alt Hacker NewsAgreed. 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.
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Same here. I just didn't want to expend energy racing trigger happy mods. It was so odd, to this day remember vividly how they cleanup their arguments once proven wrong on the closing vote. Literally minutes before it would the close threshold.
Gen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996)
Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008)
Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)
And you can't delete your post when you realize how awful it was years later! That anti-information sticks around for ages. Even worse when there are bad answers attached to it, too.
The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me as a bizarre feature, to put words in other people’s mouths.
I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting.
I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP.
The same is true for reddit imo, it became impossible to post anything to a subreddit way before LLMs
People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.
The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes.
The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions.
Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.