{"slug": "stack-overflow", "name": "Stack Overflow", "category": "ai", "category_name": "AI tools and apps", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 42, "warners": 20, "score": -10.581, "rising": 0.35, "first": "2025-11-26", "latest": "2026-10-30", "why": "I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 15, "compare": 4, "warn": 22}, "spark": [0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "stackoverflow.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://stackoverflow.com", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Stack Overflow", "Stack Overflow for Agents", "StackOverflow for Agents", "StackOverflow"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 804821776, "item_id": 50301361, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301361", "by": "rpigab", "date": "2026-10-30", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant", "excerpt": "I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant regardless of how many questions are asked, because most of asked questions were irrelevant anyway, it was noise, new users who didn't even perform a simple search before asking, closed rapidly. I used it 99% for searching, reading, 0.9% answering, 0.1% asking. What would be relevant is how many answers are actually read today. It must h", "context": "", "use_case": "searching and reading answers", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 743953585, "item_id": 46497099, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497099", "by": "JazCE", "date": "2026-01-05", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites.", "excerpt": "> Really? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation? I mean, that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer. From that answer, if you're still having issues, you form a question around: \"I found this answer on [SO](link), which lead me in this direction and found these [documents](link), however I am still having ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}, {"id": 743855776, "item_id": 46490986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46490986", "by": "JazCE", "date": "2026-01-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile", "excerpt": "As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0]. I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a di", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}, {"id": 737726144, "item_id": 46107884, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46107884", "by": "throwaway2037", "date": "2025-12-01", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it is a damn good website, if only for the archive", "excerpt": "I don't get these comments. I'm not here to shill for SO, but it is a damn good website, if only for the archive. Can't remember how to iterate over entries in JavaScript dictionary (object)? SO can tell you, usually much better than W3Schools can, which attracts so much scorn. (I love that site: So simple for the simple stuff!) When you search programming-related questions, what sites do you normally read? For me, i", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "It\u2019s been a very hard year"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 804559904, "item_id": 50284994, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284994", "by": "joe_the_user", "date": "2026-10-29", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "it's gamified interface made it impossible to win unless someone was ultra-competitive", "excerpt": "Yeah, it makes me curious about exactly what thinking was involved in the site going to heck like that. Part of it was questions and answers accumulating and so the question of duplicates thus apparently weighing on the moderators minds more. Part of it might have been an effort to prevent people gaming the system. Actually, talking to ChatGpt, I found this article: \u201cStack Overflow Isn\u2019t Very Welcoming. It\u2019s Time for", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 804547296, "item_id": 50284206, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284206", "by": "yallpendantools", "date": "2026-10-29", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application", "excerpt": "I think the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application of the \"hacker\" mindset (more or less) to a lot of fields that do not benefit from the hacker mindset. From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between \"broadly applicable\" and \"too specific\". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my hom", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 801673664, "item_id": 50104604, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104604", "by": "LiamPowell", "date": "2026-10-15", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "This seems so poorly thought out.", "excerpt": "This seems so poorly thought out. The first obvious question is \"why do agents need their own Stack Overflow?\" They can already read docs and code well. Why would they need a source of indirect and outdated information? Then we have this verification system where you're just going to have the same model verifying the same code using the same method across a bunch of instances. What's even the point? You gain nothing ", "context": "", "use_case": "Q&A for coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stack Overflow for Agents"}, {"id": 783585920, "item_id": 48974120, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974120", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-07-19", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "i got stung by exactly this.", "excerpt": "> i got stung by exactly this. > i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow. You came to a place where the terms and conditions state explicitly (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing) that you license your answer to the community with a Creative Commons CC-BY license (", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"}]}], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["programming q&a", "searching and reading answers", "agent skill file", "q&a for coding agents", "developer q&a", "q&a for programmers"], "compared": [{"slug": "chatgpt", "name": "ChatGPT", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 2}, {"slug": "brave-search", "name": "Brave Search", "co": 1, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "gemini", "name": "Gemini", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 743764096, "item_id": 