Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

I saw this happening in sort of slow-mo, but didn't know who to tell or what to do, so here you go.

Around 2017-18 I was pretty involved in the bootcamp/learning programming community, and I noticed my fellow teachers recommending students to "do not ask question on StackOverflow, if you have an issue it' better to ask in Github to the library author, people are more polite and you get better answers".

As an Open Source dev myself, this left a slightly bad taste, but couldn't exactly disagree since SO culture IS brutal (specially in the tight timeframe). I did explain when I could that the best is actually to learn to ask the right question, and that often this is part of the debug experience for yourself, but I was but a little pebble against the stream. This had probably gone for a while, and it was then also when we saw a lot of talk about burnout in open source devs. At some point it seemed there was someone burning out every other week!

Everyone can put 2 and 2 together to see what was happening; low-quality questions were not being asked in StackOverflow anymore and now they were dumped to random OSS devs who didn't sign for it and were forced to move from a collaborative environment that was Github back then to a more customer-facing environment it became.

The "interesting" part is what happened as a consequence. Today if you do Open Source, become semi-famous and want to continue, it's pretty clear that you have to have a thick skin and do a combination of: just shut down ALL issues/support in popular repos[1], or get used to tell people NO quick and easily, or take regular breaks, or I guess be part of a big company being paid to deal with issues as part of your job.

I'm not sure it's the gamification itself so much as the details by which it's implemented.

I still rarely use stackoverflow to ask questions, but I've given up on answering them. I don't mind giving answers elsewhere, but stackoverflow specifically discourages that, somehow.

A few effects that are clearly harmful (IMHO):

- Stackoverflow's game mechanics strongly discourage duplicate questions. But this is pretty dispiriting when it happens to you - both as questioner, and as answerer. Additionally, duplication is often not exact; there can be significant difference that are sufficient to really change the appropriate solution. Stackoverflow is really bad at finding those.

- Even where questions are in essence duplicate, that is clearly not always obvious to the novices asking the questions. It's just not very helpful to close their questions in a rather toxic fashion and effectively berate them for not already seeing the parallels they were looking for in the first place.

- Stackoverflow discourages discussion. However, discussion is useful in finding the best solution or even merely discovering the context and limits of that solution.

- When discussion happens despite the SO UI, gamification rewards almost exclusively the primary asker and answerer; to the extent discussion is permitted, it's not encouraged to be constructive or healthy therefore.

- Stackoverflow's attention algorithm highlights new questions and highlights first answers to those questions. However, this encourages answers that are essentially "First post!!1!", and then maybe editing those into something better. It discourages well thought out responses. This isn't intrinsic in gamification; it's simply due to the way they've tuned the knobs.

- There's an intrinsic tension in how they've tuned their gamification: on the one hand, they encourage knee-jerk responses because speed is of the essence, and on the other, they discourage questions that benefit from quick-n-dirty answers. That tension doesn't lead to a healthy middle ground, it just leads to frustration and a bad experience.

Fora like this one and reddit also use gamification - we all see and respond to votes - but they do so differently. Stackoverflow could try to learn from that. And stackoverflow could make the gamification more collaborative, and less zero-sum. Whether they'll do so... I guess at this point I kind of doubt it.

Sorry, tangential rant, but, God I hate stale issue bots. The issue is valid, it's reproduced, it's been discussed, nothing's changed, it hasn't stopped being a valid issue just because it hasn't had activity in 30 days, or 6 months, or a year.

Just means the maintainers haven't gotten around to fixing it/implementing it yet, nothing wrong with that - they don't owe anyone a timeline for fixing issues.

The only way to fight the stale bot is to constantly spam your issue with "bump" comments, which nobody's going to do (and if they do, surely the maintainers will just complain that you're spamming, and rightfully so).

So if the maintainers don't have time to deal with your issue within X months, it just won't get fixed. They won't even be aware that those issues are still there (because who goes through closed issues looking for stuff to do?).

And so I hit google for an issue I'm having with Project X, stumble upon a "closed" issue, scroll to the bottom, and see "closed by stale bot". WHY IS IT CLOSED WHEN IT IS STILL AN ISSUE.

They know this is a problem, so they’re hiring contractors to write code and label it to teach the AI.

There is a chicken-egg problem with using ChatGPT for domain specific technical knowledge. ChatGPT is trained on data from sites like SO. If everyone starts using ChatGPT instead and technical communities die off, it seems like ChatGPT would quickly become ineffective.

You would still have documentation published by originators of the technology but a lot of programming is figuring out the quirks of things that aren't in the documentation or getting past bugs.