| ▲ | josephg 4 days ago |
| > The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet. Not provide a service for the question-asker or answerer. Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie. |
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| ▲ | dahart 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The over-moderation you described helps people for a short time but then doesn’t help the person who googles much later. I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one. |
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| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one. Okay, but who's going to arbitrate that? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.) The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though. | | |
| ▲ | dahart 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before. Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time. Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content. One thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example. Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate. | | |
| ▲ | shagie 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content. The community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced. However, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-... Note the "Questions closed" and "Questions reopened". Compare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-... The tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the "make the site friendly" by removing comments and banning users. The "some of the answers should have been deleted" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain. | | |
| ▲ | dahart 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain. Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right? | | |
| ▲ | shagie 3 days ago | parent [-] | | That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level. Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for "quality before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was "quantity and engagement will follow" and then "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all. |
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| ▲ | mixmastamyk 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago. | | |
| ▲ | n5NOJwkc7kRC a day ago | parent [-] | | And yet for the past five years, every time I've looked at it, the top answers are all uselessly outdated. Simply getting rid of the stupid dupe policy would've helped solve this a lot better than time-weighted voting. | | |
| ▲ | mixmastamyk a day ago | parent [-] | | It works well in my experience, but it is not always enabled. Seems to be opt-in on every site instead of default. |
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| ▲ | dent9 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the "Top Answer" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by "Recent" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant | |
| ▲ | jbaber 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation. | |
| ▲ | IshKebab 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. Yeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow "recommendation" questions. So they know that it's an issue but just ignore it for programming questions. |
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| ▲ | lurk2 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this: 30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator). 30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP). 5 minutes on implementation. 2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard. With an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my initial prompt even as a layman. When you’d actually find an answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question that lacked one of your conditions. |
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| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version, and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers. | | |
| ▲ | zarzavat 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes but that only works if the questions are identical. Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent [-] | | No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place. Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point. It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal. | | |
| ▲ | gyan 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates. That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. > When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. That is generally irrelevant. | | |
| ▲ | wpietri 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy? There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created. What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term. It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site. | | |
| ▲ | shagie 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started. In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it. That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding. However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult. Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate. Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back. This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone. The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude. Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered. | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my "users". I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of "dead-ness", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that. Because from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia. For a scope of "practical matters about writing code", as compared to "any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it". I am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congregate in public and try to accomplish something. I do not share your goals. The community is not like software, and "serving and adapting to users" does not benefit the people doing the work. We never arranged to have the kind of "users" you describe. | | |
