I occasionally run parkruns at the park near my home in Singapore. A 5km run is a nice way to start the weekend. 5km isn’t a lot of most runners, but I’m a poor runner and it requires and all out effort from me just to finish in under 30 minutes, which I can happily report I’ve been doing quite consistently the last 3-4 runs.

Park run is a volunteer event; everyone at the event is either a participant or a volunteer, no one is paid to organize the event – and it’s AWESOME. In most parks there is a strong cohort of regulars and a large number of first timers as well.

The event starts with a first-timer briefing, usually 5 minutes long explaining to folks the course that the run will take, some safety and security tips and answering any questions the participants might have. Then there is the full run briefing, where the run director gives an event specific briefing. Volunteers are introduced, first-timers are welcomed with cheers, and milestones (like someone completing their 50th parkrun) are celebrated with photos.

Everyone makes their way to the starting line, and the event is officially kicked off, with volunteers start getting the finishing line ready. During the race, volunteer pace-setters wearing their pace numbers help you maintain your desired pace, and there will be at least one tail-walker – a volunteer that walks the slowest across the entire 5km to ensure no one gets left behind and that the run doesn’t finish till everyone finishes.

Tail walkers help park run ensure no one is ever in last place, because the tail walker concludes the run, and they will always be behind you. In other words, someone is volunteering to be last.

Everyone is welcomed and cheered, and no matter what time you finish your run, you’ll be met with at least one applause, cheer or gentle pat of the back for finishing.

Even regulars keep going, for many runners a 5km run is too easy – more of a warmup, yet they still show up. Even at my 30 minute 5km, I see runners who’ve finished their run, cool down and now doing a reverse loop in my direction before I’ve completed my 5km. So why are these runners who are obviously a league ahead of most everyone else in the run still here? I think there’s something about being in a community that keeps folks coming, doesn’t matter how good or bad you are, there’s something about running with a community that makes it special.

Nobody says RTFM here.

Because Park Run is a community first, here’s what the website says:

parkrun is a free, community event where you can walk, jog, run, volunteer or spectate. parkrun is 5k and takes place every Saturday morning. parkrun is positive, welcoming and inclusive, there is no time limit and no one finishes last. Everyone is welcome to come along.

Now…..let’s contrast this to StackOverflow.

If you ask a silly question in Stackoverflow – you’ll know it – immediately!!

In fact, your question won’t even become public until a moderator “moderates” it. Until then it sits in question purgatory. The last time I tried to ask a question in stackoverflow, it was followed by 5 comments and responses from moderators before the question was eventually closed and marked as duplicate – even though it wasn’t a duplicate, and I was still confused. My question was never published in public because the moderators deemed it unworthy.

To the stackoverflow moderators, my confusion was my fault, and Stackoverflow wasn’t here to fix my confusion. Instead it was here to ensure that only questions of the highest calibre and precision get posted. The entire experience left such a sour note that I decided right then I would no longer use that dreaded website. Asking questions is tough, and if I could craft such a high precision question that would mean I already had the knowledge that I required to answer the question in the first place.

I’m not new to stackoverflow, I’m in the top 400 contributors of security stack exchange. But there’s just something off about the tech community that we reduce ourselves to snarky know-it-alls instead of prioritizing the community, that somehow in this one place called “tech”, the price of being nice is so high, apparently no one can afford it.

If Parkrun is a community first, run second. Stackoverflow is an archive of answers first and a community never. Stackoverflow never prioritized being a community of humans, which meant it was so fungible that ChatGPT displaced it overnight, because after all, ChatGPT is also an archive of answers – minus the snarky moderators.

In Parkrun even a 15 minute runner might take the time out to make sure you don’t make the wrong turn while he’s lapping you (I’ve seen it happen!), that’s the equivalent of a Google Principal SWE answering your hello-world python question. This isn’t about “scaling”, it’s about building a community, and in a community no one should be afraid of asking a question.

Stackoverflow was focused on avoiding duplicates, it would rather err on the side of not posting a question, than risk an ultimately inconsequential duplicate on the site. The results, shocked no one, people eventually stopped asking questions.

People say Stackoverflow died because of Generative AI and Coding assistants, but if Reddit can have significant growth during the same period why did Stackoverflow fail so spectacularly? There’s probably more than one answer to the question, but the biggest component will be community. StackOverflow never grew into one, and therefore didn’t stick with users, it was an archive, and archives can be replaced.

If you focused entirely on answering questions – then any LLM model is going to kick your ass, because the they don’t judge, and they don’t snark, they answer and keep on answering, and never mark your question as duplicate.

And so endeth Stackoverflow, to which I say good fucking riddance.