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Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

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Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#251

Post by firesteelrain »

MrZander wrote: post #226
crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

While there were many zealots that gave SO this reputation, I don't know if that's the reason it died. As someone who frequently answered questions in the 'New' queue, the sheer amount of rule breaking, low effort, and obvious duplicates was astounding. I eventually quit answering questions because 99% of them were not worth interacting with. Just vote close and move on. Ultimately, I think SO is dead because it got…

Well there are new users all the time and can’t expect them to now all of the in’s and out’s of the rules while posted there are still hidden rules. It’s become a toxic site.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#253

Post by saalweachter »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #225
saalweachter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero. You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing t…

I wonder what stage of the loop HN finds itself in.

So the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?"

For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property does.

For others -- which I think HN falls into -- it's just word of mouth about a cool place to hang out, so it will die when there's a cooler place to hang out.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#256

Post by oh_my_goodness »

kstrauser wrote: post #180
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We"?

Yes. There's a whole book explaining what enshittification means, and it's not merely "gets worse".

Glad to hear about the book. I'll check it out. It would be interesting to read the author's opinions.

Otherwise I don't understand (yet) what point you're making. Who claimed that S.O. "merely got worse?" I see a discussion with many more specifics than that. One commenter in this thread mentioned griefing users. That's a familiar artifact of enshittification. (The white boxes covering up Google Maps, for example. Or the way Quora destroyed its own site in a quest to "improve questions".)

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#257

Post by [deleted] »

antasvara wrote: post #190
mandevil wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user. So why does that mean tha…

Perfectly said. To extend this, the eventual problem is that you eventually lose all of your new users, which means you lose the extremely valuable intermediate users (ones that know enough to ask complex questions, but not so much that they can figure out the answer).

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#258

Post by mathattack »

lokar wrote: post #183
mathattack wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years” It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.

And some (Broadcom) see a product in decline, but with some amount of stickiness/lock-in. They cut R&D and extract value as it withers away.

Yes. And gut support too. The only consolation is that the software still exists.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#259

Post by MrZander »

casey2 wrote: post #247
MrZander wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there were many zealots that gave SO this reputation, I don't know if that's the reason it died. As someone who frequently answered questions in the 'New' queue, the sheer amount of rule breaking, low effort, and obvious duplicates was astounding. I eventually quit answering questions because 99% of them were not worth interacting with. Just vote close and move on. Ultimately, I think SO is dead because it got…

You sound exactly like an enforcer of the cultural problem the GP was talking about. Group think is healthy in small doses, but overdo it and it kills the group. It's simply not on a new user to understand whatever group interpretation you have made up on top of the written rules. There is no platonic ideal of a good question, the project was doomed from the start if people take that idea seriously. The UX says submi…

When I say "low effort", I don't mean "not perfect". I was quite lax actually as I understood how annoying some users were when I asked my own questions.

I'm taking about entirely unreadable posts (not English, or just nonsensical) or posts that were very clearly a copy paste homework question with no code.

I helped hundreds of people of all skill levels for free, simply because I found it enjoyable. I quit when it stopped being enjoyable. It stopped being enjoyable when the quality of question declined to 99% garbage.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#260

Post by aucisson_masque »

xtracto wrote: post #182
aucisson_masque wrote: post #176

> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models. What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ? Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need dat…

Within a couple of years, LLMs or equivalent AI engines will have the ability to generate factual knowledge themselves using their "outdated" knowledge and their reasoning mechanisms. For example, one of the classical requests from S.O. questions and GitHub issues is a "minimal reproducible example " of the question/problem. So a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write that, run it, see the issue , go to the l…

There have been studies where an ai that feed on its own data become dumber and dumber. I don't think it's just going to 'generate factual knowledge' Ad vitam æternam.
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