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The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

267 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.

The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.

What happened?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stack Exchange has been making a large number of bad calls over the past few years. Basically pissing off their moderators. The first one was Monica who actually sued them for it (libel or defamation or something, basically they said she was being transphobic or something when she wasn't) and they settled. Around that time, possibly before, they removed a site from their Hot Network Questions because of a single tweet. Combine that with them constantly ignoring Stack Exchange Meta (where users and admins are meant to interact for the better of the site and discuss the sites themselves). Moderators were understandably furious when their posts get ignored in the place where Stack Exchange says they're meant to communicate when a random tweet gets more attention and immediate action.

More recently they've given different instructions privately to moderators than what they said publicly with regards to suspected AI content.

I mean, combine all of that with how hostile the users of the site are. Accusing you of not searching before posting and marking your question as a duplicate because they think it is and refusing to listen to why you say it isn't.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sure they are bad, because general corporation and enshittification cycle, but when someone consistently mentions, "a single tweet" or something like that that they represent as purely innocuous (but without any explanation or link to source), gets my suspicious radar WAY up...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Your suspicion makes sense, let me provide some context.

(Quick aside for the unaware, not necessarily Snapz, Stack Exchange (SE) is the company and family of sites behind Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is the biggest and was the first and that's why it doesn't have the same "Blah Exchange" branding.)

I think this answer on SE Meta describes the Tweets the best. I can't find good archived links to the tweets and they seem to be deleted now. This answer has screenshots and quotes them. This answer is not the first thing that happens in chronological order but it is the best thing I've found with quotes of the tweets. So just go here to see what the tweets were. I guess it was actually about three and not just a single one like I remembered. Summary here,

stack exchange: the #1 site for your questions about dataframes and female treachery

normal website

IPS: How to approach a friend about his girlfriend asking to sleep with me?

IPS: How do I tell students at a school I volunteer at to stop flirting with me?

SciFi: Story about aliens nicknamed 'Eechees' who have created a network of tunnels on Mars

2:37 PM - 16 Oct 2018

1 Retweet 38 Likes

Someone then retweeted that,

When people seem confused about why Stack Overflow might not be the most welcoming/comfortable place for people to find answers to programming questions, show them this

[The tweet from above]

This question on Interpersonal Skills (IPS) Meta is (as far as I can find) when the community at large first found out about what happened. Then later there was this question on SE Meta (which the earlier answer is in response to). Both of these posts have most of the context.

Feel free to look over as much as you want, I'll just post some of the highlights proving the points I was talking about.

From the IPS Meta question, in this answer

Was the removal of this site from the [Hot Network Questions (HNQ)] in response to a Twitter complaint?

Yep.

Oh. Well, that seems... crummy.

Yep. Let me tell you about it.

The initial response to the tweet in an internal discussion wasn't actually "let's pull IPS out of the HNQ" it was "Maybe we should finally kill the HNQ or redesign it to make it better." I think that reworking the HNQ is something that many people want to see - myself included. Should a tweet be the final straw when it's been discussed so much over the years? No. Am I willing to be OK with that if it means something will change? Begrudgingly, yes... but that's a separate issue.

[...]

It's easy to panic and focus on optics instead of tenable solutions, and while it looks really drastic, pulling IPS from the HNQ was a pretty moderate response. Yes, it was a quick decision - like pulling your hand away from a hot stove when it burns. It was the solution we chose - without consulting IPS - because it was effective and easy to implement since it would fix the perceived problem immediately and there was already a technical solution in place for doing it.

[...]

We are going to have some internal discussions to improve how we respond in situations like this in the future. We don't want Twitter - or Reddit or any other external site - to be where users go to get real change to happen on the network. We love our meta system - the child meta sites and Meta Stack Exchange - and we need those to be where people feel they can come to and get a response from us.

This comment explains the community's feeling very well I believe.

The immediate response doesn't set a great example and looks outwardly like we didn't think things over. I think is a massive, almost impossibly massive understatement. I don't know if you guys can ever recover any of the massive amount of community trust you lost that day. Finding out that yes, indeed, a twitter complaint is a more powerful force of site governance then months of meta discussions by the most engaged users of the site just means that there's no point participating at all until whatever dynamic causes this is completly [sic] and provably wiped out.

Also this

[...] Removing IPS and only IPS based on the outrage of a few Twitter users is incredibly unfair to this community and sends a very strong signal that SE considers the opinions and efforts of valuable contributors practically worthless. If y'all do care about this site, then please act like it? [...]

From the SE Meta question, this answer

[...]

What happened was that someone called SE out on Twitter for something you could conceivably see as problematic (two questions with out of context bad titles showing next to each other in that list). After that, not only was that change done within 40 minutes of it being pointed out, this happened after MONTHS of engaged users of that site asking for the HNQ to be adressed.

[Lemmy UI does not underline individual links, so here are the three links individually]

https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1520/should-we-edit-titles-that-are-not-sufficiently-descriptive

https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1291/should-we-step-up-our-voting-culture/1294#1294

https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1314/moratorium-on-hot-network-questions-until-we-have-greater-control-over-content

Yet, this happens only after Twitter outrage from non-users of the site. Why is that? Even if you have the very best of intentions and had this cooking internally for a long time (which I'm going to just assume for the purposes of this argument - good faith and all), this couldn't possibly have had less fortunate timing.

I'm not trying to rag on Stack Exchange for doing this, but why was such a massive change made without consulting, collecting feedback from or even notifying the site's active user base? Why does an engaged user of IPS have to visit twitter of all places to find out SE has cut out more than half of their site's traffic overnight?

Why wasn't the community consulted on this? We had discussions on it before, a lot of people came down in favor of restricting IPS from showing up on the sidebar in some fashion or another, and now we get this. No feedback, no discussion. Someone that apparently SE wants to placate made a stink on Twitter, and somehow that's more effective than months of constructive reasoning in driving change. What reason, if at all, does an engaged user of the site have to trust the community governance model with this?

If it sounds like I'm really annoyed by this its because I am, yes I was in favor of removing IPS from HNQ before, but the circumstances under which it happened is making me lose all hope I have for SE's leadership's ability to formulate concrete plans to make changes constructively.

Edit: Make individual links as bullet points in one of the quotes since Lemmy UI does not make it clear it is three links.

Edit 2: Add summary of the tweets so more context is on this post.