13 ms·

What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

• esjeon 2mo ago
  I've only posted one question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.
• amelius 2mo ago
  I miss Joel Spolsky's writings especially in this dark age of AI.
• moralestapia 2mo ago
  Hehe, I'm so glad I blew the lid on this thing some time ago. Mods were so shitty I always wanted to have my schadenfreude on them.
• fHr 2mo ago
  joining the space and getting to know this site in 2015ish it was toxic af, well deserved
• hbcdbff 2mo ago
  Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph
• mid-kid 2mo ago
  Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
  • zh3 2mo ago
    Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.
  • dumberquestions 2mo ago
    The trend might've stalled or even reversed if it weren't for AI, we can't just assume the same end was written in stone.
  • hilariously 2mo ago
    Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff. Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.
    • Ekaros 2mo ago
      Somehow I feel that whole idea was 50% broken from start. In field changing as fast as programming you simply cannot have canonical source that is done. There are areas which are constant or slow moving. But too many others are in churn. Trying to apply same rules for both is clearly insanity. And this is really the failure of SO... Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it might have worked... But can't remove power from those who had it for years...
      • hilariously 2mo ago
        You also have to think that SO was very early in gamification and changing things around that never got political will afaict - people love their points.
  • elif 2mo ago
    The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years. That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.
• xyzsparetimexyz 2mo ago
  Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users
  • gyan 2mo ago
    If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did. What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.
    • iso1631 2mo ago
      There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
      • fluoridation 2mo ago
        Definitely this. The moderators seemed to have the Lock Question button connected to their dopamine pathways.
    • Foobar8568 2mo ago
      It just accelerated the trend, and I am sure that reddit took over for a lot of new users. The different problems with SO has been well documented. And they killed maybe one of the most side features of it : https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-jobs-developer-story https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j... So yeah metakill your own brands with stupid policies.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
    • liljacob 2mo ago
• ReptileMan 2mo ago
  Slightly accelerated their decline. You have a drop around chatgpt release then the slope returns to its previous pace of decline.
• IshKebab 2mo ago
  AI and ridiculously aggressive moderation. If it had been a more welcoming place it probably would have lasted longer.
• nolok 2mo ago
  SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community. I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
  • bluedino 2mo ago
    There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss. It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"
    • rib3ye 2mo ago
      As noted by others, the initializer for the curt communication culture was "don't ask stupid questions, idiot."
    • frollogaston 2mo ago
      Once or twice someone on SO used their chat feature to help me out after I asked a question, back when I was a n00b. That was really kind of them. Eventually, once I actually knew my stuff, I spent some time answering good questions on there. And yeah I had to be discerning.
  • embedding-shape 2mo ago
    SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people. Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.
    • tokioyoyo 2mo ago
      An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.
• khalic 2mo ago
  Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
  • airstrike 2mo ago
    This isn't really a bell curve.
    • khalic 2mo ago
      check my other response, it's very much a bell curve, statistically speaking https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
      • j_maffe 2mo ago
        > statistically speaking That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?
        • khalic 2mo ago
          A bell curve is not an "amortised function." Amortization applies to accounting and algorithmic time complexity, not probability distributions. You're likely thinking of a Probability Density Function (PDF). If you are going to police terminology, it helps to use the correct words. Second, fitting a curve with an R^2 of 0.911 is the exact opposite of "making shapes out of clouds.
        • antonvs 2mo ago
          > A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standard deviation. The general notion of a bell-shaped curve is broader than that. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function > “typically continuous or smooth, asymptotically approach zero for large negative/positive x, and have a single, unimodal maximum at small x.”
• simianwords 2mo ago
  The company my friend works for has a slack channel for help with code, like an internal stackoverflow. It’s almost inactive now. I asked to see one of the questions from 2024 - it could have been solved with one LLM search. We have eliminated a whole genre of peer to peer communication.
  • dudul 2mo ago
    I noticed the same thing. Another thing that seems to have disappear: lunch and learn focusing on the tech stack. And I mean specifically about "how to do this in <programming language", not product/company focused.
• pknerd 2mo ago
  Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Careful - the LLM companies are also modern day dictators and pharoahs.
