I see that many moderators have resigned, citing some issues I don't know about. I don't know any of these moderators, I have no emotional connection to them, and so I don't care personally about them. Yet, the sheer number of resignation posts that I see makes me unsettled.

I just use Stack Exchange to find answers to my questions; I'm just a normal user.

Should I be worried about these resignations? Stack Exchange continues to help me find answers to questions, and possibly help people who may need it.

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    The site is rapidly dying since September and it will affect you by quality of content eroding. This is a process that has been going on for many years, but was escalated by a impressive display of incompetence this autumn. Currently, there are far more experts leaving than joining. This site will eventually become Quora 2 and your questions will be met with incorrect, low-quality answers. – Lundin Jan 15 at 7:39
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    If you are using the main site to get or find an answer to your question, the impact of what is happening at the moderation / curation end of the SE network will not impact you now. The long term users here do believe that changes made by the management of Stack Exchange Inc. will impact your ability to find good answers. On top of that moderators need the trust and be backed by a professional led Community Management team. On Monday the company let go of one of the most important thought leaders in community management. That will have impact in the next 6 to 8 weeks. – rene Jan 15 at 7:41
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    Unfortunately moderating is one of those thankless jobs where many people won't even notice it was being done untill it stops being done. – ivarni Jan 15 at 7:42
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    The era of SO may be over; at least its Golden Age. This is probably inevitable with any large community, but the erosion process is currently being helped along quite a lot instead of pushed against, as moderators and many other users have tried to do over the past decade. – deceze Jan 15 at 7:59
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    I'll be pruning some comments here. Let's continue the discusson in The Meta Room, or Tavern on Meta SE, or Discord. – Samuel Liew Jan 17 at 1:58

16 Answers 16


I decided to stay away from the queues for today, so why not spend some time answering on Meta!

Diamond moderators are essential to keeping the site clean, fair, and friendly

The first thing you need to understand is that the role of a diamond moderator is diverse. They aren't here to answer questions; they aren't here to post questions. They are here to moderate. Some of their more important duties would be:

  • Resolving vandalism: Moderators have tools to lock posts, suspend users, and so on. Without moderators, vandals would go unchecked, and users would not be able to handle them. Without diamond moderators to step in, even in the best case, attempts at vandalizing posts would dissolve into rollback wars.
  • Resolving rude commentary: Moderators are the only ones who can delete comments single-handedly. You would keep seeing more and more rude comments, and even ruder replies, resulting in more "Stack Overflow sucks" blogs, more t-shirts with the middle finger on the SO logo, and so on.
  • Resolving evaders of system-imposed restrictions: It isn't easy to evade post bans, but there are ways to do it. Although I won't go into details here, moderators are the only ones who can take care of that.
  • Resolving voting fraud: Here again, a user who has poor answers compared to you would garner way more reputation just by creating a few fake accounts to upvote their posts. This isn't possible when moderators are there patrolling the shores.
  • Resolving plagiarism: Users cannot delete plagiarized posts single-handedly if they have a positive score. Without moderators to step in, someone else could easily take credit for your content and end up getting more votes for it.
  • Resolving trolls: Users have no power to warn, delete, or do anything with respect to repeat trolls.

And these are just some of the main functions that moderators perform. I can go into more, like chat moderation, fixing tags, handling repeat offenders in the review queues, putting a stop to suggested edit trolls, and so many more places where even 25k users have little or no power.

But it goes deeper than that

All that said, the primary reason why you need to be worried is not because of the effect, but rather the cause. Moderators are resigning because they have lost trust in the company staff. This is concerning because users, moderators, and the company are all equally necessary for the growth of the site. The company provides the necessary infrastructure for the site, the moderators help set up the platform by weeding out the bad elements, and the users ultimately provide the content. In this perfect ecosystem setup, when the relationship between any two groups breaks down, it has devastating effects on the other two.

If the moderators decide to pack up and leave, then the company and users would need to do the work that would normally be done by moderators, and who knows how many of the bad elements that we do not need on the site would be disguised as users! There are, in fact, already a number of 10k users who do not know how to review, a lot of 5k users who do not know how to name a tag, etc. Giving them powers to moderate other users wouldn't necessarily be great.

At the moment:

  • The relationship between the moderators and the company isn't great:
    • The company fired one of the moderators, Monica Cellio, because that moderator had some concerns with respect to a newly-announced company policy.
    • The company fired two Community Managers (CMs) who were known to be very close to the community: Shog9 and Robert Cartaino. Unlike community-elected moderators, CMs are employees of Stack Overflow. The decision to fire these two CMs does not appear to have been financially motivated, but it is unclear, since no details have been provided to us.
  • The relationship between the users and the company isn't great:
    • The second iteration of the Stack Overflow Quality project never took off, even though it was advertised with much hype.
    • There are a total of 4 developers working on the Stack Overflow public Q&A platform (which is one more than the famous "we less than three developers" quote).
    • The veteran users are blamed for being rude, while in fact the root problem is the influx of poor quality questions.
    • The new users are being blamed for poor quality questions, while in fact the root problem is they're not being given enough advice beforehand on how to ask a good question.

All in all, the three vital parts of the community aren't working well with each other, which should definitely be worrisome for you as a member of the community, no matter how active you are.

Now getting to your question:

I just use Stack Exchange to find answers to my questions, I'm just a normal user.

Here's the problem: With more and more experts leaving, and more and more "normal" (non-expert) users joining, the number of unanswered questions will increase. We already have a huge number of unanswered posts. There are some areas where there are just one or two top players, and if they leave, it would just be a wasteland. You would not even get the Tumbleweed badge as a consolation prize because the company recently removed it, calling it unfriendly. Yes, more new experts would definitely come, but we are losing more of them day by day. The net change would be a decrease.

Not to mention that some experts haven't come to Stack Overflow because it has a reputation of being rude, which would have been solved if the second iteration of the quality project had gone through.

I don't know any of them, I have no emotional connection to them, so I don't care personally about them

The personal connection is something that grows as you get deeper and deeper into the community. Three of the four top-voted questions on Meta are because of the love that the community has shown to moderators. The users elect these moderators, and the moderators serve the users. It is like a properly functioning democracy. The users back the moderators when needed, and the moderators shield the users when needed. You might be emotionally disconnected with users, but when you spend enough time with them, like 2–3 hours per day for 5–7 years, you begin to bond with them. You learn from one another, teach one another, and correct one another.


