We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole • Hacker News Board

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#81

Post by smithkl42 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

smithkl42 wrote: post #44

I can only speak for myself, but I very much resonate with this. I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself. For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that arou…

If you're interested, a perfect example would be this question here ("should I enable application insights profiling on production Azure web apps"):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77855606/should-we-enabl...

That's an interesting question! It's a question that real programmers might want to have answers to! And I had a very specific answer, based on real-world experience and data. But the question got closed as being off-topic.

Shrug. They get to make the site they want. It doesn't mean it's the site folks want to visit.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#82

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

akpa1 wrote: post #48

I really don't like this sentiment: > "Because I can get an answer from an LLM (which does need to be verified) in less than a minute versus the hours or days I would have to wait to get a toxic and potentially useless reply on stackoverflow. They should really downsize or just kill the company it’s a relic of the past and most developers won’t miss it." To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask…

> To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered.

What made SO no longer useful to me, though, is that far too many of the existing answers are either obsolete or incorrect.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#83

Post by phoronixrly » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #67

brigade wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.

I question the "failed" here. You did land on their pages, after all. You most probably also clicked on an internal link and moved to another of their pages, and then bounced off.

Man, what a perverted definition of success... They failed in being useful to the end users, but they damned sure made their engagement KPI look good, and also got a few ad impressions on the way.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#84

Post by ACS_Solver » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #55

This may be a controversial take based on the last few years of SO discourse, but the strictness in SO was part of what made it a good resource. For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise. For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits. I'…

StackOverflow was great because it's not like a support forum or a mailing list. It's more like a repository of knowledge. It's been extremely helpful to me when arriving from Google, and I've gotten a couple useful responses to my own questions either. Awesome resource.

Where SO started failing in my opinion is when the "no duplicate questions" rule started to be interpreted as "it's a duplicate if the same or very similar question has ever been answered on the site". That caused too many questions to have outdated answers as the tech changes, best practices change and so on. C# questions have answers that were current for .NET Core 1.0 and should be modified. I have little webdev experience but I know JS has changed rapidly and significantly, so 2012 answers to JS questions are likely not good now.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#85

Post by NiloCK » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

Eisenstein wrote: post #61

lanyard-textile wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, us of course. The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data. Did the user commit the final answer? What changes were made before they did?

> The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data. Does Claude code copy your repository onto its server?

I do not know whether I'm misinterpreting this comment but:

Yes, the context from working sessions moves over the wire - claude "the model" doesn't work inside the CLI on your machine - it's an API service that the cli wraps.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#86

Post by phoronixrly » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…

> Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds

Mindless stackoverflow copy-pasting was a scourge of the programming world before. I can't imagine the same low quality stackoverflow answers mashed into slop being the best of any world...

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#87

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

ronbenton wrote: post #40

Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…

I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.

[deleted]

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#88

Post by Groxx » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #75

Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…

Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwe…

Fully agreed with your reason for leaving, but I'll throw in: it's absolutely terrible at showing time relevant information, seemingly on the theory that someone will dedup and edit every question and answer as it becomes history rather than helpful.

That became more and more clear as the site and content aged, and afaict they have done absolutely nothing to address it. So after a few years the site had good information... but often only if you had accidentally time traveled.

I had FAR too many cases where the correct answer now was much further down the page, and the highest rated (and correct at the time) answer was causing damage, and editing it to fix that would often be undone unless it was super obvious (if I even could). It shifted the site from "the most useful" to "everything still needs to be double checked off-site" and at that point any web search is roughly equivalent. And when it's not a destination for answers, it's not a destination for questions (or moderation) either.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#89

Post by morsecodist » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…

I would never ask a question on stack overflow because half the time it seemed to be flagged a dupe or for some other reason and it brought you closer to being disallowed to ask. I actually have answered a good amount of stack overflow questions to get a higher score but the overzealous question shutdowns totally had a chilling effect.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#90

Post by kstrauser » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #79

brigade wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.

> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.

Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves.

Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-question website, but the graph of people willing to do so over time looks a lot like their traffic graph.