• Kuinox 2mo ago
  The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it. You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation. Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
• Someone1234 2mo ago
  ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022, and frankly wasn't very good originally. The SO decline started occurring almost two years ahead of that, and was already on a sharp decline before ChatGPT shipped, and certainly before ChatGPT actually became good. This is revisionist history. People told SO that they were leaving for YEARS because of how incredibly toxic it had become. It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately. Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended." They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Two years before ChatGPT is shortly after Joel and Jeff sold Stack Overflow to private equity. The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.
    • jeanlucas 2mo ago
      For those who don't know what the Monica affair was: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-is-monica-and-why-so-much-notice-from-se-users https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-...
  • lynndotpy 2mo ago
    The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"? In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy pro-AI decisions from the admin.
    • Someone1234 2mo ago
      > The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"? The title of this thread is "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph." That's a narrative. At least before the mods change it.
• lynndotpy 2mo ago
  Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner. The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site. Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program. Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
  • executivevice 2mo ago
    S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
    • baq 2mo ago
      It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
      • palata 2mo ago
        This. I left SO before AI because moderators were terrible.
• charcircuit 2mo ago
  If there is not allowed to be duplicate questions isn't it by design that as the site and industry matures the number of posts go down.
• wtfHN26 2mo ago
  Looks like SO was already dying since 2017. I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards. AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.
  • pydry 2mo ago
    for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.
    • embedding-shape 2mo ago
      - Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only" - Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library - Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked - Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs - Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP - Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong
      • antonvs 2mo ago
        You’re using your mom for rubber duck debugging, then. An LLM can work for that as well, usually better because it knows a lot more than your mom.
        • embedding-shape 2mo ago
          It's fictional, I never actually got burned by a tech lead nor been put on PIP either, nor asked my mom to help me with programming :)
          • antonvs 2mo ago
            That's not really relevant, the point is LLMs are actually pretty good for the scenario you described.
• 5701652400 2mo ago
  same story for blogs
• pluc 2mo ago
  So... nothing that it wasn't already doing to itself? There's no one drop where "AI got into the market", SO had been declining steadily for years. I actually expected this post to be about how SO survived by selling its internal organs to AI. Now do a graph for the money. https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-giants-pay-for-data/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...
  • j_maffe 2mo ago
    > There's no one drop where "AI got into the market" Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.
• avaer 2mo ago
  The collapse into a ghost town is striking. Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO. This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that. SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.
  • khalic 2mo ago
    check the graph and superpose the ai adoption curve, you're right to be skeptical
  • Rohunyyy 2mo ago
    I remember a time when people were posting their SO link and karma on their resumes. O how have the times changed.
  • mort96 2mo ago
    There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.
  • Sammi 2mo ago
    > This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that. Literally describing how academia has worked since time immemorial.
• shevy-java 2mo ago
  This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in 2008, and I would reason it took a few years, say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to about 2015, roughly. Then it declined. It still has some value today, as sometimes you can find useful information on SO, but its peak days are long over and I don't see how it can manage to come back, with or without AI slop. It would basically require a lot of re-design and some things that never worked, such as the karma system, should be changed. Also moderators - they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.
  • simianwords 2mo ago
    I disagree. From what I see, company specific stackoverflow like mailing lists or slack channels are also dead. The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore. One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental. FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.
• vcryan 2mo ago
  They had a good run!
• Alien1Being 2mo ago
  The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.
  • simonblowsw 2mo ago
    [dead]
• ahmetson 2mo ago
  When an ecological shoes company pivot to AI, I wonder why StackOverflow executives don't pilot for AI now.
  • adamtaylor_13 2mo ago
    There's still a question of what that would do for them. I haven't used SO in years because I haven't needed it in years. That's primarily due to AI answering my technical questions.
  • chanux 2mo ago
    They are trying I guess: https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/10/announcing-stack-overflow-for-agents/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/10/announcing-stack-overf...
  • zahlman 2mo ago
    They have been. Very aggressively. The community hates it. Their attempts have been ham-handed and offer zero value added over putting your question into chatgpt dot com instead of the SO submission form; but they would be hated anyway.
• dudul 2mo ago
  SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
• Alien1Being 2mo ago
  Wikipedia seems to be going the same way.
• adamtaylor_13 2mo ago
  AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene. I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.
• momocowcow 2mo ago
  Can it please do the same to reddit?
