Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwellers got their way and drove everyone else away.
Instead of a rich interaction forum, it became a gamified version of Appease The Asshole. I stopped playing when I realized I’d rather be doing almost anything else with my free time.
For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run, who is empowered to say “I appreciate your efforts but this isn’t how we want to do things here” and veto the ruiners. Otherwise you inevitably seem to end up with a self-elected bureaucracy that exists to keep itself in place, all else be damned.
(Bringing it back to a local example, I can’t imagine HN without dang and the new mods. Actually, I guess I can: it would look a lot like Reddit, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I vastly prefer the quality of conversation here, thanks.)
Fully agreed with your reason for leaving, but I'll throw in: it's absolutely terrible at showing time relevant information, seemingly on the theory that someone will dedup and edit every question and answer as it becomes history rather than helpful.
That became more and more clear as the site and content aged, and afaict they have done absolutely nothing to address it. So after a few years the site had good information... but often only if you had accidentally time traveled.
I had FAR too many cases where the correct answer now was much further down the page, and the highest rated (and correct at the time) answer was causing damage, and editing it to fix that would often be undone unless it was super obvious (if I even could). It shifted the site from "the most useful" to "everything still needs to be double checked off-site" and at that point any web search is roughly equivalent. And when it's not a destination for answers, it's not a destination for questions (or moderation) either.
Definitely. And interestingly, that sucked for authors of the old answers, too. I had a few highly ranked answers from around 2010 or so. Every now and then I’d get a new notification about someone telling me I was completely wrong and should be embarrassed. Look, my time traveling friend, that answer was perfectly reasonable when I wrote it 16 years ago. It’s not my fault that the ebbs and currents of SO pushed you to it today. I’d answer differently today, but I’m not going to go back and “fix” all my old suggestions to keep them up to date.
That’s the weird feedback loop from practically forcing new askers back to the old answers, which was bad for everyone involved.
The Android filesystem APIs are a perfect example of this. The old answers no longer work because Google keeps restricting what apps can do. If you're lucky, someone might post a comment or a new (non-accepted) answer.
> For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run
That was Jeff Atwood. Who said a lot of very interesting things about how the site was explicitly intended to differ from traditional forums where "perfectly good" questions are constantly asked.
> Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay.
This is absurd and I can't think of anything remotely like this happening in practice. The opposite is true: popular questions attract dozens of redundant, low-quality answers that re-state things that were said many years ago, list two different options from two other different previous answers, list a subset of options from some previous answers, describe some personal experience that ultimately led to applying someone else's answer with a trivial modification for personal circumstances unrelated to the actual subject of the question, etc. etc.
Instead of a rich interaction forum, it became a gamified version of Appease The Asshole. I stopped playing when I realized I’d rather be doing almost anything else with my free time.
For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run, who is empowered to say “I appreciate your efforts but this isn’t how we want to do things here” and veto the ruiners. Otherwise you inevitably seem to end up with a self-elected bureaucracy that exists to keep itself in place, all else be damned.
(Bringing it back to a local example, I can’t imagine HN without dang and the new mods. Actually, I guess I can: it would look a lot like Reddit, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I vastly prefer the quality of conversation here, thanks.)