6 ms·

It's not just open source though. Many high quality sources of information are being (over-)exploited and hurt in the process. StackOverflow is effectively dead

It's not just open source though. Many high quality sources of information are being (over-)exploited and hurt in the process. StackOverflow is effectively dead [0], the internet archive is being shunned by publishers [1], scientific journals are bombarded by fake papers [2] (and anecdotally, low-effort LLM-driven reviews), projects like OpenStreetMap incur significant costs due to scraping [3], and many more. We went from data mining to data fracking. [0]: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-... [1]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-internet-archive-access-due-to-ai-scraping-concerns/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-inte... [2]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/ [3]: https://www.heise.de/en/news/OpenStreetMap-is-concerned-thousands-of-AI-bots-are-collecting-data-11157359.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/OpenStreetMap-is-concerned-thou...

_aavaa_ 7mo ago
StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014 (minus a very transient blip from covid). Then the chagpt effect is a sudden drop in visitors. But the rate of decline after that looks more or less the same as pre-chatgpt.
- torginus 7mo ago
  We can only hope reddit shares the same fate. Its only saving grace - as much as it pains me to say it - is that it's still not Facebook
- silverwind 7mo ago
  StackOverflow was killed by its toxic moderators. I hope it stays online thought because it's massive source of knowledge, although in many cases outdated already.
  - franktankbank 7mo ago
    Would AI be as good at coding as it is without the rigorous moderation of a significant training source?
  - foxglacier 7mo ago
    I always thought StackOverflow was meant to fizzle out over time as more questions get answered and don't need to be asked again. Perhaps the decline is just a necessary part of their rule of having no duplicate questions - keeping it as a clean repository of knowledge rather than a messy forum. Just the other day a question I asked about 10 years ago got flagged as a duplicate. It turns out somebody else had asked the same question several years later and got a better answer than my question got, so that other one is the canonical one and mine is pushed away. It feels kind of offensive but it makes complete sense if the goal is to provide useful answers to people searching.
    - RHSeeger 7mo ago
      Unfortunately, the rule of no duplicate questions also destroyed lots of questions that weren't duplicates... because _someone_ couldn't be bothered to read them and realize it wasn't the same. Plus, there were a lot of fun questions they were really interesting to start with; and they stopped allowing them.
      - jamesfinlayson 7mo ago
        Yes, this. I've asked a couple of questions where the only responses are from people saying "possible dupe of x" where x is something that has a couple of the same words but no relation to what I'm asking.
        taneq 7mo ago
        Turns out if you design a forum where a high effort, high quality post can be devalued by a low effort response, you discourage high effort, high quality posters.
- raxxorraxor 7mo ago
  Mods made asking questions a very hostile experience since they had a flawed ideal of SO becoming some form of encyclopedia. So no wonder people jumped on another train as quickly as possible, especially since it so often was a mistake to close a question whose next best answer was a long deprecated solution. It still has some corners where people are better, but this is mostly the smaller niches.
  - lithos 7mo ago
    Even someone who hates AI, is likely to hate it less than SO.
- lelele 7mo ago
  I don't know about others, but I switched to Reddit or forums for asking and answering questions because it offered a much smoother experience.
- AbstractH24 7mo ago
  StackOverflow is the next iteration of Yahoo Answers.
- ggregoire 7mo ago
  > StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014. > [0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-... (monthly question asked on Stack Overflow) "monthly questions asked" is a weird metric to measure the decline of StackOverflow tho. How many times are people gonna ask how to compare 2 dates in python, or how to efficiently iterate an array in javascript? According to the duplicates rule on SO, should be once anyway. So it's just inevitable that "monthly questions asked" will forever decrease after reaching its peak, since everything has already been asked. Didn't mean it was dead tho, people still needed to visit the site to read the responses. A better metric to measure its decline would be "monthly visits", which I guess was still pretty high pre LLM (100s of millions per month?), even if the "monthly questions asked" was declining. But now I imagine their "monthly visits" is closer to zero than 1M. I mean, even if you don't use Claude and its friends, searching anything about programming on Google returns a Gemini answer that probably comes from StackOverflow, removing any reason to ever visit the site…
