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by johnfn5 hours ago |
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upvoteby dspillett5 hours ago|
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> I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI

A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)

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upvoteby kstrauser5 hours ago|
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Traffic started dropping precipitously in summer ‘20. There were no widely known LLMs then, let alone ones used outside labs. ChatGPT went public in November 2022, well into the decline.

While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.

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upvoteby autoexec51 minutes ago|
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I wonder if AI didn't end up having an impact in other ways. Did they get more aggressive about captchas or bot detection around the time when LLMs came out annoying or keeping out legit users? I imagine they were saw a lot of bot traffic in the years before AI chatbots went public and that probably continues even now that it's a ghost town.
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upvoteby Jtarii5 hours ago|
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So you think there is a viable business around technical Q&A even with GPT 6 Astra or whatever existing?

LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.

Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.

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upvoteby kstrauser4 hours ago|
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If there is, I’m not creative enough to imagine it. I don’t contend that SO could survive AI. You’ll never hear me arguing that. However, that graph shows that it was already dying before AI became widely available. AI 100% certainly kicked it while it was down. It just cannot have been the cause of the downturn because the downturn was in full swing before AI could’ve had any effect at all.
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upvoteby cwnyth4 hours ago|
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I think you're forgetting of a certain major event that happened in 2020. An event that initially caused a lot of free time around the world and kept people indoors...
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upvoteby kstrauser4 hours ago|
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You mean, the kind that made them more likely to sit around asking and answering questions because there wasn't anything else do to, and which caused an initial spike of traffic?
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upvoteby cwnyth4 hours ago|
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I think it's pretty clear that was the cause of the 2020 spike and fall. Once people started going back to work (summer 2020 for us), questions dropped back to pre-2020 levels.
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upvoteby kstrauser4 hours ago|
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Sure, but it rapidly fell before its pre-COVID levels and then kept dropping rapidly for the next year or so, and then AI really kicked in.
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upvoteby bsder4 hours ago|
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Agreed.

StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".

Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.

After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.

THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.

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