It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled.
In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.
No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.
But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?
And what makes the data outdated? New code? It can train on that. That, or there is simply nothing new to learn, just new ways to express the same thing.
I'm not surprised it's on the way out.
I've had 3 deleted by Community bot as abandoned, but since they were over a year old when that happened, I couldn't care less.
Stack Overflow is explicitly not designed or intended to solve problems or do the decomposition of the problem for you, nor the synthesis of answers. Because the result would never be useful to anyone else. The entire point is to have something searchable, and to allow answer-writers to keep their explanations DRY.
This has spectacularly failed, because no matter how frustrated people get with traditional discussion forums (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_th... among many other typical complaints), they apparently are much more suited to human nature.
Heaven knows how Wikipedia managed to avoid devolving into "Quora but even worse because you can scribble over someone else's post".
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgp...
It is not relevant to SO whether an LLM can provide personalized help, write with any particular tone, answer promptly, accept every input prompt as valid and try to make sense of it, discuss back and forth to figure out a problem, etc. Because Stack Exchange is explicitly and by design not for those things.
But also, downvotes work differently on meta anyway, and the community there generally takes a negative view of LLMs. Because, again, the point of SO is for the answer to come from a human expert, and be verified against subject matter expertise rather than simply being evaluated for coherence or generally sounding appropriate in context.
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?
It is frustrating not only because you can't get instant help, but also because it shows the futility of even trying to post on there.
some have a tendency to go overboard with this thinking, only to discover that a heavily pruned tree is now a dead tree, now finding themselves in dead tree garden.
Then, with better moderator tools, the "ultimate knowledge base" group set out to achieve the ultimate knowledge base by reducing the amount of people who were just there to talk.
Yes, because the people who were just there to talk had reached a point where they could effectively only pollute the knowledge base. Bad questions make good ones harder to find, simply by existing (since the bad one could potentially be found instead, and because of the broken window effect).
Moderators (actual elected moderators, the two dozen or so that exist for ~29 million user accounts and ~24 million non-deleted questions) went on strike in mid 2023, largely because the site staff/owners interfered with their ability to remove such content (an overwhelmingly popular policy with strong community consensus): https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000 and this decision propagated across the Stack Exchange network (as most SE sites had adopted similar policies): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/
A large fraction of the userbase is explicitly opposed to helping LLMs out in any way whatsoever. I personally have ceased contributing new question or answer content, and only edit existing posts. I contribute new content on Codidact (https://software.codidact.com/) instead (disclosure: I have recently become a moderator there).
You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor. It doesn't. Because none of the average SO contributors did.
It is unclear what algorithmic improvements are required to leverage the available data to get AI to AGI, but a lack of data is definitely not the bottleneck.
One could say that these AI systems aren't sharing their solutions (or questions) with other AI systems and that the world would benefit from it if they did, though. Perhaps it's a good idea to have some shared space for AI systems where they share the validated solutions they synthesized.
Replacing the average SO cobtributor isn't adequate to replace SO, and AI is able to “replace” SO effectively only since major models have gotten not only SO-as-training-data but web search (including SO) for immediate grounding.
And without SO or something like it with active human contributions it’ll have even more trouble replacing the value SO would provide for new questions and new domains where it will neither have SO traijing data nor SO query-time-search-results to use to synthesize answers.
Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.
But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.
"Growing" by an utterly irrelevant metric.
Popular != good.
You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.
The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.
Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.
Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.
So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing
So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.
> and now it's dying
Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
> Maybe something was better before
Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?
If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.
The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.
I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually).
> Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
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.
Notably, after getting completely humiliated with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 in June 2023 (right after a moderator strike had just started, protesting the staff trying to prevent them from removing AI content from the site), and getting embarrassing feedback on the feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162), they came back last November with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 and have been forcing it through.
(As someone who is all too often hired tomorrow, at a fraction of the before rates, to clean up this mess)
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.
These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there.
Before GH boomed it was often SO doing this job.
This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.
There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.
Yes.
They belong on the existing question - unless the existing question is poorly asked and the new one is better asked.
New answers can, by default, be added at any time - and should, if existing answers are actually out of date rather than simply being old. (Many 10+ year old answers really do still apply.)
Asking the question again is not how the site is designed or intended to work.
Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.
(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)
AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.
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.
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.
A big reason why AI is replacing these things. A big part is the experience itself. There are quite a few people who have have been repulsed due to the smugness, or other wise having their questions marked duplicate/irrelevant/stupid etc.
AI is also pretty much instant. You can also talk to it like you are talking to a person.
The killer AI feature!---> AI listens, without judging you.
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.
There is nothing to do with unstated belief here.
It is explicit policy that we don't have discussion at all.
We have answers to questions.
Which is why there's a question (explicitly labelled as such, and not just "help me") at the top of the page, and every post below it is labelled as an answer (and is explicitly not a response to anything else but is simply there to answer the question).
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
Duplicates are not forbidden on Stack Overflow. Duplicate questions are linked together - that's what "duplicate" means in the system. Beyond that, logged-out users who land on a duplicate question that doesn't have its own answers, will be automatically redirected to the target.
When duplicate question are linked on Stack Overflow (and everywhere else on Stack Exchange), they are automatically closed, which merely prevents new answers. The purpose is to allow high-quality answers to be gathered in one place - on the duplicate target, which in turn is ideally a high-quality version of the question (and a focus for curators to improve further, when they notice that it becomes a common duplicate target).
