We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #101

falcor84 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 questio…

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

When I wrote about the issue on MSE (https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/394952/173477) a couple years ago I explicitly called out that the terminology is not productive. It generally seems to describe dissatisfaction with the user experience that results from a failure to meet the user's expectations; but the entire reason for the conflict is that the user's expectations are not aligned with what the existing community seeks to provide.

And yes, the ambiguity you note has been spammed all over the Internet (everywhere Stack Overflow is discussed) the entire time. Some people are upset about how things are done; others consider what is done to be inherently problematic. And you can't even clearly communicate about this. For example, someone who writes "You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk." might have in mind "don't point people at the policy document as if they should have known better, and don't give specific interpretation as if their reading comprehension is lacking"; but might also have in mind "point people at the policy document, and give specific interpretation, because otherwise there's no way for them to know". Or it might be "say something nice, but don't close the question because that sends the wrong message inherently" (this interpretation is fundamentally misguided and fundamentally misunderstands both the purpose and consequences of question closure).

And yes, every now and then, the person making the complaint actually encountered someone who said something unambiguously nasty. For those cases, there is a flagging system and a Code of Conduct. (But most Code of Conduct violations come from new users complaining when they find out that they aren't entitled to an open, answered question. And that's bad enough that many people don't comment to explain closures specifically to avoid de-anonymizing themselves.)

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

#152

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #46

Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow 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.

> 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.

You are supposed to go to the existing question and post a new answer on it.

Answer approval means almost nothing and should never have been implemented. In the early days it helped experts spread out their attention, as there was an immediate signal that a question had at least one answer good enough for the OP. But there is really no reason to prioritize the OP's opinion like this. (The reputation system has been misaligned with the site's goals in many ways.)

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

#153

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

stackskipton wrote: post #121

j_w wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are bad questions (and ideas, like you said). Stackoverflow tried to incentivize asking good, novel questions. You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case. A good question isn't just "how do I do x in y language?" But something more like "I'm trying to do x in y language. Here's what I've tried: and here is the issue I have . " This does two things: 1. It dem…

I'm reminded of this link: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Biggest thing as someone who has been in Discords that are geared towards support, you can either gear towards new people or professionals but walking the line between both is almost impossible.

I believe in gearing towards teachers. Q&A sites are often at their best when the Q and A come from the same source. But it needs to be someone who understands that the Q is common and can speak the language of those who don't know the A. Unfortunately, not a common skillset (typically doesn't pay the bills).

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

#154

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #126

stackskipton wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though." When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly…

The key part of your post is "has to tell people". Absolutely nobody on SO was obligated to respond to anything. The toxicity was a choice, and those doing it enjoyed it.

No, questions that don't meet the site's standards must be closed as quickly as possible, and it actively harms the site to ignore this duty.

Please read "How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing?" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263), especially my answer (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/425738/523612), and "Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer?" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808).

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

#155

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:43 PM UTC

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…

> To play devil's advocate, I think some people confuse terse, succinct communication with being mean.

I agree completely (this was part of my findings in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/394952/173477).

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

#156

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #115

morsecodist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never ask a question on stack overflow because half the time it seemed to be flagged a dupe or for some other reason and it brought you closer to being disallowed to ask. I actually have answered a good amount of stack overflow questions to get a higher score but the overzealous question shutdowns totally had a chilling effect.

One thing that isn't talked about enough is the impact aggressive moderation had on people answering too. If you were in the New queue, and found a question you could answer, by the time you posted your answer the question itself may have been nuked by mods making your answer/effect not seen by many.

Yes. The problem is that the model was questions open by default, so you had exposure to the question before it could be properly be considered for inclusion. The Staging Ground fixed this, but too little (only applied to a small random sampling of questions) and way too late.

It's considered part of your responsibility, as someone answering questions, to understand the standards for closing questions (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) and the motivations behind those standards, and to skip over (better yet, flag or vote to close) those not meeting those standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808).