  • brynnbee 2mo ago
    If you made a chart showing real human activity on reddit I imagine there's a big decline. The obviousness of bots and bot upvoting is undeniable
    • AussieWog93 2mo ago
      Had the same thought. Since around 2022-2023, most subreddits insta-ban you or hide your posts unless you have x karma (you gain karma by posting and getting upvotes). So unless you happen to have an old account with karma from pre-2022, the only new users whose posts are actually getting through are the ones that know the specific subreddits that let you "karma farm" - ie, mostly bots and bad actors. Also tangentially related, much of the weirdness of Reddit ("Thanks for the gold, kind stranger", fedora-tipping, narwhals baconing at midnight, references to weird memes etc.) also happened to disappear after GPT-3 came out, and get replaced with really strong opinions about politics and investments.
• blablabla123 2mo ago
  The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then. I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...
  • cubefox 2mo ago
    > The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then. That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.
• code_duck 2mo ago
  I’m surprised the site had that little activity, relatively, around 2010. That’s when I was using it the most. It seemed plenty large to me at the time… I can’t imagine the experience was that great a few years later. I wasn’t really paying attention by the time it reached the peaks later that decade. I always found the format of the side obtuse and the culture not very welcoming. My most popular answer ever was something about JavaScript from 2008 or 2009, and to this day, people come in and say “this isn’t the way to do it, this is outdated“. No kidding, but every new question about that gets closed as a duplicate.
• TomMasz 2mo ago
  I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
  • includenotfound 2mo ago
    Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway. Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours. Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.
    • palata 2mo ago
      Sometimes? It happened more and more and when every second question was like this, I left. I wasn't going to fight against moderators forever. That was before AI.
    • naet 2mo ago
      The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.
    • lazyasciiart 2mo ago
      And your second attempt would get closed as a duplicate of your first attempt.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Sometimes you'd get banned for asking an exact duplicate of a previous question of yours that was closed. They'd tell you to edit the closed question and it would be reopened. But if you'd edited the closed question instead, it wouldn't be reopened.
• robryan 2mo ago
  Some of the pre-ai decline in questions might just be that they had filled out of alot of the question space. What might be more interesting is the traffic graph as it would be possible to have a decline in questions but still have traffic rising to the existing ones. Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.
• jurf 2mo ago
  I never understood the point if having the unfathomable churn of thousands of new questions per day. The value of SO to me was always a knowledge base with reputation mechanics, and that did not change. I still default to searching before asking AI.
• ipaddr 2mo ago
  Should read what Google did to remove sites from search results.
• armchairhacker 2mo ago
  The graph starts falling shortly after 2020. AI certainly contributed but Stack Overflow was dying without it.
• npn 2mo ago
  Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people. Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• Snoopfrogg 2mo ago
  Sadge
  • cpburns2009 2mo ago
    Are you a X-ennial? I've only ever heard my little brother say that. Just curious.
  • lucb1e 2mo ago
    I tried looking it up but "“sadge” The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary." Care to say more than whatever slang I presume this is?
    • r721 2mo ago
      I think they meant https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sage https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sage
• erelong 2mo ago
  As others said it wasn't just AI but their excessive moderation
• emanueleielo 2mo ago
  [dead]
• splittydev 2mo ago
  Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
• gcanyon 2mo ago
  AI didn't start the decline, it just finished it.
• EspressoGPT 2mo ago
  Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there. Funnily enough, there's now a "StackOverflow for Agents": https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent
• pdpi 2mo ago
  Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.
  • folkrav 2mo ago
    There is a pretty sharp acceleration of that decline around 2022/2023.
• nurettin 2mo ago
  I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.
• felooboolooomba 2mo ago
  Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong: * Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it. * Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.
  • nolok 2mo ago
    Yeah, I used to mostly answer there instead of ask and was in the top % for several big tags whatever that means / is worth, but then at some point I realized things had changed and I was spending more time fighting rules and guidelines rather than sharing knowledge and having a good time so I just stopped.
• simonblowsw 2mo ago
  [dead]
• infecto 2mo ago
  AI was the final nail but SO was already on a downward trajectory imo. Too much angry rule setting and confident jerks.
