News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time by josephg on Monday January 05, 2026 @01:25PM (#46502610)
Thanks for replying. I find your point of view for all this fascinating.

With your experience, why do you think the site is failing? What could or should be done to save it?

Re:Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time by zahlman on Monday January 05, 2026 @02:22PM (#46503412)
Top-level view:

from the perspective of people who aren't explicitly trying to teach on their own initiative, overall the site has outlived its purpose. In that time it drew way too many total questions to surface what's actually valuable; between that and no functional search (the internal search was always bad; Google et. al. got worse over time, partly intentionally) you're lucky to find anything valuable.

I'm not generally worried about out-of-date answers; the truly outdated answers are mostly on outdated questions, describing situations that don't come up any more or premises that are no longer valid for ordinary programmers (e.g., fixing problems with obsolete tools).

Combing through to curate properly is too little, too late now. Much stronger (but polite, of course) gatekeeping was required earlier on, which in turn required (among other things) proper means for communication between "core" users and the public. At this point, it's best to start over (hence the part where I'm now a moderator at Codidact).

There's a lot more I want to say, but I don't have it organized in my head and this is way downthread already. Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post?

Re:Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time by JazCE on Monday January 05, 2026 @03:40PM (#46504621)
> Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post?

yes please!

Re:Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time by josephg on Monday January 05, 2026 @07:38PM (#46507273)
> Perhaps I could interest you in a hypothetical future blog post?

I'd love that.