Uh, no.
StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.
Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.
Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.
Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.
It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.
For reference, here is the verbatim (except for code formatting for HN) Markdown of the initial version of a question asked in 2010, my answer to which became my highest-ever scoring answer (and which ended up getting over 2 million views):
if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ]
and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2
and for the second
(2+3)/2
third
(3+4)/2
...... etc
how can do as that ?
like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?
also how can i sum a list of number ?
a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]
is it:
b = sum(a)
print b
in i get one number !?
it doesn't work with me
help me plzI hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.
But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was specifically intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to avoid chatter because that gets in the way of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.
AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.
People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.
If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.
AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.
Before AI people would still try asking questions on SO despite the hostility because it was the only/main place to get answers. Over this time, SO popularity was deteriorating.
After AI people who had bad experiences with asking questions on SO would ask the AI instead. This is because the AI wouldn't mark your question as a duplicate, wouldn't question its validity [1], etc. It would just answer your question. You could even ask it follow-up questions if the answer wasn't quite what you were looking for. All of this in real time, not waiting to get an answer.
[1] Unless the question triggered the safety gates that the AI companies have in place.
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[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay
[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!
I'm not qualified for anything else that isn't also remote, full of AI and getting more so, or both, so I may quite literally end up waiting tables, I have friends who can help me skip the queue there with an “he's a good bloke” recommendation. While I was in hospital recently (gallbladder trouble and liver infection) talking to one of the porters who was wheeling to & from the CT scanner, they apparently need more bodies ATM, I could certainly do that (other than the temporary issue I was in there for I'm fit & healthy) and might actually find some enjoyment in it. Both involve dealing with real people who are in the room with me. Anything I do once I leave here will be result in a massive pay cut, but if the change saves my sanity then that will have to be acceptable.
I don't contest productivity benefits and there's a time and place for Claude in my workflow but I fear sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day. Half joking. But it makes 1:1s even more awkward now when I have to put on a show for the GenAI parade.
Thanks. I might need it!
> sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day
We track who uses what AI and how much. For billing/expense tracking purposes, as we've gone from “use it as much as you can” to “use it as much as you need to but don't waste it”, but there will be a table somewhere with my name in the bottom section next to a bit fat 0.
> has been pretty pushy when it comes to GenAI use tho … Flat out saying no comes with …
You'll have to deal with that or get out, eventually, how soon depends on your management. AI is not going away, even when/if the costs rise when all that investment capital starts being clawed back. If it is any help in choosing an exit strategy: under UK employment law (if you are elsewhere you'll have to verify how things work in your jurisdiction) they can't force you to use AI or punish/sack you for not as it can be argued to be a material change of role (as it is described as revolutionary, or in less breathy terms “like becoming a manager”, etc.) not just a different tool. But if you refuse then the same argument can be used to make you redundant (“we need more AI people and fewer traditional devs, traditional devs are being declared redundant, would you like to switch roles instead?” would be perfectly legal). As much as the payout for my long years in the same place would be nice, personally I don't think I can sit it out long enough for that to happen.
It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.
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 :)
While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.
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.
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.
The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.