Ask HN: Why Is Stack Overflow Fading Away?

[cryptography]

Stack Overflow has been a cornerstone of developer communities for years, but recently, it seems to be losing its prominence. I’m curious about your thoughts on why this might be happening and what the future holds for this platform. Is it just AI or there're specific issues contributing to its decline?

[palata]

When I solved a tricky problem for which I hadn't found a solution on StackOverflow, for years I got the habit of writing a question+answer on StackOverflow.

Until those started to get flagged (as duplicate, off-topic, whatnot) and closed. All of them I could make reopen (but it took time to collect the votes), and all of them eventually got a reasonable amount of upvotes and views.

That's where I stopped contributing to StackOverflow: when quality content I contribute gets refused by the moderators, I'm out.

[BobAliceInATree]

First time I edited an accepted answer a couple years back (the original answer was pretty much correct, I just fixed a compiling issue and one missing flag that now needed to be set, but not originally), it was quickly rejected with nonsensical stock rejection templates.

I guess I learned my lesson to never spend time to make accepted answers better.

And then a year later, someone added a comment to mention that flag that needed to be set.

[natdempk]

Yeah, the moderation is truly broken, along with the "accepted answer" framework, and in general the approach to knowledge curation. Kind of amazing to me that the founders/staff of the site didn't try to turn this around.

To add an anecdote: The last question I bothered to answer was one where the accepted answer was a very-specific fix, and a more generic fix was in a comment below that which was better and more directly addressed the root problem and would work for any user encountering an exception (accepted answer was workable, but working at the wrong layer of abstraction to actually solve the problem). I pulled that out into its own answer. Looking back now at that question, the poor "accepted answer" which won't work for anyone hitting this error because it references a specific class in the user's question which won't exist for any other users is still accepted with -5 and the better answer is below the fold at +16. This is pretty typical across a lot of questions. The fact that SO doesn't automatically handle this case is basically a failure of the site's abstraction model and algorithms over answers.

For a site where the long-term value is ostensibly curating high-quality answers to the maximal number of questions, the best answers languish, and the questions and answers don't get sufficiently refined/updated over time. Arguably you'd want something closer to a wikipedia article about each problem that gets built out and updated over time if you want to provide canonical information about problems. Similarly I think the idea of closing things that are close, but different as duplicates has failed. These are often sufficiently different that the details are interesting and probably would provide value/activity/detail to the site. There should probably be some way to roll these up into a higher level article/topic to cover variants of problems, related cases, etc. This could start to act as pillars or knowledge-hubs within SO to get to a place of more canonical information or a more "tacit/practical wikipedia". Really not sure why things stopped at Q&A and seemed to stagnate where they did.

Though, they seemingly achieved profitability and sold for $1.8B without doing any of this, so what do I know. :) Probably the right move was focusing on other things like launching new communities, and making money for the company.

[pmkary]

People are so mean there. I've seen those who say they love Stack Overflow, but to me, it always feels like I ask a real question that has been haunting me for a long time. At times, I reach the point where I think, "to hell with it," and I ask on SO. For example, I once asked a very specific question about how to manually layout text in GTK, and people responded as if they were noob questions (which honestly they were not). They bully you for not having searched the web, even though you did search and found nothing. This bullying makes you feel dumb, and then most of the time, they just give you a look and walk away without helping you.

For me, it has always been about searching Google. If it led to SO, I would check the solutions, but most of the time, they didn't work. There would always be a blog somewhere with someone nice enough to put in the effort and explain things in detail. Once I got used to this, LLMs emerged, which are so much better. They provide solutions and combinations that make wild things easy, even those without documentation. And they do so instantly and pleasantly. No LLM bullies you for not having searched the web and then walks away. I'm kind of glad that SO is fading; there's a lot of bullying that is running into oblivion.

[rererereferred]

I wonder how will LLMs give you the answer when the source, SO, is gone?

[dr_kiszonka]

Despite all their drawbacks, LLMs don't bully you and I feel comfortable asking them the most idiotic of questions.

