Also: the bigger the corpus of already answered questions, it’s more likely that you can just look up an answer instead of asking.

Eventually SO becomes a site exclusively for lurkers instead of a platform for active participation

> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.

This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.

> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.

This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.

Here's my brilliant idea: the longer it takes for an answer to be marked correct, or the more answers there are before one is marked correct, the more points that answer deserves.

Remember when the R developers would ask and answer their own basic questions about R, essentially building up a beginner tutorial on stack overflow? That was a cool time

This has been my experience.

My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as time went on, and they became unanswered, almost always (I often ended up answering my own question, after I figured it out on my own).

I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I encountered, were the types of things that people who ship, encounter; not academic exercises.

Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on there, don't ship.

LLMs may sometimes give pretty sloppy answers, but they are almost always ship-relevant.

That might be true on Stackoverflow but not on other network sites like Cross Validated, which was killed by splitting the community into multiple SE sites and longtime users quitting in protest over various policies and not being replaced.

Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I still pop into SO when in learning a new language or trip into new simple questions (in my case, how to connect and test a local server). But when you're beyond the weeds, SO is as best an oasis in the desert. Half the time a mirage, nice when it does help out. But rare either way.

I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.

Maybe there's a key idea for something to replace StackOverflow as a human tech Q&A forum: Having a system which somehow incentivizes asking and answering these sorts of challenging and novel questions. These are the questions which will not easily be answered using LLMs, as they require more thought and research.

Wasn't there a "bounty" program where if it had a lot of views but no answers, the answer rewarded more internet ego points?

There is also github issues discussions now which also helped in asking these niche questions directly to the team responsible. I dont ask questions about a library on SO I just ask it on the github of the library and I get immediate answers

> the more experienced you become, the less useful it is

This is killer feature of LLMs - you will not became more experienced.

>toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes

>zombie community

Like Reddit post 2015.

Yahoo answers

Google answers

And the horrific Quora

>Gen 0: expertsexchange.com

No way.

Fun story: SO officially states comments are ephemeral and can be deleted whenever, so I deleted some of my comments. I was then banned. After my ban expired I asked on the meta site if it was okay to delete comments. I was banned again for asking that.

If you're talking about deleting questions, that's because deleting the question would delete everyone's answers that they potentially worked very hard on and which others might find useful. If you think the answers are bad you can always post your own competing answer.

You can’t delete anything here either… so make sure you don’t say anything awful.

> took gamification way too far

I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes.

To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.

I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.

An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up.

It just goes back to first principles.

The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.

My heuristic is that if your interlocutor asks follow-up questions like that with no indication of why (like “why do you want to do X?” rather than “why do you want to do X? If the answer is Y, then X is a bad approach because Q, you should try Z instead”) then they are never going to give you a helpful answer.

How do I add a second spout to this can?

...

Well, the pump at the gas station doesn't fit in my car, but they sold me a can with a spout that fits in my car.

...

It's tedious to fill the can a dozen times when I just want to fill up my gas tank. Can you help me or not?

...

I understand, but I already bought the can. I don't need the "perfect" way to fill a gas tank, I just want to go home.

Tbf the problem there is probably FIPS more than anything else.

The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question about best practices, but you can't ask people to share their experiences or recommendations.

Fixing loads of LLM-generated content is neither easy nor fun. You'll have a very hard time getting people to do that.

The community is not "toxic". The community is overwhelmed by newcomers believing that they should be the ones who get to decide how the site works (more charitably: assuming that they should be able to use the site the same way as other sites, which are not actually at all the same and have entirely different goals).

I don't know why you put "duplicates" in quotation marks. Closing a duplicate question is doing the OP (and future searchers) a service, by directly associating the question with an existing answer.

> Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.

Isn't this how Quora is supposed to operate?

Absolutely 100% this. I've used them on and off throughout the years. The community became toxic, so I took my question to other platforms like Reddit (they became toxic as well) and elsewhere.

Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open source, I've written everything from emulators and game engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc.

