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.

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.

Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.

It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated. Just like a bronze sword.

Mods are finally happy.

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..

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 do have a webarchive of StackOverflow on some backup disc somewhere - just in case :D

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.

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.