5 ms·

Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the pla

by alach11 4mo ago

Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.

StableAlkyne 4mo ago
IMO it was a combination of moderators and users Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  > against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
  - StableAlkyne 4mo ago
    That's the thing though, it was voluntary. If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.
    - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
      This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week. Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...
    - ceejayoz 4mo ago
      > If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
      - StableAlkyne 4mo ago
        And also part of the decline from the asker side, once a less abrasive alternative became available
        ceejayoz 4mo ago
        Again: the "less abrasive alternative" is built off the labor and knowledge of those abrasive folks. They're a large part of the reason it knows what to less-abrasively suggest.
        StableAlkyne 4mo ago
        Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters. This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison. For better or for worse, people are cursed with ego, and we need to account for that when communicating with others. It is a failing of the platform (and a tragedy, because it is healthier to learn from a human) that it was unable to foster a positive environment.
        ceejayoz 4mo ago
        > This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison. People flock to heroin, too. > Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters. This applies to asking questions, too.
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    > Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day. Fourteenth clear as imagined in their head XY problem of the day. By far most of the "XY problems" I saw, on SO or elsewhere, were actually "XY problem problems" - i.e. a responder having so limited imagination and character (or, to be charitable, just running very low on energy and focus), that upon coming across a question they couldn't comprehend, they would assume the person asking the question must be confused instead.
- Paracompact 4mo ago
  Could've been a good rule: Unless the XY problem is so severe that X is impossible, you can't heckle or post Y solution unless paired with X solution.
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    X in an XY problem is almost always possible, like "how do we make ship canals and harbors with nukes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) or "I'd like to amputate my hand to fix a hangnail".
- huhkerrf 4mo ago
  It's hard for me to imagine a user base more pedantic and judgy than reddit. It must have been really bad.
  - ijk 4mo ago
    Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems. There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect. The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
  - mcswell 4mo ago
    In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.
svachalek 4mo ago
It was always strict, that was its feature. But it was dying well before ChatGPT came along, due to going from strict to unusably over-moderated.
- joshstrange 4mo ago
  I'm all for a heavily moderated forum (that's why I like HN) but SO was clearly on the decline (from the graphs in this post) before LLMs came onto the scene. It peaked around 2017 (not counting COVID numbers) and was in a steady decline. ChatGPT just pushed it off the cliff (figuratively and literally).
strongpigeon 4mo ago
> but it always was that way. I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this. But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
smrq 4mo ago
Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.
- dpark 4mo ago
  I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions. I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.
  - baq 4mo ago
    What’s crazy is with the current gen of LLMs you could 100% rein in the abusive mods. SO could reinvent itself as a place for coding agents to get clankermotiomal support after they ‘hear’ ‘WHY THE F DID YOU DO THAT’. (Seriously a hook could draft a submission and then set up a listener for responses. Who would be answering is an interesting question tho)
  - ijk 4mo ago
    Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.
    - boca_honey 4mo ago
      That basic 90's sitcom level-1 sarcasm is not helpful in any adult discussion, it's very common on engineers and technical people, and it's probably the reason SO and similar sites were being abandoned by the regular internet users before LLMs. Just say what you intent to communicate, dude. If funny is not your forte, don't force it.
stackghost 4mo ago
Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so. It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
- bluedino 4mo ago
  Question askers got lazier and lazier.
lanewinfield 4mo ago
Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency. Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
zem 4mo ago
if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise). I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
- silon42 4mo ago
  I found this often for C# (and sometimes Typescript) related stuff... redirected to a question with a wrong/useless answer. For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.
dpark 4mo ago
It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
deaton 4mo ago
StackOverflow's extremely strict moderation was probably the #1 reason it turned into a high quality resource rather than a dumpster fire like reddit.
jsLavaGoat 4mo ago
Why are you trying to do that? You should do this totally different thing that I do because I know how to do it.
ijk 4mo ago
A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens. There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation. The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century. It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5
IshKebab 4mo ago
Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves. It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.
cyanydeez 4mo ago
yeah, everyone seems to just ellide over the ability of LLM's to scrape all of stack overflow and do the same hack and slash response. Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.

