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Discussion (68 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.
It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.
Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.
I can say that easily over 90% (pretty close to 100%) of the most useful answers I would find in stackoverflow back in the day, were from questions/threads that were locked as bad questions (forget what term they used) by those horrible moderators.
It was literally a joke. Every good question with thoughful useful answers, was always poo poo'ed by the moderators.
The only reason stackoverflow remained useful is that those questions and threads remained available and were a treasure trove of useful information. If they'd actually deleted the threads moderators declared useless, there would have been zero useful content on the site.
It is really a monument to failed moderation policies.
I may have asked 20 questions on Stack Overflow in 20 years. But I probably answered several thousand. Whatever I was deeply interested in at the moment, there was no better way to learn more than to try to answer those tough questions. It was like a hobby, during a few minutes of downtime, to just cruise around looking for database optimization problems... the way some people might pick up a Sudoku puzzle. It would keep me in the zone.
A lot of the mods sucked, and they had to deal with deluges of spam from kids asking for answers to CS exam questions... but hunting for the really juicy questions that couldn't be answered with a search was part of the fun.
I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.
If you aren't using the incredible technology we have around us right now to accelerate your learning then it is us that should be mourning your loss of imagination.
I won't down vote you, because you simply misunderstood me. Of course I'm using this incredible technology to accelerate writing code.
If you never learned the value of learning itself, for its own sake, you have everything to gain from a world in which skills like learning and thinking for yourself are useless. I can hardly blame you for that.
But as someone who has learned by teaching others, people who in turn will learn by teaching others, I don't find your belief in someone else doing the work for you to be particularly sustainable. Or convincing. Regardless of whether I think it's contemptible, lazy, or damaging to your mind, which isn't my problem.
Thats a pretty bold position to take.
I find asking a question about whether an application should be doing what it is doing, and getting someone's braindead response of "Claude says it does this..." shows that people aren't learning. I know what it is doing, I can read an IF statement, I don't need someone to spit out 3 paragraphs of unrelated nonsense.
With Claude people aren't learning. They aren't even reading their copy/pasta response to see if it relates to the question.
And there was a time when I enjoyed answering question on StackOverflow but that time ended long before the end of the site. It started out kind of competitive but ended insanely competitive to the point that answering questions was a waste of time.
I agree with the rest of your comment, and I sympathize with what you're saying here, but really this only applies when measuring engineers against a yardstick that frankly is rapidly in the process of no longer existing.
As an industry rather than an art form, software is measured by its output.
Au contraire, the reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and it was immediately closed as a duplicate of something unrelated but with a superficially-similar name from 5 years prior, and then you were threatened with a ban.
StackOverflow was easily one of the most toxic communities on the internet and I don't miss it.
Yes, there were genuinely helpful people there. I strove to be helpful as well. But my most common experience there was:
- People asking why you're doing that (without answering the question).
- People telling you that you shouldn't do that (without answering the question or providing an alternative).
- People closing your question as off-topic or duplicate without actually reading and understanding what you wrote.
- People editing your question and changing the meaning (leading others to innocently conclude off-topic or duplicate). Or removing actually important details.
- People giving just plain wrong answers that get upvoted, with comments from more senior people begging them to change or remove it.
Or in the words of Brick Top: "If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."
And yes, every so often a golden answer by an amazing person.
Now I can just ask a few LLMs, comparing and contrasting their answers. Even better: I can interrogate them on their answer.
Stack Overflow had a community of sorts, but it wasn't anywhere near like a physical community.
We may work online, but we exist in the flesh.
In the earlier days SO was more of a community. I guess the life-cycle of the Internet. I answered a few question back in the day. Asked a few. All in all positive experience. I still look fondly at some of my better accepted answers...
Unfortunately, it's hard to see the Internet having cycles overall. It's been more like a spiral over the last 35 years or so.
I suspect that a lot of the stuff everyone recognizes as AI-isms/writing tics - is actually just the way genX'ers sounded when they were explaining things to strangers on the internet
AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.
I realize that everything seems to be about increasing the pace of life, but this is another "chance" for humanity to figure things out.
I hope when they arrive they send postcards.
Source: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
Less/fewer is probably a lost cause, and a little bit of why is this kind of useless correction. If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.
