Yet another Hacker News

StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month

94 points babelfish 2 hours ago 121 comments

amacalac 2 hours ago | parent

They get that many?!

cebert 2 hours ago | parent

I don’t think they’re gonna be long for the world

gnabgib 2 hours ago | parent

Related discussion What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph (483 points, 3 months ago, 595 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

AI didn't do it to SO. SO's new ownership did it to SO. It's a hostile place with or without AI.

mahboi 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

armchairhacker 1 hour ago | parent

SO has been useless for years now, but the other Stack Exchanges can be interesting, they deserve more spotlight.

kulahan 1 hour ago | parent

I really do love their other communities so much more. Lots of super interesting content - it feels like a new digg or something. I go to one of the other stacks and look at the most popular non-tech stack posts once or twice a week purely for entertainment. The breakdowns on obscure but interesting topics can get really fun to read!

EvanAnderson 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

paulpauper 1 hour ago | parent

I am amazed it's still that high

werdnapk 1 hour ago | parent

And how much was AI trained on their data? That's the sad part. Nobody asking new questions, so not much more for AI to train from.

philsquared_ 1 hour ago | parent

With or without training they would have gotten eaten.

ahartmetz 1 hour ago | parent

Why?

SyneRyder 1 hour ago | parent

The peak number of questions was in 2013, and they had roughly zero growth between 2013 & 2016. They were in decline long before LLMs were on the scene.

hatthew 1 hour ago | parent

The golden age of SO was when all the important questions that have accumulated over decades were getting asked and answered. SO stabilized once that backlog got finished, and then started dying once people moved to github issues for project-specific questions. Chatgpt just replaced the last remaining type of questions ("plz do my work for me"), which arguably shouldn't have been getting asked in the first place.

poszlem 1 hour ago | parent

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

sureMan6 1 hour ago | parent

It's training on every single codebase in the world instead now

You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data

gwerbin 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

mburns 1 hour ago | parent

FWIW, StackOverflow posts are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA v4.0, same as Wikipedia.

paulddraper 1 hour ago | parent

The highly technical sites -- StackOverflow, Unix & Linux, MathOverflow -- see little use.

Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.

Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.

esafak 1 hour ago | parent

It is sad because it was such a well designed community. But its lessons live on.

reassess_blind 1 hour ago | parent

StackOverflow helped build the LLMs that replaced it.

hackersnooze1 1 hour ago | parent

does well designed mean rotten and pointlessly hostile

kstrauser 1 hour ago | parent

Nah. It launched well, but sorely needed a BDFL. Almost without fail, services that delegate moderation duties to users are ruined. Inevitably, well-meaning people form councils and boards, and then those get taken over by people with nothing but time on their hands. It's the same thing that happens with school boards and HOAs: the last people you want running them are the ones that have the time and the drive to actually want to be in charge of them.

jdthorpe 1 hour ago | parent

It was an AMAZING community... right up until it wasn't. I cut my teeth on trying to answer questions and learned how much I didn't know when other people's answers were better than mine. Literally made a career out of what I learned there, and I thoroughly enjoyed welcoming people to SO and encouraging new coders to keep learning. But then dang, the question purists and eager close-every-question jocks came to dominate the platform and made it no fun to ask or answer. Even if AI was never a thing, the change in culture probably would have opened the doors to a competitor.

glouwbug 57 minutes ago | parent

Everything is cyclical. Maybe they come back when AI gets heavily regulated or pay gated. Who knows

eluru 35 minutes ago | parent

it was as well designed as the nipples on a man

chasil 1 hour ago | parent

The riddle was: "What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?".

Oedipus answered: "Man: as an infant, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks on two legs and; in old age, he uses a walking stick".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_and_the_Sphinx

6510 1 hour ago | parent

This question has already been asked?

Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.

It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.

pseudosavant 1 hour ago | parent

Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.

pseudosavant 1 hour ago | parent

I put it in a quick chart to make the rise and fall more visual. https://imgur.com/a/046CfZ2

kstrauser 1 hour ago | parent

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

zer00eyz 1 hour ago | parent

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)"

999900000999 1 hour ago | parent

Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use

tintor 1 hour ago | parent

ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.

gerdesj 1 hour ago | parent

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...

yongjik 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

eluru 43 minutes ago | parent

it does not

hatthew 1 hour ago | parent

SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.

p-e-w 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

hatthew 15 minutes ago | parent

I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).

