1. AI allows you to ask stupid questions or the same question without (typically) ridiculing or demeaning you for doing so.
2. Context changes as time rolls by. A question that was asked some period ago might just need to be re-asked, continuously and ongoing.
Now, SO had already suffered its demise prior to AI. But good riddance, from my point of view. StackOverflow was great in its day, essential even. But it fell victim to its own success, I guess.
1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.
2. AI clearly finished the job.
I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.
SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It dropped off a cliff when, 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow. Even then, it looks like 4 months of ChatGPT speed-ran about a year's worth of traffic decline, and then the slope went back to approximately the pre-AI angle.
I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.
You're underselling it. It's less than in their second month of existence - and that has been true every month for the past year. For the last few months it's also lower than their first month. Stack Overflow, effectively, no longer exists.
And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.
I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.
When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)
Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.
Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
SO was invented as a Q&A site, where human experts might answer specific technical questions, in a precise, preferably provable way. This is what machines now do well enough.
But there's a need to talk to human experts, learn their opinions, personal experience, non-obvious bits. E.g. I enjoyed asking certain questions at Software Engineering and Emacs SE sites. Sometimes I just ended up talking with a maintainer of a specific package I had questions about. This is something Claude and ChatGPT cannot easily replace, and maybe something that may keep certain SO communities alive. (Unless Reddit eats the remnants of their lunch.)
StackOverflow is great if your question is "How would we have done X back in 2012?" Because you can't re-ask or re-answer questions that have had their correct answers change as technology changed. So the sites is stuck back in time when each question was first answered.
1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and
2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
This does four things simultaneously:
1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model
2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)
3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.
4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
StackOverflow jobs was great when it existed, found great opportunities through there. So dumb they killed it especially with LLM's eating their core business.
Fewer than 1,000? To be honest, even before AI, I'm surprised it ever got more than 50 or a 100 in some StackExchanges. It was on borrowed time especially after reading a lot about the moderator drama/issues.
as a student i remmeber ikept getting my questions removed even after trying to follow every rule.
this one time i decided i will use their top questions as a template just to test it, so i did i made sure it was a new question, following each rule
SO turned into a place that heavily favoured their experienced answerers over new answerers and askers. Admittedly, I fell into the former camp: someone with some excess time on his hands and an itch to answer interesting questions - and like most of the experienced answerers, I ended up being very disinterested in answering homework questions, “lazy” questions, and the like. “Downvote and move on” was the motto.
In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave easy questions to be answered by new answerers. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.
In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.
If there is any proof that no one will be writing code, this is it.
I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.
I'm curious if the quality of AI answers will get worse without public sources like Stack Overflow or if LLMs have gotten to a point where that doesn't matter as much.
1. AI allows you to ask stupid questions or the same question without (typically) ridiculing or demeaning you for doing so.
2. Context changes as time rolls by. A question that was asked some period ago might just need to be re-asked, continuously and ongoing.
Now, SO had already suffered its demise prior to AI. But good riddance, from my point of view. StackOverflow was great in its day, essential even. But it fell victim to its own success, I guess.
1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.
2. AI clearly finished the job.
I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.
SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It dropped off a cliff when, 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow. Even then, it looks like 4 months of ChatGPT speed-ran about a year's worth of traffic decline, and then the slope went back to approximately the pre-AI angle.
I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L
And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.
When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)
Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.
Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.
Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
But there's a need to talk to human experts, learn their opinions, personal experience, non-obvious bits. E.g. I enjoyed asking certain questions at Software Engineering and Emacs SE sites. Sometimes I just ended up talking with a maintainer of a specific package I had questions about. This is something Claude and ChatGPT cannot easily replace, and maybe something that may keep certain SO communities alive. (Unless Reddit eats the remnants of their lunch.)
1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and
2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
This does four things simultaneously:
1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model
2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)
3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.
4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
It was also deleted, die already stack overflow
I love you stack exchange and all related sites.
All yall need to keep learning
In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave easy questions to be answered by new answerers. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.
In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.
I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.