• cynicalsecurity 2mo ago
  StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all. Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
• LunicLynx 2mo ago
  I think Ai is not the issue here. SEO on the other hand very much. It’s not like any one ever went to stackoverflow to find a solution, it was just that they were the google results for a lot of things
• chriscrisby 2mo ago
  Stackoverflow deserved to die
• ivankra 2mo ago
  Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin. Interesting to compare with MathOverflow which has distinctly different policies (only research-level questions) and professional community: https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/stackoverflow#graph https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/st... - also falling lately, but by a factor of 2-3x from peak rather than 1000x.
• rlv-dan 2mo ago
  Picking on SO and the mods in particular is a popular HN pasttime. I'd like to add that I interacted a bit with SO (1k points) and never really had any problems with them. I must be lucky...
• clickety_clack 2mo ago
  The site looks like it was actually dying since 2014 and AI just turned off the life support. It was such a hostile environment. It always seemed like you basically had to already know the answer to ask a question.
• jeanlucas 2mo ago
  I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2] Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable. --- [1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by-prosus-for-a-reported-1-8-billion/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by... [2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-stack-overflow https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...
  • SkiFreeWin3 2mo ago
    This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.
  • _aavaa_ 2mo ago
    I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.
    • Jtarii 2mo ago
      So you think its mostly just coincidence that 4 years after AI is introduced stack overflow is dead?
      • guiambros 2mo ago
        No, of course not coincidence. It's just that people didn't have an alternative until 2021-ish. Users hated SO for many years prior, but had nowhere to go other than small niche communities. When LLMs came into play, it was just the obvious choice. In an alternate universe, where LLMs didn't exist, I bet you SO would be equally dead by this decade. Someone better, with healthier values and a more welcoming community, would come up and steal their lunch.
• mohammedmsgm 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• JustRouzbeh 2mo ago
  It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community
  • kittoes 2mo ago
    The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"
    • zzril 2mo ago
      I have never actively asked a question on SO either. But for every programming question I ever had (literally!), I always either found the solution to it, or the reason why my question was stupid. (Which usually boils down to me not understanding sthg about the technology I'm working with.) Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...
• baist0 2mo ago
  The site for lazy code monkeys is dead.
• invader 2mo ago
  Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development. Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development. Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model. Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place. Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead. Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models? Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?
  • emdash 2mo ago
    The platform in question was openly hostile to people asking questions and made discussions against the rules. That's why people left the moment a better option came along
    • invader 2mo ago
      Yes, it had that problem. But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels. Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...
• speedgoose 2mo ago
  I will miss their yearly developer survey. Otherwise I won’t miss them. What a frustrating experience it was.
  • disposition2 2mo ago
    They still have it, and just sent it out
• exe34 2mo ago
  What I like about AI is that it doesn't close my chats as "duplicate" and link to something unrelated. It doesn't refuse to tell me how to do something just because there's another way to do something else that I am not interested in and didn't ask for.
• quaddoggy 2mo ago
  Perhaps the harshest lesson of stackoverflow is that it represented what happens when you give programmer-types unfettered control of a culture. A bitter pill indeed.
• uwagar 2mo ago
  that must be depressing to the owners and the investors.
• hnthrow10282910 2mo ago
  Honestly SO helped me a lot in Uni 10 years ago. However I was banned 5+ times for just asking a normal question with attempts at answering. Can’t say I’m surprised. It was not welcoming, massively exclusive and had a rude community. RIP
• frenzcan 2mo ago
  While I never posted much to Stackoverflow I have fond memories of it as a sole developer, finding other people with similar issues and the quality solutions offered that often got me out of a jam.
• mark-r 2mo ago
  There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.
• jwsteigerwalt 2mo ago
  My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…
• myshapeprotocol 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• frb 2mo ago
  By now I’m more and more starting to wonder how this graph looks for Google itself
• asveikau 2mo ago
  Looks like the decline started before the ai boom. I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.
• bjourne 2mo ago
  It wasn't only LLMs it was also the downright user-hostile attitude prevalent on many sites on the SE network: https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX Yeah, bro, I'm not a statistics professor so I can't provide you with the "details or clarity" you need. I tried my best and if that's not enough, fuck it. Same story on history.SE: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hitler-view-his-botched-career-as-a-painter https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hi... If you're gonna require "evidence of prior research" I won't bother. The bots are way friendlier and just as knowledgeable. The golden goose were users asking questions, not the anal-retentive content curators. SO let the latter drive away the former.
