I always thought StackOverflow was meant to fizzle out over time as more questions get answered and don't need to be asked again. Perhaps the decline is just a necessary part of their rule of having no duplicate questions - keeping it as a clean repository of knowledge rather than a messy forum.

Just the other day a question I asked about 10 years ago got flagged as a duplicate. It turns out somebody else had asked the same question several years later and got a better answer than my question got, so that other one is the canonical one and mine is pushed away. It feels kind of offensive but it makes complete sense if the goal is to provide useful answers to people searching.

Unfortunately, the rule of no duplicate questions also destroyed lots of questions that weren't duplicates... because _someone_ couldn't be bothered to read them and realize it wasn't the same.

Plus, there were a lot of fun questions they were really interesting to start with; and they stopped allowing them.

The major trouble with StackOverflow is that nominally duplicate questions may have different answers if asked on 2011 vs 2026 - and the trouble is that answer rankings (the thing that determines what answers are in the top) don't decay over time. So if someone try to answer an old question with up to date info, they won't garner enough upvotes to overcome the old, previously correct but now outdated accepted answer at the top. (even with a ranking decay, there is little incentive to give a new up to date answer to a established thread - people are more likely to contribute to brand new threads)

It would be better to allow duplicates in this specific case, but mark the old thread as outdated and link the questions in such a way that one can see the old thread and compare it to the new thread.

The problem with this, and why SO’s downfall was completely self-inflicted, is that the correct answer from 2013 is only occasionally still the correct answer in 2018. There are a lot of other issues with SO’s general moderation policy but well and truly it was as idiotic and myopic as it was toxic.

They treated subjective questions about programming methods as if they were universal constants. It was completely antithetical to the actual pursuit of applied knowledge, or collecting and discussing best practices and patterns of software design. And it was painfully obvious for years this was as a huge problem, well before LLMs.

That said, I will say after being traumatized by having my threads repeatedly closed, I got so good at boiling down my problem to minimal reproducible examples that I almost never needed to actually post, because I’d solve it myself along the way.

So I guess it was great for training me to be a good engineer in the abstract sense. but absolutely shit at fostering any community or knowledge base.