EvanAnderson 55 minutes ago | parent

I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.

fps-hero 44 minutes ago | parent

There is something about the gamification of social interaction which breeds a hostile community. Power hungry users chasing internet points, or moderators needlessly raising their hammer.

I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.

cwillu 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

worthless-trash 29 minutes ago | parent

My favorite point was when you're the single person to have worked on a problem, published an answer, published a paper had the answer accepted and some MUPPET edits your answer to mean something else entirely, and it has your 'name' now beside an incorrect answer.

ranger_danger 1 minute ago | parent

Most online platforms I have used to ask questions or make comments (whether it's real-time chat, mailing lists, forums, etc.) were extremely hostile and always have been... I guess it's just human nature.

StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.

mawadev 1 hour ago | parent

I have some wishful thinking for everyone reading this: what if the people at StackOverflow built one of the best bot protections out there? I would honestly expect the graph to go up with all the LLMs and automated content spamming..

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

The graph doesn't include Stack Overflow for Agents, which is a real product that exists for some reason.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

You're underselling it. It's less than in their second month of existence - and that has been true every month for the past year. For the last few months it's also lower than their first month. Stack Overflow, effectively, no longer exists.

And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.

NichoPaolucci 1 hour ago | parent

Well, the community never made it a very welcoming place... But, I think a part of this is that it's just faster to throw a Q into ChatGPT. There's no waiting for a response, a major bonus is the non-hostility + willingness to respond to 'stupid' questions.

p-e-w 1 hour ago | parent

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

Uh, no.

StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

avereveard 1 hour ago | parent

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.

raincole 58 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't matter. Even if it were the most friendly community ever, as long as their core value were the same - answering programming questions that with clear answers - it would have been replaced by today's AI completely. It's irrelevant today how bad GPT3.5 once was.

johnfn 55 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI, which it unquestionably was. GPT-3.5 was able to answer some small chunk of my programming questions (like 10-20% of them), which seems clearly reflected in the graph.

dspillett 46 minutes ago | parent

> I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI

A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)

kstrauser 31 minutes ago | parent

Traffic started dropping precipitously in summer ‘20. There were no widely known LLMs then, let alone ones used outside labs. ChatGPT went public in November 2022, well into the decline.

While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.

Jtarii 20 minutes ago | parent

So you think there is a viable business around technical Q&A even with GPT 6 Astra or whatever existing?

LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.

Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.

kstrauser 14 minutes ago | parent

If there is, I’m not creative enough to imagine it. I don’t contend that SO could survive AI. You’ll never hear me arguing that. However, that graph shows that it was already dying before AI became widely available. AI 100% certainly kicked it while it was down. It just cannot have been the cause of the downturn because the downturn was in full swing before AI could’ve had any effect at all.

cwnyth 14 minutes ago | parent

I think you're forgetting of a certain major event that happened in 2020. An event that initially caused a lot of free time around the world and kept people indoors...

kstrauser 7 minutes ago | parent

You mean, the kind that made them more likely to sit around asking and answering questions because there wasn't anything else do to, and which caused an initial spike of traffic?

bsder 8 minutes ago | parent

Agreed.

StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".

Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.

After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.

THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.

cowlevel 52 minutes ago | parent

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

dspillett 49 minutes ago | parent

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!

theteapot 43 minutes ago | parent

Good luck. What are you thinking of moving on to?

Unai 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

socalgal2 29 minutes ago | parent

To me your description is mythical reddit. Actual Reddit is every bit as hostile as stack overflow and unlike stack overflow, old questions can not be updated with new answers when existing answers get out of date.

cwnyth 16 minutes ago | parent

I think Reddit is even worse. You could get banned from SO for using pretty foul insults, but in some places of Reddit, it's business as usual.

mahboi 3 minutes ago | parent

Don't know if I've ever seen a crashout on SO. On Reddit it's like every single post. It's even worse than the classic YouTube comments page. And then the people who aren't doing anything wrong get banned too.

cwnyth 17 minutes ago | parent

But SO was never a place to just talk to others. It's not a general purpose discussion site. It could have been a friendly place, but users still would have left, because it's just far easier to get an immediate answer from AI, and those answers have only been getting better.

Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.

cowlevel 14 minutes ago | parent

In the early years it very much was. You could ask just about anything that was programming related and had a question mark. In the middle times of SO a lot of those became "locked for historical preservation" and new ones weren't allowed.

lossolo 56 minutes ago | parent

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.

medellin 55 minutes ago | parent

HN really this dense? It was hostility towards users… my god

Gigachad 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

fhn 15 minutes ago | parent

sort of like the hostility you're showing?

Pet_Ant 49 minutes ago | parent

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.

It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.

It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.

I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.

ChrisMarshallNY 40 minutes ago | parent

> 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).

schneems 25 minutes ago | parent

I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.

I have engaged with some younger devs who don't even bother turning the thought into a question. They make statements and expect you to do the work of inferring the question. Which I feel like they got from chatbots since it's faster and LLMs don't care if you make them jump through hoops.

> The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.

There is a sweet spot of providing just enough detail but not too much in asking a good question. And even the best only “bat 300”. I've posted answers to my own questions plenty of times when I got no response.

I hear you on the hostility. Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow. The first time I tried asking a question on IRC I got mocked so bad I logged out and never tried again. Most forums were like that.

I gravitated to Ruby back then because it was one of the only forums people would be patient and empathetic with me.

ChrisMarshallNY 21 minutes ago | parent

I have heard great things about the Ruby community. I don't use the language, myself, so I wouldn't know from experience.

Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.

Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.

cowlevel 16 minutes ago | parent

I suspect that prior to Eternal September you could connect an online identity to a real life one. You might not know the guy but you knew it was J.Smith at MIT and if he acted bad enough your admin could ask their admin which idiot gave him a computer terminal.

cowlevel 17 minutes ago | parent

I found that Stack Overflow, like Reddit, rewired my perception of what "good" is and made me view bad things as good.

60000 rep btw

RHSeeger 26 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

Gigachad 17 minutes ago | parent

You'd also get people downvoting completely valid rule abiding questions, and the site heavily punished being downvoted. So you'd get hit with a stick repeatedly for trying to engage with the site, it's no wonder everyone left as soon as there was an alternative.

eYrKEC2 25 minutes ago | parent

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..

slicktux 1 minute ago | parent

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…

kstrauser 1 hour ago | parent

And here's why: https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-ove...

LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:

Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?

A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]

I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.

hackersnooze1 1 hour ago | parent

good riddance.

EvanAnderson 1 hour ago | parent

I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.

I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.

When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)

Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.

Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.

Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.

dspillett 38 minutes ago | parent

> I miss Server Fault

Same. And DBA.se. I was a top contributor of both for the first few years at least, even got sent some free swag a couple of times, not because I cared about the points and being in the first page of people ordered by them, but because I felt genuinely useful and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.

I never really did the social side though, I have problems with distance friendships including online communities (I just don't connect well with people that way) which is one reason that I'm hating tech work more and more these days (being on a remote team is not good for my mental health, while I'm not a huge people person it turns out I absolutely need some in my life, and really in my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).

ChicagoDave 1 hour ago | parent

If there is any proof that no one will be writing code, this is it.

I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.

faangguyindia 1 hour ago | parent

Reddit is going the same way.

I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.

Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.

Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.

But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.

luqtas 1 hour ago | parent

and hopefully soon we have decentralized protocols as the standard when we think about user spaces. amen

unethical_ban 56 minutes ago | parent

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.

EvanAnderson 43 minutes ago | parent

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

namrog84 1 hour ago | parent

There was that 1 person who used to work(paid?/volunteer?) at Reddit that actively tried to cultivate high-quality AMA on Reddit. Ever since they've been gone. It hasn't felt the same.

Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.

Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.

I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.

Gigachad 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

saimiam 4 minutes ago | parent

Victoria (I think)!