• fantasticwaddle 2mo ago
  Wow!! I checked for English learners, Artificial Intelligence and GenAI as well and even they suck :D Guess where these people went? Reddit?
• tsss 2mo ago
  Yeah, I don't remember when was the last time I even visited stackexchange. AI is so much better, it's not even a contest. The real question is where AI will get its knowledge in 10 or 15 years when there is no training material anymore...
• anticensor 2mo ago
  This query is even better: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/cumulative-unanswered-questions-per-month https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/c...
  • nunez 2mo ago
    Wow, this one really highlights the collapse. Basically no new questions have been asked this year while unanswered questions climbed unabated.
• econ 2mo ago
  Did anyone use the site search? Whenever I tried it it was disappointing. After ~two attempts I always went back to Google. Having the answer is of no use if you refuse to give it. LLMs didn't happen overnight. With all the aging questions, perhaps it was always doomed to be replaced by something.
• peterbmarks 2mo ago
  Didn't Stack Overflow have a similar impact on Experts Exchange?
• TheRealPomax 2mo ago
  I can't see any specific "and then AI happened" in this graph? SO made a lot of dumb choices that made it less and less useful for people independent of forcing AI in there, nothing in this graph is a clear indicator that AI was even a blip on the rapid decline of a service intent on making itself as poor an experience as possible for folks wanting to help other folks.
• waldothedog 2mo ago
  I am surprised how early the overall downward trend developed. There is no doubt LLMs put a nail in the coffin, but the 5 years from 2017 to 2022 look to have brought a non trivial decline of their own
  • shagie 2mo ago
    Often the people curating the questions are also the ones who are answering them. Their goal (loosely described) was so that if you pulled up the front page of the site, you'd find questions that are interesting to read and answer. If you, as a professional visiting the site went to it and found the front page with things that were trivially answered by reading the documentation or "how do I draw a triangle with stars?" ( https://stackoverflow.com/q/10932962/ https://stackoverflow.com/q/10932962/ type things) you, as a professional, are less likely to stick around. In the period, Stack Overflow was reducing the ability for people to curate content and trying to boost "welcoming". https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve... Part of this is that much of the early writing style was intended to mirror technical writing. In reading https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/developer/cmdlet/approved-verbs-for-windows-powershell-commands?view=powershell-7.6 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/devel... one doesn't find "Hope that helps" at the end of the page. It takes a while for a person to understand the norms of writing for a given audience. In the early days, people either came to it with that mindset or were able to be given more attention and guidance as to what the expectations for the site were. When Stack Overflow become extremely popular with college students and people outsourcing their work ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960245 ) the ability for the... for lack of a better term "elders" of the site to try to get people to understand how the site worked and its expectations. Many of the new users expected Stack Overflow to work much like forums - with a back and forth between people and a chat like environment... that wasn't so. The use of the curation tools to try to help onboard a person were deemed as unfriendly and "toxic" started getting tossed around. Stack Overflow corporate, trying to be sensitive to the broader cultural movements at the time and the "we need to make this a more inclusive space" made it harder to curate and began a campaign of removing or limiting curation tools as part of "welcoming". During this time, there was one tool that was enhanced in its effectiveness. If you had a gold badge on a tag you could close it as a dup of another question categorically. Rather than "this question is poorly written and it is unclear what you are asking" (requiring 5 close votes from different people - that would never happen if it didn't happen in the first few minutes because few went to the review queues) they could close the question as a duplicate of what it might be. That didn't help things when it came to the perception of the site. It was a last ditch effort to try to make it so that the front page was the well asked questions. Combining the reduction of curation tools, labeling their use as gatekeeping, the growing ratio of new users to elders, and corporate quite literally saying that those people who were doing the curation were the bad guys... well, a lot of them left or reduced their activity. That in turn made it so that it was harder to find the well asked questions and fewer people were around to answer questions. Note I write "well asked" not "valid" - a lot of people claim to have a valid question but don't ask it in a way that is well suited to the Q&A format. Combine that again with reductions in staff, various awful "experiments" in the name of improving engagement. That was akin to firing half of a construction team at a house while having them add a new patio... all the while the basement is flooded. And so you've got what is there today. Very few curators left compared to 2016. Few caring answer new difficult questions. The easy college homework questions (how do you draw a triangle) and the outsourcing of work to free labor is now done with an LLM... and there's no coming back from that. ... And few people believe in the mission goal of Stack Overflow - and those who do, don't believe Stack Overflow corporate believes in that mission goal.