This is because of the years and years of effort that the users, moderators, and Community Managers put together. It will certainly not grind to a complete halt within days, or even months, but it will certainly decline over time. The only reason that Stack Overflow survived was because it was a library of high quality posts. The moment there are other equivalent places, it would just fall apart.

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    A bleak picture indeed. But all the effects you have listed occur over time, and won't be noticed if your only goal is making the numbers better for an IPO, which is reasonably what they're doing. The question is then: Do we help with that or not? – Magisch Jan 15 at 8:53
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    @Sayse Some of the top programmers (including authors of libraries) whom I've spoken to have informed me that Stack Overflow is rude and that's one reason why they think twice before joining. We wouldn't have earned that reputation if it weren't because of the useless tools provided to us to fight bad content. That is what I wanted to convey in that paragraph. Feel free to update the answer, I'm not that great at English. :) – Bhargav Rao Jan 15 at 9:02
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    @BhargavRao Maybe you have better information then I do then, but everything I read and see points to a company desperately gearing up for being acquired or running an IPO, because apparently further angel investor cash would be hard to get. – Magisch Jan 15 at 9:06
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    "already a number of 10k users who do not know how to review" I'll happily hold my hands up and say I'm a 40K user that "doesn't know how to review" (aka just doesn't use them). I'm sure there are many more of us out there. – Larnu Jan 15 at 9:22
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    The new users are being blamed for poor quality questions, while in fact the problem is with them not being given enough advice beforehand on how to structure their post. Hmmmm. I wish I could believe that. – President James K. Polk Jan 15 at 17:28
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    @con, there's a lot of backstory here, a summary here. – Bhargav Rao Jan 15 at 17:55
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    @JamesReinstateMonicaPolk, The results from the mentorship and the ask-question wizard experiments did show that a well phrased question had better reception from the community than a poor one. – Bhargav Rao Jan 15 at 17:57
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    so....to the people leaving, what sites will you use for coding questions in the future? Where do you see good energy/buzz? The Slack communities I've used (like Elm's) are nice and helpful, but the search is pretty crummy. It sounds like Codidact might be good once it's up and running, but it's a work in progress. The Subreddits like Swift's are okay, but the solid technical answers tend to be sparse. – James Toomey Jan 15 at 19:02
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    ok, you posted your answer, now back to work ;) – Jean-François Fabre Jan 15 at 20:38
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    "The only reason that Stack Overflow survived was because it was a library of high quality posts. The moment there are other equivalent places, it would just fall apart." A library of high-quality posts that are all licensed CC-BY-SA. If SO starts declining it shouldn't take that long before there are other sites with the same exact library available. – Chris Jan 16 at 22:36
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    @Chris There are already 2 open source projects in progress codidact and topanswers – Manohar Reddy Jan 17 at 4:40
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    >The veteran users are blamed for being rude, while in fact the root problem is the influx of poor quality questions - this is purely opinion based. I am a veteran user and I would say veteran users and the general atmosphere of the site is a far cry from the initial days. This may be exacerbated by the questions asked but ultimately it is up to users how they act. I feel the site has always been full of "write teh codez" questions. I will say though this is a very balanced and non-partisan answer which I appreciate. – Mr. Boy Jan 17 at 11:33
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    @BhargavRao What's "we less than three developers" a reference to? – Fabien Snauwaert Jan 17 at 11:54
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    @FabienSnauwaert On the homepage of stackoverflow, there is (was?) a line that says "We <3 people who code". While it is obviously intended to mean "we <heart> people who code" the community jokingly started saying that stackoverflow only had 2 developers working for them, based on an intentionally overly-literal reading of the text. – Davis Broda Jan 17 at 14:19
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    @Stumbler Regarding downvotes, all of them are silent, and we expect them to be so. Voting is a rating system, not a commentary system. And the old close reason "not a real question" didn't mean that it wasn't real because of the topic. It meant that it wasn't a question. Either way, because that got misunderstood, the close reason was retired. Your "look-down-ones-nose-at-Windows-users" assessment is quite surprising to me. I'm a Windows user, and have been answering Windows programming questions since the site started. If you see comments disparaging of Windows or anyone else, please flag. – Cody Gray Jan 19 at 4:30

It is not just moderators leaving. The heavy users that answered your questions are also departing. Some are just as fed up as the moderators.

Revised answer: I've updated the figures in this answer with newer plots that are less affected by the "roomba", a cronjob that automatically deletes questions that received downvotes and no answers. Mostly by using the data that includes deleted questions.

Answered questions over time

This plot, generated by this query, shows the relative share of questions answered after 1/7/14 days, answered ever, the amount of questions closed, and closed-or-deleted (not double-counting closed+deleted questions).

After 365 days (min January 2019 in this screenshot), a cronjob will auto-delete certain questions, which made the earlier plots in this answer harder to read. You can see that in the early times of Stack Overflow, 80% of questions would be answered within one day; while today we are at around 45%. If you are willing to wait for two weeks, you have a 50% chance of being answered, and after a year it's 55%. At the same time, about 25% of questions get closed/deleted quickly, and after one year the garbage collector has deleted over 35% of questions. As a fun side fact: before 2012, we have more answered questions than answerable questions (because there can be closed questions with answers).

  • Answer rates in SO have been going down constantly since 2009 already.
  • In August 2019, December 2019 and January 2020 we so far have unusually high closing rates. This likely also causes observed low-answer rates for such questions (e.g., duplicates). This is likely because during these periods 3 close votes were enough to close a question; so roughly 5% of questions get closed that otherwise wouldn't.

So the new plot no longer supports my hypothesis that "many" high-profile users may have suspended activity here, too. Or at least it does not show much in this data; at least it is shadowed by the change to the closing threshold. We do have an all-time-low with respect to answered questions, but these low values sync up with the closing (and deletion) rates.

If we zoom in to 2017-now, with weekly resolution, everything actually looks quite normal (except for the garbage collector & the 3-close-votes experiment):

Weekly resolution answer/close/delete rates

It is also interesting to look at absolute numbers, with weekly resolution:

absolute question/answered numbers, weekly resolution

You can see that SO maxed out around April 2014, when quadratic growth stopped (linear increase in daily questions = quadratic growth). Either at this point maximum market penetration had been reached, or the community could no longer accommodate this amount of new users and low-quality questions. Until mid 2017 we have a fairly constant usage, and then numbers begin to drop.