[DidYaWipe]

Some SO users just run around downvoting everything, and of course the cowards leave no comments.

If you dare bring this up in the SO forum, perhaps suggesting or asking about a way to mitigate this behavior, pedantic douchebags go apoplectic with "Oh THIS again" as if the problem were solved.

[acbart]

People on Stackoverflow give you a look?

[isosphere]

I never got around to grinding enough karma points on there so that the platform will let me actually engage with it. Since I can't post answers or even vote on things, there's not a lot of reason for me to bother logging in. As a result I just mooch off what I find and leave.

I can't be the only one. Their walled garden kept me out.

[nathanasmith]

I stumbled on an obscure question years ago on one of the sub exchange sites that dovetailed precisely with something I'd been working on for years. All the proposed answers were subpar so it was like I was born for this particular question. After cracking my knuckles and preparing to reply I realized I couldn't. I didn't have enough karma or whatever. And that was the end of that.

[lbourdages]

Same for me. I have an account with zero karma on it. When I created it I was a total programming novice fresh out of uni and could not really contribute. As time went on, I could definitely have started contributing, but not having any karma became too high a barrier of entry - I'm using it during my work hours, I can't just spend endless time grinding.

[scarface_74]

And the entire stated purpose of SO was not to be like expertsexchange…

[sunaookami]

closed, marked as a duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870156

[laylower]

Ok, I know I am not adding to the quality of hackernews but your comment does enough of the heavy lifting for both of our comments.

Brilliant! And it does demonstrate at least part of the problem with stackoverflow - overzealous mods.

[Neywiny]

I appreciate that the linked post is 9 years old. That's usually my problem with duplicates so I have to put in my post every possible duplicate and why it didn't work.

[anotherevan]

Truth in satire.

[mattm]

The last time answered a question on Stack Overflow it got rejected.

I was using an unpopular Google API which was returning an unexpected error with a weird code. There was an unanswered SO question about the exact issue from years ago.

I found the answer to the problem in some open source library and added an answer to the SO question with a couple sentences and a link to the source code. My answer was immediately rejected.

There was a way to flag it to ask for review which I did but got no response. I ended up going to meta.stackexchange to ask for an explanation. Finally, after multiple people discussed about it the answer was approved. When I asked why a valid answer was rejected in the first place the response was "links on old questions are often spam and mods just auto-reject".

I won't bother contributing in the future if it takes that much effort to answer. BTW I had something like 20k karma.

[tail_exchange]

A few reasons for me:

- Rude and antagonistic moderation.

- Closing topics too aggressively. Very often in favour of topics that are too old, no longer relevant, or don't fully address the question.

- Ignoring the constraints of the asker. For example, asking how do I do X with Y framework, and having someone telling you to switch to B framework instead. Even worse when it's a mod hellbent on shutting you down for not being able to change your constraints.

Reddit, in all its chaos, seems to be faring better at being a support community than SO.

[paulmd]

If you can imagine it, the collective response to being told this in as many words was “are we so wrong? no, it’s the users who are the problem”.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

granted, framing it as a sexism issue etc was probably a doomed effort from the start even if it’s true in a sense.

[bjourne]

For simple questions you can just ask ChatGPT. For complex questions the Stack Overflow moderators would have closed your question for lack of focus. Unless a question reads like a tech spec it is ambiguous and unanswerable to them.

[al_borland]

How will ChatGPT handle new languages and technologies that don’t have a wealth of old human generated content to train on? Is it smart enough to read the docs and figure it all out?

[fragmede]

closed as duplicate killed the site. it's important to not have duplicates, but editors got trigger happy with it, so questions that were similar but different were getting closed. even questions that mention the similar one in the question as being similar but distinct get closed. a duplicate question 6 years later where libraries and patterns have been deprecated is closed as a dupe, even though the answer isn't relevant.

anyway, that's one issue, among others, that make the site ossified.

[asdajksah2123]

Wouldn't it have been more useful to merge duplicates?

