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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

One of the issues certainly is that Stackoverflow is absolutely over. Within the last twelve months the number of users just fell off a cliff.

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That might be a good thing after all, at least in a certain sense. Stack Overflow has been dying for the last ten years or so. In the first years there where a lot of good questions that were interesting to answer but that changed with popularity and it became an endless sea of low effort do my homework duplicates that were not interesting to answer and annoying to moderate. If this now gets handled by large language models, it could maybe become similar to the beginning again, only those questions that are not easily answerable by looking into the documentation or asking a chat bot will end up on Stack Overflow, it could be fun again to answer questions on Stack Overflow. On the other hand if nobody looks up things on Stack Overflow, it will be hard to sustain the business, maybe even when downscaled accordingly.

Is it really dying? There's only so much growth possible without having it flooded with low effort stuff. They try to instead grow by introducing more topics, but that's limited as well.

I personally didn't use it so much (meaning: Writing content) because it always felt a bit over engineered. From what I remember the only possible entry point is writing questions that get up voted. Not allowed to even write comments, vote and of course not allowed to answer questions. Maybe that's not correct but that has always been my impression.

In general stack exchange seems to be a great platform. I think "it's dying" has an unfortunate connotation. It's not like content just vanishes, just the amount of new stuff is shrinking.

Maybe it changed, but you could ask and answer questions right after signing up, just commenting, voting, and moderation rights required a certain amount of points. I only answered questions and was among the top 100 contributors at my peak activity but that was at least a decade ago.

I stopped contributing when the question quality fell of a cliff. Existing contributors got annoyed by the low effort questions, new users got annoyed because their questions got immediately closed, it was no longer fun. There were a lot of discussions on meta how to handle the situation but I just left.

So admittedly things might have changed again, I do not really know much about the development in the last ten or so years.

That's still how it works: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

If you're logged out it's just a list, but if you're logged in it'll grey out and put a checkmark next to the ones you have.

To be honest, I used Stackoverflow less and less over the years. Not sure that was because I learned more. I just think most times I went there I was looking for snippets to save time with boilerplate. As better frameworks, tools, packages, languages came along I just had less need to go to Stackoverflow.

But yes, AI put the nail in its coffin. Sadly, ironically, AI trained off it. I mean AI quite literally stole from Stackoverflow and others and somehow got away with it.

That's why I don't really admire people like Sam Altman or the whack job doomer at Anthropic whatever his name is. They're crooks.

SO sold off their own data and made it insanely web-crawlable.

So makes sense that SO like users will use AI, not to mention they get the benefit of avoiding the neurotic moderator community at SO.

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