This is also reflecting in the overall trend of active users which is going down on the long run. The heyday of SO was in 2014. Here is the plot of active users, that answer at least 3 questions a week:

Chart showing active users, 2009 - 2020

In 2014, we had over 6000 users actively answering questions. Now we have more like 3500. You can set the threshold yourself - at 10, we had 1200, and have less than 600 now; we used to have 100+ users answering 35+ questions a week, now we have around 50.

BUT: I do not see an unexpected decrease since October nor December

Anymore, in this newer analysis that better handles deleted questions. So are "heavy users" leaving? I don't know. At least I have stopped answering questions. This probably is the last answer that I do on Stack Overflow and the other Stack Exchange sites (and for some tags, I am ranked all-time #1).

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    I get a little bit sad for the unmotivated non-0-starting graphs... :´( – Alex Jan 16 at 9:21
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    @Alex the plot is auto-graphed by stackoverflow. I'd also prefer to have the key in a different place. – Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse Jan 16 at 16:29
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    Yes, I am a user who is just as fed up as the moderators. My frustration began three years ago when a Stackoverflow stakeholder posted a highly political rant that attempted to shame and discourage users who didn't agree into leaving. The recent events, which I find appalling, are the outcome of that way of thinking. As a user, I no longer come to Stackoverflow first, and I seldom post or interact. It is no longer a community, and the content comes with an unacceptable price. – Deborah Jan 17 at 3:13
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    The sharp drops at the end of the active user graph is misleading, as only about half of January 2020 has passed so far. Of course there are much fewer users having written 10 answers in 17 days, compared to a whole month. – w-m Jan 17 at 11:03
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    Fantastic answer, but the data assumes that the number of shitty/unanswerable questions doesn't change much, which seems uncertain. How about this query, that I can't express in SQL: For each month, select the number of users who have >1k reputation (now) and answered questions in each of the preceding three months, and none in the three following months, ie. high-rep leavers. Compared with the number of ones who started. – arnt Jan 17 at 11:23
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    I have logged out of Stack Overflow on my computers so I'm not tempted to actually answer/comment/edit. Wonder how many folks did that... – enderland Jan 17 at 15:07
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    This answer makes me sad—the charts remind me of classic Shog9. – Michael - Where's Clay Shirky Jan 17 at 16:39
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    @enderland I stay logged in and lurk meta. That's about it. Last answer I posted was in July. Haven't regretted my decision since. – Silvio Mayolo Jan 17 at 20:23
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    These charts don't even account for questions that shouldn't be getting answered in the first place primarily duplicates. New-ish users can be forgiven to some extent but there are plenty of users with tens of thousands if not 100K worth of rep that just answer questions seemingly without any care for the all-important curation aspect of this site. – Dexygen Jan 19 at 1:17
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    "The heavy users that answered your questions are also departing. They are just as fed up" - that's actually terrifying. The site could devolve into the blind leading the blind - nothing more than a site for fools. – stevec Jan 19 at 16:12
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    A detail worth noting: SO heavy users peaked 2014, but stats.SE peaked 2017 and only dropped little since then, codegolf peaked 2017, superuser peaked already at its creation 2009, Ubuntu in 2012, English in 2015 - so its probably not a technical change causing the peaks; but rather a social thing. – Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse Jan 19 at 20:41
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    For what it's worth, you can place me in the "Has NOT QUIT" camp. – VonC Jan 19 at 22:34
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    Rather than quitting, I have decided to focus only on very few "key" tags that are dear to me and dump the rest (like dealing with queues, flags etc.). If SO frowns upon the community, they can do that themselves. In the end, it is their business, job, bucks. – tukan Jan 20 at 13:33
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    Beautiful analysis that proves quite easily that there has been literally no effect whatsoever from various high profile mods "quitting". The site has been in steady decline since peak popularity in 2014, which is normal and natural for a site like this. At current rate of decline it will be another 10-15 years before the site is as active as it was in 2010. – Geoff Griswald Jan 21 at 12:08
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    @GeoffGriswald you won't see effect of such exodus in such a short time span. In long term you will see the steady quality decline - the competition never sleeps. 10-15 years of current rate, which is improbable. Exodus has tendency to speed-up. – tukan Jan 21 at 20:15

There are many people who would rather spend time providing value to an organization that cares, and so, with each moderator firing and other bad news, trust and loyalty in Stack Overflow goes down. Right now, there is no competition, but if a copycat site comes along, a lot of experts could abandon ship and head there.

It's unlikely that Stack Overflow will go completely extinct; however, a band of former SO members have already gotten together to create a community-driven Q&A site called Codidact, so this isn't just theoretical. In my opinion, SO is playing with fire by disregarding their community and focusing on creating profits.

Regardless of what happens, there will always be some place to go to get questions and answers on programming topics.