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

gwerbin 58 minutes ago | parent

I stopped using Reddit not because I got banned, but because it has been steadily converted from the world's most popular forum platform to a trash heap of engagement hacks and shady practices. Moreso than SO, which was already struggling with existential problems before AI, Reddit did itself in.

ryandrake 9 minutes ago | parent

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

EvanAnderson 57 minutes ago | parent

I refused to make a Reddit account. I knew my personality would lead me to wasting entirely too much time on the site if I could reply. (Like here... >sigh<)

When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.

I suppose I was never their target market anyway.

cellsstudio 19 minutes ago | parent

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

cwnyth 10 minutes ago | parent

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

unethical_ban 54 minutes ago | parent

My account of well over a year and 11k karma was banned by admins presumably for an admin-deleted comment where I said "Hi kids, buy our product!" as a Steve-Buschemi-meme reference, and was flagged as spam. To your point they also have their Comment Quality Score (CQS) which lowers you automatically if you use Proton email aliases, lowers you if you use VPN to access the site, among other things.

Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.

tdb7893 45 minutes ago | parent

I went on Reddit recently to look something up and some of the niche subreddits were decent but I was shocked at the amount of just total garbage that's there now (including lots of weird misogyny) so it's not just the bans that are a problem. It feels like every social media platform is just miserable to use now. Except occasionally posting here my only social media is just Discord servers with my actual real life friends.

cellsstudio 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

Gigachad 12 minutes ago | parent

Problem is there are no niche subreddits anymore, there are no walls between subreddits at all. Reddit runs on a modern algorithm where any individual post which scores well will be shown to the whole site regardless of users individual subscriptions.

Gigachad 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

Vaslo 1 hour ago | parent

I answered a number of questions on there. Some non-native English speaker started going my answers and making language editing suggestions. The grammar was fine. I refused all the changes because they were at best basically the same or at worst incorrect. I refused maybe 4-5. The next day the guy got on and had done a bunch more then went to some of my answers and made hostile comments about my answers on simple things like Pandas for Python.

That was that for that site.

mgdev 54 minutes ago | parent

They should reboot, focused on

1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and

2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)

This does four things simultaneously:

1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model

2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)

3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.

4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems

bryant 47 minutes ago | parent

> 2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)

> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems

I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?

mahboi 45 minutes ago | parent

Who decides which person is correct?

aaronbrethorst 30 minutes ago | parent

Maybe someone new could create a new community modeled along these lines where experts could exchange knowledge, or more junior people something else, for answers.

hatthew 9 minutes ago | parent

The discussion around who gets a green checkmark and +15 rep was bad enough. I can't imagine how it would be if there was real money involved.

wondering5du 6 minutes ago | parent

So instead of just not getting paid for my help I might even get to pay if my answer is deemed to be not good enough. Thanks but no thanks.

tdb7893 53 minutes ago | parent

I'm curious if the quality of AI answers will get worse without public sources like Stack Overflow or if LLMs have gotten to a point where that doesn't matter as much.

h4kunamata 52 minutes ago | parent

Deserved.

Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:

* 1 trip to mars

* 10 trips to the Moon

* Converted water to wine

The worst system until you can finally help others.

Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.

A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.

hatthew 4 minutes ago | parent

What do you mean? You could always answer questions without any barriers, and partial answers were acceptable. Unless you're talking about protected questions (very rare), or you had such a fundamental misunderstanding of the site that you got answer-banned.

eluru 46 minutes ago | parent

good, make it die faster

nreece 44 minutes ago | parent

Still over $100M in revenue, now mainly from AI and Enterprise customers.

https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...

eluru 40 minutes ago | parent

as a student i remmeber ikept getting my questions removed even after trying to follow every rule. this one time i decided i will use their top questions as a template just to test it, so i did i made sure it was a new question, following each rule

It was also deleted, die already stack overflow

etchalon 22 minutes ago | parent

SO suffered from its success and, bluntly, the laziness of humans.

I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.

I stopped contributing.

dmcgill50 8 minutes ago | parent

It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated. Just like a bronze sword.

ryandrake 6 minutes ago | parent

StackOverflow is great if your question is "How would we have done X back in 2012?" Because you can't re-ask or re-answer questions that have had their correct answers change as technology changed. So the sites is stuck back in time when each question was first answered.

BrenBarn 5 minutes ago | parent

I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).