• red_admiral 2mo ago
  I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.
• yalogin 2mo ago
  The move the current companies are missing is to have a legislation declaring ai as a person. Just like how corporations are people, if ai is a person then they don’t have to show number of people fired, can argues content creation and engagement is through the roof and so many other possibilities. /s
• chuckadams 2mo ago
  One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.
• deadbabe 2mo ago
  Now that Stack Overflow is mostly dead, what's the experience of asking a question there? Will you still get berated or are people chilled out?
• otterdude 2mo ago
  Where will AI's get the training data to answer questions now?
  • andriy_koval 2mo ago
    AI is smart enough to figure out many answers from docs or code prototypes. Smaller fraction of novel questions are still submitted on SO, github discussion and mailing lists.
  • LAC-Tech 2mo ago
    Right, there's a lot of schadenfreude about SA not being so popular and serves them right for being mean when I asked them a question... but it was also no doubt a gold mine of AI training data. Stands to reason this may be an agentic AI golding age, as future models just eating their own data.
• sph 2mo ago
  I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer. There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    It definitely seems like politics ruins everything. Nerds once thought they'd transcended politics and then discovered they hadn't. "Politics" being another word for "game theory when it's about humans"
  • scotty79 2mo ago
    > were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities And the solution turned out to be putting every user in their own safety bubble of recommended conten and expanding the bubble only when user gets adventurous. And TikTok became gold standard for that that everone tries to emulate with varying degrees of success
• BrandoElFollito 2mo ago
  SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet. I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too. And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes. Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help. Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely. There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high. Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.
• zuzululu 2mo ago
  people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird. i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.
• ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
  Discussion in January: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345 And previously in 2025: Stack overflow is almost dead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999125
• casey2 2mo ago
  There's always going to be lots of latent insecurity among amateurs when a pro shows up. Honestly because of this and the relative lack of actual pros on the site, real pros will get pushed out and the site will actually build a collection of misinformation. That's probably why pros feel that software quality has dropped so much in since stackoverflow.
• luciana1u 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• phendrenad2 2mo ago
  AI didn't kill SO, SO was already declining due to toxic users and lack of organization. The toxic users were dunning-krugerian anal-retentive mini-Napoleons who delighted in locking anything slightly off-topic and merging slightly-related questions, and the lack of organization was a tendency for people to give incorrect answers but still get upvoted (due to Google search surfacing the page in the wrong context).
• j45 2mo ago
  Just like stackoverflow saved developers from experts exchange, it might be able to save us from what is coming from AI being an averaging engine by default and generating average code. Hopefully it's average but always works.
• dmurvihill 2mo ago
  Looks like StackOverflow was already declining by the time ChatGPT came out
• neals 2mo ago
  This made me browse through my StackOverflow history. Funny to see how I though I was such a skilled developer, though the questions I asked and the answers I gave 16 years ago... cringe.
• esskay 2mo ago
  Stack overflow was always going to die. AI just sped it up. The misconception that it was a community is surprising. People went there for an answer and left, very few would stick around, not only because there was no incentive, but if you did you'd likely get crapped on by one of the hostile moderators which would ensure you'd leave and never come back, because who wants to willingly be treated badly. It was basically an imposer syndrome enforcing machine.
• dwedge 2mo ago
  I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones). It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing
• hazrmard 2mo ago
  Does the peak starting in mid-2020 correspond to mass speculative / adversarial / bandwagon hiring by tech companies during the pandemic?
• arjie 2mo ago
  They didn’t stand a chance. Even in the era where they made a great community etc etc AI would have destroyed them. Other people are just a poor source of information now that we have dramatically good search across all human knowledge.
• sota_pop 2mo ago
  I recall some moves where SO announced they would be revising ToS to disclose their intent to repackage and use the site’s content for sale and/or model training. Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted. I guess that’s “LLM related”
• calvinmorrison 2mo ago
  just today I googled "convert PDF to Jpg" and the first stackoverflow answer was a hit on google and the question was "CLOSED, NOT APPROPRIATE".
