Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time • Hacker News Board

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#791

Post by wpietri » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #539

gyan wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates. That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't cont…

> That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer…

Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy?

There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created.

What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term.

It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#792

Post by tgv » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #784

johnfn wrote: post #210

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 know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to fi…

Or we just stagnate, as tech no longer can afford to change.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#793

Post by mannykannot » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #305

johnfn wrote: post #210

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 I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were pr…

Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#794

Post by firesteelrain » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #512

eastbound wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality. > 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…

> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. No, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise. If you mean "without writing a direct answer to the new question first", that is the exact point of the system . Literally all you have to do is click the link and read…

[flagged]

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#795

Post by dxdm » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #539

gyan wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates. That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't cont…

> That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer…

I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.

This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first.

The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences.

It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy".

I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#796

Post by malfist » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

gfhifd42 wrote: post #430

malfist wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone with a green username, you sure do have strong opinions about hn

I literally said I've been here longer than someone who has been here since 2013 so you attack my profile age. This is the toxic destruction of hn I'm talking about. You are the toxic one. You offer negative value.

If you meet one asshole on your way to work, they're probably an asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, you're probably the asshole.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#797

Post by noduerme » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

scirob wrote: post #765

wtetzner wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of AI on a site like that? Wouldn't you just ask an LLM directly if you were fine with AI answers?

I and many others already go the extra mile to ask multiple LLM's for hard questions or for getting a diversity of AI opinions to then internalize and cross check myself. There are apps that build up a nice sized user base on this small convenience aded of getting 2 answers at once REF https://lmarena.ai/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/lm-arena-the-organization-... All the major AI companies of course do not want…

I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points.

What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake, as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated.

For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on.

>> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.

Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble.

May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#798

Post by matsemann » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

haddr wrote: post #623

matsemann wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would you share the link to the answer?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20375176/should-i-always...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#799

Post by wavemode » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

nolok wrote: post #776

andomar wrote: post #768

StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable. Instead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This killed the pub and with it the business. The most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old timers took w…

Another exemple being "Comments are not for extended discussion ! if you want to actively bring value by adding information, later updates, history, or just fun that cultivates a community, please leave and go do that somewhere else like our chat that doesn't follow at all the async functionnality of this platform and is limited to the regular userbase while scaring the newcomers."

"comments are not for extended discussion" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided "yeah, let's kill this".

The people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes just letting a community do what it wants (within reasonable boundaries, of course) leads to a better and more successful product than actively trying to steer things in a certain direction.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#800

Post by matsemann » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

fabianholzer wrote: post #589

brabel wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good.

Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?

It's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.

One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever taken part in moderating the review queue, you would've seen the insane amount of low-quality questions flowing in. I saw probably ten variants of "how to center my div" daily being closed as duplicates. The asker might be miffed about getting their question closed (but with a link to a solution..), but if you want to actually get answers to the high quality questions, the noise has to be filtered somehow.

Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners figure out their syntax errors or how to apply a general solution to their specific issue. And you may not like SO for it, but to not want to be a site for that is their prerogative.