alt Hacker NewsStackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
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I never used stack overflow.
Preferred books at the library.
I tried using it and my question never got answered :(
I'm closing this down as duplicate and pointless.
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.
I blame that one Jon Skeet dude for answering everything.
Good, that site sucked after 2015 pretty much. Museum of powertripping mods.
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 those 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.
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.
Well deserved, site full of toxic users who will do anything but answer your question, LLM FTW.
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.
I am amazed it's still that high
good, make it die faster
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.
SO suffered from its success and, bluntly, the laziness of humans.
I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.
I stopped contributing.
The question that a lot of people aren’t asking, these AI models were trained on human actual data, researches, answers, and books. Now AI removed the need to create those and people aren’t incentivized to make any new ones, the newer models say in a year or so will be trained on slop, piles and piles of slop, how’s their intelligence will be?
SO died some time ago already though; I'd say even before AI.
I remember that I once asked a question about dual-licencing MIT and GPL 2.0 in the same project. Within an hour or two, it was downvoted to -7. Now this alone is already quite concerning (it was a genuine question), but what was even more annoying was that not a single person who downvoted this, explained as to why. So, if my time investment here for asking a question, gets negative karma without any explanation, and then subsequently no useful answer at all: what is the point of SO? I still answered a few questions here or there, but the whole karma system just discourages contributions and I stopped using it with regards to both asking anything or giving answers.
SO is not useless since some answers still hold useful answers, but they really should have started to fix SO early on. Instead they just gave up.
I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).
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The riddle was: "What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?".
Oedipus answered: "Man: as an infant, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks on two legs and; in old age, he uses a walking stick".
Stackoverflow wasn't killed by AI, it's long dead because of those "Closed Question" bummbers.
I've never seen an online community incentives vandalism rather than contributions.
Quora took it over. Better layout, better moderation, better answers.
Deserved.
Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:
* 1 trip to mars
* 10 trips to the Moon
* Converted water to wine
The worst system until you can finally help others.
Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.
A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.