• cpburns2009 2mo ago
  StackOverflow was on decline due to mismanagement and hostility towards the community. This was well before AI. AI was just the death blow.
• _ink_ 2mo ago
  Ironically it gives me: This IP address has performed an unusually high number of requests and has been temporarily rate limited. That's also something what AI did to the internet :(
• geoffbp 2mo ago
  Hug of death? Doesn’t seem to load for me
  • lucb1e 2mo ago
    Yes, still down. The HTML loads eventually with the query contents, but no CSS, much less query results
• chaps 2mo ago
  Just tried to open stack overflow and was told their site was under maintenance. When I refreshed, it blocked my IP for refreshing too many times. I expect better from SO.
  • jwrallie 2mo ago
    503 and then rate limit here for refreshing once.
• nativeit 2mo ago
  lol. Error 503.
• sackfield 2mo ago
  One thing I wonder, if you look at the comments here it is clear the moderation and the general hostility of the site was a big reason why a lot of people left or didn't engage with it. Yet, I can't recall SO doing anything about this, and its confusing to me why. Was it: a) They don't acknowledge this was a problem. b) They are unwilling to tackle this problem. c) They are unable to tackle this problem. I'd love to know what the people who run the site (from a business perspective) think about this. It might offer some insight into its cousins that are going down the same path (reddit / wikipedia).
  • edelbitter 2mo ago
    In any case, business perspective prevailed, subject matter experts stopped sticking around. Personally, I think the (slow but steady over many years) switch from b) to c) is what doomed the site. There was a few noteworthy company post, especially those after the mass layoffs / private equity takeover on the meta site that acknowledged the problem, so its certainly not a), even when you apply a strict standard about the terms in which to acknowledge the problem (which was well-known long before). Those company statements had some rather clear and well-received community commentary below that essentially questioned whether any of the suggestions on tackling the problem should even be tried. The very-much-not-welcoming onboarding experience, while it had great potential for improvements, was yet serving the sites unique needs quite well. Two weeks of persistence and reading the manual were not much of a detrimental filter.. not to those that would eventually go on to contribute back for many years. And those were the ones that ultimately mattered. Not those one-off solve-my-homework posts that only saw indifferent/annoyed moderation action. That probably still wonder why nobody took their hand and spent their evening guiding them through the steps necessary to make their post useful to anyone other than just the original author.
  • ggregoire 2mo ago
    Might be a vocal minority. I used to visit SO every day, several times a day, for like 10+ years, got so much value from it and would not have changed anything to the site. "AI Overview" in Google completely killed it tho and I don't really see what they could do about it other than completely change the site into something else. RIP.
• h4kunamata 2mo ago
  Wrong, what SO did to themselves in a graph! You cannot reply to a post to either provide correction or solution because you don't have enough "points" to do so. You were forced to complete an insane list of requirements just to comment. Let that sink in.
• gck1 2mo ago
  It's always slightly amusing to me how SE has the most restrictive cloudflare turnstile config set. On the rare occasion that I DO want to go there, they greet me with an impossible gate that takes 15+ seconds to pass on Brave and gets invalidated quickly. If anyone from SE is reading this: you already failed to protect your data from the LLM crawlers, SE is no longer that much interesting to them. The only visitors you're gating today are not bots, they're humans.
  • edelbitter 2mo ago
    >failed to protect from the LLM crawlers Never meant to be protected. I only contributed there because it specified in no uncertain terms that everything was going to be CC BY-SA licensed and posted in a public archive every now and then, so you do not need to scrape to use & redistribute if you intend to adhere to those terms. That would have been sufficient protection, if only governments had not u-turned from Walt-Disney-Copyright straight to "Open"AI-Copyright.
• trashface 2mo ago
  Honestly i'll take LLMs over SO any day. If I want LLMs to belittle and passive-aggressively mock me while providing borderline help, I can prompt them to do that. But I could never turn that off on stackoverflow.
• greatsage_sh 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• hnsuckdix 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• prologic 2mo ago
  The Irony here is what Hacker News did to this page. 503 Service Unavailable :D
• est 2mo ago
  For me, stackoverflow is dead long before AI. Questions getting closed for no reason, answers getting deleted randomly. Don't waste your time asking & answering questions on SO.