ETA: a fun comment below points me to a running joke I was unaware of; my apologies if this was an instance of it that I missed. I am not really a television person but this feels like a significant bit of cultural ignorance on my part.
Capitalism is optimized to produce products and services people want to buy which drives people wanting to work more hours. Which then drives up the costs of things that aren’t replicated endlessly like land and goods that are intentionally left scarce such as admission to elite institutions.
You can work dramatically less and still live well, but the sirens call is very seductive. Food, clothes, transportation, housing, etc all offer real value at minimal cost and little pushing you in that direction.
Deleted my account after a while and never looked back. Also toxic community in general.
So glad now I can just spar with AI to troubleshoot stuff.
Meanwhile, the rest of us still have work to do and can't spend all day arguing with strangers on the internet. Not all even speak English at all.
I really don’t know where all these rose tinted glasses are coming from about early web communities.
As a teen trying to learn to code with no help at home and no money, going onto a technical forum you had to steel yourself to being ostracized for not already being an expert.
I mean people on hacker news in 2026 don’t appreciate how terribly toxic and not friendly at all this site itself was in 2012 when I joined.
I mean hacker news itself has had the reputation of being full of the most toxic technical people in the responses, and you know the dropbox response is exactly the precise reason this place has the reputation it does
- I learned to communicate answers crisply to others
- I saw what made software hard to grok which helped me write better software
- I intentionally answered questions I did not know the answer to from the outset to push me to learn
I grew tremendously by helping others, and things look pretty bleak if we all become glued to token streams instead.
The assumption here is that, people as a crowd, have some discretion, will, thouhht, intention, agentic control and act to change something.
Mostly they don't. Especially on the matters that don't affect their survival drastically.Things might be going down-hill, but if is a slide with mild ramp, no one even notices it. They might even enjoy the ride and going-down is normalized.
Just like Romans might have done when the Rome declined over a prolonged period. No one noticed it.
People are just subjects without own descretion on all matters that are not survival related. They go with crowd. Theat's precisely why we have billionaires owning people's communities.
Not that I find them all that useful, still.
These principles can coexist, but there are forces working against it. The problem is when people post antagonistic comments in response to good faith attempts to make something useful because they used, or were imagined to have used AI.
We have mass produced AI garbage that is filling the domain that Spam used to occupy. We also have people sincerely wanting to make things and being dismissed as making slop. These behaviours should not be met with equivalent responses, and they should not be. AI is removing the barriers for some to develop, of course their first attempts are not going to be very good. Hurling abuse at them is neither a good way to help them improve, nor is it a thing that a good human being does.
Instead of dismissing something that another person has worked on as slop, consider if the person is likely to accept constructive feedback about what it is that their thing is lacking. Maybe if that occurs their next thing might be less sloppy.
My app tries to help people read the Bible more.
I’m asking myself.. What constitutes better? And is it worth pursuing?
Is better always better?
As a side note, Stack Overflow did embody this better than any other popular online platform. X has become the opposite cesspool with floating gold nuggets here and there. I digress..
Time to look up who owns Stack Overflow, Reddit and Hacker News if you had some romantic ideas about them not being owned by billionaires.
> You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.
This part makes the entire post sound like a parody. Maybe Jeff Atwood has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor?
Yeah no, ask for help on Stack Overflow and you were were more likely to be met with castigation and snide remarks. It was such a breath of fresh air when ChatGPT let us not have to deal with that community anymore.
What marked it out originally (and was visible in some other less-travelled StackExchange sites rather later) was a culture of holding replies to a sort of account in the reply comments; people urging each other to make their replies better-sourced, less hollow, more responsive.
The goal of being non-duplicative alas ultimately is always going to lead to a culture that polices itself too hard. I am an LLM cynic but I think it’s possible that LLMs could actually help steer that process more gently, guiding submitters to likely answers but also helping them fine-tune a more specific, narrow, never-asked question.
Only repeated reasserting can keep it on the path: the difference is that you can without it closing the chat on you.
I'm very happy SO is done and dusted with.
Thing is Quora which was supposed to be a forum of people with real credentials also went down the drain because it succumbed to low quality questions and answers. I guess we need a LinkedIn like place where people with real credentials and experience can contribute to deep discussions. Discord won't cut it since it's not index-able.
