Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow
by moralestapia on Monday July 31, 2023 @05:35PM
(#36949201)
I used to be mad at SO but after some time now (haven't been there in years) I understand is just another instance of an Eternal September.
At the beginning, SO used to be great because its community was mostly comprised of curious developers, hackers and whatnot; people who, in general, loved technology. Anyone who really enjoys what they're doing usually enjoy helping others who know less and enjoy having curious and intellectually rewarding conversations. SO (ten years ago) put you in the company of those people. Ask anything and you would get back a thoughtful reply from one of the most knowledgeable people in that particular topic, for free. The first time I experienced this my mind was completely blown, that is the kind of thing that made me feel the internet is an amazing place.
With time, as SO started to accrue users, people started to join and use SO motivated by entirely different things. For instance, there was the one group of people who used SO as some sort of "do my homework because I'm too lazy to figure out trivial things for myself", I don't think these people were actually toxic to the SO community, perhaps they were just a nuisance, but that paved the way for ... another group of people (who I think had actual mental and social problems IRL) who decided to start policing on others all over the site, just because they were after some imaginary internet points and/or because they needed to fill some emotional void in their real lives with brief periods of menial amounts of power over others. This isn't unique to SO, it is something that happens to all online communities that need moderators, at some point.
At some point, gradually or whatever, there was a switch from SO being run de facto by knowledgeable and passionate people to being run de facto by these kind of moderators who completely missed what was the soul of the site they came to leech on (most of them joined way after SO was up and running). A lot of people sensed that and slowly became uninterested in the site, since the initial experience that SO provided to them was now replaced by an entirely different thing (even thought, in the surface, it was still a Q&A site). Whenever this happened, SO started to die and it wasn't around April 2022 (as TFA says); I'd say it was around 2014, maybe a bit earlier.
To this day, I still don't know why the people running SO (not the dumb moderators, but the actual owners of the site) let this happen and actually encouraged the exact kind of behavior that led to the site's demise. I guess because the numbers were looking good anyway? I also think they thought of themselves "too big to fail" in a sense. I like Jeff and Joel and I'm sure they saw this coming years ahead, I have no idea why they didn't do anything to prevent this. Perhaps they just couldn't? SO fell into the VC trap and now had investors to please and milestones to reach and whatnot (I had a good laugh when they announced their series E [1]). I guess that's why they both stepped down from SO at some point and went to much more entertaining ventures.
Their current CEO is completely oblivious of all this. Here's him talking nonsense for about an hour [2], he really missed the point as to why SO was dying. Did he ever use SO?. Compared to Jeff and Joel I think of him of someone with a complete opposite personality, I'd be surprised if he has ever wrote an actual line of code (aside from the usual "Hello World" stuff). At least he made some money out of this, put some bread on his table or whatever.
Sad to see the site go, but excited to see what will take its place in the future.
At the beginning, SO used to be great because its community was mostly comprised of curious developers, hackers and whatnot; people who, in general, loved technology. Anyone who really enjoys what they're doing usually enjoy helping others who know less and enjoy having curious and intellectually rewarding conversations. SO (ten years ago) put you in the company of those people. Ask anything and you would get back a thoughtful reply from one of the most knowledgeable people in that particular topic, for free. The first time I experienced this my mind was completely blown, that is the kind of thing that made me feel the internet is an amazing place.
With time, as SO started to accrue users, people started to join and use SO motivated by entirely different things. For instance, there was the one group of people who used SO as some sort of "do my homework because I'm too lazy to figure out trivial things for myself", I don't think these people were actually toxic to the SO community, perhaps they were just a nuisance, but that paved the way for ... another group of people (who I think had actual mental and social problems IRL) who decided to start policing on others all over the site, just because they were after some imaginary internet points and/or because they needed to fill some emotional void in their real lives with brief periods of menial amounts of power over others. This isn't unique to SO, it is something that happens to all online communities that need moderators, at some point.
At some point, gradually or whatever, there was a switch from SO being run de facto by knowledgeable and passionate people to being run de facto by these kind of moderators who completely missed what was the soul of the site they came to leech on (most of them joined way after SO was up and running). A lot of people sensed that and slowly became uninterested in the site, since the initial experience that SO provided to them was now replaced by an entirely different thing (even thought, in the surface, it was still a Q&A site). Whenever this happened, SO started to die and it wasn't around April 2022 (as TFA says); I'd say it was around 2014, maybe a bit earlier.
To this day, I still don't know why the people running SO (not the dumb moderators, but the actual owners of the site) let this happen and actually encouraged the exact kind of behavior that led to the site's demise. I guess because the numbers were looking good anyway? I also think they thought of themselves "too big to fail" in a sense. I like Jeff and Joel and I'm sure they saw this coming years ahead, I have no idea why they didn't do anything to prevent this. Perhaps they just couldn't? SO fell into the VC trap and now had investors to please and milestones to reach and whatnot (I had a good laugh when they announced their series E [1]). I guess that's why they both stepped down from SO at some point and went to much more entertaining ventures.
Their current CEO is completely oblivious of all this. Here's him talking nonsense for about an hour [2], he really missed the point as to why SO was dying. Did he ever use SO?. Compared to Jeff and Joel I think of him of someone with a complete opposite personality, I'd be surprised if he has ever wrote an actual line of code (aside from the usual "Hello World" stuff). At least he made some money out of this, put some bread on his table or whatever.
Sad to see the site go, but excited to see what will take its place in the future.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978387
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aA5bzzSYAA