What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

But we weren't, and it wasn't.

People were overwhelmingly trying to be polite and factual about what needed to happen for a question to be reopened, the entire time I tried using the site. The yelling and cursing overwhelmingly came from people who imagined that they were entitled to do things that were explicitly against policy, simply because of UI affordances.

We are not the ones who created those UI affordances. We had no control over any detail of the reputation system or the review queues. We had no way to show you the things you needed to read except to link them to you, and we were constantly confronted by people who interpreted any kind of hyperlink to policy in a discussion as inherently rude. We had no control over the onboarding flows that failed to show those things to you. The only access we had was to produce a mini-faq (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251225) out of Q&A on the meta site (which really should not itself have used the Q&A format IMO, but that is also something that was completely out of our control).

And for the cases where people got out of line, there was a flagging system all over the place and moderators who took complaints seriously; and there was also a meta site where people could come to have policy explained in more detail. But it was genuinely rare that people who actually knew better, actually got out of line.

It was far more common for people to complain loudly that they were hard done by because someone downvoted their question (which genuinely merited it, per the purpose of downvotes on the site) and didn't leave a detailed comment explaining why (which is not an expectation ever imposed on Redditors or anyone else, and is an action protected by policy because i) there's hovertext on the down arrow summarizing the general reasons for using it; ii) people who leave those comments often get abusive replies). Or to complain that they were hard done by because their question was closed for being "too easy" (which is not why it was actually closed; an actual closure reason was explicitly labelled in the interface, but a more accurate summary of the typical close reason is "you've identified the symptoms of a problem in your code, but thus far you have not actually distilled this to a question; you just want someone else to make your code work again"). Or to complain that someone had the sheer audacity to pick through a problem description, isolate a single apparent cause, recognize that beginners encounter that issue constantly, and provide an immediate link for free to the existing "canonical" Q&A for it. (After all, why should they have to adapt code that was written against some other abstract example reconstruction of the problem, to their own code? Why should they have to figure out how that pattern applies to their hundred-line code dump, and where?)

> Your perspective, frankly, doesn't matter. It won't rehabilitate the reputation of SO. I'm sorry this hurts as you've obviously invested a lot of time there.

You don't understand. I am not trying to rehabilitate the reputation of SO.

I am trying to rehabilitate the reputation of the Q&A site format.

And I am trying to get people to stop slandering me and other people I made friends with and cared about. In particular, to stop ascribing false and hurtful motivations, and to have some empathy for what we put up with, and to consider the possibility that what we were trying to accomplish might actually be a worthwhile thing to accomplish that serious people might actually genuinely care about.

When people talk about SO, overwhelmingly they talk about me and my friends. And they repeatedly incorrectly describe me and my friends as "moderators", which comes across as sheer apathy.

Of course my perspective matters to how people are treating me on the Internet based on their perception of things that I did.

> Sites die when the experience isn't something end users enjoy.

I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall here. The site was constantly full of people who were fundamentally not apparently interested in the site's goals, not apparently interested in joining or understanding the existing community, not apparently interested in anything but the service they incorrectly believed the site was there to provide. And the constant implication of this discussion — because it always boils down to "the site died and people hated it and hate you and that's bad and reflects badly on you" — is that I'm somehow supposed to feel bad about the fact that they eventually figured out they were in the wrong place and left. (Or perhaps more accurately: LLMs finally provided they place they really wanted to be the whole time; before that, some made do with Reddit I guess.) After I went out of my way to keep my cool volunteering my time against an unending horde, knowing that attempts to "correct the record" off-site would be at best sneered at.

No, I don't feel bad about that. Because feeling bad about that is logically equivalent to rejecting the right of self-determination that you just acknowledged.

Er... yes.jpg ?

You seem to be under the impression that I'm trying to defend all the site's design choices. I'm not. I'm trying to defend a community that did the best it could with what they were given, after all sorts of requests were repeatedly ignored or denied (or preemptively judged unreasonable and not even made) and then new ownership came in and tried to force an unending torrent of even worse ideas on us, even undoing the few things we actually liked about the design.

> The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.

Again, qualification in the subject matter is entirely orthogonal to understanding of what the site is trying to accomplish, what the policies are, and how those policies were designed to align with the objectives.

That was the part we did have control over. But we were making a good faith effort to carry forward the oral tradition of Atwood and Spolsky's vision.

Grow up.

It's not lawyering. I'm extremely well aware of the impedance mismatch. It wasn't created by the community. It was created by the site software failing to align with the site's goals.

> in the minds of the vast majority of people who knew about it, it was a site to ask questions about relatively obscure topics, and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge.

