I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top.
I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleasant, but somehow the actual result is the exact opposite.
That being said, I don't think the culture or moderation has got worse recently, so I suspect the traffic decline is either a change in Google's algorithms or the impact of ChatGPT (or both).
I think moderation culture changed for a reason. About 8-10 years ago quality of answers started to decline because HR started to source SO for candidates. This created incentive for posting thousands of answers moments after the question is posted that were simply not right. More often than not those wrong answers were upvoted anyway. And HR won't check the quality of answers, they are concerned only with your total score.
Once I was researching something and found wrong answer on SO from some junior dev from India. The answer was wrong and it was evident that the author of the answer didn't even fully read the question. Out of curiosity I checked the author's profile and found out that it was a deliberate strategy: e.g. when there's a question about working with files, he'd post an answer with a link to the language page on "open".
I politely asked the author in the comments to stop posting wrong or useless answers. Instead, he wrote very aggressive response, opened my profile and downvoted as many of my answers as he could.
And there were many similar cases, probably still are.
Everything went downhill once people had real incentive (like actual money, not just internet cred) to game the system for reputation points. The mods had to come up with ever-evolving layers of rules on top of rules that lowered the answer quality and put up huge barriers for an average user to contribute.
Incentives really make or break this type of website. Often on the internet I find myself thinking "Thank God this [website specific metric] isn't worth anything so people have no reason to game it".
I think "Internet Karma" systems are inherently flawed. I know one technical website with karma, where one type of users eventually gained majority of the karma capital, downvoted all opposition into such deep negative karma, that they can't write anything anymore, and now there's strictly one point of view in all the articles and comments.
Which is aligned with the site owners' point of view, so they have no incentive to change anything. Though everyone notices that quality of articles and comments started to decline once the users with karma majority censored all others out.
HN implements some significant limitations to the model that make it work. Things like not being able to downvote replies, can't edit / delete your replies after certain criteria are met, limited upvoting until a certain amount of contribution, etc.
These are constraints that limit the types of people that are interested in remaining here. But HN is by no means "small".
I've a rather high account. So I can revert mod decisions and sometimes do. E.g. reopen a marked-duplicate that isn't duplicate on closer inspection.
I don't do it often (can't be bothered too much) but when I do, I sometimes almost feel the hate radiation over the web. Indeed, people on a rage-tantrum going through all my answers and questions and downvoting those. Lol.
I also have a similar account and you inspired me to vote to reopen maybe twenty questions in a row. All of them were perfectly good questions closed for stupid reasons.
Let's not forget that in india it is not considered wrong to "game" the system, even it is considered unethical by western standards. It is not a coincidence all of these tech support scammers are based in india.
this brings forth an interesting topic, how do we reconcile cultural differences in online platforms ? Nobody can deny they exist, and they create clashes like the aforementioned one.
Do people not remember the "Hacktoberfest" fiasco? People were encouraged to make a PR on public repos in exchange for a free t-shirt, and _obviously_ this led to repos being overrun with spam PRs changing a single line comment.
with loads of people replying and thanking the author, excited for their t-shirt, not really knowing they're _creating unnecessary work_ for actual engineers with limited time.
Incentivized systems like this can work okay in small, self-selected communities, but as soon as it's open up to the entire world, the implied courtesy of said system vanishes, and immediately we're pandering to the lowest common denominator.
I don't think you do. Your platform should have an explicit and expected code of conduct set up in advance, and people should be held to it. If they cannot, they aren't allowed to use the platform.
When it becomes apparent that there are cultural norms that make it difficult or impossible for people from those cultures to use your platform, you re-examine your code of conduct, of course, to make sure you're not unduly excluding people. If you are, you amend the code, you change the platform in ways necessary to support them, and everyone tends to end up better off as a result.
But some cultural norms will be antithetical to the point of the platform, like in this case: SO cannot function properly when people attempt to game the system. In those cases, the CoC remains, and people from that culture will either have to adapt to the platform or find (or make) a similar one that works for them.
The alternative, as we see here, is that your platform degrades until it's not useful to _anyone,_ this "problem culture" included.
gaming the system is prevalent but not considered ethical in india. HRs won’t allow such candidates for example. So there is no question of amending CoC to make room.
There is a difference between something being prevalent and something being culturally accepted. The solution lies in naming and shaming. Making it clear that such people aren’t wanted on these platforms.
But i don’t think anyone should chalk this up to “cultural norms” That’s just being unfair to those of us who are just as fed up with this mindset.
I mean, neither do I, but I'm giving the poster above me the benefit of the doubt, and also kinda recognizing that -- even though I can't think of a concrete example right now -- there's almost certainly a situation where there IS a cultural norm that is otherwise acceptable, but antithetical to a particular platform, so the question is still valid, IMO.
This incentive was always there, from day one. It was a classic thing to put the most basic answer as possible in as quickly as possible just to get it out the door and then refine it later, because whoever posts the answer first would have theirs shown first presuming no upvotes.
This is exactly the reason I gave up on SO. It was so disappointing to see the "frist!" answer get votes, even when it was factually incorrect. By the time it took me to think and write a half decent phrase the original answer had been edited dozens of times. The site was also eager to interrupt me every time to tell me that an existing answer had been edited. They did everything possible to allow the system to be gamed and, well... they succeeded.
That matches my experience. I stopped using it in 2015 after trying to solve something with a new framework I was using and finding that all of the answers on SO were just wrong.
The exact opposite happened, contrary to this often repeated meme. Both SO and Wikipedia became what they were because of their strict moderation and RTFM-implied attitude. It's what drove professionals like me to the site. I'm just a regular user BTW, but it felt like SO people were my peers.