46485256, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485256", "by": "Shog9", "date": "2026-01-03", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "It sucked, for everyone.", "excerpt": "There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not \"search engines\"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user in", "context": "Former Stack Overflow employee", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345", "title": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time", "mentions": 11}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50282454", "title": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month", "mentions": 6}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949", "title": "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48282709", "title": "Stack Overflow's forum is dead thanks to AI", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47650401", "title": "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527471", "title": "We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"compare": 1, "warn": 1}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 2}, "2026-01": {"warn": 5, "neutral": 3, "recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 3}, "2026-03": {"compare": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 2}, "2026-05": {"warn": 3, "neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"warn": 1, "compare": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"warn": 4, "neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 3, "warn": 4, "compare": 1, "recommend": 1}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 804821776, "item_id": 50301361, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301361", "by": "rpigab", "date": "2026-10-30", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant", "excerpt": "I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant regardless of how many questions are asked, because most of asked questions were irrelevant anyway, it was noise, new users who didn't even perform a simple search before asking, closed rapidly. I used it 99% for searching, reading, 0.9% answering, 0.1% asking. What would be relevant is how many answers are actually read today. It must h", "context": "", "use_case": "searching and reading answers", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 804649584, "item_id": 50290599, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50290599", "by": "jodrellblank", "date": "2026-10-29", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "StackOverflow is particularly sucsceptible to this", "excerpt": "> \"They would edit MY TEXT\" It isn't your text. All content is submitted under a Creative Commons license[1][2] which lets StackOverflow 'adapt remix transform' as long as they give credit (username) and indicate if changes were made (edit history). StackOverflow is particularly sucsceptible to this \"I imagine the site is something else and I'm making myself mad and blaming them\". I don't know why because it's never ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 804621328, "item_id": 50288833, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50288833", "by": "tacone", "date": "2026-10-29", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "here's the related skill", "excerpt": "For anybody interested, here's the related skill: https://agents.stackoverflow.com/skill.md", "context": "", "use_case": "Agent skill file", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stack Overflow for Agents"}, {"id": 804615792, "item_id": 50288487, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50288487", "by": "bluedino", "date": "2026-10-29", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "> It wasn\u2019t a \u201chelp me!!!111!\u201d site, it was an exchange. That's exactly what it turned into, though. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320536/what-is-the-best-triage-response-for-give-me-teh-codez-questions", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 804559904, "item_id": 50284994, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284994", "by": "joe_the_user", "date": "2026-10-29", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "it's gamified interface made it impossible to win unless someone was ultra-competitive", "excerpt": "Yeah, it makes me curious about exactly what thinking was involved in the site going to heck like that. Part of it was questions and answers accumulating and so the question of duplicates thus apparently weighing on the moderators minds more. Part of it might have been an effort to prevent people gaming the system. Actually, talking to ChatGpt, I found this article: \u201cStack Overflow Isn\u2019t Very Welcoming. It\u2019s Time for", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 804547296, "item_id": 50284206, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284206", "by": "yallpendantools", "date": "2026-10-29", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application", "excerpt": "I think the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application of the \"hacker\" mindset (more or less) to a lot of fields that do not benefit from the hacker mindset. From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between \"broadly applicable\" and \"too specific\". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my hom", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 804528560, "item_id": 50283035, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283035", "by": "avereveard", "date": "2026-10-29", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It was dying well before AI", "excerpt": "https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflows-decline/ It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"}, {"id": 801673664, "item_id": 50104604, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104604", "by": "LiamPowell", "date": "2026-10-15", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "This seems so poorly thought out.", "excerpt": "This seems so poorly thought out. The first obvious question is \"why do agents need their own Stack Overflow?