For me, it has always been about searching Google. If it led to SO, I would check the solutions, but most of the time, they didn't work. There would always be a blog somewhere with someone nice enough to put in the effort and explain things in detail. Once I got used to this, LLMs emerged, which are so much better. They provide solutions and combinations that make wild things easy, even those without documentation. And they do so instantly and pleasantly. No LLM bullies you for not having searched the web and then walks away. I'm kind of glad that SO is fading; there's a lot of bullying that is running into oblivion.
If you dare bring this up in the SO forum, perhaps suggesting or asking about a way to mitigate this behavior, pedantic douchebags go apoplectic with "Oh THIS again" as if the problem were solved.
Being unable to clearly mark the bounds of relevancy for answers (in a structured way that affects search) is a major weakspot of SO.
If it wasn’t trained on a specific newer API or Cloudformation/Terraform/CDK construct, with 4/4o, I just give it the link to the relevant documentation and tell it to use the links to help it create the right code.
2. Checks Google/SO and no answer
3. Figures it out themselves
4. Blogs about that
5. AIs that search pick it up first but eventually it ends up in training.
As well as AI teams paying for content for training.
One of the ingredients that made GenAI possible was a massive quantity of public, relatively high quality data (the internet).
We crowd sourced that over decades. If we transition to only interacting with AI agents in private as consumers, the corpus will fail to grow and update.
Until those started to get flagged (as duplicate, off-topic, whatnot) and closed. All of them I could make reopen (but it took time to collect the votes), and all of them eventually got a reasonable amount of upvotes and views.
That's where I stopped contributing to StackOverflow: when quality content I contribute gets refused by the moderators, I'm out.
I guess I learned my lesson to never spend time to make accepted answers better.
And then a year later, someone added a comment to mention that flag that needed to be set.
I find it okay to not update the answers: just like a blog post or a newspaper article, I find value in being able to say "this person had this problem in 2012, and this other person provided a fix also in 2012". But then it should be fine to ask the exact same question a couple years later if one expects a different answer. And it should not be marked as a duplicate. If anything, it could be marked as a duplicate after the answer is accepted, if it turns out to be the same (and if the new question has no value). But in reality, when I am stuck on a problem, I don't mind checking 5 similar answers. It's much better to have to find a solution from 5 similar questions than to not find it at all because it was moderated away.
Also it would keep people engaged: the current policy means that for some topics, it's very hard to contribute questions/answers because there are so many already. But in reality, many of the existing ones are more than 5 years old! If people could repost similar questions and get points for answering them (instead of being flagged as "duplicate"), it would probably keep the community more engaged.
To add an anecdote: The last question I bothered to answer was one where the accepted answer was a very-specific fix, and a more generic fix was in a comment below that which was better and more directly addressed the root problem and would work for any user encountering an exception (accepted answer was workable, but working at the wrong layer of abstraction to actually solve the problem). I pulled that out into its own answer. Looking back now at that question, the poor "accepted answer" which won't work for anyone hitting this error because it references a specific class in the user's question which won't exist for any other users is still accepted with -5 and the better answer is below the fold at +16. This is pretty typical across a lot of questions. The fact that SO doesn't automatically handle this case is basically a failure of the site's abstraction model and algorithms over answers.
For a site where the long-term value is ostensibly curating high-quality answers to the maximal number of questions, the best answers languish, and the questions and answers don't get sufficiently refined/updated over time. Arguably you'd want something closer to a wikipedia article about each problem that gets built out and updated over time if you want to provide canonical information about problems. Similarly I think the idea of closing things that are close, but different as duplicates has failed. These are often sufficiently different that the details are interesting and probably would provide value/activity/detail to the site. There should probably be some way to roll these up into a higher level article/topic to cover variants of problems, related cases, etc. This could start to act as pillars or knowledge-hubs within SO to get to a place of more canonical information or a more "tacit/practical wikipedia". Really not sure why things stopped at Q&A and seemed to stagnate where they did.
Though, they seemingly achieved profitability and sold for $1.8B without doing any of this, so what do I know. :) Probably the right move was focusing on other things like launching new communities, and making money for the company.
Many good responders and some of the better heavy handed mods work around the lack of tools for dealing with time with a constant stream of "Update:" and "Update to the Update:" top-level edits to the "accepted answer", but that isn't universal and requires manual intervention, only encourages heavy-handed moderators that heavy-handedness is the "right" approach versus a light touch, ignores what the over-gamified voting system was supposed to represent as the concept of an "answer", and overall sometimes just makes answers look "sloppy" rather than "idempotent".
