I used to hire people straight off of SO. Sometimes skipping the usual process of they has solid answers to the types of questions we’s ask - went straight for culture fit.
I think instead of blaming ai and other esoteric reasons for SO’a downfall leadership should look into the damage cancelling the job board has done. People helping others at least had the incentive of being given a job. Now there’s no point really.
Although, since they made all of these controversial changes, it feels less like helping people and more like doing free work for a random company.
The real killer for me was limiting the data dumps to paying customers. They really let down the community who trusted SO would be a trustworthy steward of the data. The charm of the site is gone.
1. Most questions were already answered by reputation hunters with pastes from documentation when I got around to it.
2. SO started discouraging "teach the man how to fish" answers and insisting on code ready to copy/paste. I'd like to help people learn not write their code.
I did get invited to the job board thanks to Google. Some error in their android examples didn't get corrected for years and my answer on SO explaining the 'right way' to do it whored me ... checks ... what, I'm at almost 8000 points now in spite of not logging in in years.
Said job board didn't get me anything but then I never filled anything in. Maybe I had them import my linkedin, but iForget.