  - hn92726819 7mo ago
    Your first point only holds if nothing ever changes in the programming world. People write new languages and frameworks all the time. How do you compare dates in pandas? How about polars? Duckdb? Etc.
d_silin 7mo ago
Overpromises and overhyping of AI is making all of IT industry worse.
- sixtyj 7mo ago
  Everytime I start to discuss LLM/AI with non-IT people it is the same. Absurd expectations. Or denial of AI. But as CEOs like Altman, Musk or Amodei have some much space in media, they can amplify their products - as good salesmen :) I think that we are in times similar to 1997-1999, “everything will be web”.
nunez 7mo ago
AI also killed Reddit (the API changes were motivated by early GPT iirc) So so SO much good stuff is gone now and much of what's left is AI cruft
- gf000 7mo ago
  Well, Reddit surely didn't help the issue with how it was all handled.
- lawstkawz 7mo ago
  That’s entropy for you. Society is a Ship Theseus; each generation ripping off planks and nailing their own in place. Having been online since the late 80s (am only mid 40s...grandpa worked at IBM, hooked me and my siblings up with the latest kit on the regular) I have read comments like this over and over as the 90s internet, 00s internet, now the 2010s state of the "information super highway" has been replaced. Tbh things have felt quite stagnant and "stuck" the last 20 years. All the investment in and caretaking of web SaaS infrastructure and JS apps and jobs for code camp grads made it feel like tech had come to a standstill relative to the pace of software progress prior to the last 15-ish years.
- randomNumber7 7mo ago
  I think reddit was killed by a moderation that only allows the most norrowminded persons to have their echo-chamber.
  - noosphr 7mo ago
    Any moderation position that can be filled by an unemployed shut it will be filled by an unemployed shut in. Yiu either have to pay your mods, like hn, or have your mods pay you, like the old BBS boards that reddit and stack overflow replaced. Problems of the 2010s. Today you can use an 8b model to flag all problematic posts. The only issue is that all the posts are also by 8b models.
    - Der_Einzige 7mo ago
      You’re telling me dang gets paid to be a mod here? AI can’t come fast enough!!!!
csomar 7mo ago
Stack Overflow is an interesting case because these days most people ask questions on Discord instead. The data isn't public, and the search functionality is terrible. It makes no sense, but somehow companies still prefer it even though it's inefficient and the same questions keep getting asked over and over.
- m4rtink 7mo ago
  Looks like at least Discord is recently decided to finally fix the issues caused by having users & are trying very hard to not have any going forward through insane identity verification mandates enforced by the most toxic partner companies ever. :)
- karmakurtisaani 7mo ago
  > the same questions keep getting asked over and over. More user engagement, users spend more time on the platform. These companies don't have the best interest of users in mind.
- arcologies1985 7mo ago
  > and the same questions keep getting asked over and over. This is a feature not a bug. The people asking those questions are new blood and accepting and integrating them is how you sustain your community.
rurp 7mo ago
Even if we completely avoid the worst case scenarios where AI obliterates the job market or evolves into a paperclip maximizer, it has a good shot of being the most destructive technology in generations. The tech industry has already done a lot of harm to our social fabric with social media, gambling, and other addictive innovations replacing real life experiences and personal connections. This has led to well documented increases in depression, loneliness, and political extremism. Now it seems AI is poised to eliminate most of the good innovations that tech brought about, and will probably crank social strife up to 11. It already feels like the foundations of the developed world have gotten shaky; I shudder to think what a massive blow will bring about. I've read enough history to know that I really, really don't want to live through a violent revolution, or a world war, or a great depression.
- renegade-otter 7mo ago
  After the iPhone, every single "innovation" has wrecked all kinds of havoc. Whatever we have is not healthy, and AI is going to supercharge that.
BrandoElFollito 7mo ago
StackOverflow was destroyed by a steady stream of miserable questions, and then by the infinite ego of moderators and power users. They forgot that there are still people asking good questions and started to close everything. Z downvote from z bozo weights the sama as one from an expert. You need to bend backwards znd then lay flat to not annoy mods Meta is the nest of psychopathic narcissists. And many more. Stack Exchange sites such as cooking or latex (and other niche ones) work very well. It is just that people are not full of themselves. I started with SE ca 2014, loved it, participated a lot, accumulated half a million internet points and now hate the place. It did not age well.
nicbou 7mo ago
Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT are also killing traffic to information websites

