Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

data.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 615 posts

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#461

Post by NetOpWibby »

lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

I say this every time the topic of SO/AI comes up.

LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response.

There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes to close my question) before I gave up.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#462

Post by dannyw »

dfabulich wrote: post #439
throwaway2037 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia Can you explain? I am read-only there and it seems better than ever. Even in the era of LLMs, Wiki is still an awesome source.

Wikipedia's traffic (and donations) are collapsing. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik... People don't like to think of it this way, but Wikipedia is funded by ads. Except, the ads only advertise one thing: requests for donations. If people don't visit Wikipedia, because the AI regurgitated Wikipedia's answers, they won't see Wikipedia's donation ads, and they won't donate. Over time, if cur…

Doesn’t WMF hold hundreds of million and growing on their foundation balance sheet, and raise $150M+/year through donations when hosting expenses are $4M/year?

Obviously they need staff and more costs than just hosting, but something isn’t adding up for me, so I stopped donating.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#463

Post by edelbitter »

gck1 wrote: post #441

It's always slightly amusing to me how SE has the most restrictive cloudflare turnstile config set. On the rare occasion that I DO want to go there, they greet me with an impossible gate that takes 15+ seconds to pass on Brave and gets invalidated quickly. If anyone from SE is reading this: you already failed to protect your data from the LLM crawlers, SE is no longer that much interesting to them. The only visitors…

>failed to protect from the LLM crawlers

Never meant to be protected. I only contributed there because it specified in no uncertain terms that everything was going to be CC BY-SA licensed and posted in a public archive every now and then, so you do not need to scrape to use & redistribute if you intend to adhere to those terms. That would have been sufficient protection, if only governments had not u-turned from Walt-Disney-Copyright straight to "Open"AI-Copyright.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#464

Post by zahlman »

kstrauser wrote: post #447
20k wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination

I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own. Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.

It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain.

When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.

The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.

People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.

(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#465

Post by dannyw »

firesteelrain wrote: post #322
dfabulich wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation. Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise , as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and a…

You aren’t downvoted on Wikipedia. And people have been complaining about heavy handed editors and mods there for a long time. Same with SO. It’s pretty much a meme now.

Wikipedia at least has a culture where (most of the time) if you’re objectively rude or mean, especially to newbies, you’re at least shunned a bit.

Strict moderation etc isn’t a bad thing, but the environment and culture you mould is what matters.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#466

Post by zahlman »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #404
20k wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination

The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve. An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?" Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their abil…

> An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more.

Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions of Stack Overflow accounts, only a few dozen have ever actually been moderators, and they do a tiny share of curation. Their main job is responding to flags.

> It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.

The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be, and often something it was fundamentally trying not to be. It was correct to make such users "feel unwelcome", because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with or explained to. The statistics make it clear that most of them never had any intention of trying to join a community (or, say, ask another question after the one that motivated account creation) in the first place.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#467

Post by zahlman »

rcxdude wrote: post #414
jay_kyburz wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve. An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?" Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their abil…

Being able to edit answers isn't even a mod thing. In fact, for most of SO's life, it wasn't even a 'being logged in' thing (you could just edit an answer anonymously). How they wound up with a Q and A site where you could edit another user's answer far more easily than leaving a comment on it I still will never fully understand. (this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions…

You could not unilaterally edit anonymously; your edit would have been put in a review queue.

It is good that leaving comments is hard. First off, because it was learned repeatedly, the hard way, that removing that barrier leads to ungodly amounts of literal spam. Second because even insightful comments detract from the main intended flow of using the site, which is: you find a question from a search engine, read the question and verify that it reflects what you're trying to figure out, then scroll down to the answers and learn something. The entire point is to not be a discussion forum (which is also why comments were not threaded for most of the the site's life). In fact, the site came into existence specifically because of frustration with what ends up happening on a discussion forum where people can discuss endlessly.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#468

Post by t0mpr1c3 »

lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

It seems to me that AI did SO in, not its moderation culture.

SO is not a place to ask where to get your homework assignment done, that's for sure. The gamification does not necessarily reward the best content, but I didn't experience hostility myself.

(I do find this site fairly hostile. And Wikipedia is the lowest possible hell, I've never in my life experienced anything comparable to the ferocity with which people prosecute their grudges, all the way to IRL doxxing. German language Wikipedia is another whole level of self-appointed officialdom.)

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#469

Post by zahlman »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #254
lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone. Yet I certainly couldn't ask…

Would you be willing to show questions you attempted to ask? I'd be happy to help explain how policy works/worked there.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#470

Post by cataphract »

lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

Yes, yes, the usual narrative. They were not welcoming.

I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website:

  * Most questions were low effort crap
  * Users were mostly divided between only asking questions and only answering questions
  * The reputation system favored: 1) easy questions (understood by a larger audience -> more people upvoting), 2) fast answers (before the question dropped from the front page; also answers with more votes got more visibility).
So, contrary to the usual narrative, the incentives and most activity was directed to answering newbie questions. That made up most of the volume, and it was what the reputation system rewarded. Even if a question got closed as a duplicated, by that time there usually were already answers to most easy questions. And deletion could only happen after some time (two days IIRC).

The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system.

The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.

Post reply on HN