Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation.

Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.

Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).

Long before LLMs. Setting aside peak-COVID as a weird aberration, question volume has been in decline since 2014 or maybe 2016.

It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it.

Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did.

And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community.

Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort to salvage what little there was left for themselves.

Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings.

I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor) contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific issues.

The timeline also matches:

https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...

https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...

> legitimate questions being closed for no good reason

They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) and well considered, having been exhaustively discussed over many years.

> or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t

I have seen so many people complain about this. It is vanishingly rare that I actually agree with them. In the large majority of cases it is comically obvious to me that the closure was correct. For example, there have been many complaints in the Python tag that were on the level of "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)

> a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.

On the contrary, the top answerers are the ones who will be happy to copy and paste answers to your question and ignore site policy, to the constant vexation of curators like myself trying to keep the site clean and useful (as a searchable resource) for everyone.

> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

I actually completely agree that people who prefer to ask LLMs should ask LLMs. The experience of directly asking (an LLM) and getting personalized help is explicitly the exact thing that Stack Overflow was created to get away from (i.e., the traditional discussion forum experience, where experts eventually get tired of seeing the same common issues all the time and all the same failures to describe a problem clearly, and where third parties struggle to find a useful answer in the middle of along discussion).

It seemed to me that pre-llm, google had stopped surfacing stackoverflow answers in search results.

Oh yeah.

My favorite feature of LLMs, is the only dumb question, is the one I don't ask.

I guess someone could train an LLM to be spiteful and nasty, but that would only be for entertainment.

I suppose all sites that have a voting component run the risk of becoming unpleasant.

Hacker News, and we who frequent it, ought to have that in mind.

That depends on what you mean by "came along". If you mean "once that everyone got around to the idea that LLMs were going to be good at this thing" then sure, but it was not long ago that the majority of people around here were very skeptical of the idea that LLMs would ever be any good at coding.

all true, but i still find myself ask questions there after llm gave wrong answers and wasted my time

The irony is that the LLMs are trained on stack overflow and should inherit a lot of those traits and errors.

How can we be sure that LLMs won't start giving stale answers?

>For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better

But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.

not only stackoverflow, but also reddit.com/r/aws reddit.com/r/docker reddit.com/r/postgresql all 3 of them have extremely toxic communities. ask a question and get downvoted instantly! Noo!! your job is to actually upvote the question to maximize exposure for the algorithm unless it is a really really stupid question that a google search could fix

Yep, LLMs are perfect for the "quick buy annoying to answer 500 times" questions about writing a short script, or configuring something, or using the right combination of command line parameters.

Quicker than searching the entirety of Google results and none of the attitude.

> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

For now. They still need to be enshitted.

Indeed. StackOverflow was by far the most unpleasant website that I have regularly interacted with. Sometimes, just seeing how users were treated there (even in Q&A threads that I wasn’t involved in at all) disturbed me so much it was actually interfering with my work. I’m so, so glad that I can now just ask an AI to get the same (or better) answers, without having to wade through the barely restrained hate on that site.

This change was happening well before LLMs. People were tired of being yelled at and treated poorly.

A cautionary tale for many of these types of tech platforms, this one included.