Ask HN: Is Reddit going the way of Stack Overflow?
6 NotAnOtter 11 9/8/2025, 3:46:51 AM
Stack Overflow was once a haven for tech questions & explanations in the early 10's. At some point, the mod team soured and started deputizing members that started shunning and deleting comments for thinly justified reasoning. Things like asking a question that was asked 8 years ago would get your question deleted, ignoring the fact that tech reasonably could have changed in those 8 years. The site was not only generally toxic, it was difficult to actually use. Searching on google your question "stack overflow" was the main use case in the late 10's. LLM's have been the final nail in the coffin for SO, and the usage charts reflect this. Why bother carefully searching and phrasing your question to get a sassy answer 8 hours later, when Claude will give you an answer in 5 seconds with approximately the same accuracy of an internet stranger?
So - is Reddit headed the same way as SO? The mods of individual subreddits have been toxic for ages. Political subs curate hive minds, niche topics exclude members that are less informed, etc. Reddit admins, the ones that are emplyoed by the site, are also generally anti-user. Banning members without cause, poor or no explanations of what the ban is for and generally just policing with an iron fist & a rubber brain.
Reddit fills a different niche from SO, being more entertainment focused. But I feel it's the same mistaken model of moderation that will lead to the same demise in ~5 years.
Thoughts?
It's eerie.
They are actively harming human users in defense of their toxic mods & botters. Site is dying and they are the murderer.
SO -> Github Issues, LLMs
Quora -> Medium/Substack/SO/SE
/., Digg, Quora -> Reddit -> ??
I'd love something to replace reddit, but I can't find another platform that is as open (e.g. don't need an account), has the diversity of topics.
The political (and sub-reddit) echo chambers are ridiculous though.
I feel some users will leach into platforms that created even more walled gardens, i.e. Discord, or platforms that reduce the sense of walled gardens i.e. Twitter.
Instead of platforms expecting the user to inform who/what to follow, they infer from user behaviors.
Reddit isn't comparable, as AI has not replaced human opinion.
This doesn't hold up when looking at usage charts. There is a clear peak around ~2015 with a steady decline through to now. LLM's came to market in their current form in the last couple years, and took a couple years to be broadly adopted. There was a clear and obvious market fall off way before AI / LLM.
> Reddit isn't comparable
I agree with that in isolation; but since I don't agree with the AI premise this isn't especially relevant. I don't think AI will replace Reddit, I think one of the other major platforms will absorb it's users like Reddit / Hackerrank / better documentation / back searching absorbed SO's users through 2015-2021
As I said in my original post, LLM was the final nail in the coffin. I'm not arguing they aren't related. I'm saying they SO was falling long before LLM's took over. This isn't difficult logic.
When you load a random content page, the top 50% of the page is a question, the bottom 50% is an ad that is designed to look like a comment, and the entire right panel is ads. Quora is more ads than content, you have to scroll and decipher what is or isn't an ad based on their greyed 2px font ad disclaimer.