alt Hacker NewsStackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
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StackOverflow jobs was great when it existed, found great opportunities through there. So dumb they killed it especially with LLM's eating their core business.
I've browsed SO and friends a lot over the years, and still do, but not sure I ever posted a question there. I read answers, and posted a few answers. I think I'd go to IRC or a forum or issue tracker to ask for help instead. Maybe some generational or cultural thing going on.
Selling it the Prosus killed it, they don’t have a clue about it and how it should work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange
1. LLMs don’t blame you when you ask for book recommendations or say “you must use Superuser instead of Stackoverflow or Linux…”. But it also gave as a bit of community and entertainment. 2. LLMs are useless with the data input from Gitlab, GitHub and Stackoverflow. Especially Stackoverflow, because the snippets, good comments and ratings are invaluable. 3. Removal of job adds. That was the obvious and non disturbing money source.
Stackoverflow is also one of the last platforms allowing you to downvote and put a “price tag” on downvotes. This is incredible helpful in preventing hostile voting. And still allow counter-measures against bad answers.
Please. Cannot the original founders take a data dump and let use re-launch it? Or we just do it.
Every interesting problem I ever had that I checked SO for was either off topic and modded down or the original poster said “I found a solution” and disappeared. Pure misery!
they really can go fall into black hole with Adobe
Questions and answers are locked inside discord, slacks and LLM chats
"I come to bury SO, not to praise it"
.. something.. something
"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones"
I remember the day I ask my first question about C, instead of an answer I got -1.
They get that many?!
Meh… you can't create duplicated questions on SO so obviously 20 years later there is not much left to ask.
A better metric would be visits per month… which probably doesn't look very pretty too. I used to visit SO every day several times a day for like 15 years: ask a technical question on google, click on the first SO result, get the solution I was looking for. Now I still ask google but I just have to read the AI Overview to get the solution I'm looking for…
Note that I recently tried to sign up so that I could answer/update some questions that I have expertise in and was refused because my email address wasn't recognized.
And like 950 of them were probably closed for being "off-topic".
Still over $100M in revenue, now mainly from AI and Enterprise customers.
https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...
I do not miss StackOverflow. It wasn’t a community, it was a toxic environment that rewarded asshole behavior.
Half the time the communities were helpful, half the time they were hostile.
Woooow. That makes me feel... old.
What will LLMs be trained on when SO does no longer exist (or is an archive of increasingly obsolete answers)?
I rarely wish for the downfall of things, but StackOverflow is one of those exceptions. Good riddance.
The communities were helpful half the time and hostile the other half.
Out of curiosity, is Joel Spolsky still involved in SO? What’s he up to these days?
I enjoyed reading his articles but it feels eons ago.
Stackoverflow had such a toxic and beginner-unfriendly community...
"This problem was already solved: https://news.ycombinator.com/404"
StackOverflow had the most toxic community didn't it?
I do have a webarchive of StackOverflow on some backup disc somewhere - just in case :D
It was a very flawed site. If you ever tried to ask a question they'd tell you to fuck off, but 99% of their threads were just empty with toxic comments from the mods. You'd find the perfect thread for your problem, and then it would just be locked as a dupe with no actual answer thread available.
It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated. Just like a bronze sword.
The current way too write software is too just ask the ai do it. StackOverflow will be soon mostly irrelevant completely.
I have some wishful thinking for everyone reading this: what if the people at StackOverflow built one of the best bot protections out there? I would honestly expect the graph to go up with all the LLMs and automated content spamming..
I'm gonna flag this post as duplicate.
I’m still sour about my first and only SO question attempt.
After such a long time user, here I was, finally interacting with the community. My first question. I spent at least an hour composing it. Something about Django and Celery. Then came the mods. Crushed my dreams. I tried editing the question. Crushed again.
And I remember thinking, wtf? I’m just trying to ask for some help. Why is this so damn hard? Never tried again.
SO turned into a place that heavily favoured their experienced answerers over new answerers and askers. Admittedly, I fell into the former camp: someone with some excess time on his hands and an itch to answer interesting questions - and like most of the experienced answerers, I ended up being very disinterested in answering homework questions, “lazy” questions, and the like. “Downvote and move on” was the motto.
In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave easy questions to be answered by new answerers. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.
In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.
Incredible that SO sold for $1.8B at one point.
I never used stack overflow.
Preferred books at the library.
I tried using it and my question never got answered :(
Yeah, this is definitely due to AI.
But let me address the "toxic" moderation. They needed something like appeals courts. SO should have installed a layers above the community mods that could review and rebuke the decisions of the "lower" mods to steer things.
Oops, all assholes.
I'm closing this down as duplicate and pointless.
I blame that one Jon Skeet dude for answering everything.
Good, that site sucked after 2015 pretty much. Museum of powertripping mods.
And here's why: https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-ove...
LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:
Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?
A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]
I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.
Everyone seems to say that it was always a terrible place to ask questions where you'd have your question closed for no reason.
I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
I think it's good that the site got rid of thise quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.
Well deserved, site full of toxic users who will do anything but answer your question, LLM FTW.
I answered a number of questions on there. Some non-native English speaker started going my answers and making language editing suggestions. The grammar was fine. I refused all the changes because they were at best basically the same or at worst incorrect. I refused maybe 4-5. The next day the guy got on and had done a bunch more then went to some of my answers and made hostile comments about my answers on simple things like Pandas for Python.
That was that for that site.
Back in the early days of SO, around 2009 or maybe 2010, I asked a Motif question. I got told that I I was an idiot and I shouldn't be using Motif because it was obsolete, how dare I ask a question about it? Blah blah blah.
Yeah, no shit nobody uses Motif for new development, but if you haven't guessed, I was working on a legacy enterprise system.
Just rubbed me the wrong way and still kinda annoys me to this day. Not everyone is dicking around for fun or works at startups where you can light other people's money on fire. Some of us have paying clients, I'm not using Motif because I want to.
This question has already been asked?
Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.
It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.
It is sad because it was such a well designed community. But its lessons live on.
The highly technical sites -- StackOverflow, Unix & Linux, MathOverflow -- see little use.
Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.
Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.
It's funny how my experience with SO is nowhere near as bad as what HN usually reports.
I admit that my first few questions earned me a lot of downvotes due to their poor quality. But it humbled me and taught me the importance to create minimal reproducible examples.
After that, some of my questions were answered in depth by experts. I was blown away and very grateful that some random stranger would take the time to answer such a niche question I had.
Besides, I've seen colleagues of mine whom I consider brilliant but whose questions on public forums were bad... They give too many details, leave out part of the context, don't make it easy to reproduce their error, ask vague questions, and so on. I wonder if it's for the same reasons that HN has trouble with SO.