8 ms·
Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
by mid-kid 2mo ago
Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
- zh3 2mo agoIndeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.
- dumberquestions 2mo agoThe 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 agoYep, 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 agoSomehow 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 agoYou 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 agoThe 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.