You complain, but actually the deck is heavily stacked in your favour: there is a 5-minute grace period on answers; plus you can submit the answer by yourself, regardless of your reputation score, while typical closures (not duplicates and not questions flagged and then seen by someone on the very small moderation team) require three high-rep users (and it used to be five) to agree.

However, the question was not "nuked": the OP gets at least 9 days to fix it and submit for reconsideration before the system deletes it automatically (unless it's so bad that multiple even higher rep users take even further consensus action, on the belief that it fundamentally can't be fixed: see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-a...).

And this overwhelmingly was not done "by mods". It's done by people who acquired significant reputation (of course, this also generally describes the mods), typically by answering many questions.

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

#157

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #75

Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow 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…

Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwe…

> For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run

That was Jeff Atwood. Who said a lot of very interesting things about how the site was explicitly intended to differ from traditional forums where "perfectly good" questions are constantly asked.

> Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay.

This is absurd and I can't think of anything remotely like this happening in practice. The opposite is true: popular questions attract dozens of redundant, low-quality answers that re-state things that were said many years ago, list two different options from two other different previous answers, list a subset of options from some previous answers, describe some personal experience that ultimately led to applying someone else's answer with a trivial modification for personal circumstances unrelated to the actual subject of the question, etc. etc.

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

#158

Post by ChrisArchitect » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #144

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing in the submitted article that isn't part of or significantly different than the large discussion already ongoing/passed. The discussion about toxic community etc. The short blog post is basically just another comment on that greater discussion. The discussion which is already over there. No need to split it up or repeat it again days later. It's a duplicate discussion .

I disagree, and that’s what I value here: you can add your tags, and we can opt to follow or ignore them as we see fit. That’s far better than the SO model of a site participant having the ability to shut down the conversation for everyone. But also, a note: conversations are never finished . People talked about this broad topic yesterday, but I didn’t see it yesterday to be able to weigh in. I’m here today, saw this…

You're welcome to continue the 'unfinished' conversation over there. The thread isn't closed. This article isn't bringing anything new. And yet is forcing the thousands and thousands of HNers who saw the previous main discussion and news days ago to see it again? Sorry you weren't there, sorry you missed it. It's the bringing it up and repeating much of the discussion so soon that's the hinderance. Stuff moves pretty fast around here.

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

#159

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

closewith wrote: post #62

Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow 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…

> StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary…

> Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this.

It always looks like this from the outside. Especially for those who don't understand what the quality standards are, or what the motivations are for having those standards.

There is a Code of Conduct and a flagging system for a reason.

> It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.

This is not a contradiction or rebuttal. Every Internet community is allowed to decide its own objectives. Stack Overflow's was explicitly not "help the question-askers". It was brought into existence specifically because of the social problems, and lack of utility for later searchers, observed in "help the question-asker" environments (i.e., traditional discussion forums). Of course there was an exodus when it was no longer required to bother a human to make a natural-language query find the right information (more or less, most of the time). From Stack Overflow's perspective, that's just an improvement on conventional search, and no more of a problem than the fact that Google used to be good at indexing the site.

(I still don't understand why Firefox spell-check doesn't think "asker" and "answerer" are words. They're not in my /usr/dict/share/words, either. I've been speaking English for over four decades and I still hate it.)

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

#160

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

smallerfish wrote: post #74

simianparrot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think it's not true today, it's just the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

You're claiming 20% of LLM responses are hallucinations, today?

Nowadays when I do a conventional search for information, the results on all sorts of topics are dominated by obviously LLM slop articles trying their hardest to SEO by padding out the page with tons of tangential dreck. When I can actually scroll through and glean the information I'm looking for, it's wrong in at least some subtle technical detail a significant fraction of the time, yes.

And then, the other day someone showed an example of a "how to configure WireGuard" article, padded to hell, in LLM house style, aimlessly wandering... being hosted on the webpage of a industrial company selling products made out of wire meshes.