| ▲ | immibis 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Deadness is the symptom, not the cause. Users don't avoid SO because it's dead, but rather, SO is dead because users avoid it. It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. There's another thread on the front page about IPv6 where someone had a good analogy: IPv4 vs IPv6 is like Python 2 vs 3. The Python 2 diehards continued arguing furiously to an emptier and emptier room. They never felt they were proven wrong, and the intensity of the argument never diminished but the argument was with fewer and fewer people until they were just arguing with themselves as the world moved on without them. And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026, after the horse is long gone. Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. You might want to reflect on why you hold such fervent beliefs that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now? The referenced comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477920 | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. No, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years. What you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care. The goal was never for the site to be "not dead". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found. The site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts. > And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026 This is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over than they should have needed. But really, the feedback for Stack Overflow is trying to take it in the direction of places that existed long beforehand. If you want forums, you know where to find them. And now you can also find LLMs. Which, as commonly used by people seeking programming help, are basically a grizzled forum guy in a can. >Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. "Everyone actually agrees with [me]" is the polar opposite of what I actually believe and am actually saying. I am well aware that the model is unpopular. My point is that the popularity of the model is irrelevant to me. > Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now? I have a lot of reputation points (the site still exists), far more than I ever felt I deserved, and I never really felt like they were worth anything. A huge percentage of them come from an answer to a terrible question (that was still terrible after heroic attempts at editing; this all happened long before there was a common understanding of the purpose of question closure or what would make good standards for questions) that, once I understood things properly, I closed and tried to get deleted. Over the last few years, with that new understanding, I have been trying to give away my superfluous reputation points in bounties, trying to get missing answers written for the few really good questions lacking good answers that I identify, always to no avail (the bounty system promptly became a honeypot for ChatGPT hallucinations as soon as ChatGPT became available). You do not know me or my motivations in the slightest. | | |
| ▲ | immibis 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > The goal was never for the site to be "not dead" ok? fine then. If you think it's fine for the site to be dead then please stop spamming comments defending it. It doesn't need any defence to stay dead and such defence is not useful. Response to child comment: no, you are not replying to people telling you why you need to care about a thing. You are mostly replying randomly throughout the thread and telling people why they are wrong. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I am only responding to many people trying to explain why I should care about the thing I don't care about. The defense is useful because a) it being "dead" by these metrics is unimportant; b) people are blaming a community for mistreating them, when they came in without any intent of understanding or adapting to that community; c) other sites in this mold exist, and are trying to establish themselves. |
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| ▲ | wpietri 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | As a former Wikipedia administrator, I think one of the things that Wikipedia has done exactly right is to strongly prioritize readers first, editors second, and administrators third. The unofficial Wikipedia administrator symbol is a mop, because it's much more a position of responsibility than it is a position of power. I obviously think you and other user-hostile people should be permitted to congregate and accomplish something. What I object to in Stack Overflow's case is the site being taken over by people like that, serving themselves and their own preferences with such vigor that they alienated vast numbers of potential contributors, putting the site on a path of decline from which is unlikely to recover. Even by your own terms, having a place for some (conveniently unspecified) group to "congregate in public and try to accomplish something" looks certain to be a failure. However much you don't care about deadness or declining revenue, the people paying the bills surely do. Stack Overflow was only a success because it served and adapted to users. But I give you points for being honest about your hostility to the entire point of the site. It not only makes it clear why it's failing, but it'll keep people from being sorry when it gets closed down. |
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| ▲ | gyan 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. How do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a certain tag? | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent [-] | | "[tag] is:question duplicate:yes" But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page. | | |
| ▲ | gyan 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > But if you had a personal experience, it will be easier to look within your questions on your profile page. I answer Qs on this topic, not post them. ---- Here's an example I found: https://superuser.com/questions/1929615/
(the canonical q is about extracting as mono, the closed q is about muting one channel) | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel, as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One of them also asks about "downmixing" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer. The point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions. | | |
| ▲ | gyan 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The dupe is what I linked.
The orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972 The orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio. The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants. One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > The dupe is what I linked. The orig is Ah, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me. > The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe IDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert. | | |