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    The more I see things fall apart here, the more I think it might be good in the long run. Stack Overflow was a great 2008 site still standing in 2020 because its position looked unassailable. Its successor won't be a "copy-cat" with 2008 features and better management, it'll be the long-overdue next iteration of the concept. It might have: direct GitHub integration to attach a "question branch" where users can pull and comment inline; language-specific custom features including server-side snippet interpreters for non-JS languages; smart VSCode plugins; question types with their own reqs... – user56reinstatemonica8 Jan 15 at 10:21
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    @user56reinstatemonica8 I fail to see what git would add given that the code included is (hopefully) a snippet which is unlikely to evolve (In the case of C++ question I think new answers would be do the job if the votes erode with time). – Gabriel Devillers Jan 15 at 12:51
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    @GabrielDevillers Sometimes, a snippet mayn't suffice and, more often, having the whole code ready to compile and run makes finding a solution much faster. Some questions require multiple source files and posting and downloading them separately is a pain. Moreover, by sharing a repository, you can be much more confident that you're solving exactly the same problem the (possibly inexperienced) OP has. – maaartinus Jan 15 at 22:04
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    @maaartinus As per stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example, a reusable piece of knowledge doesn't require "multiple source files" because they contain much irrelevant stuff that makes it harder for others to relate the question to their problem. And if it's not reusable, it has no business staying on the site. – ivan_pozdeev Jan 16 at 18:47
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    @ivan_pozdeev I care more about the reality than about the SO rules. Sure, most of the time, a small snippet is best. But sometimes, it's not. Then having both the “reprex” and the project is better than having just one thing. +++ Moreover, on Code Review, multiple files are very often needed and getting them without the project is a pain. +++ I'm here to give and receive help and to learn; I see the rules as a mean to make this site work, not as an ultimate law. – maaartinus Jan 16 at 19:48
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    @maaartinus Then you are just adding noise to the system. SO is not about giving just any "help" but definite answers. And not having definite answers makes it impossible to "learn" anything since you are forced to dig up the important details from irrelevant noise (and keep figuring out which is which). So you are undermining your own efforts. – ivan_pozdeev Jan 16 at 20:12
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    @maaartinus I'm speaking from experience trying to find any information at SO nowadays -- noise makes search results useless. – ivan_pozdeev Jan 16 at 20:17
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    @ivan_pozdeev A simple link to a repo is no noise; that's nonsense. The question can always be edited, so that the most important part is clearly shown. Noise is a real problem on SO, but the noise IMHO mostly comes from mixing questions of different levels. If I could filter out the trivial questions, then I'd surely get much better results. That's just an idea: Add a "difficulty level" voting (with no influence on the score) and allow such personalized filtering. – maaartinus Jan 16 at 22:25
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    OK, call me a bit confused with this: focusing on creating profits. In as far as at least the Monica side of things goes, it doesn't seem to be motivated by profits. It does seem like a bizarre entanglement of good intentions - "let's be respectful to users with xyz gender/pronoun preferences", but then seemed to go overboardthe other way and made a mountain out of anthill where a user claimed persecution via Twitter. But it wasn't due to profit seeking. As far a profits go, a website which does not make any is at risk of going out of business, so not automatically a bad thing to seek. – JL Peyret Jan 17 at 3:19
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    What I meant by that is that the leadership could be entirely focused on profit making activities such as Stack Overflow for Teams and their other projects, and have disregarded the community in the process. What happened with the code of conduct could be the result of leadership making sure potential customers aren't hearing about people getting offended for LGBTQ reasons, and them trying to create some good PR stories. Getting rid of Shog9 and Robert could be about their roles having little to do with producing profit for the company. – wp-overwatch.com Jan 17 at 6:24
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    Not that I actually think all of those statements are completely true, and I don't think it's 100% about profit, especially what happened to Monica has little to do with money, but I do think that money is a big driving factor for why Stack Overflow is becoming so out of touch with their community. Although I did read this from a SO board member today meta.stackexchange.com/questions/340697/… Also there's twitter.com/shog9/status/1217543603179835393 – wp-overwatch.com Jan 17 at 6:25
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    @user56reinstatemonica8: I may not agree with the idea of Github interaction (or any other external site), but I completely agree with the idea that it may wel be time to take the lessons learned and move on. I like the idea of Stack Overflow, but see no reason to be loyal to a company who isn't. – Matthieu M. Jan 17 at 8:00
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    "right now there is no competition" nb - there is an attempt at making on happening at codidact.com, and that's ignoring all the other (failed) attempts to beat SO such as expertsexchange. – TylerH Jan 17 at 15:04
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    @ivan_pozdeev: Agreed. I have tried the same, using Stack Overflow as a research tool and low-quality posts drown out useful content. Hopefully, they will come to their senses and open a helpdesk part of Stack Overflow to relieve the tension with beginners (and thus repair the public image), instead of opening the floodgates even more and trying to stuff everything into the same bucket (and trying to change users). – Peter Mortensen Jan 18 at 23:25
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    Experts Exchange was not an "attempt to beat SO", much less a failed one. It's a site that was successful in its niche. It still is useful for some things. I'd certainly wish to see a community driven replacement optionally allow paying users to defray the costs of operation; I do not want to have anything "paid for" by ads. The aggravation the ads cause for me is likely taking off my lifespan at this point - those stress hormones aren't a free lunch. Paying a few bucks a month for not being stressed out by ads (neither me nor non-paying users) is the best deal ever. – Reinstate Monica Jan 20 at 14:58

Assuming you're a "light" user who only dips in when you have a problem to solve:

When you ask a question:

  • You'll see more snarky responses from people who haven't bothered to read your question properly but want to condescend someone, because the people who do this will usually not face any penalty so will do it more.
  • You'll get more spam and time-wasting responses like guesses or one-line "Here's something from google you've already read" from people hoping to get easy, lazy rep, because these won't get deleted so will be an effective strategy.
  • You'll get fewer good quality answers because the people who would write them have run out of patience.
  • It's more likely that your question will just sit unanswered because you won't realise you need to edit it to add a missing detail, because no moderator or experienced user will see it in a review queue and tell you.

When you search for a question on a search engine:

  • It's more likely that, instead of the search results including one good question with a few good answers each with lots of votes and comments, you'll have to wade through many near-identical questions with a couple of answers scattered between them, which should have been duped together but haven't.
  • Because those answers have had less traffic each and less voting and commenting, it's more likely that you'll see an answer that looks good but has a hidden pitfall. You'll learn about that hidden pitfall the hard way, rather than through a helpful comment.
  • There will be more annoyances to wade through like spam, bad answers that completely miss the point or random arguments or trolling.
  • There will be more times you don't find any question with a good answer, because the people who would have written those answers have run out of patience.

If you want to improve your skills by answering some questions:

  • It'll be much harder to find good quality questions that haven't already been answered when they were asked already.
  • It'll be less likely that your question will be seen and get feedback from someone knowledgable who could help you learn by posting an informative comment pointing out a detail you didn't know about. I learned lots from such comments over the years: in recent years, not so much.
  • Your answer will be seen less, appreciated less and voted on less (when learning a new language or skill, answering questions and getting upvotes is a great encouragement that you're on the right path).
  • You're more likely to be hit with trolling or similar.
  • You'll be more likely to run out of patience.

I think most of us have already seen most of these happening already.

Certainly with web searches, I used to scroll straight to the "Stack Overflow" section because it usually contained one great page that was even better than official documentation. Now, I scroll past it until I'm sure there's nothing else like a github issue or good looking blog post, because so often I'm just digging through 5 or 6 near-identical unanswered questions.

