Hacker News

Right? It's not a very subtle spike, is it? Even then, if you erased the bump, the graph is pretty close to a straight downward-sloped line from 2016 to late 2022.

It's kind of sad: I bet there was some excitement around the SO office. Is this it? Are we on the way back? Have people remembered that we're here and now they're returning? Alas, no, they weren't, and they weren't. That must've been rough.

This was all too common across tech. I know of many products at the time that, say, had their usage quadruple in Covid (from a very large baseline) and nobody in leadership seemed to ask the question "is this permanent or just an artifact of people being stuck at home?" Clearly the answer was "no".

> That’s why it succeeded.

The moderation style in the latter years was very different than at the beginning.

It was always heavily moderated, but after some point it felt like there were more layers of moderation and rules and cultural expectations added every year.

Moderation went from being a background cleanup operation that quietly kept the site in line to being the primary thing I expected to see when following a StackOverflow link from Google. In the later years it felt like every other StackOverflow search result was going to be the question I had followed by a moderator shutting it down for some reason before anyone could answer.

The moderation wore me out and I wasn’t even posting questions, just trying to find answers!

> I was almost always rewarded with good answers.

Huh. I had the opposite experience. The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.

I stopped bothering, after a number of questions went answered only by me (after I found the solution on my own).

It did reduce the insults, but that seemed to be the only gain that I got, for carefully articulating my questions.

LLMs aren't perfect, but they don't imply that I'm being lazy, for not already having the answer, and they do give me an answer, instantly (and, like SO, the answer is not always the best one).

> That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new.

And _then_ it became so much more hostile to users - and lost a lot of what made it so wonderful. It became very common that asking a new, good question would be marked as a duplicate because there was something it wasn't a duplicate of.

It certainly didn't start that way, having been there and followed them on their podcast -- pre-launch. It became more and more hostile. It was initially positive, even when questions didn't fit the mold. Then successive waves of pedantic moderators chased out the altruism. There never seemed to be a suitable mechanism to slap down the haters, then years pass, you need to ask a question, and find out that it is causing you anxiety to just post a question..

I think the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application of the "hacker" mindset (more or less) to a lot of fields that do not benefit from the hacker mindset.

From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between "broadly applicable" and "too specific". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my homework by posting pictures of my WIP and citing Youtube videos I'm trying to follow but, apparently, this is already toeing the line. I honestly don't know what the mods expect of a good question there. Of course, there will be an appreciable degree of case-specificity in my questions because if the YT tutorials could already answer my problem, I would have no need to ask for help and advice!

Then we have sites like Literature SE which has been languishing in their sandbox since literally forever. Like most SE sites, the guidelines bid you to "avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussions" and "be specific" but I find that untenable in a Literature site. Notably, sister site SF&F is comparably thriving but there is a fair amount of open-ended speculation going on in there.

Lastly, IMO, it just suffers because at its core its problem is human and social, not technical. In an effort for better curation we ended up with Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Science. For some posters, finding the right SE site already introduces a huge wall to overcome for posting. This hampers a lot of the out group: students who might be seeking homework guidance or looking to supplement their own readings and lectures, amateurs who are just curious about something in the field. I've had a question in one of the Science SEs outside my field that was well-received by the community but one mod kept "tagging to delete" (I forgot the exact term) almost every year. This mod action has a prescriptive period and, boy, he kept at it. Honestly, I don't care in the end. I asked the question out of sheer curiosity and got a satisfactory answer. Yet I wonder how exactly they expect to foster a community this way.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Agreed, being a n00b in the open source & hacker community I recall asking half assed question on forums and IRC and would get the infamous RTFM.

I detested it but quickly realized that I needed to put in work and learn and only when I understand can I ask valid questions to real problems…not just asking for someone to spoon feed me an answer.

I really appreciate that experience…

Let's just be blunt. The main target audience were clueless idiots who just wanted to solve their current programming problem, e.g. compiler error etc. They didn't care about anything else, they just wanted to copy-paste text and for the problem to go away, preferably without even needing to turn their brain on.

Now we have a new guy in town, who offers "robotized copy-paste the solution to YOUR specific programming problem, no reading required! we can even control your computer for you, so you can do something you actually enjoy and stop wasting time on this complicated computery thingy for boring nerds", which serves the aforementioned audience much better.

They were on their downswing but LLMs put a gun to their head and executed them. I don't use Stack Overflow anymore, just an LLM and cppreference.

Damn sad how quickly that habit changed for me.

Never asked a question, but got some good info from people who had asked questions and the people who replied.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with 'hostile attitude'. There's just no reason to use StackOverflow when I can use a chatbot that gives me infinite StackOverflow answers for any conceivable problem I have, within seconds.

People used to add "reddit" at the end of their search queries, and now I'm sure many of those people just ask a bot. But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.

So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.

Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.

SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.

Because AI removed what little value it had.

AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.

People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.

If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.

AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.

People like me⁰, who I admit will also soon be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, will still refer to it for some time.

--------

[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay

[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!

https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflow...

It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.

Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.

It's like how everyone hated dialup but still kept using it anyway until there was broadband.