• jerrac 2mo ago
  My perspective: Stack Overflow was started to be a documentation site, but was implemented as a Q/A site. And that doomed it from the start. If someone wants to get help, and they end up on Stack Overflow, the structure looks like a Q/A site, and they treat it that way. The people "in the know" then accuse them of being "bad" for posting a question to a documentation site. Combine that with the gamification, and it had to turn into the toxic mess that it did. When I first heard of the gamification method of moderation, I thought it was a really good idea. But, over the years, it has proven to be a means to enforce an echo chamber, rather than a way to filter out bad posts. I have yet to find a site (HN included), where that isn't true.
  • supriyo-biswas 2mo ago
    It was always intended to be a documentation site, see https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and similar.
• insaider 2mo ago
  RIP Jon Skeet, stack overflow legend, guy must've spent 100k hours answering C# questions! (He's not dead, but SO is)
• Too 2mo ago
  Even without AI, a large part is also that everything easy and relevant has already been asked and answered. 10 years ago, there was still demand for low hanging ”how do I reverse a string in programming language X”. On top of that, languages and libraries today tend to have a lot better documentation. What’s left to ask now is ”plx fix my homework” - [pastes error log unique to the posters environment]. Something that Claude is very good and very tolerant at.
• scotty79 2mo ago
  ChatGPT was released in November 2022 so only the last decisive blow was dished by AI. Stack Overflow was already 40% below its peek when it was struck. However looking at the shape of this last drop, I think it wouldn't matter if the SO was in its prime when it happened. SO would die regardless, at the schedule dictated more by strengthening AI rather than its own.
• SanjayMehta 2mo ago
  Wikipedia will suffer the same fate if they don't reform soon. Their "editors" are worse than SO's.
• ilaksh 2mo ago
  Stack Overflow abuse and the rage it generated in me is sort of nostalgic. Kind of sad in a way that I can't quite recall the rage anymore. By the way, at least as far as what it is showing me，SO is an AI site now. Home page Ask a question goes straight to an LLM doing RAG against Stack Overflow. Edit: actually they tricked me into asking AI. The text box to ask AI is right next to what is actually an Ask A Question button that skips the AI. It's training data seems limited or out of date because it had no idea what Gemma 4 E2B was. It just said that wasn't in the SO data and could I explain wtf I was talking about please. I guess not Gemma 3 either. And no web search. So it's useless for me today. Interestingly, the Stack Overflow AI answer is provided by OpenAI, and these may be the most useless responses I have seen any time recently. Whaddyaknow. Got me a little twinge of the good ole' rage tingles after all!
• pss314 2mo ago
  The Pulse #119: Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134 The Fall of Stack Overflow https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overfl...
• fco356pal 2mo ago
  So many insights in my past came from stackoverflow answers. But it always required reading through tens of discussions and combining solutions. Young engineers will never know the pain.
• simplesocieties 2mo ago
  I don’t have some grand theory on SO’s downfall. All I will say is that sometimes us programmers try to optimize every single thing in life and that’s simply not how humans work. SO tried to optimize the Q/A by eagerly rejecting repeat questions, without considering what the consequences of that were. If you’re in a classroom / lecture hall, your teacher / professor isn’t going to chide you for asking an “obvious” or “repeat” question (bad ones might). Imagine if every time you wanted to talk to a TA or professor you first needed to lookup previously asked questions in a database and then, iff your question hasn’t been asked before, you may ask the professor or TA after hours. Programmers might call this system “efficient” but most people would be pretty unhappy with it.
• rpigab 2mo ago
  We could fix this graph using AI: make AI post 250k questions each month, problem solved?
• jsrozner 2mo ago
  Meanwhile, what AI did to arxiv: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981206
• khernandezrt 2mo ago
  They did that to themselves. Posting a question on SE was the hardest task I've had to endure back when i was a junior developer.
• Aperocky 2mo ago
  The peak was in 2014, far before any coherent AI became a thing. As someone with substantial "points" accumulated all a full decade ago, I can easily see why. If you only allow certain opinions and criteria for specific subjects, your user will eventually shrink to only the few that possessed them. It's a Spartan death. Don't blame it on the Persians or Athens.