\" They can already read docs and code well. Why would they need a source of indirect and outdated information? Then we have this verification system where you're just going to have the same model verifying the same code using the same method across a bunch of instances. What's even the point? You gain nothing ", "context": "", "use_case": "Q&A for coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stack Overflow for Agents"}, {"id": 800021952, "item_id": 50001372, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50001372", "by": "OutOfHere", "date": "2026-10-08", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Be advised that it already exists: https://agents.stackoverflow.com/", "excerpt": "Be advised that it already exists: https://agents.stackoverflow.com/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Agent.reviews \u2013 Where AI agents read and write reviews on tools"}, {"id": 793980272, "item_id": 49623767, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49623767", "by": "reeeeee", "date": "2026-09-09", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "There already exists a Stack Overflow for agents", "excerpt": "There already exists a Stack Overflow for agents: https://agents.stackoverflow.com/all?sort=hot", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Accidental Blackboard"}, {"id": 783585920, "item_id": 48974120, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974120", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-07-19", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "i got stung by exactly this.", "excerpt": "> i got stung by exactly this. > i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow. You came to a place where the terms and conditions state explicitly (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing) that you license your answer to the community with a Creative Commons CC-BY license (", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"}, {"id": 783577600, "item_id": 48973600, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48973600", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-07-19", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "The company repeatedly attempt to force shitty AI-powered features on the community", "excerpt": "The community arrived at, drafted and enforce policy forbidding AI-generated content; this usually meant answers because that was the obvious use case for LLMs. (We were getting absolutely flooded from day 1 with really obviously LLM-generated crap, which represented absolutely zero value add over the OP going to chatgpt dot com and copy-pasting the question there instead. Often this came from users who came back to ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"}, {"id": 783513696, "item_id": 48969606, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969606", "by": "shagie", "date": "2026-07-19", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Stack Overflow was reducing the ability for people to curate content", "excerpt": "Often the people curating the questions are also the ones who are answering them. Their goal (loosely described) was so that if you pulled up the front page of the site, you'd find questions that are interesting to read and answer. If you, as a professional visiting the site went to it and found the front page with things that were trivially answered by reading the documentation or \"how do I draw a triangle with star", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"}, {"id": 783344752, "item_id": 48959047, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959047", "by": "flyingshelf", "date": "2026-07-18", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "> would've been a \"newcomer track\" It's there now. Too late I guess. https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"}, {"id": 783329088, "item_id": 48958068, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48958068", "by": "EspressoGPT", "date": "2026-07-18", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "there's now a \"StackOverflow for Agents\"", "excerpt": "Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there. Funnily enough, there's now a \"StackOverflow for Agents\": https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"}, {"id": 781507280, "item_id": 48844205, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844205", "by": "bluGill", "date": "2026-07-09", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "They were too degraded to be worth using 5 years ago compared to the hey day", "excerpt": "A few years, and that was on accident. They were too degraded to be worth using 5 years ago compared to the hey day", "context": "", "use_case": "programming Q&A", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How long has it been since you last opened Stack Overflow?"}, {"id": 775773088, "item_id": 48485818, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48485818", "by": "nomilk", "date": "2026-06-10", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Looks interesting.", "excerpt": "Looks interesting. Not clear if only agents can ask/answer questions, or if humans are welcome to too? And if API is the only way to do so? I sought clarification here https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/439925/how-does-stack-overflow-for-agents-beta-work although it might be downvoted/closed as SO meta is usually strictly for SO only (not necessarily SO for Agents).", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stack Overflow for Agents"}, {"id": 775707760, "item_id": 48481735, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481735", "by": "nailer", "date": "2026-06-10", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "A bit lame, agents should be able to just pay with x402", "excerpt": "It's an API. https://agents.stackoverflow.com/skill.md POST /api/posts Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY X-Sofa-Session: session-uuid Content-Type: application/json { \"content_type\": \"question\", \"title\": \"How do I parse JSON in Python?\", \"body\": \"I need to parse a JSON string into a dictionary. What's the best approach?\", \"tags\": [\"python\", \"json\"] } A bit lame, agents should be able to just pay with x402 rather tha", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stackoverflow for Agents"}, {"id": 775034496, "item_id": 48439656, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48439656", "by": "matheusmoreira", "date": "2026-06-07", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Won't be for long.", "excerpt": "Won't be for long. https://sherwood.news/tech/stack-overflow-forum-dead-thanks-ai-but-companys-still-kicking-ai/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48282709", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix?"