| ▲ | josephg 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there Really? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation? I've used ffmpeg plenty of times, but it doesn't seem obvious to me how I'd mute one audio channel. From your other comments it sounds like you believe SO should have less content. Why? How would SO be improved by forcing people to figure something like this out from the existing answer? I just don't understand the benefit to having that question marked as a duplicate and deleted. I've long wondered the same thing about wikipedia. Why does wikipedia delete well written pages about obscure topics? Is their hard disk full? Does every page cost them money? Does google search struggle at scale? I don't understand the benefit to deleting good content. | | |
| ▲ | JazCE 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Really? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation? I mean, that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer. From that answer, if you're still having issues, you form a question around: "I found this answer on [SO](link), which lead me in this direction and found these [documents](link), however I am still having issues with getting the thing to work correctly when i run this bit of code, ```code```, from the output it says it's doing this or that, but when i check something, i find that it's not doing what it claims in the outputs. What might I have missed?" And even then, that's still a fairly shaky question. Most people don't know how to write questions, which is most of what this whole comment section is complaining about. | | |
| ▲ | josephg 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer. My brain is spitting out a parse error on this sentence. Too many double negatives. Zahlman was claiming above that the "duplicate" question linked earlier in the thread wasn't a useful question. Its not useful because if you read the accepted answer in the original thread, you can figure it out easily. Prove it then. Figure it out easily for us. I think the point of SO is for people to look up the answers to questions they have. If people have similar but distinct questions with different answers, it seems objectively better to surface both SO threads. Ideally they'd be linked together so if I accidentally stumble on the wrong question, there's a link to the question I'm actually interested in. > "I found this answer on [SO](link) Why bother with all of that? I mean, it sounds like all those extra words are all to grovel sufficiently to the SO moderator-gods, hoping in their capricious anger they won't mark your question as a duplicate and wipe it from the internet. Grovelling doesn't help the question asker or the question answerer. As a user, my problem with SO isn't that people ask bad questions. Its usually that the question I actually have - if its been asked - has long ago been deleted as a duplicate. And the only question remaining on the site is subtly different from the problem I'm actually facing. Or the answer is tragically out of date. Perhaps if people asked better questions, the moderators would be happier. But the site shouldn't be run purely for the benefit of its moderators. It became a meme. "How do I do X in javascript?" "Here's how you do it using jQuery." "But I'm not using jquery." "Question closed!" | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Zahlman was claiming above that the "duplicate" question linked earlier in the thread wasn't a useful question. Its not useful because if you read the accepted answer in the original thread, you can figure it out easily. No, I was not. Duplicate questions are often very useful. They just... shouldn't host separate answers in a separate place, because that leads to a) duplicated answering effort and b) dilution of results for third parties who search for the information later. Having a question like this linked as a duplicate highlights the fact that the same fundamental problem can be conceived of in different ways, and appear different due to ancillary requirements. > If people have similar but distinct questions with different answers, it seems objectively better to surface both SO threads. Ideally they'd be linked together But we aren't talking about different answers. A bit of adaption to ancillary details is expected. Otherwise there would be no duplicate questions, and also no reason to ever try to have Stack Overflow in the first place, because asking on a forum would be fine. Searching the Internet to figure out how to fix your code could never work and never help, because obviously nobody else has ever written your code before. But problem-solving doesn't actually work that way. Closing duplicate questions as duplicates is linking them together. > Why bother with all of that? I mean, it sounds like all those extra words are all to grovel sufficiently to the SO moderator-gods This is because you are still approaching the site with the mindset of "what do I have to do to get these other people to give me the information I want?" But it's not (just) about you. A good question will be seen by many other people. > Its usually that the question I actually have - if its been asked - has long ago been deleted as a duplicate. Duplicates are not automatically deleted and not ordinarily manually deleted. > And the only question remaining on the site is subtly different from the problem I'm actually facing. Would reading the answers give you the information need to solve the problem, after first putting in the expected effort to isolate a single problem? If not, why not? That's what we care about. > Or the answer is tragically out of date. My experience has been that old answers are not actually "out of date" nearly as often as people would expect. But when they are, this is fixed by putting a new answer on the existing question. The bounty system was created largely for this reason. It has proven a failure, for a variety of reasons, but that's a failure of understanding gamification, not a problem with the model. > Perhaps if people asked better questions, the moderators would be happier. But the site shouldn't be run purely for the benefit of its moderators. It's frankly infuriating to read things like this. I have already said so many times that the overwhelming majority of the people objected to are not moderators, but people insist on using that language, not making any effort to understand the existing community, and then wondering why they feel unwelcome. More importantly, though, we are going out of our way to try to build something that benefits everyone. While most people asking questions are thinking only of themselves. | | |
