alt Hacker NewsEveryone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse?
The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.
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I think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to "get to the bottom" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism.
All of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered.
I remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/discussion board, which feels more appropriate for the current state of the industry.
The question askers got stupider and stupider.
Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood:
> Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!
https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...
> Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...
> Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn’t always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive. > All the content on the site must exist to serve the mission of learning over entertainment – even if that means making difficult calls about removing some questions and answers that fail to meet those goals, plus or minus 10 percent.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/