Woooow. That makes me feel... old.

I do not miss StackOverflow. It wasn’t a community, it was a toxic environment that rewarded asshole behavior.

They get that many?!

Still over $100M in revenue, now mainly from AI and Enterprise customers.

https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...

Incredible that SO sold for $1.8B at one point.

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

It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated.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

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..

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.

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.