Stack Overflow is almost dead

Everyone is blaming AI, and it's undoubtedly a factor.

But also, the culture of Stack Overflow has changed significantly over the years. It used to be a place where anyone could ask a question and get help with a problem ... and it was amazing.

Today, you're far more likely to have your question downvoted, flagged as a duplicate (of an unrelated question), or attacked in the comments by overzealous responders (and once that happens, good luck on actually getting help). Your odds of actually getting help on the site are only a fraction of what they once were.

And I'm not just saying this as some SO newbie: I've been using the site since beta! As someone who has used it that long, the change in quality is undeniable.

The short version: Stack Overflow was always, explicitly intended to be the site that you think "went wrong", and is made so by a community that actively discusses policy (and gives detailed reasoning) in the open - not by its tiny, overwhelmed moderation team. There is abundant historical documentation of this, but it took time for that intent to be explained coherently and the site initially grew far faster than it could be properly gatekept. This was aided by a broken and ill-conceived reputation system that never got the rethinking it needs, even after overall feedback was finally explicitly solicited in 2023. It was also aided by several naive ideas about human nature and incentive systems in general.

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Again, the people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.

I have the view of a curator - an informal role that anyone can adopt by simply reading the meta site, understanding policy, and trying to help out with the process. Granted, it takes 3000 reputation to cast close votes, but anyone can submit edits, and it only takes 5 reputation to participate in meta (waived if it's about your own question being closed), 15 reputation to flag posts, and 50 to comment (and explain what's wrong with a question).

You say you have 100k reputation there. That's more than me. Yet I take all the actions you complain about, and have at times been very active doing so (for example, I added or moved hundreds of duplicate links to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 , and have gone weeks at a time running out of daily close votes). I'm not a mod.

There are 29 million user accounts, of which about 100k may cast close votes. There are 24 moderators.

Questions are in fact much too hard to close. Three separate people - who, by the above stats, are outnumbered almost 300:1 by those entitled to post answers - must agree. The purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from being answered until it meets standards; questions that could in principle meet standards are supposed to get fixed. But anyone can come along and just post whatever in the answer section; getting that deleted (answers can't be "closed" separately) is even harder; and the presence of that answer causes further problems.

The primary reason questions rarely get reopened is because closed questions overwhelmingly come from new users who don't care in the slightest about any of the process or goals, don't read the information that's given to them about what has happened, and thus never make any attempt to fix the question. (They may do this indefinitely, even after "deletion", by the way - and are expected to do so rather than reposting.)

What you think of as "normal users" aren't the ones who should get to decide what the site is or how it works. How people want an already existing site with 16 years of history to work is completely irrelevant. The fact that people have wanted it to work that way for 16 years is also irrelevant given that a) there are countless places already on the Internet that do work that way that they could use instead; b) they have been getting told off all that time, with varying degrees of tact and sophistication.

If people started trying to use actual Wikipedia as a Q&A forum, it would be correct for them to be shut down no matter how many people wanted to do that. I get that people's views on immigration vary a fair bit around here, but I imagine you'd agree that immigrants shouldn't get to write new laws for a country when they arrive.

Stack Overflow, and every Stack Exchange site, is not a forum, by design. The classic explanation of this (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 ; especially see Robert Cartaino's answer) was originally drafted in 2011. Since it is not a forum, it is not a Q&A forum. It is a Q&A site, and people asking questions have always been expected to have a question that meets standards so that others can benefit from it. Of course, those standards have changed over time - as the community started to recognize patterns in questions that were causing a distraction and not helping to build up something useful. But it has always been with the fundamental motivation and understanding: look at what happens on traditional discussion forums; understand what's frustrating about trying to find or contribute information in that environment; be something else.

> Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify.

There's another common misconception here - one which I held myself for years, and one which the community expressed for years in poorly-conceived close reasons that eventually got fixed. Or you could say: over time, we realized that something didn't work right for the purpose.

As you say, you can't easily evaluate or quantify that research simply by looking at the question. But that's exactly why it doesn't actually matter: because it isn't seen in a properly written question.

The purpose of the research is not to earn the right to ask a question. The purpose, rather, is to optimize the question for the format. If the question meets standards, it meets standards; doing the research is a means to that end, and it's only "expected" because it's usually necessary.

So, for example, if your code doesn't work, you're expected to do your own debugging first, until you find the part that actually causes a problem that you don't know how to fix. And then you're expected to not talk about that debugging process, and not show irrelevant detail from your code. Instead, isolate non-working code as best you can manage into a MCVE, SSCCE or whatever else you like to call it (our documentation includes advice: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), and talk about the example, directly.

>Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate... has been both frustrating and disheartening

Why? Someone just directly pointed you at an already existing answer. You got helped even faster than if someone had to write that answer from scratch. Which is a big part of the point.

Yes, that does mean that you need to apply an explanation of the same problem from an abstracted context, to your specific need. But that was supposed to be part of the expectation anyway. Because we aren't interested in the problem that motivated you to ask - you are not required to have actually had a problem at all, in fact. We're interested in having a question whose answer can help everyone in a similar situation.

But we don't provide a discussion forum, help desk, or debugging service.

> (with seemingly little recourse)

As it happens, I once asked a question that was closed as a duplicate. Here's the advice I'm still shown if I go back and look, in the blue banner at the top:

> This question already has an answer here: (link to the other question)

> Your post has been associated with a similar question. If that question doesn’t answer your issue, edit your question to highlight the difference between the associated question and yours. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.

"Edit your question" is linked to https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-edit... .

> Find out more about duplicates and why your question has been closed.

Links:

https://stackoverflow.com/help/duplicates https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions

Note that even the moderators don't get to control this form message - they can at most petition the company staff for a change. The "closed-questions" link tells me about the close reasons in a fair amount of detail, and eventually links to "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/help/reopen-questions), which also mentions the option of taking the matter to the meta site.

If I were to edit the question, the form now has a checkbox to "Submit for review", with additional popup help including a link to https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-reopen . As described in the above documentation links, the question would be put in a review queue, giving it more attention for those who can cast reopen votes.

(The reveal: actually, I closed it myself, using my gold-badge privileges - either I eventually found what I couldn't before asking, or someone pointed it out to me in a chatroom or something. The title for the Q&A I wanted was reasonable, but very different from the title I came up with. So now it's easier to find.)

It's not my responsibility, as a Stack Overflow user, to make Stack Overflow a site that gets lots of users posting and viewing lots of content.

It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish.

I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing morally wrong here. It's fine if people think I'm "hostile" because I politely tell them what they aren't supposed to do while they think they should be entitled to do it anyway, because them doing it actively harms things I actually care about.

I disagree with the choice of "aggressive", though. This is a purely defensive posture.

Stack Overflow has a community which is trying to create something useful and is not trying to cause harm to anyone. As such, that community is entitled to have and pursue goals that aren't aligned with those of others, and should not be expected to change those goals simply because other people don't share them, or because they want to use Stack Overflow's time, space and other resources to do something different.

That community is a separate entity from the company (Stack Exchange, Inc.). The community owes nothing to the company, as it has been paid nothing, and is exploited to drive traffic and ad revenue while their content feeds AI.

>They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions"

Because they have not shown that they understand what a good question is, or what the standards are. Or because they presume that they are the ones who should get to say what makes a question good or not.

>you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".

????? I said nothing of the sort.

>other than "we are great".

This, too, is your wording, not mine.

But, again. Show concrete examples in a suitable manner, or there is nothing to discuss.