_aavaa_ 7mo ago

StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014 (minus a very transient blip from covid). Then the chagpt effect is a sudden drop in visitors. But the rate of decline after that looks more or less the same as pre-chatgpt.

torginus 7mo ago
We can only hope reddit shares the same fate. Its only saving grace - as much as it pains me to say it - is that it's still not Facebook
silverwind 7mo ago
StackOverflow was killed by its toxic moderators. I hope it stays online thought because it's massive source of knowledge, although in many cases outdated already.
- franktankbank 7mo ago
  Would AI be as good at coding as it is without the rigorous moderation of a significant training source?
- foxglacier 7mo ago
  I always thought StackOverflow was meant to fizzle out over time as more questions get answered and don't need to be asked again. Perhaps the decline is just a necessary part of their rule of having no duplicate questions - keeping it as a clean repository of knowledge rather than a messy forum. Just the other day a question I asked about 10 years ago got flagged as a duplicate. It turns out somebody else had asked the same question several years later and got a better answer than my question got, so that other one is the canonical one and mine is pushed away. It feels kind of offensive but it makes complete sense if the goal is to provide useful answers to people searching.
  - RHSeeger 7mo ago
    Unfortunately, the rule of no duplicate questions also destroyed lots of questions that weren't duplicates... because _someone_ couldn't be bothered to read them and realize it wasn't the same. Plus, there were a lot of fun questions they were really interesting to start with; and they stopped allowing them.
    - jamesfinlayson 7mo ago
      Yes, this. I've asked a couple of questions where the only responses are from people saying "possible dupe of x" where x is something that has a couple of the same words but no relation to what I'm asking.
      - taneq 7mo ago
        Turns out if you design a forum where a high effort, high quality post can be devalued by a low effort response, you discourage high effort, high quality posters.
raxxorraxor 7mo ago
Mods made asking questions a very hostile experience since they had a flawed ideal of SO becoming some form of encyclopedia. So no wonder people jumped on another train as quickly as possible, especially since it so often was a mistake to close a question whose next best answer was a long deprecated solution. It still has some corners where people are better, but this is mostly the smaller niches.
- lithos 7mo ago
  Even someone who hates AI, is likely to hate it less than SO.
lelele 7mo ago
I don't know about others, but I switched to Reddit or forums for asking and answering questions because it offered a much smoother experience.
AbstractH24 7mo ago
StackOverflow is the next iteration of Yahoo Answers.
ggregoire 7mo ago
> StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014. > [0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-... (monthly question asked on Stack Overflow) "monthly questions asked" is a weird metric to measure the decline of StackOverflow tho. How many times are people gonna ask how to compare 2 dates in python, or how to efficiently iterate an array in javascript? According to the duplicates rule on SO, should be once anyway. So it's just inevitable that "monthly questions asked" will forever decrease after reaching its peak, since everything has already been asked. Didn't mean it was dead tho, people still needed to visit the site to read the responses. A better metric to measure its decline would be "monthly visits", which I guess was still pretty high pre LLM (100s of millions per month?), even if the "monthly questions asked" was declining. But now I imagine their "monthly visits" is closer to zero than 1M. I mean, even if you don't use Claude and its friends, searching anything about programming on Google returns a Gemini answer that probably comes from StackOverflow, removing any reason to ever visit the site…
- hn92726819 7mo ago
  Your first point only holds if nothing ever changes in the programming world. People write new languages and frameworks all the time. How do you compare dates in pandas? How about polars? Duckdb? Etc.

d_silin 7mo ago

Overpromises and overhyping of AI is making all of IT industry worse.