I think the "moderator capture" by heavy-handed moderators seems an inevitable consequence of the "game" mechanics, where some of the tools have been lacking, and the sorts of people prone to undervaluing their own labor on behalf of companies incentivizing them with "points" over wages. I think the increasing feel of "StackOverflow is stale" is directly for not having time mechanics and a way to refresh answers from time to time as technology changes or shifts. The parts of "StackOverflow" that are as close to "evergreen" as possible are continually edited mini-wikis in a sloppy 90s top-posting USENET thread style that is messy and requires both heavy-handed moderation and works around the tools and the concept that an answer has a single author rather than is enabled by the tools.
ETA: Time in both directions, too: sometimes you are stuck in a legacy codebase and need to know "what was the accepted answer to this question 5 years ago?" and want easier tools to wade through legacy answers than trying to archeology dive through years of poorly organized Wiki editing history and comment history scattered across a N answers and M comments to each answer and/or hope that someone preserved somewhere in the middle of the top-posting thread in the current wiki state.
>There should probably be some way to roll these up into a higher level article/topic to cover variants of problems, related cases, etc. This could start to act as pillars or knowledge-hubs within SO to get to a place of more canonical information or a more "tacit/practical wikipedia".
There was an attempt to do something like that with the Collectives project but it doesn't seem to have gotten any real momentum going.
I can't be the only one. Their walled garden kept me out.
I've just checked: you don't even need an account to post an answer.
Spam sites that scraped SO content where a big problem for a while, so that would have certainly pulled traffic from SO.
If I had to guess about other reasons, I'd say we've moved on from giving our knowledge and content away for the benefit of corporations.
What does being an SO contributor actually get you?
Whats the point in monitoring new posts and answering questions?
The economy is hard enough as it is. I dont need to be giving my time away for free to help corporations generate more billions from Ad Revenue.
But whow knows!?
Like I say, is it actually declining by any metrics that are public? (genuine question)
Biggest grievance was an example where a question would ask someone like "how do I safely open a file in Python 3.11?" Obviously the answer is a context manager. But they would say that's not generic enough, the answer shouldn't use language specific features. Even though the question was for a specific language. Meaning I'd be spreading bad practice.
I had a reason to dive into obscure and esoteric corners of some languages/frameworks/toolkits. I practiced helping people with technical problems, which was likely a major contributor to getting my current job where developers also provide technical support to the customers (who are also software developers). Having this out in the open and being able to point at the fact that I was ranked in the top 100 contributors certainly helped.
However, things have changed since the early days, of course. Basic documentation and tutorials for programming languages and toolkits have become better overall, I'd say. We've got good centralized knowledge bases for certain topics, e.g. MDN where you previously would have had to piece together information from SelfHTML, W3Schools and other partially wrong sources, or go straight to the relevant specification (not for everyone, of course). Stack Overflow has become the repository of answered questions that is pretty searchable and there are a lot of questions that simply don't need to be asked again. LLMs have scraped SO, so ChatGPT and others can answer many programming questions fairly well (with the occasional hallucination or error).
By now I only rarely open SO anymore. But I go through different hobbies every few years anyway, and while I was still studying, I had the time, I learned a lot, and to this day I still like explaining things and helping others.
The worse the economy is, the greater the inequality between the masses and the top 0.1% the less we can afford to be idealistic and give away our time.
anyway, that's one issue, among others, that make the site ossified.
Even framing the same question in different ways is useful. If someone posts a Duplicate, adding that to a list of "alternative questions" that is collapsed by default on the original post might have been a better approach.
It also takes away the whole "your question is worthless" dynamic that closing a question raises.
I never asked a question on SO, though I used it as a reference often. I had this idea in my head that to ask a proper question that wouldn’t get moderated away or obliterated by the community, I would have to spend significant time and energy researching how to ask appropriate questions, and provide a bunch of supporting details that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did my due diligence before asking.
I guess at the end of the day this means I didn’t actually _need_ to ask a question, but also means some useful discussions and interesting answers to problems I solved, that I’m sure others have, don’t haven’t answers out in the wild.
Brilliant! And it does demonstrate at least part of the problem with stackoverflow - overzealous mods.
