Hacker News

I like that you can see a Covid bump in there and then it immediately craters lol

Where else were people getting answers and help from between 2018 and AI getting good in the mean time? As I remember it there wasn't really an alternative.

Maybe it was more consolidation of tech and better docs over time.

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.

It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.

It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.

I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.

Not just their users. My org got pitched stackoverflow careers and their private knowledgebase around 2019. We were somewhat interested but found it too hard to work with them.

We weren't going to be a huge contract (~100k/yr) but the tone was very much "conform or fuck off". I think the sticking point was that we were offered 1x permanent careers ad in North America and 2 in Oceana, and we wanted 3 in Oceana instead.

I've had a similar experience the couple of times I've asked or attempted to respond to questions (about software I wrote lol) - grammar and framing seemed more important than technical information/a solution.

N=1 anecdata ofc, but I'm not surprised at their demise

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.

Well, the community never made it a very welcoming place... But, I think a part of this is that it's just faster to throw a Q into ChatGPT. There's no waiting for a response, a major bonus is the non-hostility + willingness to respond to 'stupid' questions.

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

That and [redacted] mods who delete your question “because its a duplicate” but its not, you just assume it is and lock it. Lots of this when .NET Core came out and it drove me up a wall. Wouldnt surprise me if a lot of “hallucination” type answers come from bad Stack Overflow data being interpreted as “fact” in earlier models.

> It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

The same thing that happened to perl.

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.

> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

Uh, no.

StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

> I miss Server Fault

Same. And DBA.se. I was a top contributor of both for the first few years at least, even got sent some free swag a couple of times, not because I cared about the points and being in the first page of people ordered by them, but because I felt genuinely useful and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.

I never really did the social side though, I have problems with distance friendships including online communities (I just don't connect well with people that way) which is one reason that I'm hating tech work more and more these days (being on a remote team is not good for my mental health, while I'm not a huge people person it turns out I absolutely need some in my life, and really in my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).

I used to spend time on these sites answering questions. It was actually fun and educational.

I stopped using Reddit not because I got banned, but because it has been steadily converted from the world's most popular forum platform to a trash heap of engagement hacks and shady practices. Moreso than SO, which was already struggling with existential problems before AI, Reddit did itself in.

The Reddit banning algorithm is strange in its own way.

In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).

Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.

A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing

I went on Reddit recently to look something up and some of the niche subreddits were decent but I was shocked at the amount of just total garbage that's there now (including lots of weird misogyny) so it's not just the bans that are a problem. It feels like every social media platform is just miserable to use now. Except occasionally posting here my only social media is just Discord servers with my actual real life friends.

Reddit is an absolutely hostile platform now, the amount of dogpiling is insane. Say the wrong thing and apparently you're simultaneously a bot, and a valid target for harassment (why people are so invested in harassing people they think are bots, I have no clue?)

In general, in online communities - i think there is no such thing as free moderators. If you aren't paying them in money then you pay them in power.

I am so deeply banned from Reddit it feels retaliatory in some way.

Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.

There was that 1 person who used to work(paid?/volunteer?) at Reddit that actively tried to cultivate high-quality AMA on Reddit. Ever since they've been gone. It hasn't felt the same.

Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.

Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.

I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.

Reddit still has a place for very niche communities. To this day it can be the best place for a lot of things.

But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.

One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.

I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.

You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.

Surprised to hear this, I'm not alone!

My account was banned back around 2021. I had a separate account on mobile, which got subsequently banned for 'evading a ban'. Have been unable to create an account since then, even on entirely new machines, different OS, renewed IP. Whatever tracking techniques they use are downright scary.

The worst part is that all of this started because a mod in a right-leaning sub silenced my account, then decided to turn it into a permanent ban for no reason.

Nowadays, I'd still like to visit r/programming for a change, and share some of my work, but otherwise it's such a cesspool of AI-generated content and bots that the appeal has almost entirely faded.