I’ve personally started a half dozen different communities over the last 20 years. some last longer than others but almost none last beyond the moment leaders stop putting effort into them, which is the fate of every community.
As a serial community organizer I can tell you definitively that there are no long lasting communities drums eventually turn into an obvious scam on someone or finding increasingly unhinged people willing to stick to a mythology.
I would love for not this to be true but I’ve yet to find an example otherwise
Pick a group: shriners, elks, masons, religious groups, cults, wellness groups, drug user communities, veterans, long distance runners, gardeners etc…
It literally doesn’t matter, none of them last unless there’s some kind of expectation that either you’re going to get some financial or opportunity to improve your social standing or access to resources unavailable to “those people out there.”
It’s a shame really, but that’s the limits of human society it seems.
Quick, remove this from HN before the investors see it!
Seriously though, there's so many posts "about AI" that amount to "is AI going to ruin humanity?" and I find it so tiresome. It's just a tool, people. Tools don't stop people from being people. If anything the problem is it makes people more peopley. The telephone didn't end in-person socialization, and neither did books, television, VHS, video games, the internet, etc. These are technologies that, despite allowing you to distance yourself from people and get information without talking to a person, actually brought people together more. Six million years of evolution doesn't go away because you made a robot. There will still be communities. People are still gonna people.
What we should be doing is not focusing so much on the technology, and focus more on how we are constantly being manipulated by the rich, corporations, and government, so that our socialization is to their benefit and our detriment. If your problem is connecting to people, and someone's answer is "I have a business idea", run away from that person.
Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.
I've noticed that in "programming" forums, questions have devolved.
In the "before times", you'd get a mix of simple-medium-hard-extreme questions.
Google and StackOverflow made most of the medium and hard questions disappear.
Now with LLMs, all the higher difficulty levels except "beyond extreme" have vanished, leaving only the stupidly difficult questions that nobody can answer -- and hence doesn't contribute to collective knowledge, including the AI's knowledge.
Conversely, there is a new level of "below simple" questions by people that I dare say are too stupid to even attempt to become software developers. The type of questions that can could always have been answered with just Google, and are "beneath" both AIs and humans. These are worthless questions along the lines of "my computer not work, plz halp!?" followed by "I can't reboot it!" as if that makes any sense.
Again, that contributes nothing of value to the zeitgeist.
Worse, because the effort required to spin up a blog is trivial now thanks to AI and people are getting desperate for work, I'm seeing a mountain of "slop coding blogs" that are either 100% low-cost-AI output full of errors, or organic human-origin slop... full of errors. No longer are blogs written by the "best of the best" to disseminate their hard earned knowledge, they're now an alternative to a resume and produced in bulk by the most junior developers hoping to land a job through "exposure".
This also massively dilutes the last remaining source of good public information to draw. Google searches are useless now because finds nothing but endless SEO garbage.
What's going to happen in 5 or 10 years from now, when all of the pre-AI knowledge[1] is stale and out of date, making it irrelevant, but there's no new knowledge being publicly produced to train on?
Will programming languages, tools, and frameworks ossify because new languages are "post-AI" and hence untrainable due to a lack of StackOverflow questions and answers?
Will AI labs build their own private "AI members only" version of StackOverflow, building up their internal knowledgebases for training, sharing this with nobody else?
Will humans be paid to solve problems for the sole purpose of generating AI training materials? Is this the future of knowledge work!?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
You can't steal something that's infinitely duplicatable. Also, AI training is fair use, not that I believe it should have to be.
There are many ways to steal labor, violating copyright is one such way, but not all copyright violations is labor theft, nor does labor theft require copyright to be violated.
Were StackOverflow, Google, and LLMs not all created by people who cared enough to help you?
There are much better places on the internet to find personal connection than StackOverflow ever was.
They may have cared about helping "people", but not the individual D. (from the OP) who posted a single question and needed a bit of human connection in the process.
And it's great they did find personal connection on Stack Overflow, but it was infamous for its hostility to noobs. It's sad to say, but Stack Overflow very possibly discouraged more people than it encouraged in this way.
I'd guess that both IRC and Discord have a much better track record of personal connection and helping people, and they're still thriving.