Right. 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.

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.

I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which.

But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior.

I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.

Arstechnica used to have different kinds of upvotes for "funny" vs "insightful" - I forget exactly all of them. But I found it awesome. I wanted to and could read the insightful comments, not the funny ones. A couple years back they redid the discussion system and got rid of it. Since then the quality of discussion has IMHO completely tanked.

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.

well you can say all that but it doesn't hold up to experience. The culture feels very different here. So, no, it's not the same.

Well I've been around here longer than you and i don't have a vested interest in the koolaid.

You think being on this site gives you cred. That's why you personally identify yourself. You likely have your hn profile link on your resume or website etc. Hoping maybe this place will lead to something for you.

Clearly we don't agree on that. I don't even bother to turn off secret mode for this tripe.

Thank you malfist for proving my point. Lol

For someone with a green username, you sure do have strong opinions about hn

I literally said I've been here longer than someone who has been here since 2013 so you attack my profile age.

This is the toxic destruction of hn I'm talking about.

You are the toxic one. You offer negative value.

If you meet one asshole on your way to work, they're probably an asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, you're probably the asshole.

maybe I think those things, or maybe I think totally different things; you have no way of knowing

I know because i click your username and see your email and website.

Click on my name you get nothing.

Yours is full of hope of someone reaching out to you. Mine is idgaf.

I don't need to defend the status quo. I don't want karma pOints.

I want integrity.

What you seem to want is to fill the comment section with deranged rambling

> Well I've been around here longer than you

Prove it. Use your main account, you coward.

I don't have anything to prove to you.

You are the toxicity I'm talking about. You've added zero value to the discussion. I've offered value.

You attack my account age and I've already said why it's not old.

Because idgaf.

Integrity usually means owning your words. Pseudonymity can be fine, but pretending it signals higher principle is backwards.

This response sounds quite toxic actually

Because you don't want to hear it, that's all. It's not toxic, it's idgaf.

> 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.

Its karma farming. Number must go up regardless of the human cost. Thats why the same problem is seen here, to a lesser extent.

Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement.

Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter.

I wonder what is the role of moderating duplicate questions. More time passes - more existing data there is and less need for new questions. If you moderate duplicate questions, will they disappear from these charts? Is this decline actually logical?

2020 there was new CEO and moderator council was formed: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-o...

People overestimate the impact of toxicity on number of monthly questions. The initial growth was due to missing answers. After some time there is a saturation point where all basic questions are already answered and can be found via Google. If you ask them again they are marked as dups.

That would be true if no new technologies were created every year (even more often).

You do not find the 2009 jQuery answer satisfying?

There are new technologies, but if you look at the most viewed questions, they will be about Python, JS, Java, C, and C++ without libraries.

I wonder if we can attribute some $billion of the investment in LLMs directly to the toxicity on StackOverflow.

If you ignore the early pandemic bump, it even looks like the decline started in late 2017, though it's more variable than after the bump

The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant to post when they were working from home?

More people spent lot more time learning new tech skills (at every experience level).

The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc) and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.

I’d guess it’s also because it’s not as easy to ask your random question to a coworker when they’re not sitting next to you in the office.

I felt it became easier with slack.

The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without hesitation and producers just also don't do actual documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which works in the moment, but terrible for future team members to even know what questions to search/ask for.

A huge amount of people were just starting to learn programming, because they were stuck at home and had the time to pick something up.

If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.

There is an obvious acceleration of the downwards trend at the time ChatGPT got popular. AI is clearly a part of this, but not the only thing that affects SO activity.

Many people are pointing out the toxicity, but the biggest thing that drove me away, especially for specific quantitative questions, was that SO was flat out wrong (and confidently so) on many issues.

It was bad enough that I got back in the habit of buying and building a library of serious reference books because they were the only reliable way to answer detailed technical questions.

If you do not mind my asking, what sorts of questions were you asking that were resulting in wrong answers?

Ironically they could probably do some really useful deduplication/normalization/search across questions and answers using AI/embeddings today, if only they’d actually allowed people to ask the same questions infinite different ways, and treated the result of that as a giant knowledge graph.

I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid moderation.

It is sort of because of AI - it provided a way of escaping StackOverflow's toxicity!

Could view it as push/pull dynamics: pushed away by toxicity, pulled to good answers from AI.

Use of GPT3 among programmers started 2021 with GitHub Copilot which preceded ChatGPT.

I agree the toxic moderation (and tone-deaf ownership!) initiated the slower decline earlier that then turned into the LLM landslide.

Tbf SO also suffered from its own success as a knowledgebase where the easy pickings were long gone by then.

> the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.

A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented.

If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that.

Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc.

Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.

Toxic community is mostly a meme myth. I have like 30k points and whatever admins were doing was well deserved as 90% of the questions were utterly impossible to help with. Most people wanted free help and couldn't even bother to put in 5 minutes of work.

Other tech support forums are terrible in other ways. AI is a godsend.

Typical response:

I am RJ, an Independent Advisor and Microsoft Gold Certified Support Specialist Enthusiast.

I know how your system is not functioning as desired! Rest assured, I am here to help you resolve this today.

Please follow these steps in order. Do not skip any steps.

Step 1: Reboot your computer Step 2: Reinstall windows Step 3: Contact Microsoft support

Did this resolve your issue? [ Yes ] [ No ]

If this helped, please mark this as the Answer and give me a 5-star rating so I can continue providing high-quality, scripted responses to other users!

Standard Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft. I am an independent volunteer who enjoys copying and pasting from a manual written in 2014.