- Reddit: I only stumble upon questions by accident, and often on mobile where I’m not in the mood of typing long answers or code. - GitHub: I’m mainly here looking for answers myself, is there a nice way to look over all issues for a couple of projects so that I can easily see whether I could help somewhere? - discourse, discord, …: usually framework-specific, so not as ideal/comfortable as SO I imagine
Are others on the same situation? Where do you answer questions nowadays?
[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/ai/#1-ai-tools-in-the-d...
In its early days, the site had a vibrant community, and was actively being improved by a team that pretty much entirely consisted of power users. The whole team was active on the site and available in Meta and chat -- you could report a bug or propose a new feature and it would often be fixed/implemented and live on the site within a couple hours. The site was expanding and constantly being updated; the staff was focused on expanding the Stack Exchange platform, making the user experience better, and building up the community.
But around 2016, the company abruptly stopped most new development on the core platform. They announced a sweeping "Quality Improvement Project" [0] that was supposed to bring badly-needed improvements to the moderation system, asking the community for ideas and suggestions; announcing some major overhauls that were in progress...and then radio silence. For the next several years, there were no changes to the core platform except bugfixes, minor tweaks, and several UI overhauls that nobody asked for. The company shifted nearly all of its development resources to side projects that were universally failures: Teams, Documentation, video tutorials, another product called Teams, etc. Stack Overflow was (and still is) nowhere near profitability, so they were cutting costs and desperately trying to find some way to monetize the site, while neglecting their core platform and laying off staff.
Over the next few years, the team became more distant and unreachable as staff left and were replaced with new employees who were not engaged users of the platform, and largely didn't interact with it at all. Most of the company's hiring was in sales and marketing; the company is now largely run by the sales department rather than engineering. The site started to decline during this era, and the fun, friendly atmosphere of the early days gave way to with a more grumpy, corporate, and bureaucratic vibe.
Then in 2019...a lot of stuff happened. The company published a blog post blaming the userbase for the site's unwelcoming reputation, rather than the broken moderation process. The company made an announcement that they would no longer be engaging with the community and seeking feedback on new products and features, because they were tired of reading negative reactions to products that weren't useful and changes like UI redesigns that compromised usability. (Infamously, an executive quipped that the users who participate in Meta discussions represent "0.015%" of the site's visitors, and therefore weren't worth listening to -- despite these users contributing around 80% of the site's content). The company also announced plans to illegally change the licensing terms of user-submitted content, fired a volunteer moderator with no warning or explanation over a blatantly false allegation of transphobia [1], issued false and defamatory statements about that moderator to The Register; and fired two staff members who were just about the only employees who still engaged with the community and pushed back internally on the company's bad decisions [2]. A huge chunk of the community (including myself) stopped participating after everything that happened in 2019, and the site has seen a massive decline in quality and engagement since then.
In the wake of this, the company did start to make some changes -- they started engaging more with the community, and started working again on new features and changes, including moderation improvements -- but it's clear that people in the company working on the core site and engaging with the community have limited resources and very little influence with the company, and their work is too little, too late.
Then, the company got bought out by a private equity firm. The new CEO seems convinced that AI is the solution to monetizing Stack Overflow, somehow. This started with implementing half-baked AI features that didn't work, and the latest iteration seems to be trying to convince AI companies to pay for access to the site's content -- never mind that it's all available for free under a creative commons license. He's been trying to lock down the site's data dumps in an attempt to restrict AI companies from being able to download them, most recently with another attempt at illegally relicensing CC-BY-SA content [3]. Never mind that the drastic decline in engagement over recent years means whatever value the site has for AI training comes from its historical content which has long been freely available; not its new content [4]. (The most entertaining part of this debacle is that whenever the company announces some misguided new initiative, droves of ex-employees show up on Meta to tell them what a bad idea it is.)
So, TL;DR: the company neglected their core platform for years, lost or fired their most experienced staff, and lost most of their userbase and engagement. Now they're burning money, running an outdated platform that's not up to the task, and are caught off-guard by ChatGPT.
[0]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889
[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965
[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342039
- Rude and antagonistic moderation.
- Closing topics too aggressively. Very often in favour of topics that are too old, no longer relevant, or don't fully address the question.
- Ignoring the constraints of the asker. For example, asking how do I do X with Y framework, and having someone telling you to switch to B framework instead. Even worse when it's a mod hellbent on shutting you down for not being able to change your constraints.
Reddit, in all its chaos, seems to be faring better at being a support community than SO.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...
granted, framing it as a sexism issue etc was probably a doomed effort from the start even if it’s true in a sense.