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    Nice summary. One thing that still works is filtering by score. If only the score is high enough, all the unanswered, low quality content is not shown and there quality is still high, even though the field is a bit restricted then. We could just freeze all questions with score large say 20 and put them on a separate site, I guess. And the future is not looking good either. My personal benchmark is Jon Skeet. As long as he is continuing to answer there is hope. He is still answering. – Trilarion Jan 15 at 11:20
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    Trouble is when people feel they need to filter by score, there's no way for a good quality new question to get anywhere – user56reinstatemonica8 Jan 15 at 12:13
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    In short, the S/N will continue to drop. – Chris O Jan 15 at 19:55
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    Regarding “search for a question on a search engine”: before The Downfall, I had plans to “mass-edit” “all” the questions that have a title like “Halp, why is this code not working” into good shape: with a title that uniquely describes the problem, but also the question body and tags. This would help any user simply searching for solutions to programming-related issues, and it would help content curators (like me, or mods) to find dupe targets more effectively and make related questions more easily findable. I’m no longer willing to dedicate my time to this endeavor for the “new” SE. – user4642212 Jan 16 at 7:54
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    I agree with everything, save for "It'll be much harder to find good quality questions that haven't already been answered when they were asked already." --> albeit true, this has nothing to do with the current state of affairs imo, and is rather a consequence of Q&A saturation on established languages/frameworks. – Mena Jan 17 at 12:30


Have you ever been to a museum? Imagine you walked into a museum and you had, say, a Van Gogh painting that was surrounded by doodles of kindergarteners taped on the wall around it (even on top of the frame). Would you notice the Van Gogh (a highly prized and desired piece of art) when it was surrounded by all sorts of little doodles by kids who spent 5 minutes with a crayon?

Now imagine Google. You type in a search term, and you have to sift through 15 pages to find anything relevant to your term. Would you be likely to try this approach next time? Or, what if you came to the front page of Stack Overflow and found dozens of posts not about programming at all? What if you had to sift through pages of spam trying to trick you into clicking some link? Would you want to come back? Would you still find Stack Overflow helpful?

Moderators are a deeper level of curators on Stack Overflow. When you search for something and find an answer, it likely means a curator did their job. It means the dozens of other low-quality Q&A or spam were removed by someone, and that someone was possibly a diamond moderator.

Why should I care? I only do Q&A.

You should understand something critical here. There is a thing called the "stack effect" (despite the name, it is unrelated to Stack Overflow). The stack effect is where, once the movement of air in a structure is established (think of a chimney or vent pipe), the air continues to travel in that direction. As long as things keep working as they should, the flow continues uninterrupted.

Real life works in much the same way. Companies, organizations, and communities have a stack effect. If you interrupt things too much and for too long, you diminish the effect until it disappears. A single moderator resigning is not a big thing. It's happened many times before, with no ill effects. But the recent resignations are part of a much larger event that has been recently exacerbated. Moderators don't just happen; they're almost always forged in the broader community of regular users who simply jumped in somewhere and simply asked "How can I help?" That community is suffering right now.

What we may be witnessing is the end of Stack Overflow's stack effect. That remains to be seen. In the meantime, you may find that when you flag something for moderators, it doesn't get handled in a timely fashion. You might find it harder to find content amidst the ocean of people posting everything from "I have a problem with this code" to "How I maek program? Plaese halp!" Things may get worse before they get better.

In the meantime, enjoy Q&A. It might take months or years for Q&A to be seriously affected by all this. Feel free to stay exactly where you are (and I mean no snark or sarcasm there; I do envy your ability to be beyond all this drama). But understand, if you clicked the prior links, you might find yourself where some members of the community are: scared, confused, and angry. And you might be asking yourself, "Do I want to keep coming here?"

It is a very good question right now.

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    Thank you for this good answer. As a user, I was appalled by the handling of events that led up to the moderator resignations (had I been a moderator, I would have resigned too). As a user, I now tend to interact with other answer channels that are not part of the Stack Overflow family - this means, Stackoverflow is my last choice instead of my first choice to post or answer questions. – Deborah Jan 17 at 3:06
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    "How I maek program? Plaese halp! Thanks in Advanced." I'm trying to spend some time fighting that battle right now. Still wondering if it's worth it.... – ouflak Jan 17 at 12:22
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    @ouflak It's not. – Ian Kemp Jan 20 at 8:17
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    @ouflak: Not considering recent events, that is physically impossible (9,000 new questions every single (week) day). If you want to have an impact, spend the time on the content that is actually seen by most users (search engine hits) (optionally, in a particular tag). And/or on the search engine results that come up when you yourself use Stack Overflow as a research tool. – Peter Mortensen Jan 20 at 9:10

This is just one possible outcome...

Act I

Just like in any heist movie, the cowboys' first objective is to neutralise the law enforcement and put in place their own leaders to make the process of oppression easy.

Act II

The new leaders decide that every question deserves an answer and remove close votes altogether, the current experts are sent to the gallows and new experts begin to write the same answer to every single post. You come along with the same problem, try to research it and find an answer but don't manage to find the real answer because these questions haven't all be consolidated into one true question (closing as duplicates).

New experts burn out quickly and begin to struggle to hide their frustration and begin to make rude comments because there's no-one around to stop them. New users are none the wiser because there isn't anyone around to guide them in what would be the best way for them to ask their question.


The companies advertising jobs stop because the level of candidates they're receiving isn't worth the effort or cost anymore and SO Jobs is no longer profitable and ceases. SO Teams fails because anyone considering it just looks at the broader site for an example and does not want that in their own ranks. The loss of revenue from this just doesn't allow the budget anymore for the podcast and the cowboys lose their radio voice.

tl;dr - Moderators leave, experts leave, answers get spread around and uncared for, Stack Exchange loses their revenue streams.