The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in documentation, specifically related to undocumented behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO, I received either no response and downvotes, or negative responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back, so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button if folks were super negative and didn't answer the question.

Later on, most of my answers actually have come from Github,and 95% of the time, my issues were legitimate ones that would've been mentioned if a decent number of folks used the framework, library, or language in question.

I think the tl;dr of this is this: If you can't provide a positive contribution on ANY social media platform like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Github, etc. Don't speak. Don't vote. Ignore the question. If you happen to know, help out! Contribute! Write documentation! I've done so on more than one occasion (I even built a website around it and made money in the process due to ignorance elsewhere, until I shut it down due to nearly dying), and in every instance I did so, folks were thankful, and it made me thankful that I was able to help them. (the money wasn't a factor in the website I built, I just wanted to help folks that got stuck in the documentation hole I mentioned)

EDIT: because I know a bunch of you folks read Ars Technica and certain other sites. I'll help you out: If you find yourself saying that you are being "pedantic", you are the problem, not the solution. Nitpicking doesn't solve problems, it just dilutes the problem and makes it bigger. If you can't help, think 3 times and also again don't say anything if your advice isn't helpful.

They literally sold: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-...

He and Jeff made it abundantly clear their mission was to destroy the sex change site because that site was immoral for monetizing the benevolence of the community who answered the questions.

"Knowledge should be free" they said. "You shouldn't make money off stuff like this," they said.

Plenty of links and backstory in my other comments.

I remember those too! There were seemingly thousands of them!

Reminds me of my most black-hat project — a Wikipedia proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah, perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.

> Often, doing what your users want leads to success.

You misunderstand.

People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users".

Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this.

Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why.

> When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside.

I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care. Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made.

> trying to deny the toxicity and condescension

I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context.

As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish?

I'm talking here about cases (which is basically all of them) where the first person to ask was simply needlessly specific. Or where the canonical has the list as an incidental detail and the next person insists that the answers won't work because this code has a tuple, you see, and doesn't see the merit in trying them.

If you imagine that the answer should be re-written from scratch to explain that the approach will be the same, you have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of the site. Abstraction of contextually unimportant details is supposed to be an essential skill for programmers.

[flagged]

It's also disconnected incentives. SO users get numbers to go up by taking moderation actions so of course they do that. Also you literally get banned from reviewing questions if you don't flag enough of them to be closed. These are incentives put in place by the SO company intentionally.

It's not like only slimy people get to use moderator tools like on Reddit, since you need a lot of reputation points you get by having questions and answers voted up. It's more like (1) you select people who write surface-level-good answers since that's what's upvoted, and they moderate with a similar attitude and (2) once you have access to moderator tools you're forced to conform with (1) or your access is revoked, and (3) the company is completely incompetent and doesn't give a shit about any of this.

Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? Do we want this?

We’re talking about how communities can become toxic. How we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to be our intentions.

I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be compensated to not let a community deteriorate.

The amount of docs that have a “Copy as markdown” or “Copy for AI” button has been noticeably increasing, and really helps the LLM with proper context.

   they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web

I see plenty of old answers that are still very relevant. Suppose it depends on what language/tech tags you follow.

There have been many times I have seen someone complain on the meta site about answers being old and outdated, and then they give specific examples, and I go check them out and they're actually still perfectly valid.

SO had answers that you couldn't find in the documentation and were you can't look in the source code.

If everything would be well documentated SO wouldn't have being as big as it was in the first place.

LLMs don't experience the world, so they have no reason a priori to know what is or isn't truthful in the training data.

(Not to mention the confabulation. Making up API method names is natural when your model of the world is that the method names you've seen are examples and you have no reason to consider them an exhaustive listing.)

You can save an open source + open weights model, which is frozen in time. That’s still very useful for some things but lacks knowledge of current data.

So we’ll end up with a choice of low-performing stale models or high-performing enshittified models which know about more current information.

Doesn't help when the ads are a layer above the model.

Yup. Like Claude 3 Opus.

Really? I thought you could only do that with open source models. Can you teach me how to checkpoint the current version of Claude Code so I can keep it as-is forever?