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Comment by jeanlucas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $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-...

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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.

So you think its mostly just coincidence that 4 years after AI is introduced stack overflow is dead?

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.

If stack overflow was universally loved, AI would still kill it.

People here seem to be so emotionally invested in hating stack overflow that they seem to think AI was like ~10% of the reason it died, when it was 95%.

Both things can be true. SO was universally hated because they let (or actively incentivized) bullying run rampant and destroy the culture.

And yes, it's possible AI would have killed it anyway, despite its best efforts. But in this version of parallel universes, AI was only a catalyst. Its fate was sealed well before 2020.

The sale is relevant. The spike in activity right before the sale already shows the management hand and how they actively ran the org to optimize for this sale. The rebound right after is hard, and it was (right) before chatgpt

They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over

Are we talking about the large Covid spike in early 2020? I don’t think that has anything to do with the sale.

Everyone trumpeting the "bad SO moderation" angle is delusional. Stack Overflow was far better than conventional forums. Without LLMs, SO would have stayed popular, there is no doubt about it. The massive decline was clearly and obviously caused mainly by LLMs.

This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.

Do you mean that curious growth spike in mid 2020? If so, can you think of anything else significant that happened in mid 2020...?

Scrolled looking for this comment the decline appears to be way earlier than LLM agents becoming popular.

But where did all the users go is something that would be interesting

Mostly: Discord, Github issues (as forum), X (twitter at the time), and Discourse! Discourse was growing steadily, even startups like OpenAI and neobanks like nubank (Brazil) had forums for their users because keeping your community active and close was something considered valuable (devrel since then has experienced a rapidly decline).

I didn't know that. Good to see they cashed out in time.

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