There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also...

For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't.

At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore.

...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call.

I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits.

[0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

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zahlman 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Oh, hey, Shog, good to see you doing well. It was a heck of a ride, hmm?

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Shog9 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at least after Facebook implodes.

	▲	zahlman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Believe me, I'm full of vision (and hope). But it's hard to write stuff when there's so much to write that I can't find a natural starting point, and when the (lack-of-)network effects are so brutal.

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intended 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lots of moderation issues are also UI issues.

I suspect it’s the same issue for whatever is the “meta” in a competitive video game.

Optimization based on the available affordances ?

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mixmastamyk 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Best answer so far, too bad way down here.

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MichaelZuo 4 days ago | parent [-]

It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?

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Aurornis 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies.

The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale.

Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst.

I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.

	▲	mixmastamyk 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed, think we're getting warmer.

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mixmastamyk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them.

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junon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing.

Hi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly in a vacuum (from the outside).

How much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected things? I always got the impression that they tried to scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave of less technical/principled users.

	▲	Shog9 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama. OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come. In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed.

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oblio 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I swear that about 3 of your replies look like LLM content or at best "LLM-massaged" messages :-(

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Shog9 3 days ago | parent [-]

I was writing like a robot before robots could write, dammit!

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oblio 3 days ago | parent [-]

I've done that, too. It's a bit like a dream where it's not clear what's real and what's not.

	▲	Shog9 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It has been ... Borderline creepy... Watching how folks - including some professional writers - have adapted their workflows to the capabilities of LLMs, treating them as a copywriter whose input is a spec and for whose output they are the editor. Because it seems natural to me; that's how I've always written... Except, I'm also the bot. Just turn off part of my brain and an endless stream of verbiage emerges, vaguely centered around a theme... Then the real work begins: editing for relevance and imposing a coherent structure. So, I don't really fault anyone who adopts these new tools for the task. But I have some strong feelings about the lazy editing.

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losradio 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall.

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NobodyNada 4 days ago | parent [-]

Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.

Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.

It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

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b112 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

This always cracks me up. I've seen it so many times, and so many books cover this...

Classic statement is "never take your eye off the ball".

Sure, you need to plan ahead. You need to move down a path. But take your eye off of today, and you won't get to tomorrow.

Maybe they'll SCO it, and spend the next 10 years suing everyone and their LLM dog.

You know, I wonder how the board and execs made out suing Linux related... things. End users were threatened too, compelled to pay...

SO could be spun off into a neat tiger, nipping at everyone's toes.

	▲	brianwawok 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		But was “today “ that profitable? Stack overflow always struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make money. If the current business makes very little money, it may not be worth the work.

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losradio 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

His tone was extremely passive aggressive and rude. I don’t think he made the site better - he contributed to the downfall

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wizzwizz4 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Can you provide an example? The only rude Shog9 posts I can think of were aimed at people abusing the system: known, persistent troublemakers, or overzealous curators exhibiting the kinds of behaviours that people in this thread would criticise, probably far more rudely than Shog ever did.

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Shog9 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is."

Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.

That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.

With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.

But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.

	▲	9dev 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I always found these discussions around the tone of SO moderation so funny—as a German, I really felt right at home there. No cuddling! No useless flattery! Just facts and suggestions for improvement if necessary, as it should be. Loved it at the time.