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> But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.

I hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.

But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was specifically intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to avoid chatter because that gets in the way of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.

by socalgal25 hours ago|

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To me your description is mythical reddit. Actual Reddit is every bit as hostile as stack overflow and unlike stack overflow, old questions can not be updated with new answers when existing answers get out of date.

by cwnyth4 hours ago|

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I think Reddit is even worse. You could get banned from SO for using pretty foul insults, but in some places of Reddit, it's business as usual.

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by mahboi4 hours ago|

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Reddit is full of rage and also people getting banned for no reason. But crashing out on StackOverflow, now that's when someone needs help.

by cwnyth2 hours ago|

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I'm a mod on two SE sites. It definitely happens. And yes, (imo) they typically need help.

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by 4 hours ago|

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by cwnyth4 hours ago|

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But SO was never a place to just talk to others. It's not a general purpose discussion site. It could have been a friendly place, but users still would have left, because it's just far easier to get an immediate answer from AI, and those answers have only been getting better.

Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.

by cowlevel4 hours ago|

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In the early years it very much was. You could ask just about anything that was programming related and had a question mark. In the middle times of SO a lot of those became "locked for historical preservation" and new ones weren't allowed.

by zahlman21 minutes ago|

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It wasn't supposed to be like that. Atwood and Spolsky had an insufficiently refined concept of what makes a good question, that was overly tied to "keeping the riff-raff out" and insufficiently based in having a searchable reference that covers a full spectrum of "difficulty levels" but still having every question clearly posed and properly scoped.

Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.

It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.