by Jerry2 on 5/15/25, 8:41 PM with 276 comments
by louison11 on 5/15/25, 9:30 PM
by irrational on 5/15/25, 10:07 PM
I also felt around that time that it became unwelcoming. I didn’t realize they had revamped the moderator tools. That is the time period when I stopped using it too. Now I know why.
How many other websites have also shot themselves in the foot by tweaking things?
by Funes- on 5/15/25, 10:16 PM
by palata on 5/15/25, 9:23 PM
Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
by billy99k on 5/15/25, 8:44 PM
As far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven't even gone to the site for a couple of years now.
by panstromek on 5/15/25, 9:22 PM
Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
by oliwarner on 5/15/25, 10:18 PM
Stack Exchange sites are designed to nuke duplicates, help people before they post a new question. It seems a natural conclusion that the number of original questions decreases over time.
I won't pretend that some people live their lives inside and LLM but many of us still use search engines and SO.
by outcoldman on 5/16/25, 4:35 AM
Looking at my profile since 14 years ago, the most upvoted answer that I solved was about a basic question of how to specify fields properly when you serialize JSON into a C# class.
I do believe the value of StackOverflow was only about people who were lazy enough to read the documentation of the language/framework they were trying to use. I used to be active on StackOverflow back in the days, but in the last 10 years the only value I saw in it was if I needed to get back to some language to just find an answer on how to write a for loop in that specific language (swift vs go vs ...).
I personally do not believe there is much knowledge base on StackOverflow. In most of my questions to "google" for the last 10 years, very rarely would I be directed to StackOverflow for the right answer.
There are a lot of complicated questions on StackOverflow, but the site was flooded by people asking and answering basic questions about programming. And people who are there just to get some karma.
by simonsarris on 5/16/25, 12:37 AM
There was a belief, sometimes unstated but often explicit, that no more (serious) discussion is really to be had, and further wondering how can one stop people from asking. It became difficult to discuss anything if there was even something vaguely related asked before. It was not possible to discuss something you knew the answer to, but did not know why, or wanted to hear arguments for which of 5 ways might be best. All (to me) very worthwhile technical discussions. Totally shut down.
by Buttons840 on 5/15/25, 10:22 PM
No Boilerplate recently said "writing is thinking"[0], and suggested links are the ultimate knowledge graph organizational tool--not tags, not folders--links[1].
StackOverflow tried to prevent all duplicate questions. This was stifling and reduced writing, reduced thought, and most importantly, reduced user engagement.
The people who wanted to write their problems and ask their questions stopped going to StackOverflow. The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow.
Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over. Let the people write their questions, and write their answers and give advice. Instead of preventing duplicates, link duplicate questions together.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqm4-B07LsE [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0yAy2j-9V0
by deepsummer on 5/16/25, 6:47 AM
Certainly LLMs are a huge factor, but I feel that LLMs rarely give good (and trustworthy!) answers to the things I would check on Stackoverflow. Just like LLMs are no good replacement for API references because they get the details wrong all the time.
by bfung on 5/15/25, 9:27 PM
by exsomet on 5/15/25, 10:05 PM
LLMs probably sped things up, but it seems like it was inevitable that it would fall into disuse and eventually be overtaken one way or another.
by DoctorMckay101 on 5/16/25, 8:19 AM
Really aggressive moderation, people trying to score points for a worthless achievement system by spamming comments like "You should narrow the scope of this question"
Having to grind achievements to be able to comment, like or dislike.
I used it for a year or so back in 2013?, went back to posting in forums like XDA developers, Codeguru and Reddit.
by OutOfHere on 5/15/25, 10:17 PM
Let's say for the sake of argument that 95% of humanity perished. Is humanity then dead? It isn't.
by dbg31415 on 5/15/25, 10:00 PM
Hey, if it all crashes and burns, at least it’s the so-called smartest guys in the room going down with the ship. Just a bunch of VCs learning the hard way that they had no idea how to actually run or grow the company they bought. “Look at how well we optimized it!” Yeah — right into the ground.
by croemer on 5/16/25, 7:50 AM
For community viability: people will keep using it where LLMs fail. For new problems. It's still the place to go for undocumented workarounds.
Traffic and voting activity is certainly down but there is still immense value and new valuable questions are asked and answered there.
by gabrielhidasy on 5/16/25, 1:04 PM
Feels natural that after 16 years of refinements, most normal questions are already there. I use it every week, but can count on one hand the number of questions I asked (0 through my account) over 12 years of having an account. ~All my questions were already asked.
by williamDafoe on 5/18/25, 11:55 AM
Now ChatGPT for SO is a Band-Aid on top of a Band-Aid on top of a mistake!
I really don't believe in the elitist policy to qualify for being able to answer stack overflow questions ... Whenever I have a better answer than all the existing ones stack overflow says I'm not qualified to answer so shut up! To hell with SO - I answer more questions at my company than anybody else and SO is run by elitst fools ...
by bloppe on 5/15/25, 10:16 PM
Maybe the future involves LLMs asking questions on something like SO when it routinely fumbles a particular topic. People could get paid to answer them and provide more training data. Who knows at this point
by kurtis_reed on 5/16/25, 12:58 AM
If it were up to me, moderation would have been overhauled. But it wasn't up to me.
by scubadude on 5/15/25, 11:53 PM
The best thing about SO is seeing the competing solutions, the discussions, meaning with some discernment you can find that peer-reviewed high quality code snippet. Why would people prefer whatever the AI spits out?
Fortunately I see a few blips on SO so hopefully people are coming back now that the shine has worn off AI.
