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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

#101

Post by Permit »

falcor84 wrote: post #93
Permit wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.

It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes. A more positive q&a community might "steel-man" the question and try to find what's different about it, but SO's culture leaned heavily towards essentially telling people "go away, you don't have anything new and worthwhile for us".

> It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes

This discussion needs a grounded definition of "toxic" then.

Elsewhere in this thread I see:

> I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.

So we're all speaking about different things it appears.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#102

Post by darkwater »

phoronixrly wrote: post #83
darkwater wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question the "failed" here. You did land on their pages, after all. You most probably also clicked on an internal link and moved to another of their pages, and then bounced off.

Man, what a perverted definition of success... They failed in being useful to the end users, but they damned sure made their engagement KPI look good, and also got a few ad impressions on the way.

Maybe my tone was not clear enough but I wasn't implying they did a great job for the end user, but they surely did for their revenue stream.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#104

Post by [deleted] »

AlexandrB wrote: post #78
ronbenton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.

To play devil's advocate, I think some people confuse terse, succinct communication with being mean. I find this to be a common cultural difference between contributors from different backgrounds. Personally I find a lot of "welcoming" language to be excessively saccharine and ultimately insincere. Something between being talked down to like I'm a child and corpo-slop. Ultimately I don't think there's necessarily a o…

[deleted]

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#105

Post by kstrauser »

onesandofgrain wrote: post #29
okaleniuk wrote: post #24

There 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.…

I’d reckon a set of mods with no superiority complex is one step though lol

And a vetted set of mods, put in place by the site’s leadership, with the power to overturn martinet decisions.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#106

Post by Eisenstein »

miningape wrote: post #53
ndriscoll wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't the LLM just read the source of the framework to answer questions directly? That's how I do things as a human. Given the appropriate background knowledge (which current LLMs are already extremely capable with), it should be pretty easy to understand what it's doing, and if it's not easy to understand the source, it's probably a bad framework. I don't expect an LLM to have deep inbuilt knowledge of librar…

Because LLMs do not work like that - there's no "understanding" the source and answering questions, it simply "finds" similar results in its training data (matching it with the context) and regurgitates (some part of) it (+ other "noise"). Meaning as technology evolves and does things in novel ways, without explainers annotating it the LLM won't have anything to draw on - reducing the quality of answers. Which brings…

I just downloaded "Degeneration in discriminantal arrangements", by Saito, Takuya from the journal "Advances in applied mathematics" dated November 2025 and fed it to Claude.

It not only explained the math but created a react app to demonstrate it. I'm not that can be explained by regurgitating part of it with noise.

I encourage you to try it with something of your own.

Abstract:

Discriminantal arrangements are hyperplane arrangements that are generalization of braid arrangements. They are con- structed from given hyperplane arrangements, but their com- binatorics are not invariant under combinatorial equivalence. However, it is known that the combinatorics of the discrimi- nantal arrangements are constant on a Zariski open set of the space of hyperplane arrangements. In the present paper, we introduce (T, r)-singularity varieties in the space of hyper- plane arrangements to classify discriminantal arrangements and show that the Zariski open set is the complement of (T, r)-singularity varieties. We study their basic properties and operations and provide examples, including infinite fami- lies of (T, r)-singularity varieties. In particular, the operation that we call degeneration is a powerful tool for constructing (T, r)-singularity varieties. As an application, we provide a list of (T, r)-singularity varieties for spaces of small line ar- rangements.

* https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aam.2025.103001

* https://imgur.com/jjfFNMI.png

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#107

Post by mahirsaid »

The sarcasm and rudeness to rookie questions was unbearable at times. Talking to new comers as if they were stupid. Those new comers become knowledgeable later on and i suspect many did not come back to that platform instead they are on reddit and various other platform where they are welcomed.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#108

Post by jrjeksjd8d »

oceanplexian wrote: post #33
jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #13

Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young p…

I think this is seeing the past with rose tinted glasses, it’s not like SO was on the cutting edge of computer science. The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude.

Most people's problems aren't the cutting edge of computer science. They're "what does this log mean" or "how do I do X in Y framework". These are answers LLMs are great at regurgitating based on a big corpus like Stack Overflow.

As the underlying software evolves the log messages will change and the APIs will change and the answers won't make sense anymore.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#109

Post by jakeydus »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #58
miningape wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because LLMs do not work like that - there's no "understanding" the source and answering questions, it simply "finds" similar results in its training data (matching it with the context) and regurgitates (some part of) it (+ other "noise"). Meaning as technology evolves and does things in novel ways, without explainers annotating it the LLM won't have anything to draw on - reducing the quality of answers. Which brings…

You’re talking about ChatGPT 2.0 and severely underestimate the capabilities of today’s models.

If I make up a riddle and ask an LLM to solve it, it will perform worse than a riddle that is well known and whose solution will be found in the dataset. That's just a foundational component of how they work.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#110

Post by bachmeier »

This topic has been beaten to death, but the defenders of the toxic environment (including the SO founders) have never understood why the environment they promoted killed SO.

It's not because people disliked the rudeness, though that didn't help and was never necessary. It's because the toxicity became the only goal. And the toxicity replaced both accuracy and usefulness.

I wanted to learn web development during the lockdown of 2020. First thing I learned was that SO was completely useless. Everything on there was wrong. Everything was wrong due to incompetent moderation that prevented bad information from being corrected. Everything new marked as a dupe even when the other post was wrong or irrelevant.

That killed SO. It was a decision of the founders and the mods. They took great pride in doing it, too.

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