Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.

Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.

Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.

::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!

> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.

I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.

Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.

The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.

Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.

It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!

But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.

(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)

I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.

Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.

I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.

Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.

When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.

My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most.

May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.

There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it.

I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.

It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.

I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site).

AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord.

SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.

> I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me

Damn. Doesn’t that just sum up so many interactions (and sadly, relationships) in life.

> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.

Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.

The worst stack overflow in this regard was meta. Most pathological corner of the internet I've ever encountered, up there with 4chan if you ask me.

S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive

> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants

I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:

1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.

2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.

This was long before LLMs.

In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort.

I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form.

These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine.

In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead?

Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.

I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.

I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?

Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.

Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.

The math subreddit is awful. Accusing everyone of asking homework questions if they weren’t formatted in perfect math notation.

Then there’s the godot subreddit. Asked 2 questions? That’s a ban.

Imagine a child learning math or game dev coming up against that.

I’d quit. Curiosity extinguished.

The godot github has one of those characters now too. Really anti new user. I worry, I worry.

You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.

You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues.

I hope somebody saves it all.

as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.

> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.

i got stung by exactly this.

i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.

and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.

dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like

   thanks in advance,
   -- 
   znpy

I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.

>StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions

This is significantly under selling it.

Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.

I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable

I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.

His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”

At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive

I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one