sixtyj 7mo ago
Everytime I start to discuss LLM/AI with non-IT people it is the same. Absurd expectations. Or denial of AI. But as CEOs like Altman, Musk or Amodei have some much space in media, they can amplify their products - as good salesmen :) I think that we are in times similar to 1997-1999, “everything will be web”.

nunez 7mo ago

AI also killed Reddit (the API changes were motivated by early GPT iirc) So so SO much good stuff is gone now and much of what's left is AI cruft

gf000 7mo ago
Well, Reddit surely didn't help the issue with how it was all handled.
lawstkawz 7mo ago
That’s entropy for you. Society is a Ship Theseus; each generation ripping off planks and nailing their own in place. Having been online since the late 80s (am only mid 40s...grandpa worked at IBM, hooked me and my siblings up with the latest kit on the regular) I have read comments like this over and over as the 90s internet, 00s internet, now the 2010s state of the "information super highway" has been replaced. Tbh things have felt quite stagnant and "stuck" the last 20 years. All the investment in and caretaking of web SaaS infrastructure and JS apps and jobs for code camp grads made it feel like tech had come to a standstill relative to the pace of software progress prior to the last 15-ish years.
randomNumber7 7mo ago
I think reddit was killed by a moderation that only allows the most norrowminded persons to have their echo-chamber.
- noosphr 7mo ago
  Any moderation position that can be filled by an unemployed shut it will be filled by an unemployed shut in. Yiu either have to pay your mods, like hn, or have your mods pay you, like the old BBS boards that reddit and stack overflow replaced. Problems of the 2010s. Today you can use an 8b model to flag all problematic posts. The only issue is that all the posts are also by 8b models.
  - Der_Einzige 7mo ago
    You’re telling me dang gets paid to be a mod here? AI can’t come fast enough!!!!

csomar 7mo ago

Stack Overflow is an interesting case because these days most people ask questions on Discord instead. The data isn't public, and the search functionality is terrible. It makes no sense, but somehow companies still prefer it even though it's inefficient and the same questions keep getting asked over and over.

m4rtink 7mo ago
Looks like at least Discord is recently decided to finally fix the issues caused by having users & are trying very hard to not have any going forward through insane identity verification mandates enforced by the most toxic partner companies ever. :)
karmakurtisaani 7mo ago
> the same questions keep getting asked over and over. More user engagement, users spend more time on the platform. These companies don't have the best interest of users in mind.
arcologies1985 7mo ago
> and the same questions keep getting asked over and over. This is a feature not a bug. The people asking those questions are new blood and accepting and integrating them is how you sustain your community.

rurp 7mo ago

Even if we completely avoid the worst case scenarios where AI obliterates the job market or evolves into a paperclip maximizer, it has a good shot of being the most destructive technology in generations. The tech industry has already done a lot of harm to our social fabric with social media, gambling, and other addictive innovations replacing real life experiences and personal connections. This has led to well documented increases in depression, loneliness, and political extremism. Now it seems AI is poised to eliminate most of the good innovations that tech brought about, and will probably crank social strife up to 11. It already feels like the foundations of the developed world have gotten shaky; I shudder to think what a massive blow will bring about. I've read enough history to know that I really, really don't want to live through a violent revolution, or a world war, or a great depression.

renegade-otter 7mo ago
After the iPhone, every single "innovation" has wrecked all kinds of havoc. Whatever we have is not healthy, and AI is going to supercharge that.

BrandoElFollito 7mo ago

StackOverflow was destroyed by a steady stream of miserable questions, and then by the infinite ego of moderators and power users. They forgot that there are still people asking good questions and started to close everything. Z downvote from z bozo weights the sama as one from an expert. You need to bend backwards znd then lay flat to not annoy mods Meta is the nest of psychopathic narcissists. And many more. Stack Exchange sites such as cooking or latex (and other niche ones) work very well. It is just that people are not full of themselves. I started with SE ca 2014, loved it, participated a lot, accumulated half a million internet points and now hate the place. It did not age well.

nicbou 7mo ago

Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT are also killing traffic to information websites