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    Behind new experts' frustration I think that there among the others there is another reason underestimated by aged users: getting reputation now is far more difficult than yers ago. Not only there's much competition, but the number of available questions decreases every day. And popular basic answers are no longer possible, and new user can only try to build their rep answering questions that will be probably closed. Since this is the way SO rewards competence (and since this is important als in RL, because of employers on SO), I think this is a critical (underevaluated) parameter. – Roberto Caboni Jan 15 at 10:59
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    @Cubo78 And how come I made the vast majority of my reputation in the year? – yivi Jan 15 at 11:22
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    @yivi do you think you are a representative sample of SO experts population? Anyway, I noticed differencies in tags subcommunities. Some of them are more tolerant when it comes to manage questions asking for code. In some other cases the some answers are downvoted even if correct. – Roberto Caboni Jan 15 at 11:29
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    @Cubo78 You mean to say I'm exceptional? I don't feel exceptional, at all. And we all feel like "those communities are upvoting crap, why can't I get some of that love!" – yivi Jan 15 at 11:31
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    @yivi I honestly don't have analyzed in deep your activity. :) But since I still believe that actively make an effort to win the answers race ARE exceptional (it requires a lot of time), and that they have a greater chance to be successful in some tags rather than others, I'd like to move forward. Do you agree with me when I say that for any topic answers become less and less rewarding? Example: this day-2-python-course question stackoverflow.com/questions/1712227/… provided 18k rep to the asker and 25k rep to the best answerer. – Roberto Caboni Jan 15 at 13:11
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    "SO Teams fails because anyone considering it just looks at the broader site for an example and does not want that in their own ranks." Really good commentary, thanks. – Sabuncu Jan 16 at 13:33
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    So scary. So realistic. I have waited for a reason to start answering again. No way now.. – TaW Jan 16 at 18:03
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    @Cubo78 All the time I spend trying to find interesting questions to answer, just gets spent on downvotes and close flags instead. The few times I find a nice question, another more experienced programmer has usually landed there before me. I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but I'm qualified of contributing with good answers. – Andreas Jan 17 at 3:33
  • @Cubo78 Re: "Example...provided 18k rep to the asker and 25k rep to the best answerer" I think you can't just treat it as rep x point rewarded flatly. Do you aware of the rep daily limit (200)? – Mukyuu Jan 17 at 3:41
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    @Mukyuu that's why I called it an example. Does this approssimation affect my logic? Does this change the fact that this guy had just to answer 99 more questions to get a gold badge? Does this change the fact that an answer providing a smart implementation of a boson mass calculation will get at most 1 or 2 upvotes? (it's another silly example. Don't focus too much on it :) ). – Roberto Caboni Jan 17 at 5:19
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    @Roberto Caboni: There are plenty of quiet corners on Stack Overflow (away from the popular tags with easy questions) where, given enough effort, it is possible to earn a lot of $rep. And as FGITW is much less of an issue, it is also possible to provide comprehensive answers of lasting value (the whole point of Stack Overflow), not playing the guessing game with one-line answers. Even with late answers. – Peter Mortensen Jan 18 at 23:05
  • This possible outcome is not an unrealistic one, quite possible in fact. But you do realise the way it is written can get you suspended, right? – Peter Mortensen Jan 18 at 23:15
  • @Peter Mortensen - I dont even think anyone from SE are reading anything written in the community anymore and as written in my bio I've partially suspended myself and significantly reduced my activity anyway. For arguments sake, any use of the fictional terminology is merely used to tie in the current situation to something the reader will have seen before. – Sayse Jan 19 at 7:06
  • A bunch of "executives" leaving never helped close shop. For all we know the organisation would come out stronger. And better. – user12379095 Jan 20 at 15:46
  • @RobertoCaboni Do people even care about rep? Gamification is so 2017. – StackOverthrow Jan 21 at 20:13

I think SO is simply wasting the social capital it has build over the years. It is one of the hardest thing to build and it may never come back.

Word of advice: proceed with caution and think twice about what you are actually doing.

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    Your advise is some 4 months too late though.... meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/… – Lundin Jan 17 at 14:21
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    @Lundin Well, yes. I have read the link you are posting. I think if everyone starts to repeat this over and over maybe it will get through. If not well what is SO without devoted moderators and users? Nothing. If the company thinks otherwise, well there won't be any selling of the company or IPO, because of the sharp drop of everything on SO. Perhaps, ideal opportunity for some other community sites? – tukan Jan 17 at 14:30

Simply put:

Four people are on a small boat on a body of water. One end of the boat is filling with water and sinking. The other end of the boat is pointing upwards. The two people at the lower end are trying to get water out of the boat with buckets. The two people at the upper end are sitting comfortably, smiling. One of them says: "Sure glad the hole isn't at our end."

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Short term

In the short term this means nothing at all for an ordinary user. All the existing answers are still available for searching. As for the new questions, if the question is reasonably easy to answer, it is very likely you will get your answer very soon.

Long term

What may trouble you are the trends - the negative effects will be experienced after few months. As there are less users moderating the site, there will be probably more of the clutter - duplicate questions, duplicate answers, incorrect answers. Another trend which is likely is that together with moderators leaving, many experienced users feel no longer welcome here and spend less time here, which means you will have to wait longer for the answer to more difficult questions, some of them will even stay without an answer.

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I just use Stack Exchange to find answers to my questions; I'm just a normal user. Should I be worried about these resignations?

Yes, if you value quality answers to your questions.

Moderators are often experts in the field themselves, and are often very active in answering questions in their speciality. These mods aren't just stopping moderating, they're often ceasing most / all activity in general. And as pointed out above, other high rep users are jumping ship too, or at least becoming a lot less active.

The likely net result of that is:

  • You'll almost certainly have fewer answers to your questions, sometimes none at all.
  • Those answers will likely be of lower quality;
  • If they are low quality, you'll have fewer moderators and experts to intervene, sort them out, or hold them to account.

And that's just for Q&A. Any offensive comments & remarks will also likely stay on posts for longer before a moderator can pick them up & remove them, squabbling and arguments in chat will be happen for longer, etc. making the whole site a more unfriendly and unwelcoming place.

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I'll give it a stab. Trying to be short here:

enter image description here

This is a fundamental ("canonical") question. As you can see, Stack Overflow is no longer the top hit

For many other canonical questions Stack Overflow still yields the first hit with some decent answers, but if for some important questions it is no longer the case - that should ring an alarm bell.

Why is that? Because the content is progressively less moderated So low quality content saturates the platform and obscures the picture. Hence lower search ranking scores. The rest is explained in other answers above.

EDIT: People in the comments rightfully humbled me not to jump to conclusions based on sole evidence. This much is true as well as it might be the sign that Google is changing as well. My point was to provide an example of what lack of moderation means and what will we possibly see in the future

Also, it happened that I needed to refresh my memories in details in Java. And suffice is it to say - the example on the picture is not the only one and there were far, far more.

