alt Hacker NewsRight. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange.
At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on top.
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> I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are.
They are not "threads" and are not supposed to be "threads". Thinking about them as if they were, is what leads to the perception of toxicity.
It's funny that people blame the site for this.
That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture. It's everywhere.
We don't "get small glimpses of that on HN"
We get exactly the same thing on hn, because it's the same people, the same culture, the same incentive structure, the same codified toxicity.
And the exact same thing is going to happen to hn. Already is. Already has, frankly.
It's just how sellout culture works. There's no integrity.[1]
SO failed because the founders had no integrity and HN is going to fail because the founders have no integrity.
Lacking integrity has short term benefits that sacrifice the long term.
From Good to great to failure.
Anyone else remwmber when Joel said he'd never sell SO and then this [1] happened? I remember.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-...
It goes even farther back to 2009 when Jeff sold out the benevolence incentive for self promotion to make money for himself thru SO.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-careers-amplify... (be sure to read the comments)
The stated purpose of SO was that the expert sex change.com was making money off q&a and jeff and joel resented that.
And then the SO folks make their q&a site about making money.
No integrity. So the good people left and the toxic people stayed.
That's the root cause analysis.
To hahn-kev, I'm literally censored, so I'm not allowed to reply any more. Only folks who drank the koolaid get the last word.
That is exactly codified toxicity. Who would tolerate that? Only those who stand to gain personally from an investment in this site. I don't care about this site or its mission. I think this site and its Mission are immoral, just like SO.
I agree there was some natural slow down as the corpus grew - the obvious questions were answered. But if the community was healthy, that should not have caused growth to stop. New technologies get created all the time, each starting with zero SO questions. (Or Google releases v2.0 which invalidates all answers written about v1.)
SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though.