And that's something just about every site and community and social media platform has to deal with. People don't stick around forever, and you can't rely on the same old people who've been there for the last decade to keep things going for the next two. So you need new users to get involved and become active, and for that you need a community that's somewhat welcoming to them and their efforts.
Feels like Wikipedia is going down a similar path to StackOverflow as well.
Instead of current practice, they should make a separate "hall of fame" Q&As that meet their standard, and no more "too broad" "duplicated" closed questions.
Only close / deletes questions that aren't relevant, like jokes and out of topics (careers) questions.
This isn't to say that Reddit doesn't have its own issues and overzealous moderators, but I would hit r/sysadmin for info on an outage or bug before I thought of SO.
I would also throw Slack in with Discord. A lot of my vendors have public Slack instances where I can ask the same question with a much better audience.
What we actually need:
- the owner of the question must be the only one capable to say if an answer is good or not for his question
- no other user must be able to modify the question of the owner even if they think it is badly explained. They can always suggest modifies but the owner can decide if to accept them or not
- the moderators can try to suggest "hey we think this is a duplicate of that" but the owner must be the one to accept or reject it. Even if he says "I just want a more current answer, the one you linked is 4 yo" the moderators must accept his decision and keep the question open
- moderators must act aggressively against people (and other moderators) saying things like "this sound like some homework" or "you better use technology y instead of x" or similar
- answers older than a few years should have a visible flag on them signaling that probably that answer is not anymore the best possible one and to be careful using it and, if it doesn't work anymore, to open a new question tagging the old one
First, why aren't they simply archiving anything over X years old? The fact that this question from 14 years ago was open for moderation is crazy. Second, who has so little to do that they're hunting down ancient questions to moderate?
I edited it to ask, instead of for the best way, some ways. The edit was rejected. I gave up and have no interest in ever asking or answering questions there again. It's just too random.
1. GitHub. Many times I have found my answer to a problem with a specific library/framework in GitHub issues.
2. Seniority. As I gain more experience, I tend to ask/answer less in SO. From time to time I still read answers.
3. To a lesser extent, chatgpt. I usually have to double check the outputs, but it works fine some times
Stack Overflow is how I learned to do almost everything. Now I never use it anymore. Mostly because it has become useless. I love that it does not have video (I hate video), but the good answers are no longer there, but there is far more attitude. I never recall being insulted or degraded before, but that sure is common now. I increasingly think that real internet ID's are a wonderful idea, just so twerps can get beaten again, as is just.
Any anonymous tool will trend towards soft, whiny bitch in the absence of leadership or subtle forms of norm enforcement. Male spaces tend to be enjoyable because of swift, brutal norm enforcement. This is missing at Stack Overflow and pretty much everywhere online, so behavior converges towards 13-year-old teen cheerleader behavior. We need to make it more of a high school male locker room environment (silent unless you have something valuable to say, with consequences if you misbehave).
In summary, the judicious use of the appropriate level of violence is the solution to everything.
I see it more as missing a sound authority stopping the fight of siblings.
I'm surprised noone is seeing an analogy at work. I switched teams recently, from an engineering team to a software engineering team, and it was obvious that they applied the SO attitude at work: bullying, berating questions, avoid facing the truth etc...
Do you mean there are less new answers than there used to be?
I think that people stopped contributing. I stopped some time ago as the site stopped motivating me to contribute.
I was using an unpopular Google API which was returning an unexpected error with a weird code. There was an unanswered SO question about the exact issue from years ago.
I found the answer to the problem in some open source library and added an answer to the SO question with a couple sentences and a link to the source code. My answer was immediately rejected.
There was a way to flag it to ask for review which I did but got no response. I ended up going to meta.stackexchange to ask for an explanation. Finally, after multiple people discussed about it the answer was approved. When I asked why a valid answer was rejected in the first place the response was "links on old questions are often spam and mods just auto-reject".
I won't bother contributing in the future if it takes that much effort to answer. BTW I had something like 20k karma.
I wish that rather than close a question you were only allowed to link an answer from what you thought was the duplicate and that just becomes another voting game vs. moderator opinion.
Also I suspect a little bit: LLMs aren't dicks, and you can ask them follow up iterative questions quicker than SO users respond.
Closed "duplicate", when the old answer is insanely out of date is a big one.
Plus whereas programming language help is at least pretty stable, config details are the least stable anyway
For a long time, the sheer usefulness of SO overshadowed all of this. People were willing to suffer for the sake of getting a result. But over time the quality couldn't keep up with the pure agony of having to deal with petty dictators. And finally, people just stopped going there, which means the chance that the best answer will be on SO is getting smaller, which means even less people bother with it and so on.