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    For every example you can find where SO isn't the top result, I can find you 10 similar queries where SO is. This doesn't illustrate anything. – Cerbrus Jan 21 at 13:49
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    +1 Sure, it's not always like this, or even in the majority of cases yet, but it's something that used to almost never happen but now happens increasingly often. What I find more telling is that for your 10 cases where SO is still the top hit, I'd bet that in at least half, SO is no longer the highest quality hit, and in at least a quarter, the "Stack Overflow" section of the search engine listing is a mess of 4 or 5 very similar questions all lacking a quality answer. Stack Overflow used to be reliably almost always better than everything, including official docs. – user56reinstatemonica8 Jan 21 at 14:35
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    Don't forget that Google is also trying to crack down on search result monopolies. This is as much evidence of Google changing, as it is SE changing. – Cerbrus Jan 21 at 14:37
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    This was pretty insightful, actually – Rainb Jan 21 at 14:58
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    Google also favors newer content. The SO question is from 2010, while the top ranked blog is from 2014. That blog is also quite popular (I used an SEO tool I have access to and the domain scores reasonably well for a blog). There's also a lot of authoritative blogs that link to it as well. I tend to agree with Cerbrus that this isn't a good example. Ironically, you did miss the good example further down the results. I got a More results from Stack Overflow link. A better argument is that SO is diluted – Machavity Jan 22 at 20:34
  • Kind of irrelevant, you can pay for your search results to appear higher on Google, and there are various tricks you can employ to make your search rank higher. I imagine SO doesn't bother with those tricks, and doesn't pay for page ranking. Quite frankly, if being the top link on Google matters to a user, then that user is too dumb to care about. Being on the first page is an achievement in itself. – Geoff Griswald Feb 18 at 12:43
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    Better example: do the same search on-site with SO's search: stackoverflow.com/search?q=java+hashmap+vs+hashset. The canonical post doesn't even pop up. You get 2 seemingly good posts and 10 bad. This could be because the SO search engine is utter crap, or because the good content is drowning in a flood of crappy duplicates, or a combination. Whatever the case, it is pretty sad. – Lundin Feb 19 at 13:37

Just the fact that some moderators are resigning will not affect you so much. However, what WILL affect you in the long run is the reasons the moderators are resigning.

If a few moderators resigns at the same time because they just happened to become parents at the same time, there's in general not a big deal. Someone else can take their post instead. But the reasons moderators are resigning are not because of that.

But what we see here is that Stackoverflow is abandoning the connection with the community. This does not only make moderators resign. It also makes experts leave the site. This will lead to lower quality of the answers, which in turn will lead to more experts leaving.

So the way it will affect you, is that if you post a question, you will be less and less likely to receive a good answer, and more and more likely to receive a guesswork from some reputation hunter. And there will be fewer and fewer experts there to downvote and correct these answers.

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Today, a user was suspended for persistent harassment towards another user, who merely posted a comment on one of their low quality questions explaining that an attempt at solving the problem is expected before asking.

After said comment, the offender posted over 12 offensive comments (with name calling, the F- word, and other forms of unpleasantness) targeting a single user, part of which were captured by the heat detector bot, the rest were flagged and manually reported by humans, spanning over various answers of the offender, as well as the target's (answers). It was about 2 hours after the initial lash out that a moderator ended the stream of harassment with a suspension.

In the end, we can delete the offensive comments and revert defacing edits. But without a moderator capable of handling these incidents quickly, they will leave a harsher mark on the site. As this attracts negative attention on the offender, biased voting will take place. Other users will reach out as an appeal to behave, and potentially become targets as well. We still don't know whether the offender will try something off-site after this. And in the meantime, all one can do as curator is accumulate enough flags on the comments to clean up after the fact. Not to mention that now the harassed user is likely to think twice before ever commenting on a question again. The real damage is done. It frightens me that this could happen to me or any other reasonable user just the same.

This is anecdotal evidence of what can happen so easily when a moderator is not there to intervene in a timely fashion, so I felt that this one was worth recording here on Meta. It is no surprise that we may find larger time gaps of the day without active moderators after these resignations.

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I too am just a "normal user", but this drama on SO/SE is a massive distraction each time I end up here after a web search, partially because there might as well be a special "Drama" sidebar highlighting the latest episodes. Of course, I allow it to become a distraction for a number of reasons, not the least of which are that I hate to see injustice (especially that caused and compounded by the stupidity of a for-profit company abusing their volunteers, and the questionable choices of people volunteering to augment the bottom line of said for-profit company), and I too used to manage a community website with similar drama that ultimately contributed to its demise.

Should we be worried? Only if you think that SE/SO is irreplaceable. The Roman Empire was irreplaceable ... until it was replaced. SO/SE's hegemony will inevitably come to an end in due course, and be replaced by the next new thing. Even if someone hits the delete key, the site and its useful information will live on in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. One way or another information -- questions and their answers -- will live on forever.

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As you can see in the comments section of your answer, moderators are not always helpful. Especially moving comments to chat is a really annoying thing. But others as well. Some community (especially the smaller ones) have even stricter moderators and for me it was never clear if that adds value.

The core mechanical tasks a moderator does can most likely be solved in another way. Most of the more mundane tasks like closing and downvoting work without moderator help.

So from my point of view as a normal asker/answered it will not affect you or the overall community much.

And in regards to the downward trend of answering rate, there is no proof this is related to moderators leaving or any community aspects at all (a lot of the SO users are not aware of all the drama).

This can also be a simple aging thing. For example, a while back it was published that for example a "java" tag statistically means it might be a bad question - and that's purely because of the amount of unenthusiastic questions with no research. As time goes on this is true for all larger technology stacks.