}, {"id": 772678081, "item_id": 48292380, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292380", "by": "aembleton", "date": "2026-05-27", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "AI is just a tool, much like StackOverflow.", "excerpt": "> Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value. Did you feel similar when Wikipedia was created or Google or when you first got access to the internet? All of these tools have made digging into subjects and learning easier. I find the same with AI. I love it when a random thought pops into my head and I can explore it with an AI such as Gemini. Then ask it for the sources it used so that I can read furth", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "So, Where Does Next-Token Prediction Leave Us?"}, {"id": 772549504, "item_id": 48284344, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284344", "by": "asqueella", "date": "2026-05-26", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "one of the many SO dramas", "excerpt": "https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stack Overflow's forum is dead thanks to AI"}, {"id": 772547696, "item_id": 48284231, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284231", "by": "dpark", "date": "2026-05-26", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on.", "excerpt": "It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stack Overflow's forum is dead thanks to AI"}, {"id": 768984656, "item_id": 48061541, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061541", "by": "bayindirh", "date": "2026-05-08", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "I still feel sour about the site. Talk about burnt bridges.", "excerpt": "You're absolutely right. The problem was so small that SO only had to make a site-wide survey, make a couple of public statements, big administrative changes and a big campaign to earn hearts and minds back. Even after that, I still feel sour about the site. Talk about burnt bridges. Moreover, in 2025, 46% of the survey participants told that they don't feel like part of the community. That number was 44% in 2024 [1]", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI Slop Is Killing Online Communities"}, {"id": 764366880, "item_id": 47772930, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772930", "by": "meinersbur", "date": "2026-04-14", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "They closed my 16 year (!) old question", "excerpt": "Moderators seem to have not enough to do. They closed my 16 year (!) old question and added comment: > Do not include solution to question please (post a separate answer instead). -- user4157124 https://stackoverflow.com/q/2224373/102498 16 years ago, questions with intentionally open answers were common and providing a summary in the question was seen as a courtesy.", "context": "", "use_case": "Developer Q&A", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stack Overflow moderator publicly leaks private flagger information"}, {"id": 762488544, "item_id": 47655534, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655534", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-04-05", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "closing questions is an impediment to Number Go Up", "excerpt": "I can absolutely say that \"I couldn't answer the question first\" is not a motive people had for closing questions. That would have been abusive and definitely something that moderators would follow up on and deal with to whatever tiny extent it happened. I can say extremely confidently from years of experience that the people who were always \"trying to be the first to answer your question\" were, overwhelmingly, the o", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site"}, {"id": 762412432, "item_id": 47650777, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47650777", "by": "Brajeshwar", "date": "2026-04-05", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "To me, it looks like more like Digg from the old days.", "excerpt": "The Beta Site is at https://beta.stackoverflow.com To me, it looks like more like Digg from the old days.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site"}, {"id": 759285280, "item_id": 47455330, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47455330", "by": "disgruntledphd2", "date": "2026-03-20", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow", "excerpt": "> It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time. It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"}, {"id": 758043088, "item_id": 47377693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47377693", "by": "genghisjahn", "date": "2026-03-14", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "", "excerpt": "I love that I don\u2019t have to look thru SO looking for a problem that\u2019s kind of like the one I\u2019m having. I have a problem solved based on my exact code taking my entire code base into account. And if I want a biting sarcastic review of my many faults as a software developer, I can ask for that too.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI Didn't Simplify Software Engineering: It Just Made Bad Engineering Easier"}, {"id": 754121137, "item_id": 47132571, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47132571", "by": "mobinpo", "date": "2026-02-23", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Stack Overflow is dying because of it.", "excerpt": "Hey HN! I built CodeAnswr because I noticed a problem: everyone now solves coding problems with AI, but those solutions never get published anywhere searchable. Stack Overflow is dying because of it. CodeAnswr is the fix \u2014 AI-assisted Q&A where the final answer gets published publicly, so the next developer searching for the same problem finds it instantly. Key things I tried to get right: - Privacy scanner strips AP", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: CodeAnswr \u2013 AI-powered Stack Overflow alternative, free forever"}, {"id": 752826594, "item_id": 47051662, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051662", "by": "ggregoire", "date": "2026-02-17", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Didn't mean it was dead tho", "excerpt": "> StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014. > [0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead (monthly question asked on Stack Overflow) \"monthly questions asked\" is a weird metric to measure the decline of StackOverflow tho. How many times are people gonna ask how to compare 2 dates in py", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI is destroying Open Source, and it's not even good yet"}, {"id": 750730960, "item_id": 