by alach11 4mo ago

StableAlkyne 4mo ago

IMO it was a combination of moderators and users Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).

ceejayoz 4mo ago
> against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
- StableAlkyne 4mo ago
  That's the thing though, it was voluntary. If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week. Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    > If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
    - StableAlkyne 4mo ago
      And also part of the decline from the asker side, once a less abrasive alternative became available
      - ceejayoz 4mo ago
        Again: the "less abrasive alternative" is built off the labor and knowledge of those abrasive folks. They're a large part of the reason it knows what to less-abrasively suggest.
        StableAlkyne 4mo ago
        Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters. This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison. For better or for worse, people are cursed with ego, and we need to account for that when communicating with others. It is a failing of the platform (and a tragedy, because it is healthier to learn from a human) that it was unable to foster a positive environment.
        ceejayoz 4mo ago
        > This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison. People flock to heroin, too. > Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters. This applies to asking questions, too.
- TeMPOraL 4mo ago
  > Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day. Fourteenth clear as imagined in their head XY problem of the day. By far most of the "XY problems" I saw, on SO or elsewhere, were actually "XY problem problems" - i.e. a responder having so limited imagination and character (or, to be charitable, just running very low on energy and focus), that upon coming across a question they couldn't comprehend, they would assume the person asking the question must be confused instead.
Paracompact 4mo ago
Could've been a good rule: Unless the XY problem is so severe that X is impossible, you can't heckle or post Y solution unless paired with X solution.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  X in an XY problem is almost always possible, like "how do we make ship canals and harbors with nukes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) or "I'd like to amputate my hand to fix a hangnail".
huhkerrf 4mo ago
It's hard for me to imagine a user base more pedantic and judgy than reddit. It must have been really bad.
- ijk 4mo ago
  Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems. There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect. The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
- mcswell 4mo ago
  In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.

svachalek 4mo ago

It was always strict, that was its feature. But it was dying well before ChatGPT came along, due to going from strict to unusably over-moderated.

joshstrange 4mo ago
I'm all for a heavily moderated forum (that's why I like HN) but SO was clearly on the decline (from the graphs in this post) before LLMs came onto the scene. It peaked around 2017 (not counting COVID numbers) and was in a steady decline. ChatGPT just pushed it off the cliff (figuratively and literally).

strongpigeon 4mo ago

> but it always was that way. I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this. But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.

smrq 4mo ago

Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.

dpark 4mo ago
I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions. I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.
- baq 4mo ago
  What’s crazy is with the current gen of LLMs you could 100% rein in the abusive mods. SO could reinvent itself as a place for coding agents to get clankermotiomal support after they ‘hear’ ‘WHY THE F DID YOU DO THAT’. (Seriously a hook could draft a submission and then set up a listener for responses. Who would be answering is an interesting question tho)
- ijk 4mo ago
  Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.
  - boca_honey 4mo ago
    That basic 90's sitcom level-1 sarcasm is not helpful in any adult discussion, it's very common on engineers and technical people, and it's probably the reason SO and similar sites were being abandoned by the regular internet users before LLMs. Just say what you intent to communicate, dude. If funny is not your forte, don't force it.

stackghost 4mo ago

Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so. It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.

bluedino 4mo ago
Question askers got lazier and lazier.

lanewinfield 4mo ago

Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency. Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.

zem 4mo ago

if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise). I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.

silon42 4mo ago
I found this often for C# (and sometimes Typescript) related stuff... redirected to a question with a wrong/useless answer. For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.

dpark 4mo ago

It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...

deaton 4mo ago

StackOverflow's extremely strict moderation was probably the #1 reason it turned into a high quality resource rather than a dumpster fire like reddit.

jsLavaGoat 4mo ago

Why are you trying to do that? You should do this totally different thing that I do because I know how to do it.

ijk 4mo ago

A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens. There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation. The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century. It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00063-5

IshKebab 4mo ago

Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves. It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.

cyanydeez 4mo ago

yeah, everyone seems to just ellide over the ability of LLM's to scrape all of stack overflow and do the same hack and slash response. Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.