The correct way to use StackOverflow was not to ask questions there.
You either found your answer coming in from a search engine, or you pretend the site does not even exist.
I don't think it was supposed to be sustainable, but oh well.
We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
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Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#42StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…
As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#43StackOverflow wasn't a toxic hellhole.
I struggle not to see the people describing it as full of exclusionary rants as telling on themselves.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#44I can only speak for myself, but I very much resonate with this.
I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself.
For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that around the edges, but the policy ended up being enforced so strictly that many interesting topics their audience would have found valuable were declared out-of-bounds. Questions I wanted answers to - and that were getting good answers! - would get closed, and so would interesting questions that I wanted to try to answer.
I tried a couple times to push back gently, and got piled on each time.
It stopped being fun, so I stopped going there. Shrug.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#45I feel this topic is approaching circlejerk status. Basically any mention of StackOverflow on HN/Reddit is just teeing up everyone to go on about how the SO moderators are the worst people ever.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#46StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…
Which directly resulted in the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025.
They drove people away, on purpose, who were creating their content. Which was a successful strategy until it wasn't.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#47StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…
And they get confident lies back 2/10 times, not enough to make them constantly question the answers, but just enough to _really_ mess with them over time. And not just that, almost no new good questions and answers are created anymore for the next iterations of LLM's to train on, so they'll be consuming more and more AI-centered SEO slop until that ratio becomes so high it becomes useless. But by then most of us who used to answer human questions won't give a s*t anymore. You reap what you sow.
Best of both worlds? I disagree vehemently. At least my job is secure; experts with decades of experience are in high demand, and I can be even more selective who I decide to work for. I'm done contributing for free to the corpo Internet though.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#48I really don't like this sentiment:
> "Because I can get an answer from an LLM (which does need to be verified) in less than a minute versus the hours or days I would have to wait to get a toxic and potentially useless reply on stackoverflow. They should really downsize or just kill the company it’s a relic of the past and most developers won’t miss it."
To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered. Sure, new questions might be falling off and it might be decreasing in relevance, but that in no way means that a massively resource-intensive LLM regurgitating paragraphs of semi-duplicated text is better enough to justify canning it. (There's also the matter of all the other StackExchange sites, I have no idea what the state of the world is on those but I imagine they also have value in themselves.)
To this day, I find almost all of my low-level questions are still readily answered by StackOverflow, and it holds lots of discussion on higher-level questions that I find useful.
Does StackOverflow have an attitude problem? Absolutely. It is fair to say that most developers won't miss it? No.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#49I think StackOverflow could have been saved from turning into a toxic hellhole if they'd had AI and LLMs in the mid 2010s. No seriously, hear me out.
SO is infamous for overzealous mods closing questions left and right, calling you an idiot, and being generally unhelpful.
I think these mods were/are burned out by dealing with mostly idiotic questions all day. They default to suspicion and hostility.
If they'd had AI weeding out low quality questions before they ever got to a human (and not the rudimentary text classifiers that were the state of the art at the time) I think the mods would be a more helpful bunch.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#50There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic.…
> And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe.
There's a recipe, it's just expensive. Intense moderation, exclude disruptive users, no grand plan for massive growth/inclusion.
StackOverflow did have intense moderation, but it also seemed to want to be a place where anyone could ask a question and that desire for mass inclusion competes with the desire to be moderated/curated and then there's issues.