this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.
ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site's coffin because it's now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn't "use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic."
I've been contributing on SO for a decade and comments like this drive me nuts.
It was a free self moderating tool and people couldn't even ask question properly for people to do the work for them for free. The entitlement is astonishing and to have the gal to call SO toxic just shows how undeserving some people are of any assistance.
Yes use the search bar and yes lock the thread if people can't spend 5 minutes to form their question there is no saving of these fools. Period.
In fact my main reason for stopping to contribute was dramatic decrease of question quality not the AI. Just try to follow the new section for a day and tell me it's not a problem, I'll wait.
SO did go overboard at times; I've seen quite a few instances where posts were locked for being "duplicates" of completely unrelated problems. Oftentimes they were accompanied with unnecessarily rude messages as well.
But yes, the unwillingness of some (most?) people to use the search function baffles me. They'd prefer to write a narrative essay in SO for their FizzBuzz assignment and argue with mods rather than type a few keywords to instantly get the solution.