GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

Re:GenAI, the snake eating its own tail by PeterStuer on Thursday January 22, 2026 @03:43AM (#46716688)

SO was great for a while, then went down the toilet, not because 'eveything had been answered', but because it became a playground of power hungry mods vs resume grinding freshmen patronizing and shutting down 90% of 'normal' users.

Even current AI is a 100x better experience than SO ever was.

We can all see how post knowledge scarecity and automated contextual niche adaptation reduces exploitation potential for knowledge production (often itself mere regurgitation), but the 'cures' proposed in the article feel very much worse than the disease.

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Re:GenAI, the snake eating its own tail by rcxdude on Thursday January 22, 2026 @03:54AM (#46716756)

I didn't help that SO had some very quirky expectations of how it should run, and failed to communicate those well, causing a constant friction between moderators and users. Also, there was often friction between the site admins and moderators, causing them to lose a lot of moderators over time as well.

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Re:GenAI, the snake eating its own tail by thr0waw4yz on Thursday January 22, 2026 @05:16AM (#46717336)

The issue with SO is also that the quality of the answers degrades over time. Asking similar questions will get closed as dupes while the referenced 2011 answer is basically useless nowadays.

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