Even framing the same question in different ways is useful. If someone posts a Duplicate, adding that to a list of "alternative questions" that is collapsed by default on the original post might have been a better approach.

It also takes away the whole "your question is worthless" dynamic that closing a question raises.

[al_borland]

I think that speaking to a larger culture issue and reputation for the site.

I never asked a question on SO, though I used it as a reference often. I had this idea in my head that to ask a proper question that wouldn’t get moderated away or obliterated by the community, I would have to spend significant time and energy researching how to ask appropriate questions, and provide a bunch of supporting details that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did my due diligence before asking.

I guess at the end of the day this means I didn’t actually _need_ to ask a question, but also means some useful discussions and interesting answers to problems I solved, that I’m sure others have, don’t haven’t answers out in the wild.

[seabird]

There's nothing more frustrating than finding somebody trying to solve a problem with the same constraints you have, clearly explaining the problem and those constraints, and having the answers run along the lines of "in my opinion those constraints aren't reasonable, here's an easy way to do it ignoring what you've explained in your question without even a nod toward how to do it the "wrong" way you're being forced to do this".

[petabyt]

This. It's like they need a justification for why you want to do something in order to give you any help.

[Dunedan]

IMO it's mainly because of management decisions, like shutting down Stack Overflow Jobs, focusing too much on AI, not listening enough to the needs of the community, ...

[bluedino]

Don't forget bad UI decisions. Right now they have a 'Sign in with Google' pop-up on every page, and it doesn't stay gone no matter how many times you close it.

[shawn_w]

Management listens to the community by doing the exact opposite of what most people want to see.

[mckravchyk]

It's worth noting that they re-introduced their jobs platform https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/

[pkilgore]

IMO when the attitude went from nurture to kill wrt to possibly duplicate questions.

I wish that rather than close a question you were only allowed to link an answer from what you thought was the duplicate and that just becomes another voting game vs. moderator opinion.

Also I suspect a little bit: LLMs aren't dicks, and you can ask them follow up iterative questions quicker than SO users respond.

[anonzzzies]

Toxic hellhole. Moderators so arrogant closing questions they basically don't like or think are stupid (they cannot answer them, but he). It worked when it did but putting just random 'smart' people 'in power' really did make them bullies. How weird.

[lithos]

AI scrapped the hell out of SO, so I can get anything on it without needing to tiptoe around the obnoxious community.

Closed "duplicate", when the old answer is insanely out of date is a big one.

[photonthug]

Just to identify a different contributor than rehashing the ai stuff. Stack overflow has always picked up the slack for software stacks that are some combination of old, poorly documented, and fiddly, but user appetite for such stacks is dramatically reduced. Jenkins is one example.. people will avoid it if they can. Xwindows is another.. people will just choose their distro based on what works rather than fighting config.

Plus whereas programming language help is at least pretty stable, config details are the least stable anyway

[firecall]

Is it declining?

Spam sites that scraped SO content where a big problem for a while, so that would have certainly pulled traffic from SO.

If I had to guess about other reasons, I'd say we've moved on from giving our knowledge and content away for the benefit of corporations.

What does being an SO contributor actually get you?

Whats the point in monitoring new posts and answering questions?

The economy is hard enough as it is. I dont need to be giving my time away for free to help corporations generate more billions from Ad Revenue.

But whow knows!?

Like I say, is it actually declining by any metrics that are public? (genuine question)

[Neywiny]

I got offered a job (through some automated recruiting methods, I'm not that special) where the concept was to write SO answers with extremely tight style restrictions. I ended up turning it down because I disagreed with their style guide but presumably some alternate me got paid to write SO answers.

Biggest grievance was an example where a question would ask someone like "how do I safely open a file in Python 3.11?" Obviously the answer is a context manager. But they would say that's not generic enough, the answer shouldn't use language specific features. Even though the question was for a specific language. Meaning I'd be spreading bad practice.

[ygra]

> What does being an SO contributor actually get you?