| ▲ | josephg 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Thanks for replying. I find your point of view for all this fascinating. With your experience, why do you think the site is failing? What could or should be done to save it? | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Top-level view: from the perspective of people who aren't explicitly trying to teach on their own initiative, overall the site has outlived its purpose. In that time it drew way too many total questions to surface what's actually valuable; between that and no functional search (the internal search was always bad; Google et. al. got worse over time, partly intentionally) you're lucky to find anything valuable. I'm not generally worried about out-of-date answers; the truly outdated answers are mostly on outdated questions, describing situations that don't come up any more or premises that are no longer valid for ordinary programmers (e.g., fixing problems with obsolete tools). Combing through to curate properly is too little, too late now. Much stronger (but polite, of course) gatekeeping was required earlier on, which in turn required (among other things) proper means for communication between "core" users and the public. At this point, it's best to start over (hence the part where I'm now a moderator at Codidact). There's a lot more I want to say, but I don't have it organized in my head and this is way downthread already. Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post? | | |
| ▲ | josephg 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post? I'd love that. | |
| ▲ | JazCE 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post? yes please! |
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| ▲ | dxdm 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first. The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences. It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy". I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. Yes. We consider that duplicate. Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need. | | |
| ▲ | dxdm 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude that people get the information they need. In fact, your latest response is so far out that I've started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta here. | |
| ▲ | AngryData 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? They seem like mutually exclusive goals for 95% of cases. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > How does "give you the information you need" mesh with "The point is not to solve the problem"? The same way that a K-12 education does. | | |
| ▲ | n5NOJwkc7kRC a day ago | parent [-] | | Oh, so... not at all? No, seriously, K-12 education is pretty infamously bad at giving you the information you need. |
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| ▲ | llbbdd 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The "nuh uh" attitude also helps explain the usage graph drop. "The users simply wanted the wrong thing than what the site is for" is also something | | |
| ▲ | naishoya 3 days ago | parent [-] | | ^ this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO: It was like seeing a movie trailer about a remake of some nearly forgotten B- horror film one was unfortunately allowed to watch when far too young. Spoiler warning for those who havent seen this movie before: Callous disregard for the utility and purpose of both the 'Q' and 'A' users; thinly veiled in a 'you don't get to tell me what i care about', wrapped in a 'my concept of how to moderate is just the way it is; if you don't like it, go F* yourself' package, trimmed with a ribbon of 'who do these Lusers that pay the bills think they are' directed at both the site owners (who write the checks to pay the bills) and all three relevant types of visitors, Q's, A's and those who neither ask, nor answer questions, but do see Advertisements and indirectly generate the income which the site owners use to write checks. But who cares?!, since Mods are not being paid (or paid well enough) to adjust a maladjusted concept of 'the way things are' into 'giving a shit' for anyone. Closed with some more vitriol declaring the site still exists and continues to be useful (as nipples on a chicken). WASH, RINSE, REPEAT... That was so last decade; I just stopped giving a damn, removed my browser bookmarks and learned to skim past less frequent and less relevant links to useless and meaningless SO pages when they appear in search results. The funniest outcome is that LLMs will continue to ingest the diminishingly accurate content of sites like this and continue to degrade the utility of even the most broadly defensible LLM use case scenario. phew, haven't thought that deeply about SO in at least 4 ... wait its 2026, make that 5 years. Good riddance to the the Whole Lot of you. | | |
| ▲ | gn4d 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO They've become parodies of themselves to such an extent that this topic should be a new sterling example of Poe's law hahahahaha |
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| ▲ | gn4d 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Exactly... I'm getting a laugh out of this thread because it's so easy to spot the power-trippers who are enraged at how their fiefdom is rapidly going extinct. |
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| ▲ | lurk2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use. Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search. Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling process didn’t really work the way it was supposed to, and you keep telling them that they are wrong, and that the site actually works well for its intended purpose—even though its intended purpose was to help users find what they were looking for, and they are telling you that they can’t. Part of StackOverflow’s decline was inevitable and wouldn’t have been helped by any changes the site administrators could have made; a machine can simply answer questions a lot faster than a collection of human volunteers. But there is a reason people were so eager to leave. So now instead of conforming to what users repeatedly told the administrators that they wanted, StackOverflow can conform to being the repository of questions that the administrators wanted, just without any users or revenue besides selling the contributions made by others to the LLMs that users have demonstrated they actually want to use. |
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| ▲ | bill3478 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework". (My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github. | | |
| ▲ | dharman246 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | "don't post your CS homework" is exactly the type of toxic comments that are not allowed on the site. Such a comment should have been flagged and would be deleted by moderators. Homework questions are welcome on SO. |