Deletion of duplicates (and posts in general) is not very well understood and people are not all on the same page - see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214 . But normally duplicates should not be deleted unless they are actively harming the search results (i.e.: it causes people to find the wrong target, because it was written in a way that fools keyword search).
Nobody gets formally sanctioned for posting a duplicate. You just get your question closed, and maybe asked to search a bit more carefully in the future (or shown how to do so).
> 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.
People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow. That action is actively counterproductive to what Stack Overflow is trying to accomplish. There are countless discussion forums (and as you say, Discord and IRC channels) already where that behaviour is valued. The Internet should be allowed to have one place where it is not valued - especially when it's a place that was specifically created to accommodate people who want search engines to be useful; who want to write high quality answers once and get many people to read them; etc.
> People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow.
I think it's worth asking, why do people give answers on the internet at all? Maybe it's because of internet points, but more often people just like interacting with other humans and teaching.
In the beginning, StackOverflow was a place for people who wanted to interact with other humans, and also a place for people who wanted to build the ultimate knowledge base--for a time their incentives were aligned.
But then over time the space for interacting with other humans got smaller and smaller, and now StackOverflow is almost entirely about maintaining the knowledge base that has been built.
And yeah, like you say, it's okay if StackOverflow isn't the place for human interaction. StackOverflow has built its knowledge base, and some still maintain it, and the long term success of that knowledge base is becoming ever more apparent--which is to say, not very successful--the day may soon come that StackOverflow isn't even hosted anymore.
(Also, I want to ward off the claims that this is because of AI. StackOverflow was in steady decline long before AI was competent at answering questions; even in 2025 the competence of AI is still in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000118)
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.
One of my top StackOverflow questions for years was around the viability of ECMAscript 6. It's now essentially irrelevant because it's found wide adoption in browsers etc. but at the time a lot of people appreciated the question because they wanted to adopt the technology but weren't sure what its maturity was.
It's also true that some technology stacks mature to a point where there isn't much more to be asked but I think there will continue to be a place for forums of discussion where you can ask and get answers around newer, bleeding edge technologies, use cases etc.
- Documentation - Open source projects using it - Github issues - Source code - Blogs - Youtube videos
The list goes on
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.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236/why-is-can-s...
When you earn enough reputation please come back and re-post your comment.
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.
Let's say for the sake of argument that 95% of humanity perished. Is humanity then dead? It isn't.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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
If it were up to me, moderation would have been overhauled. But it wasn't up to me.
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
I had to resort to reddit to ask those questions, which is ironic given the focus of SO.
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.
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.)
In any sort of IRL community, if some person decided they had the authority to prevent people from answering others' questions, unilaterally decide people aren't welcome, etc. everyone would think they had gone insane.
However there is the problem where any unmoderated public forum will eventually contain only scam artists and Nazis. Moderators address the Nazi spam problem, but now you have the moderator problem. It's been a mental side project of mine lately to find ways to solve the moderator problem, which I can't talk too much about as there is money to be made by doing so.
What happens when the forum gets overrun by Nazi spam? We'll install a set of moderators who remove it. But what happens when the moderators start removing useful information? We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the moderators. But aren't the snakes even worse? Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Then we're stuck with gorillas! No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm assuming the owners of stack felt similar? Don't know anything about them so could be easily wrong
Still, it may find its place as a last resort.
I wonder what developers started using during that time.
I think it may answer most questions from five years ago, but I would phrase it as “it has answers for most questions, but many are outdated and there’s no easy way to tell whether an answer is outdated”
[0] https://openai.com/index/api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...
Additionally, it's not just the owners... it's the millions of people who contributed.
How will technology advance without research sharing?
Something like 1000x more views than posts/comments… I wonder if that statistic has changed over the years?…
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.
As someone who has extensive experience modding an niche SE I see this sentiment quite often but honestly, the people making these complaints are just arrogant _and_ wrong about the topic they needed help with.
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
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.
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.
Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be trying to ask a question at all), so there's no reason to care about whether other people can understand the question - let alone figure out whether it's something they also want to ask.
> 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.
Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure. The entire point is that when you come to Stack Overflow, you aren't the one who gets to decide what the standards for questions are, or judge whether your question meets those standards. Because if you were, the standards would effectively not exist.
The people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
> I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work. Famously, a user with over a million reputation once went on a spree of violations (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072) of the best-publicized site policy ever to appear on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/). Many users with 100k+ reputation and/or a 10+ year history have likely never looked at the meta site. (See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224 for someone who first posted on meta after 14 years.)
That's fundamentally where SO went wrong. The mods think they're building programming Wikipedia, but normal users are using it as a Q&A forum.
> Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure.
No it doesn't. It's far too easy to close a question and they very rarely get reopened. The suggestion was that users only get to unilaterally reopen it once.
> I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work.
See this is exactly the problem. You have the mods' view of how it is supposed to work, but that isn't how people want it to work!
Mods want it to be this highly curated reference site where only perfectly written questions that exactly fit an FAQ style of questioning. They don't care that that makes it useless (or at least extremely frustrating) as a Q&A forum.
What a miserable future to look forward to
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)
This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.
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.
