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.
replyMany 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.
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...
replyMaybe 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...
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.
replyThe decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.
replyThat's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.
Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.
replyThe 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.
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