And with a constant pressure to remove or block side discussions and additional aspects to questions people who love to share get alienated (especially by deletes or moves to chat)

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    closing/downvoting isn't related to moderators at all, that's a tool all users with enough rep are responsible for. And... no one is claiming that the downward trend we've seen since 2014 is due to moderators leaving, that's just absurd. – Kevin B Jan 20 at 16:25
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    @KevinB yes you repeat what I said "closing/downvoting does not really need moderator help". And yes there have been made claims that moderators leaving is correlated with the downfall, like "It is not just moderators leaving" - and I agree thats absurd. So all in all the impact on users is low. – eckes Jan 20 at 18:37
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    Then what's your point? you're listing things that moderators don't do as reasons them leaving doesn't matter. You're ignoring all the things they actually do. – Kevin B Jan 20 at 19:38
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    It seems that you are upset that moderators keep the site clean by removing comments. Please note that commenting is a privilege, and they are only meant to be used as temporary "Post-It" notes suggesting improvements to and/or asking for clarification of a post. They are often removed when they are no longer applicable, when they are rude/unfriendly, and/or when there just gets to be too many of them for anyone to read. This is part of the design of Stack Overflow; the high SNR is what attracts many people to this site. – Cody Gray Jan 20 at 23:52
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    I agree that some smaller sites suffer from over-moderation but in my experience, it tends to not be the moderators doing it, but a few grumpy high-rep regulars who treat the "Close" button like it's their personal "Not interested" button. In my experience, with a few exceptions, the moderators tend to be the ones trying to rein them in and encourage positivity. – user56reinstatemonica8 Jan 21 at 14:42
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    The fact that this is deleted is a good example of the annoyances on SO. – Fattie Feb 18 at 14:57
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    Do you mean is not deleted, @Fattie? This answer is not deleted and never has been. – Cody Gray Feb 18 at 18:06
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    @CodyGray , my mistake - I just meant the "gray business". Sorry – Fattie Feb 18 at 19:22


As a normal user, you shouldn't worry about the resignations:

  • They are not here for answering your questions anyway
  • In contrast to other answers, I would argue there is no hard evidence that moderators are programming experts. True, they come here often but that doesn't mean they understand programming better than non-moderators who are still happy to answer your question. Please note anybody can collect high reputation point by simply participating frequently.
  • Although moderators are responsible for moderation decisions, it's unclear how exactly it can affect you, in particular if you're only interested in your own problems. You ask a question, get an answer, and move on. How would a moderator resignation affect you??
  • One gone, one come. We have a lot of people here. No big deal.
  • We still have many active moderators.
  • Stack Overflow has no serious competition. Quora is not even close. Our programming experts will stay, because they don't have anywhere else to go.
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    I would attempt to refute the statements you've made, but based on your previous answer to this question and your question that were deleted, I suspect the wall wouldn't listen – Rob Jan 17 at 12:48
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    We'll agree to disagree, but this is a fair answer. However, your second point is irrelevant. Users are not elected due to their programming skills. In fact, people are advised not to flag issues that only an expert can resolve. Indeed, moderators with programming experience are more desirable as they've got a better context, however, theoretically, none of the moderator duties require any experience in programming – Rob Jan 17 at 12:51
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    I do see your point. Fundamentally, no, we simply don't know how exactly this will play out and what the consequences will be. Can't exactly say the site's been trouble free until it really hit the fan recently. It's just as plausible that rotating the regulars and bringing in a new generation will do the site some good in the long run. Who knows? Or it may be the final nail in the coffin, as many have predicted for a long time. We'll see… – deceze Jan 17 at 12:59
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    "Stackoverflow has no serious competition." Correct. "Our programming experts will stay because they don't have anywhere else to go." Incorrect. People are already developing their own alternatives to Stack Exchange, the most prominent being Codidact. Pretty much the entire Writing.SE community has already migrated there, including its mods, all of whom have resigned. – F1Krazy Jan 17 at 13:03
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    @F1Krazy That move worked for a relatively small community, sure. Whether it works for one as large as SO remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen whether the same kinds of problems will eventually kill that community… – deceze Jan 17 at 13:06
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    @deceze True. I just wanted to point out the absurdity of saying that "expert programmers" have "nowhere else to go" on the internet. They can literally make their own place to go, and indeed are already doing so. – F1Krazy Jan 17 at 13:09
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    @F1Krazy, and indeed did do - it's kinda the reason that SO actually exists.I'm sure there's a quote from BSG that's appropriate here. Something about what's happened before will happen again... =) – Rob Jan 17 at 13:13
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    @F1Krazy It's not hard to "make a new place", that has been done many a time already. The crucial part is to attract the right people to that place at the right time. A new empty place isn't worth going to. And especially with expert programmers, they're often only interested in answering questions rather than asking them (because they can answer their own questions). A new place with too few good questions won't be very attractive to them either. – deceze Jan 17 at 13:14
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    "You ask a question, get an answer. Move on. How would a moderator resignation affect you??" Like - you ask a question and get a lmgtfy link? You ask a question and the only answer is RTFM? You ask a question and 5 minutes later it is on 15th page in stackoverflow.com/questions because all students from five courses decided to throw their exercises verbatim as questions and there are 150 identical, low quality questions before yours, good one? This is where moderation comes to action. – Tadeusz Kopec Jan 17 at 13:36
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    remember when stackoverflow was supposed to be a replacement for experts exchange, because of paywalls, is stack overflow the new experts exchange? meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92683/… but, you know, if codidact takes off, that would make me happy, no site should have the monopoly of quality Q&A. – Rainb Jan 17 at 19:28
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    "One gone, one come" - I can't imagine anyone putting themselves forward for a job where you know the exact reasons why your predecessor left and what is happening on the inside. – Sayse Jan 19 at 19:54
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    "Our programming experts will stay, because they don't have anywhere else to go" - Experts don't have to answer here. They do because they support the community. They can also decide not to do that at all, or do it on their own blogs or other channels. I (arrogantly calling myself an expert now) don't feel much inclined to answer lately, because it feels all my efforts will go down the drain anyway when this ship sinks. – GolezTrol Jan 20 at 9:56
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    Bricks don't make a mansion. When the time comes, the owners will take a call and close shop. But not because or due to some diggers leaving the site. Mansion will be built, despite them. – user12379095 Jan 20 at 15:55
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    Whoever voted to delete this answer - please reconsider. This answer presents an interesting perspective and deserves being displayed, especially with all the comments below it. – anatolyg Jan 20 at 17:13
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    @anatolyg Thanks. The "community" shouldn't be deleting my answer just because I don't agree with them. This is Q&A, and I did indeed answer it with arguments. All other answers in this question are like ".... oh, Monica left, I'm leaving, SO is doom! ...". – HelloWorld Jan 20 at 18:46

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