I had a reason to dive into obscure and esoteric corners of some languages/frameworks/toolkits. I practiced helping people with technical problems, which was likely a major contributor to getting my current job where developers also provide technical support to the customers (who are also software developers). Having this out in the open and being able to point at the fact that I was ranked in the top 100 contributors certainly helped.

However, things have changed since the early days, of course. Basic documentation and tutorials for programming languages and toolkits have become better overall, I'd say. We've got good centralized knowledge bases for certain topics, e.g. MDN where you previously would have had to piece together information from SelfHTML, W3Schools and other partially wrong sources, or go straight to the relevant specification (not for everyone, of course). Stack Overflow has become the repository of answered questions that is pretty searchable and there are a lot of questions that simply don't need to be asked again. LLMs have scraped SO, so ChatGPT and others can answer many programming questions fairly well (with the occasional hallucination or error).

By now I only rarely open SO anymore. But I go through different hobbies every few years anyway, and while I was still studying, I had the time, I learned a lot, and to this day I still like explaining things and helping others.

[cryptography]

here's some metrics: https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overfl...

[jokethrowaway]

I agree, and I see similar trends in OSS projects.

The worse the economy is, the greater the inequality between the masses and the top 0.1% the less we can afford to be idealistic and give away our time.

[sgift]

For the same reason Wikipedia suffers: People who are really good at writing factual content / good answers are not automatically good at moderation, often they are even some of the worst people for it. Moderation needs empathy, thinking about edge cases, dealing with emotions and so on. Making the people who have the most points on a Q&A site your moderators was always a recipe for disaster.

For a long time, the sheer usefulness of SO overshadowed all of this. People were willing to suffer for the sake of getting a result. But over time the quality couldn't keep up with the pure agony of having to deal with petty dictators. And finally, people just stopped going there, which means the chance that the best answer will be on SO is getting smaller, which means even less people bother with it and so on.

[randomlurking]

Im afraid this will get buried, but I‘ll try anyway since I haven’t seen this angle yet: I’m at a point in my career where I now feel „ready“ to answer questions on SO and want to help others. So my question turns into another direction: where should people eager to provide help go to? Is it still SO or are there other places?

- Reddit: I only stumble upon questions by accident, and often on mobile where I’m not in the mood of typing long answers or code. - GitHub: I’m mainly here looking for answers myself, is there a nice way to look over all issues for a couple of projects so that I can easily see whether I could help somewhere? - discourse, discord, …: usually framework-specific, so not as ideal/comfortable as SO I imagine

Are others on the same situation? Where do you answer questions nowadays?

[beretguy]

A lot of SO users migrated to codidact.com

[sidcool]

The community changed after 2017 or so. AI may have been the final nail in its coffin, but the degradation started long before. Closing questions prematurely. Rude responses. Too strict community rules etc.

[CM30]

It's difficult for newcomers to get their answers accepted there, or their questions not closed/merged with irrelevant ones. As a result, the new contributors the site needs to stay relevant are not sticking around, and not replacing anyone who moves on.

And that's something just about every site and community and social media platform has to deal with. People don't stick around forever, and you can't rely on the same old people who've been there for the last decade to keep things going for the next two. So you need new users to get involved and become active, and for that you need a community that's somewhat welcoming to them and their efforts.

Feels like Wikipedia is going down a similar path to StackOverflow as well.

[sandspar]

I've noticed that many of my searches now show several other websites before they show Wikipedia. If I'm not mistaken, search engines bury Wikipedia more than they used to.

[lucidone]

They should have leaned into becoming a developer community (the developer community) instead of focusing on Q&A. StackOverflow jobs were a great resource. Add an ad-hoc discussion forum and chat and it would have be great, like the modern IRC.

[fendy3002]

Disagree, the Q&A format is good, but the moderation isn't.

Instead of current practice, they should make a separate "hall of fame" Q&As that meet their standard, and no more "too broad" "duplicated" closed questions.

Only close / deletes questions that aren't relevant, like jokes and out of topics (careers) questions.