Well, no. "The vast majority of people who knew about it" were asking beginner-level questions, as is to be expected, because every field of human endeavour is full of neophytes. They believed their questions to be obscure due to a lack of expertise. They often were obscure; not because of the subject matter but because of a lack of attempt to debug the code (and, often, a lack of general awareness of the concept of debugging). And they were often not coherent questions at all, or else they were multiple questions arising from multiple problems with the same code sample.

But it was a site to ask questions and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge. That is not even slightly inconsistent with anything I've said here.

The problem is, "this is a place to ask and answer questions" is not the same thing as "this is a place to show what's causing you a problem and get someone to help you, specifically" and also not the same thing as "this is a place to help people solve their problems one-on-one".

> You make it sound like users were supposed to consider using the site as their primary goal, and consider the subject at hand as secondary.

Yes, because they were. Just like they are on every other website, e.g. this one. When people come to HN and post things that are counter to the guidelines, other community members use downvotes, flags and polite replies (and, in some cases, emails to the site staff) to address the issue. This much is obvious and I don't understand how it can be a point of contention.

> If you read what people were saying here in good faith (or really what damn near everyone outside of that insular community has said about it for like a decade and a half) you’d realize that you are in the extreme minority.

I have been reading it for most of that decade and a half. I have been flooded with it again and again and again. I literally cannot find an off-site discussion of Stack Overflow that isn't full of it. I am intimately familiar with the argument, and you have said nothing new here.

What I have said over and over again, which everyone outside "the extreme minority" seems unwilling to accept, is that this does not matter. If people come to a place and don't care about how things work in that place, the place is not in any way obligated to change to accommodate them. The people should leave of their own accord, and they should accept that they misunderstood the place, and accept that the place has a right to sovereignty, and find a different place that does work the way they want.

There were countless places that did work the way the typical new SO user wanted. SO existed specifically because of a belief that those places are incapable of producing a useful knowledge base, and cause experts to burn out on repeating basic advice. (SO use patterns demonstrated to me that actually there are more than enough people around who are happy to repeat basic advice and operate a free help desk for beginners; if they get upset, it's because the beginners still fail to understand things after they were explained. But those people were actively interfering with the site's objectives. They were far more destructive than any beginner could ever be.)

> And there are a hundred billion ways it could have pimped its best questions to Google without having the layer of obnoxious, arrogant people playing question police.

You had over a decade and a half to try proposing some on meta.

> Yes, the points system was a mess because of the way it made people behave.

Specifically, it enabled the people I describe in the above parenthetical, yes. But you present this argument as if you think people were downvoting and closing questions, and otherwise trying to uphold policy, in order to gain reputation points.

That is the literal exact opposite of how the system worked. You got reputation for basically everything else, which then enabled you to take those actions. You got 0 reputation for voting to close something, or for "dupe-hammering" it with that specific privilege. You got either 0 or -1 reputation for downvoting something.

You could potentially get 2 reputation points for editing something, if you didn't already have unilateral edit privileges and your edit was accepted (and because the people who could accept your edit could also edit unilaterally, and were doing all of this specifically to try to make the site better by getting good edits in place ASAP, they were therefore incentivized not to give you that reputation.) Plus there was a cap on total reputation you could get that way; you still had to ask and answer questions to reach the unilateral edit privilege.

By contrast, you got +25 for an upvote and accept-mark on an answer, no matter how clearly the question violated site guidelines; versus -2 from an annoyed curator downvoting you for not understanding that you weren't supposed to answer the question and were supposed to help close it instead. (Plus you got a five minute window to post if you'd started, even if the question got closed immediately. Plus you could do this unilaterally while three curators would have to agree to close except for duplicates. Plus only a small fraction of the userbase could cast close votes, while everyone could answer.)

> There could have been a much greater barrier to being able to meddle with other people’s words but there wasn’t.

That would have been an actively bad thing. The editing was by well-considered design, specifically to make the site better. The edits people complain about overwhelmingly do, objectively, obviously make the site better and I'm frankly tired of trying to explain the obvious. I have, over and over, for years, tried to point people at the policy explaining this. Nobody ever even tries to engage with it.

You may have noticed that Wikipedia frowns on signatures on main-space pages, and expects citations for claims, for example. SO policy is roughly analogous.

> If preponderance of users were really enamored with the community and governance and rules and site structure and all of that shit, rather than it simple having information on obscure topics and issues where you could get a question answered by someone who knew what they were talking about, then everybody wouldn’t have jumped ship literally the moment they had an alternative.

Nobody ever tried to say they were, certainly not me.

What I'm saying is that the people who didn't understand this stuff, shouldn't have been there in the first place. Because simply getting questions answered is not how you build a useful Q&A reference, and that is what the creators of the site wanted to have. Which is amply demonstrated by looking at a random sampling of questions (you can do this yourself on data.stackexchange.com with an SQL query, if you like).

I am genuinely happy they found the alternative(s) they wanted the whole time, and should have been using the whole time (well, as they became available).