Subject: Re: =?UTF-8?B?4oCcVGhl?= Pulse #134: Stack overflow is almost
=?UTF-8?B?ZGVhZOKAnQ==?=

Lynn McGuire writes:

“The Pulse #134: Stack overflow is almost dead
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134

“Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data
at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”

“June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor, Prosus. In hindsight, the founders – Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky – sold
with near-perfect timing, before terminal decline.

Unreal.

It's not the LLM or AI that made Stackoverflow jump the shark. They simply failed to achieve sufficient mind share to be able to withstand the natural factors that work to collapse every social media platform that employs content moderation. Stackoverflow's content moderation policies pissed off their most productive contributors, so they all left, and there wasn't
enough garbage left to support what's left behind.

If SO grew big enough before their loss of mindshare they might've had a chance to carry on by inertia, as a steaming pile of flaming crap. Case in point: Facebook. But they didn't. Goodbye.


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Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re=3A_=E2=80=9CThe_Pulse_=23134=3A_Stack_overflow_is_almo?=
=?UTF-8?Q?st_dead=E2=80=9D?=

On 21/05/2025 12:40, Sam wrote:

Stackoverflow's content moderation policies pissed off their most
productive contributors, so they all left

Good.

I'm sick and tired of searching for a documentation Web site and
having to wade through dozens of hits from non-normative Web
forums that don't quite have the answer for the question I didn't
quite ask.

--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
Sig line 4 vacant - apply within


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Subject: Re: =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=9CThe?= Pulse #134: Stack overflow is almost
=?UTF-8?Q?dead=E2=80=9D?=

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.c.]
On 2025-05-21, Sam <sam@email-scan.com> wrote:

Lynn McGuire writes:

“The Pulse #134: Stack overflow is almost dead
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134

“Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data
at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”

“June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor,
Prosus. In hindsight, the founders – Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky – sold
with near-perfect timing, before terminal decline.

Unreal.

It's not the LLM or AI that made Stackoverflow jump the shark. They simply failed to achieve sufficient mind share to be able to withstand the natural factors that work to collapse every social media platform that employs content moderation. Stackoverflow's content moderation policies pissed off their most productive contributors, so they all left, and there wasn't enough garbage left to support what's left behind.

The main moderation problem on StackExchange sites is the abrupt closing
of questions. This is perpetrated by those contributors themselves.

But a constant stream of fresh question is the lifeblood of the site.
When visitors stop coming to ask quesitons, it dies.

Questions are often closed because they are duplicates. However,
they are often not exact duplicates.

Moreover, people ask duplicate questions because the site's search
function is garbage: the answer is in there, but they were not able to
find it.

StackExchange pushes the narrative that questions and their answers
should be useful to future visitors. But then they rely on Google
for those visitors to actually find them.

When you do that, you are handing (even more) control over your traffic
to Google.

Google served up site summaries without routing visitors to the actual
sites, even before the rise of LLM AI.

--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal
Mastodon: @Kazinator@mstdn.ca

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Subject: Re: =?UTF-8?B?4oCcVGhl?= Pulse #134: Stack overflow is almost
=?UTF-8?B?ZGVhZOKAnQ==?=

Lawrence D'Oliveiro writes:

On Wed, 21 May 2025 07:40:31 -0400, Sam wrote:

It's not the LLM or AI that made Stackoverflow jump the shark. They
simply failed to achieve sufficient mind share to be able to withstand
the natural factors that work to collapse every social media platform
that employs content moderation.

I was answering question and gaining points on there for a while, until I realized that the points themselves didn’t mean anything (beyond conveying some kind of status on the site itself). I kind of lost interest after
that.

I think my account is still there, and my answers are still accumulating points ...

There's a very telling footnote in one of the FAQs over there. I don't have the direct link because, well, I couldn't care less, but the FAQ entry wrote about a cryptic reason for a loss of reputation points that says something like "Account Closed". The explanation is that someone in ancient times upvoted you, but their account was closed so the karma is being taken back due to the reversed upvote, as if it never happened.

And here's the telling footnote, that went something like "Ummmm… if closing
an account would cause too much disruption we have a special procedure to close accounts without reversing the upvotes".

Now, why would they have to go through the hassle of implementing a process that gets rid of high karma accounts, without backing out the rep change…

Keep in mind that high karma accounts are also more likely to have a large number of upvotes of others, too.

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