My answer to this question is that I simply got better at solving programming problems on my own without having to ask for help. That increase of skill coupled with the the overly aggressive moderation that acted as a deterrent for me to ask questions has led to a point where I have practically no need for the platform.
I have even noticed that I will typically bypass stack-overflow when researching a problem, preferring other resources first (official documentation).
There's also a lot of petty nonsense that goes on with that site. Not as badly as somewhere like Wikipedia, but there's still lots of... peculiar personalities on Stack Overflow who participate in ways that are not constructive.
AI of course just answers it. I can ask it follow ups, I can give it loose code and it just gets it. My grammar can be riddled with spelling errors and it still gets it. I can go back and forth with it and get a fine tuned answer.
When I used SO I had always just wanted an answer, but had to accept answers that were close, but not quite what I needed.
God forbid if I needed to post a question. I'd immediately get hit with over moderation, or someone closing the question for whatever reason.
I used to be an avid SO contributor up until around ~2015. I saw the mod community turn snarky. AI is just a better way to get stuff done.
All of this, apparently, because he is advertising his profile as an "xxx" expert. I am not going to point the person here publicly but if someone from SO is interested, I can send it over email.
In a significant way, that's probably due to how incredibly toxic the managing company has become. An aim for profit eventually ruins everything, including what used to be one of the best knowledge sharing sites around.
A very large part of SO questions is "how to use this poorly documented library feature?" or "what is the idiomatic way to solve X problem?", and answers to these kinds of questions become stale and useless very fast. Even more frustratingly, if you have a question like this and an old answer does exist, there's a good chance that you wouldn't be able to tell if the old answer is applicable without further assistance.
Additionally, hardcore SO contributors and SO senior management are constantly at each other's throats, very stubborn about their own interests and often out of touch with and callous about the question-asker plebs' experience in different and conflicting ways.
For many, SO karma internet points are a CV item.
EDIT with some other points:
I feel like documention of libraries and such has often gotten a lot better. AI is actually really useful and can help solve a ton of problems in the space of things I don't know how to figure out myself by reading docs, but don't need to have an actual human expert look at my situation, which is most of the stuff that ends up on SO. Support chatrooms for libraries have gotten a lot more polite and accessible, with clearly marked streamlined paths for asking your questions and much less "hop into #foobar-support on irc so you can be told to RTFM".
There's a bunch of misaligned interests on something like SO:
- Upper management is running a business, cares about user metrics and actually making money;
- Actual question-answering follows a power law, with a handful of power users being responsible for most answers. Like I said, these people often consider this internet reputation as something important to their livelihood, plus your usual ego stuff;
- Question askers don't care about SO as a platform. They are working on some kind of project, run into some kind of blocking issue, and want to find a way to get that resolved ASAP so they can continue with what they were doing.
I still get answers when I post a question. Do you mean the number of questions in general? Who cares? All I care about are my questions getting answers.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/431399/staging-grou...
Next iteration syndrome: this time we'll succeed in turning all that stuff back into $$$ knowledge.
Toxic moderators desperately hanging onto their faded glory.
A project I’ve been working on started as a web annotation tool and has evolved into a visual task manager called JustBeepIt (https://justbeepit.com). Considering many of our users are developers, we observed that Stack Overflow wasn’t among the sites where users create tasks. This led me to question why it seems to be losing its prominence.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...
It seems that I am getting more and more sensitive to the politics and policies of companies before I (continue to) use their services, even if their services would be useful for me if I had only ignored their wrong doings.
It was great, just like how Yahoo Answers was great. It’s now no longer needed as much.
People not even fixing your answer but introducing a minor edit. I think I recall someone listed as a co-author or something with zero change (not even a character was changed).
Bullying OP. The darn person tells you their question is not yet answered, and people persist: nope, comment below answered the question, or that it's a duplicate. Bullying or gaslighting someone into denying a technical problem still exists is fucking wild.
I mean, Quora has become absolutely useless a long time ago, but StackExchange has become harder to read. The amount of focus not to register some dip-shit trying to close a thread because they haven't really understood the problem, the problem you are very aware about, and getting the frustration of the OP because they're talking about the very problem you're looking to solve, is just tremendous.
* LLMs
They issue "state of the developer" reports every year that I think are laughable. The answers on SO are mostly for beginners so they can hardly claim they have deep insights into all developers. There is also a huge void of representation around non open-source and vendor specific languages. It should be called "state of the beginner web/js developer" and it would be more accurate.
My top few answers are similarly on questions marked duplicate, off topic, etc.
Seems the culture of stack overflow is that everything useful has been answered elsewhere. Therefore, if a question is useful, it must be a duplicate or pff topic.
They were valid complaints then, and they've valid now.
But... They don't answer this question, which is predicated on SO losing prominence - if poor moderation, rude answers or "duplicates" were enough to torpedo the site, why did it ever gain any prominence at all?
To understand this, we need to look at the state of the 'Net back in 2008, when the idea behind Stack Overflow was conceived and when the first version of the site launched[1].
16 years ago...
- ...USENET was still (barely) around and in use. A non-trivial number of folks hanging around on SO in the early days were old newsgroup regulars for various platforms / tech. SO offered them a welcome reprieve from the by-then-crushing tedium of spam and endless repetition that had pretty much killed USENET by then, as well as a larger audience.
- ...General-purpose "programming sites" (forums, blogs, article repositories, snippet sites) were still very much a thing. CodeProject, CodeGuru, w3schools, etc. For the most part, they had inherited all the problems of USENET and introduced new problems of their own. Again, SO offered a reprieve.
- ...Then as now, special-purpose forums / mailing lists / IRC rooms were collecting an awful lot of "original expertise" for various projects. Then as now, these were mostly useless for disseminating this information; that job fell on folks willing to spend crazy amounts of time soaking it up and then summarizing it in documentation, tutorials, FAQs, or actual books. Most of which didn't get read by the folks who most needed it[2]. So the actual dissemination was handled by the handful of people who did read these resources, via answers to questions on USENET or other major programming sites. The same questions, over and over and over again, until finally years into it some bit of critical information finally entered the public consciousness and questions tailed off.
- ...Google was really, really good at finding information. But information was often not structured in a way that was friendly to Google. Yes, as crazy as it sounds, 2008 was still on the other side of "Peak SEO". This was particularly true for programming information, which tended to live in dense, hard-to-crawl and thus poorly-indexed databases or in some cases (Experts Exchange[3]) actively obfuscated. Google was still leaning heavily on the old DejaNews archive (and Google Groups that had swallowed it) for a lot of more obscure questions, but... had kinda broken all of those in various ways. Stack Overflow's format was very friendly to Google, and Q&A quickly acquired very good ranking, with Google introducing a microformat[4] based on SO's layout for sites willing to present information in this manner.
- ...Reddit was popular, but also kind of a trash fire. Ok, maybe there are a few constants in life. There were good programming communities there, but, uh, not where the unwary would think to look.
- ...There were good, helpful programming communities on IRC too. So I'm told by people I trust. Maybe there was a secret knock or something. Anyway, there were also plenty of the other sort of channel, where asking a question would get you mocked at best or given a script to wipe your harddrive. As crazy as it sounds, a site where you might be brusquely asked to clarify your question and then given a working answer or nothing at all was much nicer than the status quo for an awful lot of folks stumbling around looking for help.
- ...GitHub barely existed. git support on Windows was iffy. Google Code was still a thing, Subversion was king, Mercurial looked like it might be the next king. Normal programmers used pastebin waaaaay too much. Stack Overflow was arguably the most "put together" site at the time.
I wanted to end with that last one, because I think it points out the real answer to your question: Stack Overflow of 2024 is still... Pretty close in terms of what it offers to Stack Overflow in 2008. Meanwhile, GitHub, GitLab, Discord, Slack, Google, even Reddit not to mention thousands of other services (most recently a lot of GenAI-based stuff) have spent the last 16 years trying to outdo each other in various ways with the intent of grabbing the attention and loyalty of programmers / tech-workers.
If I'm running a little project now, I can set up a GitHub repo w/ wiki, forum, online collaboration (including hosted build system) and if I need more a little Discord or Slack server will probably do the job. I can moderate all of that myself, or lock it down, or appoint other folks in roles to moderate. I can pick a license that suits the project, a Code of Conduct that suits its growing community, use Markdown or something similar pretty much everywhere... That's all so far beyond what was available anywhere in 2008, and so much easier and less restrictive than what SO provides...
SO got big because the 'Net was a shit place for programmers. It's shrinking now because the 'Net has gotten so much better that SO looks like shit in comparison[5].
[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/15/then-a-miracle-occurs-...
[2]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198
[4]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