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| ▲ | rendaw 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think that's a great policy. I don't think anyone wants duplicate questions. The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. I'd say 9/10 times I find a direct match for my question on SO it's been closed as offtopic with links to one or more questions that are only superficially similar. There are other problems that they don't even try to address. If 10 people ask the same question, why does only the first person to ask it get to choose the answer? Then lots of "XY" questions where the original asker didn't actually have problem X so selects an answer for Y, leaving the original X unsolved, and now all the duplicates only have an answer for Y too. |
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| ▲ | matt_kantor 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. This problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a "duplicate" is inherently subjective, and therefore mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable). I think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers interpret close votes as signals that they should give up), cultural (there's not much training/feedback/guidelines about what "duplicate" means for those with voting privileges), and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure, and it takes just as many votes to reopen a question as it does to close it (with the same voter reputation requirement)). | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure It's not quite that bad: when the OP edits the question, there is a checkbox to assert that the edit resolves the reason for closure. Checking it off puts the question in a queue for reconsideration. However, there's the social problem (with possibly a technical solution) that the queue is not as discoverable as it ought to be, and provides no real incentive; the queues generally are useful for curators who work well in a mode of "let's clean up problems of type X with site content today", but not for those (like myself) who work well in a mode of e.g. "let's polish the canonical for problem Y and try to search for and link unrecognized duplicates". Given the imbalance in attention, I agree that reopening a question should have lesser requirements than closing it. But better yet would be if the questions that don't merit reopening, weren't opened in the first place. Then the emphasis could be on getting them into shape for the initial opening. I think that's a useful frame shift: it's not that the question was rejected; rather, publishing a question basically always requires a collaborative effort. The Staging Ground was a huge step forward in this direction, but it didn't get nearly the attention or appreciation (or fine-tuning) it deserved. |
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| ▲ | Izkata 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. The idea was, if there's an answer on the other question that solves your question, your question remains in existence as a signpost pointing to the other one without having to pollute and confuse by having a mixture of similar answers across both with different amounts of votes. |
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| ▲ | CamperBob2 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then). Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time. The question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's. |
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| ▲ | hombre_fatal 4 days ago | parent [-] | | What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute. > People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's. Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack. We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot"). As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 4 days ago | parent [-] | | What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers. (As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.) | | |
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| ▲ | mannykannot 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed. |
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| ▲ | oofbey 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think many would agree that this policy was the single biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would
Have been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high quality answers were better. Management was wrong. | |
| ▲ | solumunus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is because the real goal was SEO. | | |
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| ▲ | ItsMonkk 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution. If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues. |
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| ▲ | chamomeal 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet This is mostly how I engaged with SO for a long, long time. I think it’s a testament to SO’s curation of answers that I didn’t ask almost any questions for like 5+ years after starting programming |
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| ▲ | nine_k 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| LLMs also search Google for answers. Hence the knowledge may be not lost even for those who only supervises machines that write code. |
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| ▲ | bill3478 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If this were true, then treating any question as an X-Y problem shouldn't be allowed at all. I.e. answers should at least address the question as posed before/instead of proposing an alternative approach. In reality the opposite is encouraged. For countless times, I've landed on questions with promising titles/search extracts, only to find irrelevant answers because people grabbed onto some detail in the question irrelevant to my case and provided X-Y answers. This often also causes subsequent useful questions to be marked as dups even though they no longer contain that irrelevant detail. The appeal process is so unfriendly that most would not bother. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068243 |
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| ▲ | BrenBarn 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I agree with that and I think it was the right decision. There was grousing about overmoderation but I think a lot of people got unreasonably annoyed when their question was closed. And the result was a pretty well-curated and really useful knowledge base. |
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| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie. By regenerating an answer on command and never caring about the redundancy, yeah. The DRY advocate within me weeps. |