I refused to make a Reddit account. I knew my personality would lead me to wasting entirely too much time on the site if I could reply. (Like here... >sigh<)

When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.

I suppose I was never their target market anyway.

Also subreddit mods can ban your entire account..wtf. I was banned for arguing in a poltical subreddit. So if a mod doesn't like your political beliefs they can ban you (and your devices apparently) from the site.

And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.

and hopefully soon we have decentralized protocols as the standard when we think about user spaces. amen

My account of well over a year and 11k karma was banned by admins presumably for an admin-deleted comment where I said "Hi kids, buy our product!" as a Steve-Buschemi-meme reference, and was flagged as spam. To your point they also have their Comment Quality Score (CQS) which lowers you automatically if you use Proton email aliases, lowers you if you use VPN to access the site, among other things.

Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.

Reddit is by far the most toxic place on the web, yet somehow manages to get the least amount of scrutiny from regulators. Makes you wonder why, doesn't it?

all hidden accounts posting political propaganda day and night in the name of privacy was enough to turn me off

There is something about the gamification of social interaction which breeds a hostile community. Power hungry users chasing internet points, or moderators needlessly raising their hammer.

I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.

SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.

I always hate it when a person tries to "X Y problem" me.

I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.

People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.

I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.

ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.

Most online platforms I have used to ask questions or make comments (whether it's real-time chat, mailing lists, forums, etc.) were extremely hostile and always have been... I guess it's just human nature.

StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.

Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.

AI didn't do it to SO. SO's new ownership did it to SO. It's a hostile place with or without AI.

> or re-answer

Sure you can. (But it is a significant problem that they start at the bottom of the score-based answer sort and don’t get attention.)

The discussion around who gets a green checkmark and +15 rep was bad enough. I can't imagine how it would be if there was real money involved.

> 2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)

> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems

I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?

Who decides which person is correct?

Maybe someone new could create a new community modeled along these lines where experts could exchange knowledge, or more junior people something else, for answers.

So instead of just not getting paid for my help I might even get to pay if my answer is deemed to be not good enough. Thanks but no thanks.

I really do love their other communities so much more. Lots of super interesting content - it feels like a new digg or something. I go to one of the other stacks and look at the most popular non-tech stack posts once or twice a week purely for entertainment. The breakdowns on obscure but interesting topics can get really fun to read!

It's training on every single codebase in the world instead now

You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data

FWIW, StackOverflow posts are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA v4.0, same as Wikipedia.

With or without training they would have gotten eaten.

What do you mean? You could always answer questions without any barriers, and partial answers were acceptable. Unless you're talking about protected questions (very rare), or you had such a fundamental misunderstanding of the site that you got answer-banned.

I put it in a quick chart to make the rise and fall more visual. https://imgur.com/a/046CfZ2

I'm hopeful Reddit will succumb to the same fate. There's too many power hungry people who capriciously control large elements of societal communication these days.

The graph doesn't include Stack Overflow for Agents, which is a real product that exists for some reason.

Nah. It launched well, but sorely needed a BDFL. Almost without fail, services that delegate moderation duties to users are ruined. Inevitably, well-meaning people form councils and boards, and then those get taken over by people with nothing but time on their hands. It's the same thing that happens with school boards and HOAs: the last people you want running them are the ones that have the time and the drive to actually want to be in charge of them.

It was an AMAZING community... right up until it wasn't. I cut my teeth on trying to answer questions and learned how much I didn't know when other people's answers were better than mine. Literally made a career out of what I learned there, and I thoroughly enjoyed welcoming people to SO and encouraging new coders to keep learning. But then dang, the question purists and eager close-every-question jocks came to dominate the platform and made it no fun to ask or answer. Even if AI was never a thing, the change in culture probably would have opened the doors to a competitor.

Everything is cyclical. Maybe they come back when AI gets heavily regulated or pay gated. Who knows

does well designed mean rotten and pointlessly hostile

StackOverflow helped build the LLMs that replaced it.

it was as well designed as the nipples on a man