46920685, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920685", "by": "andrekandre", "date": "2026-02-06", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use LLMs in the same way i used to used stack overflow", "excerpt": "> I use LLMs in the same way i used to used stack overflow, if I go much farther to automate my work than that I spend more time on cleanup compared to if I just write code myself. yea, same here. i've asked an ai to plan and setup some larger non straight forwards changes/features/refactorings but it usually devolves into burning tokens and me clicking the 'allow' button and re-clarifying over and over when it keeps", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "How to effectively write quality code with AI"}, {"id": 747504672, "item_id": 46719042, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719042", "by": "direwolf20", "date": "2026-01-22", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Note that Stack Overflow has already ceased to exist.", "excerpt": "Note that Stack Overflow has already ceased to exist. https://xcancel.com/marcgravell/status/1922922817143660783", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "eBay Explicitly Bans AI \"Buy for Me\" Agents in User Agreement Update"}, {"id": 744492048, "item_id": 46530753, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46530753", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-01-07", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Yes. The problem is that the model was questions open by default, so you had exposure to the question before it could be properly be considered for inclusion. The Staging Ground fixed this, but too little (only applied to a small random sampling of questions) and way too late. It's considered part of your responsibility, as someone answering questions, to understand the standards for closing questions (https://meta.s", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole"}, {"id": 744484160, "item_id": 46530260, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46530260", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-01-07", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "1. They overwhelmingly are not moderators, and they are not doing moderation by closing questions. This is curation, and duplicate closures overwhelmingly are done by subject-matter experts: users with a gold badge in one or more of the tags originally applied to the question. The requirement for such a badge is based on answering questions: > Earn at least 1000 total score for at least 200 non-community wiki answers", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole"}, {"id": 744013040, "item_id": 46500815, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46500815", "by": "gn4d", "date": "2026-01-05", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "what a braindead site, so glad I left years ago", "excerpt": "Code golfing on SO was fun, too! I just looked it up, and \"Note: This tag is currently blacklisted and can no longer be used.\" lmfao, what a braindead site, so glad I left years ago, after many years of greatly reduced activity. Source (at the top): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf?tab=Newest Look at fun stuff like this from 2010: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2440314/code-golf-%cf%80-day", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}, {"id": 743998320, "item_id": 46499895, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46499895", "by": "gn4d", "date": "2026-01-05", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "I found myself contributing less and less", "excerpt": "Friend in my group was in the public beta back in '08. We all ended up signing up by the end of '09. I used it off-and-on over the years (have some questions and replies with hundreds of upvotes). Though SO had a rap for having what might seem like harsh replies or moderation, it was often imho just blunt/curt, to the point, and often objectively defensible. I also agree with your timeframe that, in the later 2010s, ", "context": "", "use_case": "Q&A for programmers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}, {"id": 743953585, "item_id": 46497099, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497099", "by": "JazCE", "date": "2026-01-05", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites.", "excerpt": "> Really? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation? I mean, that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer. From that answer, if you're still having issues, you form a question around: \"I found this answer on [SO](link), which lead me in this direction and found these [documents](link), however I am still having ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}, {"id": 743895664, "item_id": 46493479, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493479", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-01-04", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out", "excerpt": "> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - \"it's not on that list, so you can't close it\") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the \"spolskyites\" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left. Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwo", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}, {"id": 743855776, "item_id": 46490986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46490986", "by": "JazCE", "date": "2026-01-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile", "excerpt": "As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0]. I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a di", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}, {"id": 743777520, "item_id": 46486095, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46486095", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-01-04", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "The volume of Stack Overflow was never going to be sustainable and was not reasonably reflective of its goals.", "excerpt": "The newbies vastly outnumber the experienced people (in every discipline), and have more to ask per-capita, and are worse at asking it. Category 2 is much smaller. The volume of Stack Overflow was never going to be sustainable and was not reasonably reflective of its goals. We are talking about a site that has accumulated more than three times as many questions as there are articles on Wikipedia. Even though the scop", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"}]}