But SO (the company) wanted it to be more accessible, easier for newbies, "nicer", there was a huge uproar over them publicly blasting a moderator over a disagreement on a unilaterally imposed new code of conduct, and recently they even (again unilaterally) effectively reverted the ban on LLM-generated content. This has been going on for years, and moderators have less power than they ever had. Imho this whole thing started much earlier, I think it was 2017 when they tried the SO documentation project and let everyone keep their rep where I first thought they had jumped the shark.
The company has been on a bender for the last few years, and high-ish rep users like me just don't see the value in answering anymore. With recent blog posts it seems even more clear that they are on the direct path to enshittification, against their own actual users and moderators.
Recently it feels like all the actual professionals have left and what remains are "students" asking low effort questions in bad faith while an army of spambots tries to pounce on these.
While this means boosted engagement numbers short-term, it spells death of the site long-term. SO cannot survive on low quality spam, even if other sites (like Reddit) may be able to.
Agreed. If anything, the problem of SO is that it's not evolving strict measures fast enough to stay relevant. There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, and obviously there are not enough people to moderate all of it. The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.
> There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time,
There's a question on meta from a decade ago about what the Roomba (automatic deletion scripts) should be deleting. One of the answers had a bit of point in time information:
That makes it harder to find the original source, more difficult for google to chase, and clusters results.
> The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.
Which upper management has been working against by encouraging a reduction of those barriers, disincentivizing people from moderating and curating, and trying to grow engagement from people asking questions.
Mistake I think. Because more and more facts are already covered by existing answers and more and more noobs (no judgement just fact we've all been there and I am still a noob in many regards) come into the industry as computing becomes more popular worldwide, it's unscalable unless the focus shifts towards getting people to find existing questions and answers instead of reducing SNR by asking and answering the same questions again and again in worse ways.
The scalability problem is indeed at the core of Stack Overflows woes.
When it was small, it was easier to handle the questions of the day, guide new users, handle the "fun" questions (and answers) in a way that wasn't off-putting, and generally be a smaller community.
As SO grew, it lost control of the culture that had been established there before (much like Usenet (different thread)) and became a place for people to do hit and run questions - drop their question, come back later, get the answer and move on.
The majority of the users of the site had moved from "community of people sharing information - asking and answering" to "new users without any cultural attachment asking a question and not remaining."
The core group culture became more defensive of their ideals... and lots of friction between management wanting more engagement and new users just wanting people to answer their question ("if you don't like the question, just move on" being a frequent refrain).
From A Group is its own worst enemy:
> 2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
> The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
> Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
As the software didn't allow sufficient and proper moderation and curation tooling, the way that the the core group expressed itself was the more negative and ultimately toxic approaches. Snark and rudeness are the moderation tools of last resort.
A Group continues with:
> 3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.
The current goals of upper management being advertising and engagement are not in alignment with the goals of the original founders (as idealistic as they were) and what remains of the core culture.
> It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
Note that good is italicized in the above quote and is present in the original.
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Getting people to be able to find existing questions and clean up the SNR of the content out there on SO would improve it... but that would likely make a lot of lines go down rather than up (deleting 10,000 duplicates of one question would show up).
Trying to get Stack Overflow back to a scalable model doesn't further the engagement and upper management goals directly.
Instead, they're focused on more engagement... with not unexpected responses.
The moderation culture is why I stopped engaging with stackoverflow and software.stackexchange. I noticed two problems.
The first is marking so many interesting questions and answers as off-topic or opinion-based, which vastly reduced the scope of interesting content, and discouraged daily visiting to learn instead of just using the site as a reference through google. Relying on google to feed you users is a fool's gambit. Websites need to create recurring visitors, and they do that by providing something that engages. Stackoverflow and software.SE's moderation policies made it far less engaging as they grew more heavy-handed. This left the sites open to changes in google's algorithm affecting their traffic.
The second major problem is duplicate policing and a lack of staleness policies. By not allowing the same question to be asked again it meant that the content of the network has grown gradually more and more stale. Even my own old answers are now often wrong because they are simply outdated. Stackoverflow is filled with questions in the style "what is the right way to use technology X to do Y", and the right answer to that changes every 2 or 3 years, when technology X gets an update or when new insights in how to best do Y are formed. I tried updating a few here and there, when I saw people engaging with wrong answers, but overall the blame is on stackoverflow and its moderators for not working out a more effective mechanism to get rid of stale answers and letting new users answer old questions with answers that have a shot at rising to the top. This also means that as top-voted answers grow more and more stale there is a tipping point where google no longer sees the site as a useful resource and starts lowering it in the ranking, and this is what seems has happened.
I wonder if it's just finally reached a tipping point of frustration with the moderation. I know I stopped going there years ago. At some point as all the good contributors leave you'd expect to get a snowball / downward spiral, even if the site coasted for years before that.
I was in the beta of stack overflow (my numerical id is <2000): it was always toxic and counterproductive, and I stopped seriously using it a year or so into its life (this may have been before it left beta, I don't remember).
It is still the best place to find a lot of answers (though their piece of the pie is rapidly shrinking), but participating in the system was never fun.
Maybe SO can have like super moderators / admin employees that are summonable by paying XXX score and they can bring the hammer down on problem answers and punish the toxic moderators etc.
I'd blame Google - at least for the initial drop. When you look at the "new visits" chart you can see that the drop happens in May, 6 months before ChatGPT.
I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleasant, but somehow the actual result is the exact opposite.
That being said, I don't think the culture or moderation has got worse recently, so I suspect the traffic decline is either a change in Google's algorithms or the impact of ChatGPT (or both).