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What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

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Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#501

Post by wikiiiisksklhll »

dannyw wrote: post #459
maerF0x0 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit. I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes 1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching) 2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use" 3. Progressive un…

In my opinion, the main thing was toxic moderation and the general lack of effort in creating a welcoming or constructive environment. Moderation and community accessibility can exist. I think your points have described the early SO, but moderation has definitely gone downhill as the years went on. I’m not new to communities with their own culture, expectations, and rules. I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and w…

I’ve had the opposite experience with wikipedia and have stopped posting there forever.

My edits at wikipedia, for several different topics, were reverted, for bullshit reasons. One was ”the process here at wikipedia is for edits to be mindlessly reverted, then debated thoroughly, and maybe later rewritten as the mods wants it”. I.e. as a topic expert, just adding information as drive-by is apparently out of the question.

Another reason was adding anything about the future, like information about upcoming, scheduled events, was seen as advertising. It’s of course also not consistently applied across wikipedia but the mods couldn’t care less.

It’s far, far worse than SO. Complaints I’ve seen about SO’s moderation rules have always been to keep assholes away, thank god.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#502

Post by throwaway2037 »

dannyw wrote: post #462
dfabulich wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia's traffic (and donations) are collapsing. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik... People don't like to think of it this way, but Wikipedia is funded by ads. Except, the ads only advertise one thing: requests for donations. If people don't visit Wikipedia, because the AI regurgitated Wikipedia's answers, they won't see Wikipedia's donation ads, and they won't donate. Over time, if cur…

Doesn’t WMF hold hundreds of million and growing on their foundation balance sheet, and raise $150M+/year through donations when hosting expenses are $4M/year? Obviously they need staff and more costs than just hosting, but something isn’t adding up for me, so I stopped donating.

I feel exactly the same. I think I saw a blog post on HN with a deep analysis of their financial state of affairs. They don't need my money. They can run for a long time by (1) reducing unnecessary headcount (the org is way too big) and (2) carefully managing their endowment.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#503

Post by wikiiiisksklhll »

dalyons wrote: post #499
zahlman wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. That's because you were intended to use the site like GP describes, and not by asking simply because you want to know something. > They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. What you consider "minutia" were critically important, because the entire point was to optimize for GP'…

and how did that work out? the site is dead now because of it

So is wikipedia.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#504

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

dfabulich wrote: post #294
lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation. Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise , as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and a…

90% of my over 250k rep is from asking questions.

Surely there's some value to asking a well worded question that many other people also have.

And yes, I've had my share of questions closed for some BS, including many in recent times closing 10 year old questions as dupes. Brilliant.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#505

Post by wikiiiisksklhll »

bombcar wrote: post #443
Viliam1234 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article creation [...] growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. Not just because of that, but they also made the process of creating new articles very hostile. Decades ago, when Wikipedia started, it was possible to create a short article, and as long as no one objected against it, it stayed there, and people could later expand it. That's what "wiki" was s…

The old Wikipedia had more information on obscure Pokemon than major politicians, and you could add PowerThirst as an energy drink and not have it reverted for weeks. There was something good and glorious about that, but that era is gone. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are done, finished, cooked - what comes next?

Q&A sites in the age of LLMs are dead.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#506

Post by wikiiiisksklhll »

bombcar wrote: post #443
Viliam1234 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article creation [...] growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. Not just because of that, but they also made the process of creating new articles very hostile. Decades ago, when Wikipedia started, it was possible to create a short article, and as long as no one objected against it, it stayed there, and people could later expand it. That's what "wiki" was s…

The old Wikipedia had more information on obscure Pokemon than major politicians, and you could add PowerThirst as an energy drink and not have it reverted for weeks. There was something good and glorious about that, but that era is gone. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are done, finished, cooked - what comes next?

Quora had a lot more arrogant mods, but a much shorter peak when it was useful. Now it’s not even worth for AI models to train on its content, it’s even worse than expert-sex-change, the site that was so bad in incentivized SO’s creation.

I still remember when quora was launched and people claimed it was more welcoming for open-ended questions, when it was obvious from day one it was the opposite, extremely hostile to any newcomers. It actually more appeared to be mostly a community of assholes that was expelled from SO.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#507

Post by no-name-here »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #489
inigyou wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ending a question with "thanks" is explicitly forbidden because it is noise.

This sounds similar to the people who think that using normal pleasantries in conversation wastes everybody's time.

SO questions aren't really intended as a messaging or conversation forum - they are closer to a wiki of questions. Wikipedia also doesn't allow pleasantries or signatures in articles either.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#508

Post by no-name-here »

sethops1 wrote: post #382
Noumenon72 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated. This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to…

I put my name on my professional communications.

It depends on the medium - SO is closer to a wiki of questions, and Wikipedia has similar rules against pleasantries or signatures on article pages. (They do allow it on "talk" pages, and SO similarly has less restrictive rules in places other than their primary questions and answers.)

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#509

Post by no-name-here »

masfuerte wrote: post #209
nolok wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.

Yes. There were far too many people with nothing to contribute doing useless (or actively harmful) busywork to earn points.

Are you referring to edits? If so, I haven't seen that, and certainly not as a notable issue on the site. Instead, I think I saw closer to the opposite - edits to questions or answers that fixed typos, pointed out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#510

Post by Too »

Even without AI, a large part is also that everything easy and relevant has already been asked and answered. 10 years ago, there was still demand for low hanging ”how do I reverse a string in programming language X”. On top of that, languages and libraries today tend to have a lot better documentation.

What’s left to ask now is ”plx fix my homework” - [pastes error log unique to the posters environment]. Something that Claude is very good and very tolerant at.

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