491–500 of 1001 posts
They had pretty neat infra, maybe it still runs in the same clever way. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...
https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-sa...
Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have h…
> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.
This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new (for example after a library change) and marking it as duplicate of an unanswered answer if a guarantee that the next SEO user won’t see it.
Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers. I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.
When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.
The value proposition is getting an answer to a question that is useful to a reasonably broad audience. That very often means a question that someone else asked, the answer to which is useful to you. It is not getting an "answer" to a "question" where an individual dumps some code trying to figure out what's wrong.
Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…
As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state. But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute po…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yuck. I don't know if it's just me, but something feels completely off about the GH issue tracker. I don't know if it's the spacing, the formatting, or what, but each time it feels like it's actively trying to shoo me away. It's whatever the visual language equivalent of "low signal" is.
Still gh issues are better than some random discord server. The fact that forums got replaced by discord for "support" is a net loss for humanity, as discord is not searchable (to my knowledge). So instead of a forum where someone asks a question and you get n answers, you have to visit the discord, and talk to the discord people, and join a wave channel first, hope the people are there, hope the person that knows is…
LLMs have definitely accelerated Stackoverflow's demise though. No question about that. Also makes me wonder if discord has a licensing deal with any of the large LLM players. If they don't then I can't imagine that will last for long. It will eventually just become too lucrative for them to say no if it hasn't already.
EDIT: I'm not saying I'm loving what happened and what is becoming of our roles and careers, I'm just saying things have changed forever; there's still a (shrinking) minority of people who seem to not be convinced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably about https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336526/stack-overfl... and the ensuing shitstorm
Nah. Farther back in time and psychologically deeper. Its in my, very short, comment history. They told their community their motivation was to combat the selfish monetization of digital sharecroppers and then they monetized their digital sharecroppers. They are frauds and eventually frauds are exposed and they exposed themselves for $1.8billion. And SO it collapsed. But thanks for speaking for me. Albeit incorrectly…
The selling of SO itself is no evidence that they’re actually making the experience worse.
You’re making bold claims of them being frauds, selling out the community, etc but provide nothing to support these claims.
I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…