The downside of gamification
Initially, gamification was a booster rocket. It took a beautiful aspect of software development culture—the mysterious joy of giving and receiving help for its own sake—and added a fun new way to score reputation. But what drove that helping culture? I remember a non-programmer looking over my shoulder once when I was on Stack Overflow. “Why do people help? Just for nothing?” The joy of being able to help someone by sharing what you’ve learned is something you must experience yourself to understand.
Possibly the best analogy is seeing someone whose car has broken down on the side of the road. You pull over to help because you’ve been there; you know what being broken down on the side of the road feels like. Maybe you can help, and even if you can’t, at least the stranded driver knows someone cares. And then there is the boost of discovering the source of the problem: “Look, here’s a loose coolant clamp.” That shared thrill is what we lost when Stack Overflow let the reputation game win.
Software development and the culture of helping
Whether the culture of helping each other will survive in this new age of LLMs is a real question. Is human helping still necessary? Or can it all be reduced to inputs and outputs? Maybe there’s a new role for humans in generating accurate data that feeds the LLMs. Maybe we’ll evolve into gardeners of these vast new tracts of synthetic data.
But returning to Stack Overflow and the community it once represented: Is there some radical resurrection in its future? Before AI entered the scene, it was clear Stack Overflow needed to back out of a dead-end street of its own creation. It’s possible the site could have returned to greatness by embracing what once made it great: the community and culture of software development.
That culture thrives on making people feel welcome. Practically speaking, it means letting people with foolish or off-topic questions interact with those with more experience. Someday, they’ll become the ones with experience. Maybe they’ll come back to return the favor.
It’s also clear that developers still want and appreciate community, even in the age of AI. We see that ethos alive and well in spaces like dev.to, and also in the success of GitHub’s open source, social coding model. GitHub is possibly the center of the coding universe, the true heir to the Iron Throne of the old user groups. Of course, it’s also just another useful tool, one that remains essential even in an AI-centric software universe.
This perhaps boils down to the kernel at the heart of coding for coding’s sake. By nature, software developers will always create code, just like musicians are always producing music. Even if AI could produce great music, musicians would still do it. After all, we didn’t get to Bach, Beethoven, or the Beatles and just say, “Okay, we’re good, we have music now.” Humans have an inherent need to create, and for software developers, coding is how we do it.
There is a way of writing, building, and doing software that is joyful, challenging, and rewarding. AI can be a part of that. But if it is allowed to wholesale replace it, the act of coding for coding’s sake starts to look more like an enthusiast’s hobby. It becomes akin to handcrafting wooden furniture pieces in the age of mass-produced furniture products.
Don’t lose the human element
Where does a site like Stack Overflow fit into this picture? Matt Asay recently offered some interesting ideas, like tying reputation to AI model contributions. But to truly make a comeback, Stack Overflow would have to believe in the future of human programmers and their culture. It would have to fundamentally say: This is a place where the human side of software development lives, and everything that happens here is in support of that basic mission.
The rise and fall of Stack Overflow is a poignant reminder that platforms built for humans thrive on genuine community, not just generating content. Its genius was harnessing the enthusiasm of developers. That energy was gradually diminished by a bizarre twist where a working democracy sprouted an aristocracy, and that aristocracy killed democracy.
The arrival of sophisticated AI happened in parallel, but it didn’t cause the collapse; it merely exposed the extent to which the community had already lost its spark. AI will continue to reshape the technological landscape, and the ramifications will continue to unfold before our very eyes. The lesson of Stack Overflow is even more important in the new world that is coming: Humans are the drivers of meaning and purpose. Subtract that human element at your own peril.