kstrauser

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.

HN does a pretty good job of it. Turns out paid employees seem to be more incentivized to keep people coming back.

OK, let's get this out of the way:

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

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?

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.

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.

Nah. It launched well, but sorely needed a BDFL. Almost without fail, services that delegate moderation duties to users are ruined. Inevitably, well-meaning people form councils and boards, and then those get taken over by people with nothing but time on their hands. It's the same thing that happens with school boards and HOAs: the last people you want running them are the ones that have the time and the drive to actually want to be in charge of them.

How is that different from clicking the Graph tab on that page? https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1925371/n...

And here's why: https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-ove...

LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:

Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?

A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]

I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.

This right here is why I hang around at HN.

Is JOE still your own daily driver, or do you use something else now?

Lawdy. Now we just need FoxPro Copilot to round it out.

Edit: No we don't oh please god no.

"Yo dawg, I hear you like security vulnerabilities..."

CF was an interesting path. I used the Python equivalent, Zope, extensively back in the day. Both could glue together some really powerful components and allow you to write whole web apps more or less declaratively.

That said, we collectively tried that experiment ("we" includes you, my JBoss compatriots) and realized this is not The Way Forward. That doesn't mean they're valueless, not at all! And it's the sort of experiment you have to try or else it's always going to be nagging at the back of your mind: "what if we tried this... and it was amazing?" But we did try it, and it was not amazing.

If you have to maintain CF or Zope or JBoss today, godspeed. Just know that life is easier elsewhere. It doesn't have to be this way. It's not this way for everyone.

…Server 2027.

Are you coding in Word or something? 36 point Times New Roman?

That kinda breaks my heart. I loved my kids curled up in my lap while I read them their favorite stories. I wish every parent and child had that shared experience, and I'm truly sorry you didn't.

If it comes to pass that you have little ones of your own, please don't let that be something your kids only see in the movies. Make that your own new family tradition.

I respect anyone who makes the tough call not to launch. There’s pressure to say it’ll be fine and we’ll just do it anyway, but someone sticks to their guns and says no, it’s not fine, and we can’t ship this. Doing the right thing in spite of the pressure deserves credit.

Well done, Fedora team.

Legit answer, to be sure! But if already on macOS, how does it compare? “Better and cross platform!” is the best possibility. “Nearly as good, but free!” is also solid. “Eh, it’s fine if you don’t have access to Soulver”, wouldn’t be a ringing endorsement.

For people who’ve used both: how’s it compare to Soulver?

Not that I recall and I’m feeling too lazy to look at the moment. It’s really the car’s fault, though. It’s sending the “start playing MP3s” command, which the device is obeying.

Hmmm, I’d have to see it. It’s basically the car saying “ooh you’re an MP3 player, play some music!”, and the phone is like, “oh, okay, you’re relaying your owner’s request so I’ll take your word for it”.

That's a "feature" of the vehicle's infotainment system. Some of the vehicles I've driven run Music the moment I connect my phone. Others are more respectful and wait for me to tell them to play something.

The aftermarket CarPlay adapter I installed in our Toyota is in the latter group. When I climb into the car, the CarPlay UI pops up on the vehicle's screen, ready for me to ask it to do something. Until I do, it does nothing other than show the homescreen with icons on it. A Ford I rented would fire up Music the second I plugged my phone in.

I’ve compared to building an asthma clinic on the top of Mt. Everest. If I could do that, I wouldn’t need to.

If you can brute force your way through all the intermediate years to work your way up to it. I did that. It was brutal. I highly recommend not doing that unless misery is your thing.

But ADHD has been shown to significantly affect income. It’s hard to excel in a high paying career when it’s affecting you strongly. It’s probably pretty hard to normalize for income, then, because it’s a confounding factor.

For me, yes, I still have all the fun. I just have a much lower baseline stress level to compare the fun times to. Like, if now I’m going from 70% joyful on a normal day to 100% fun on a special occasion, it’s not as much of a swing as when going from 5% joyful to 95% happy.

There’s also the chicken-and-egg problem here. Know what makes it super hard to get organized and motivated to start therapy for ADHD? ADHD! Dealing with insurance companies is the exact kind of demoralizing nightmare that makes it extremely hard for the people who need the treatment to actually get it.

Ooh, let me count the privileges I get, starting at zero.

Zero…

There, done. What treatment for ADHD has done for me in the real world is drastically cut my anxiety and stress. Turns out the most challenging parts of my life involved knowing I had to do a thing, or I’d get fired or evicted or sued or such, and being utterly incapable of getting myself to do it until it became a crisis. What a piece of crap I must be, right, for ignoring the things a responsible adult would be doing!

And then I started taking meds for it, and found out I could, just, decide to sit down and gather my tax paperwork, or write that report, or balance the checkbook, even though those things didn’t need to be done for several more weeks. At first, it was utterly liberating. And then it was kinda soul-crushing. I could’ve been living like this the whole time, minus all the stress and self esteem issues and anxiety? And then it was liberating again. Well, bummer life use to be like that, but it’s not anymore, so yay!

And it didn’t do a single thing to my emotions, other than removing about 90% of the anxiety from my life.

(I have to get this in before the inevitable jackass opines: no, life isn’t suddenly “easier because you’re taking meth”. I get no stimulant sensation whatsoever from my dose of Adderall. My morning coffee has a much stronger effect. It just allows me to decide what I should be working on at any given moment, even when no one’s angry at me. It is not an energy booster in any way.)

Why would that be?

Yup. IMO the syntax is unusably awful for interactive sessions. Scripting, where you want to come back a year later and tell at a glance what it's doing, sure. Not for daily driving though.

It feels like the difference between old-timey classical English vs street talk. "Greetings, dearest companion, how fare you this fine Autumnal day?" is a lot of syllables for someone you're familiar with. "Hey! Enjoying the day?" says the same thing, but conversational. There's a time and place for the former, mainly when writing dialog set in 1500 or something. I'd much rather say the latter when bumping into my neighbor at the cofee shop. Similarly, I could see why someone might want to write

  Get-ChildItem -Filter *.txt -Force

in a script so that it's clear-ish what that means later, but if I'm spending my time in a terminal, I'd vastly rather learn what

  ls -la *.txt

means. It's terse to the point of inscrutability, and not beginner friendly at all, but once you type it a few thousand times it's second nature.

All things considered, I'll stick to Fish, thanks.

Edit: Related, but once I learned how Unix shells typically expand globs, that feels like the right layer for handling that and similar other things. "ls" doesn't know what a glob is. When you type "ls -la .txt", the shell* expands that into a list of matching files, like "ls -la foo.txt bar.txt baz.txt", then "ls" operates on each one of those in turn. You don't have to teach every program how to interpret globs. The shell has to learn that, once, then every other program automatically benefits from it. Type "echo *.txt" and you'll see the list of matching names. Echo has no idea what that means. It only knows that it got a list of worlds to write out with no idea where it came from. I think Bash/zsh/fish/etc. do this the right way, and that implementing that in every tool is the wrong way. It just feels weird and inefficient and prone to have odd, subtle deifferences.

Why even bother, though? I have +- 8 hours a day to write code. I can spend 7.5 hours writing business logic and .5 hours getting the thing to compile (Rust/Python/Java/C#/whatever), or .5 hours writing business logic and 7.5 hours convincing myself I haven't added an RCE. I just don't see a valid use case for writing non-trivial C programs today. Maintaining existing programs, sure. That stuff isn't going away. Writing anything new in it today, though, seems like engineering malpractice.