Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

Post by intended » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

Shog9 wrote: post #456

Aurornis wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor…

There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user in…

Post by haddr » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 10:04 AM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #516

namanyayg wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing questions when I was just starting to learn programming. He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles. He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of progr…

Had a similar experience. Asked a question about a new language feature in java 8 (parallell streams), and one of the language designers (Goetz) answered my question about the intention of how to use it. An LLM couldn't have done the same. Someone would have to ask the question and someone answer it for indexing by the LLM. If we all just ask questions in closed chats, lots of new questions will go unanswered as thos…

Post by ertucetin » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 10:07 AM UTC

Post by wesammikhail » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 10:11 AM UTC

kwakubiney wrote: post #614

0xfaded wrote: post #225

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…

Naive question maybe but how haven’t the models been trained on your answer if it’s on SO?

Post by cubefox » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 10:18 AM UTC

gbear605 wrote: post #381

cubefox wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Re…

Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors.