Ask HN: What Would Make Stack Overflow Great Again?

unpopular take: SO's problem was never AI. It was that they optimized for answers instead of relationships. The best thing about old SO was finding someone who solved your exact weird edge case and you could see their other answers and learn from their thinking

they should kill Q&A entirely and become the anti-AI platform. A place where senior devs mentor juniors through real problems in real time. Paid. Like a marketplace for technical mentorship. The brand recognition is there, the trust was there, and no AI can replace a human saying "yeah I hit that same bug in production, here's what actually happened"

SO sitting on 15 years of data about who is actually good at what technology. Thats the asset. Not the answers themselves.

Totally agree on the reputation graph being the real asset. I've been shipping apps across iOS and Android for years and the SO answers that saved me were never the generic ones, they were from someone who clearly hit the exact same obscure platform bug in production.

I wouldn't go anti-AI though. AI is great at answering "how do I sort an array in Python", let it have those. Where it falls apart is the messy real-world stuff. I've had AI confidently tell me the wrong way to handle background BLE on Android, which would've gotten my app killed by every Samsung and Xiaomi device out there.

SO could own that dividing line. Let AI handle the commodity questions, use the reputation data to route the hard ones to actual humans who've been there. Mentorship marketplace on top of that. That's not anti-AI, that's using AI to make the human expertise more valuable, not less.

First of all SO should not try to compete with AI, someone in the comments said AI used SO data too for training, which I believe is 100% true. Now simply integrating AI in the platform is a cliche. SO should not try to compete with AI, what I guess would work best is to repurpose the whole platform keeping the original taste. More AI related and AI dev related problems should be asked. Right now If I'm working say with claude code and ran into an issue then I put that issue in AI again to get a resolve, and I'm not sure if what solution AI came up withis good or not, maybe it works, maybe it won't, maybe it works initially but might cause trouble on prod. So maybe SO can work as 'verified programming truth or source', like documents for real problems, and rather than technical only it can have idea oriented questions and solutions too. Imagine if SO did not had so much issues and solutions mentioned, then AI would make a lot of mistakes, learning to code and building actual applications and projects has a gap, so teaching only coding to AI won't be of much help as the knowledge or training of actual working apps. I would start using SO again if they address issues of today, AI, Vibe Coding, Marketing, Infra, Costs and many. Not sure if this would work or not because this still needs users to start looking at SO a little differently, but not to make that another reddit at the same time. So as a PM for SO I might have the best or better solution to make it great again but just the direction of repurposing the platform might help.

If I were a PM at SO, I'd consider pivoting it to a social networking platform for programmers prioritizing relationships, messaging, jobs and interview support etc just enough features to make it not too generic like Linkedin.

Paid expert support in natural extension to bounty based q/a. Also, an AI with human in the loop.

Remove snarky moderation rules, especially the one about “this question has been asked” because sometimes it is a wrong accuse and users have to post a refute and wait for it to be reopened.

Basically make it more like Reddit askprogramming subreddit but keeps a higher standard about efforts made before asking the question. Questions should only be closed if there is no effort put into it or a genuine, obvious duplicate.

It’s also a good idea to embed an AI to point users to similar questions when posting their own questions. The original one sometimes didn’t work very well.

Its data was already used to train AI, maybe they could have sold it to the big AI companies? I am guessing its too late for that. All they have is their previous name and user fondness.

But now with the usage fallen, maybe they could train their own coding models to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, sort of like a hybrid of their previous forum + AI. AI solutions that work will get locked as "Accepted" by stack overflow like before via user vote.

Community. SO went in the opposite direction, going so far as to penalize users for writing "thanks a lot for helping me".

I believe everyone understands the root cause - people are afraid to ask questions, which stems from crappy moderation, which stems from the karmic system. The founders went on to found Discourse which has the exact same problems in community, which hints heavily that it's a problem with the system.

What I would fix is the karma system.

1) Don't give mod powers and responsibilities to people with high karma; moderation skill is intangible and not related to technical competency.

2) Get rid of "bullying" habits. Punish downvoting by increasing the cost to -1. Or do what other social media has done and hide votes, especially to high karma users.

3) Reset karma to 0, but recognize their peak value. Send an email out on why. This should be enough to get rid of all the people who are in it for the karma, and pull back all the people who were in it to contribute to a knowledge base.

4) Fire all the current moderators. They've collectively done a terrible job. Add their salaries together and use it to poach dang from HN.

An agent-first community generated repository of "skills" for given tags.

A world where the BEST Typescript skills are crowdsourced over hundreds of thousands of projects/agents/people.

Q&A is dead more or less. Skills would bring it back.

Eras just come to an end.

It should adjust traget users from human to agent. That's to say, to build for agents sharing knowledge.