What is the value of SO to the world economy? Billions. Like the internet archive, it should be some sort of government funded (UN?) library
by Fire-Dragon-DoL on 5/23/25, 3:07 PM
I had to resort to reddit to ask those questions, which is ironic given the focus of SO.
by benoau on 5/15/25, 9:57 PM
And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don't recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.
by ndneighbor on 5/15/25, 10:13 PM
It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I noticed that SO started getting more strict from 2014 onward, I wouldn't know immediately what to do about the content quality issue.
My take is that, like most things, the medium of the old will be appreciated the way it wasn't in 2014. As the Brian Eno quote goes: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." People will yearn for the human forums the same way they did years past when people tire of the LLM slop. (If they do.)
by asadm on 5/15/25, 10:06 PM
by h4kunamata on 5/16/25, 12:23 AM
It has helped me in the past but yet, I could not reply nor post anything back to help others when I knew the solution because of the way how it works.
To make matters worse while working in IT, I worked with a guy that didn't know anything, if there was no SO post about the problem, the guy couldn't fix the problem.
I have been using Perplexity AI and it has been awesome, and it does provide all the sources it used making it easy to cross check the answers. It has helped me to speed my python learning curve, I am not using search engine anymore, and SO has the problems mentioned above so I have zero interest in using it.
Also, the website layout is a mess, I have to use uBlock Origin with a ton of element picker to stop loading half of its crappy.
by acyou on 5/15/25, 10:05 PM
I'm pretty sure you can get a stack overflowy experience out of an llm with the right system prompt, but the human factor might not be the same. Not wanting to be berated by others on the internet is maybe underrated as a motivational tool. How are we going to get that back?
by IvyMike on 5/15/25, 9:40 PM
by koakuma-chan on 5/15/25, 9:54 PM
by AdamH12113 on 5/15/25, 9:46 PM
by mschuster91 on 5/15/25, 9:48 PM
I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.
Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don't waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.
> I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.
Yeah fuuuuck that. It's so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can't pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA/Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.
by Cymatickot on 5/16/25, 9:42 AM
In short before we Ctrl+Copy our way to StackOverflow or Forums or IRC and we got collection of responses between good and ugly. But made us think and read or talk to others.
Now we Ctrl+Copy into LLM into a room of hell.
If LLM function is useful but don't get addicted to like honey.
by dubeye on 5/15/25, 10:56 PM
I'm assuming the owners of stack felt similar? Don't know anything about them so could be easily wrong
by spjt on 5/16/25, 11:07 AM
Still, it may find its place as a last resort.
by Gee101 on 5/15/25, 9:17 PM
I wonder what developers started using during that time.
by croemer on 5/16/25, 2:12 PM
by coolius on 5/15/25, 9:57 PM
by CyberMacGyver on 5/15/25, 9:52 PM
[0] https://openai.com/index/api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...
by ghaff on 5/15/25, 10:50 PM
by tom_m on 5/17/25, 8:26 PM
How will technology advance without research sharing?
by jarek83 on 5/16/25, 5:34 PM
by gitgud on 5/15/25, 10:01 PM
Something like 1000x more views than posts/comments… I wonder if that statistic has changed over the years?…
by marjipan200 on 5/18/25, 7:59 AM
by hungryhobbit on 5/16/25, 3:28 PM
But also, the culture of Stack Overflow has changed significantly over the years. It used to be a place where anyone could ask a question and get help with a problem ... and it was amazing.
Today, you're far more likely to have your question downvoted, flagged as a duplicate (of an unrelated question), or attacked in the comments by overzealous responders (and once that happens, good luck on actually getting help). Your odds of actually getting help on the site are only a fraction of what they once were.
And I'm not just saying this as some SO newbie: I've been using the site since beta! As someone who has used it that long, the change in quality is undeniable.
by cranberryturkey on 5/15/25, 9:53 PM
by hnlurker22 on 5/15/25, 9:53 PM
by fullstackchris on 5/15/25, 9:46 PM
unless LLMs can be instantly trained on all new software frameworks and languages that come out, im not worried stackoverflow will still have a place
by cadamsdotcom on 5/15/25, 11:12 PM
Some get superseded.
Others accelerate their decline through self-foot-shooting and/or enshittification.
Stack Overflow's journey into obscurity is via a mix of private equity indifference, better docs elsewhere, and a lack of leadership over its moderators. It was in decline long before LLMs.
It is not a new story - but it does help map out the modes of platform senescence.
Wasn't the first; won't be the last.
by 28304283409234 on 5/16/25, 3:41 PM
by storus on 5/15/25, 9:51 PM
by IshKebab on 5/15/25, 9:54 PM
I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many valid questions were closed.
They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
by hooverd on 5/15/25, 9:16 PM
by umvi on 5/15/25, 9:38 PM
by zahlman on 5/15/25, 10:37 PM
Respectfully: outsiders like the author of this piece are not the ones entitled to decide whether a question is "legitimate", or "valid" (another term I see used all the time by people who have no understanding either of Stack Overflow's standards or its goals).
Reference reading:
What is Stack Overflow’s goal? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770)
How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592)
Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476)
How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263)
A satirical answer to "The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/_/309018#309...)
What is the point of closing questions for details and clarity, debugging details, needs more focus, or very low quality? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405519)
Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808)
Why is the rate of positively scoring questions and answers steadily declining? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393032)
When is Stack Overflow going to stop demonizing the quality-concerned users who have made the site a success? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366858)
Is ChatGPT and LLM killing Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430994)
by enriquto on 5/15/25, 10:00 PM
This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.
by paulpauper on 5/15/25, 9:15 PM
But it's also possible it's pivoting to a Wikipedia-like model where it becomes a repository for answers, and less about contributions. In which case, this is not the same as it dying. As seen with Wikipedia, it can still get a lot of traffic and revenue even if few people contribute to it anymore.