Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time • Hacker News Board

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#211

Post by paganholiday » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:40 AM UTC

ianbutler wrote: post #193

paganholiday wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example wasn't even finding a right answer so I don't see where you got that.. Searching questions/answers on SO can surface correct paths on situations where the LLMs will keep giving you variants of a few wrong solutions, kind of like the toxic duplicate closers.. Ironically, if SO pruned the history to remove all failures to match its community standards then it would have the same problem.

"But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions." > "actually answered our questions." Read carefully.

>> Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc

Read carefully and paraphrase to the generous side. The metaphor that follows that is obviously trying to give an example of what might be somehow lost.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#212

Post by 999900000999 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:41 AM UTC

Good.

This is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic.

LLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#213

Post by NewJazz » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:41 AM UTC

specproc wrote: post #145

etamponi wrote: post #49

I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (…

What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top. SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit l…

The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#214

Post by banana_giraffe » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:41 AM UTC

MPSimmons wrote: post #78

echelon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO…

The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question about best practices, but you can't ask people to share their experiences or recommendations.

They actually added some new question categories a while ago [1]

"Troubleshooting / Debugging" is meant for the traditional questions, "Tooling recommendation", "Best practices", and "General advice / Other" are meant for the soft sort of questions.

I have no clue what the engagement is on these sort of categories, though. It feels like a fix for a problem that started years ago, and by this point, I don't really know if there's much hope in bringing back the community they've worked so hard to scare away. It's pretty telling just how much the people that are left hate this new feature.

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/435293/opinion-base...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#215

Post by francisofascii » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:42 AM UTC

culi wrote: post #130

I guess I'm the only one that was a fan of SO's moderation. I never got too deep into it (answered some TypeScript questions). But the intention to reduce duped questions made a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of a "living document" where energy is focused on updating and improving answers to old versions of the same question. As a user looking for answers it means I can worry less about finding some other variat…

I also agreed with this vision. It was meant to be more like Wikipedia rather than Reddit.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#216

Post by timcobb » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:42 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

> I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after?

I've wondered this too and I wonder if the existing corpus plus new GitHub/doc site scrapes will be enough to keep things current.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#217

Post by gfhifd42 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:43 AM UTC

oofbey wrote: post #201

gfhifd42 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it. Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did. And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community. Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destro…

How did Joel sell out? Curious as I’m not aware of any monetary changes. I watched Joel several times support completely brain dead policies in the meta discussions which really set the rules and tone. So my respect there is low.

He and Jeff made it abundantly clear their mission was to destroy the sex change site because that site was immoral for monetizing the benevolence of the community who answered the questions.

"Knowledge should be free" they said. "You shouldn't make money off stuff like this," they said.

Plenty of links and backstory in my other comments.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#218

Post by oofbey » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:43 AM UTC

nospice wrote: post #35

Someone1234 wrote: post #11

They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620

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…

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.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#219

Post by stirfish » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:45 AM UTC

zero_shift wrote: post #161

Salgat wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).

Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game) You ask how to do X. Member M asks why you want to do X. Because you want to do Y. Well!? why do you want to do Y?? Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended! Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment. ... Can you help me? ... I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. D…

How do I add a second spout to this can?

...

Well, the pump at the gas station doesn't fit in my car, but they sold me a can with a spout that fits in my car.

...

It's tedious to fill the can a dozen times when I just want to fill up my gas tank. Can you help me or not?

...

I understand, but I already bought the can. I don't need the "perfect" way to fill a gas tank, I just want to go home.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#220

Post by pbw » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 12:45 AM UTC

SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.