It is not obsolete insofar as it is a good source of Q/A material, which is useful to both humans (directly or indirectly) and bots. The only part of it that is obsolete is the search/query part. If the AI companies had an ounce of decency, they would see no problem injecting money into the platform to continue seeding that Q/A material which they have directly profited from. But investing in a commons is not on the playbook for vulture capitalism.

So you're arguing that SO was really un-hostile at first but at some point it became hostile, causing the crash in usage? My recollection is that SO always was very hostile towards users, even during the time period when it was growing rapidly. So hostility alone is not a sufficient explanation.

Other question asking platforms like Reddit and Discord are still going well. Nothing has been hit as hard as Stack Overflow, because people hated having to use the site the whole time.

sort of like the hostility you're showing?

Punters with enough good boy points were rolling into very obscure and technical tags to close questions as duplicate (they weren't). When I saw how impossible it was for people to ask questions in a tag I was an expert in I knew the site was cooked. Imagine, like, giving physiotherapy forum power users moderator privileges on HN.

I did too! The gamification was fun, but more than that it was just really enjoyable to help other people. I like teaching, and SO was like the crack cocaine version of that.

Reddit has the most advanced AI system.

I tried to post on r/showerthoughts several times over the past 10 years. And every time it deleted my post saying my thought wasn't original. I was wow how they would even know that, and this was pre-AI.

there is an amazing opportunity on the internet for proper community that isnt slinging shooting to either extreme of the political spectrum. we need a decent discussion board like reddit without the horrible mods banning or automods deleteing something because it wasnt EXACTLY following 19 different rules in the sub baar.

I stopped when they killed old.reddit.com for non-logged-in users.

Everything moved to Discord now. Reddit started ignoring subreddit subscriptions which made the whole platform a homogeneous blob of slop. Discord has maintained separation between communities and has minimal discoverability features so users stick to the servers they participate which builds a sense of community.

Honestly, agree. I find the niche subreddits are nice because they are still very human, in terms of both users and mods, but once they get a bit bigger it just gets destroyed by new users and bots.

I think the various reddit dramas over the years have taken their toll on the site even if they didn't completely kill it. You can see it in moderation these days, individual sub mods have called out the fact that no one pays them and they don't have the motivation to spend all day enforcing quality for free. No one has stepped up to replace them so most moderation on Reddit is site wide LLM powered moderation.

Victoria (I think)!

Yeah, AMAs lost their charm for me after she got the can.

There's Old Reddit Redirect extension in Firefox, but honestly, you're not missing out on anything there anyway.

I am totally addicted to reddit. Good instincts - stay off it hahaha

Ive experienced this as well, i confronted some reddit devs at a conference about their ability to track sock accounts and they kinda just smiled and acknowledged what I suspected vaguely.

We had it. Reddit should have just been NNTP. You can't "monetize" NNTP though.

I used to be a lot more enthusiastic about decentralized protocols. I don't know how to solve the AI problem though. I think the Internet as we knew it for assumed-human interaction is dead, and the surest way to believe you're interacting with humans now is through existing trusts, such as accounts older than AI and highly-moderated forums, and to charge for access.

I was banned from subreddits for belonging to r/conservative. Mods wanted me to disavow that subreddit to atone for the sin of belonging to that subreddit.

The “can't answer” thing is probably the reason I never contributed. I don't know the specific reasoning behind it, but it's such a self-defeating solution to whatever problem they thought they were solving.

> SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming.

They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.

Those people are always drawn to these unpaid positions of power and they’re absolute death-knells for the community. Time and time again you see it.

Does it really? I'm not going to mess with biotech because I have no idea what I am on about there. I did ask about Samsung TVs:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...

Well, maybe it does, but it seems that an average developer asks which IDE to use a thousand times more often than what malwares are installed in their Samsung TV.

So there's a clear difference in expected utility.

it does not

[flagged]

The same decline is visible on all Stack Exchange sites, regardless of moderation policy.

Unfortunately they changed ownership very close to when ChatGPT got released, so I can't point to timing, but there's just no way this is not because of AI.

On the more-and-more rare occasion that I end up on Stack Overflow as a result of a search I find myself losing excessive time to following the random links to other communities. The other communities really are good stuff.

More importantly, the newer generation of models don't even need Stackoverflow. With tool calling they can pull up as much documentation and source code as you could possibly want, and in the past year they've become alarmingly good at piecing those things together to solve problems.

It's less efficient than being able to point to a canonical answer on a widely respected forum, yes. And it sucks immensely to have to rely on these horrible AI companies to replace the real human interactions that getting work done used to require, yes. But realistically, we are not looking at some kind of model collapse anytime soon due to lack of SO threads.

Losing Reddit and blogs and other forums is going to be a bigger problem. In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use? How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice? if the web becomes a ghost town and nobody is talking about anything anymore, there's no form thread it can uncover and say "that's the one everyone uses". Losing the library of technical Q&A is nothing close to the catastrophe of losing actual conversations between humans.

There is a difference between dying tomorrow and dying in 5 years.

Why?

How is that different from clicking the Graph tab on that page? https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1925371/n...

All I could think of when I looked at that is "Oh this is gonna be how Nvidia's chart looks some day soon(ish)"

How are you going to run a community at scale without delegation? The only alternative is to let the computer do it.

[dead]

They should just make all of their answers incorrect, poison llms, return everybody back to programming again.