What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.

Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.

Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.

::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!

> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.

I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.

Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.

The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.

Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.

It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!

But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.

(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)

One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed.

The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.

If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.

I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes

1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)

2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"

3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.

I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.

Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.

I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.

Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while still trying to find a way to reward and leverage the expertise of people. Even with that I suspect it's too little, too late.

Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content.

They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.

When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.

There were also certain IMO low-value questions that really excited the SO hive-mind. I asked a question about the peculiarities of Python assignment syntax, and earned several dozen points for the question, even though no one really should have written code the way I presented it.

I liked StackOverflow for the first ten years or so of its existence, but I gradually stopped using it then suddenly quit altogether when valid questions were being closed unreasonably. At this point, LLMs with documentation in the context, issue trackers and eve the source code (if available) have surpassed SO. Now my main issue is telling the LLM to crap on my idea rather than wishing it were kinder.

I say this every time the topic of SO/AI comes up.

LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response.

There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes to close my question) before I gave up.

The math subreddit is awful. Accusing everyone of asking homework questions if they weren’t formatted in perfect math notation.

Then there’s the godot subreddit. Asked 2 questions? That’s a ban.

Imagine a child learning math or game dev coming up against that.

I’d quit. Curiosity extinguished.

The godot github has one of those characters now too. Really anti new user. I worry, I worry.

No online community can maintain quality unless there are systems in place to prevent mentally ill internet addicts from gaining power over it. This should have a name. We can can call it Eudaimoniac's Law.

Anything that gives power on a basis of seniority, activity, volunteering, is guaranteed to suck very soon. There are just way too many mentally ill authoritarians permanently online for normal people to stave them off with naive good faith.

> That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.

The biggest problem was highlighted from day one: StackOverflow was bound to become "DeadOverflow". It couldn't possibly work because the entire notion of having one correct answer to a question in a domain that constantly evolves was broken.

What killed the site was "Ever relevant question" showing up in a Google search (pick other search engine) and pointing to a "Correct and accepted answer" that was wrong with then another answer with more upvotes but which was... Already outdated.

That's why people coined the term "DeadOverflow": the very way the site was conceived would inevitably lead to dead answers.

And people pointed that out early on. Nobody listened, many of the OGs who created that company made a nice exit.

But SO was destined to eventually fail.

The entire karma/gamification/clique of users gate-keeping was bad but the issue of dead answers / DeadOverflow simply couldn't be solved, so it doesn't even matter.

Losing 99.41% of its activity is brutal but it's honestly surprising that a concept that couldn't possibly work even survived that long.

The worst stack overflow in this regard was meta. Most pathological corner of the internet I've ever encountered, up there with 4chan if you ask me.

> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.

i got stung by exactly this.

i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.

and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.

dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like

   thanks in advance,
   -- 
   znpy

which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.

I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.

It also had ridiculous rules to enforce "quality" but in the end it was to enforce user work by convention. Like one question per question only. Nobody could just post a project with a set of questions. Nobody was allowed "stupid" questions, nobody was allowed to do in depth meta excursions, the site reeked of rigor, where a true academic would have allowed for rigor to go lax when moving away from certainty aka to the funnel stage of enlightenment. It also would not allow for grouping questions into a format thats similar to the youtube "project" format.

> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.

Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.

Yes, yes, the usual narrative. They were not welcoming.

I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website:

  * Most questions were low effort crap
  * Users were mostly divided between only asking questions and only answering questions
  * The reputation system favored: 1) easy questions (understood by a larger audience -> more people upvoting), 2) fast answers (before the question dropped from the front page; also answers with more votes got more visibility).

So, contrary to the usual narrative, the incentives and most activity was directed to answering newbie questions. That made up most of the volume, and it was what the reputation system rewarded. Even if a question got closed as a duplicated, by that time there usually were already answers to most easy questions. And deletion could only happen after some time (two days IIRC).

The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system.

The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.

I tried to answer an SO question exactly once, around 15 years ago. Someone asked a question which was covered perfectly by some OSS code I had already published, so I linked to that in my answer (while explaining how the linked code was relevant). My answer was promptly deleted, of course, for linking to code. After that I lost all desire to contribute.

I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.

Yeah, I think the issue with Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange is one of how too much gatekeeping and elitism tends to eventually be the death knell for a community.

True, you might want people who are more articulate or thoughtful than the majority, but if you go too hard on that, you end up putting a time limit on how long the community will probably last. People won't stick around a community that treats them like crap, and that's a problem because at least some of those amateurs/newbies will become your future experts and power users. The people scared away by bullies like the one mentioned here didn't come back to Stack Exchange once they became the type of expert the site needed. They just shared their knowledge elsewhere.

My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most.

May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.

> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants

I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:

1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.

2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.

This was long before LLMs.

It seems to me that AI did SO in, not its moderation culture.

SO is not a place to ask where to get your homework assignment done, that's for sure. The gamification does not necessarily reward the best content, but I didn't experience hostility myself.

(I do find this site fairly hostile. And Wikipedia is the lowest possible hell, I've never in my life experienced anything comparable to the ferocity with which people prosecute their grudges, all the way to IRL doxxing. German language Wikipedia is another whole level of self-appointed officialdom.)

> I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me

Damn. Doesn’t that just sum up so many interactions (and sadly, relationships) in life.

I remember some moderator having a go at me for answering someone's question (apparently the question wasn't high quality, and me helping them has encouraging "the wrong type of question" for the site).

AI is a part if SO's downfall, but I've also seen a big shift of asking for help to places like discord.

SO has always had this thing that it's a wiki, not a Q&A site for people who are stuck - I feel like people have always wanted the second though.

You can even see the clear download slope starting in 2016 and (sans COVID) not changing slope substantially until about 2023. This part was not caused by AI at all.

I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?

Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.

Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.

You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues.

I hope somebody saves it all.

>making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site

Fancy wording but inaccurate. Plenty of long-time users (me included) left when the mods became insane.

>StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions

This is significantly under selling it.

Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.

I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable

I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.

His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”

At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive

I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one

> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation

Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example.

> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.

Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale.

> They slowly killed the site in this manner.

It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy.

> knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me

I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question.

It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question.

> I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.

Reading through, for example, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433897 and understanding what is written there is literally all that is required.

as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.

So I guess Wikipedia will eventually face the same fate

In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort.

I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has drastically declined came into my head. As well as the fact that this was predicated on them doing all that work so the LLM could essentially scrape, steal and now serve to me in this (for now) more convenient form.

These places are ultimately transactional. Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. The site overall would suffer. The vast majority of traffic wasn't people asking or answering questions it was using it as a search engine.

In Google I used to put in site:stackexchange or w/e because I knew answers there were less likely to be dead ends. Yes this is because some people got their feelings hurt. Iirc there may have been specific controversies re toxicity in meta, but scoping this purely to the question and answering side I never felt my own experience on stackexchange reflected something personal or done purely out of spite. I saw it as a way to ensure the site remained valuable as a place for high quality answers. Ensuring people have to write better questions is part of that. I often wish my LLM was meaner. My first stack exchange ribbing I just learned to ask questions better. I felt a human annoyed at my admitted laziness. This was valuable feedback. Should I have went boohoo and blamed them instead?

Now we have people wanting to fuck their AI girlfriends and waste your time with their LLM authored blog. If you think the problem with stack exchange was your feelings got hurt I just worry about what road you are leading us down. Having to earn your way in is part of human society. A LLM that tries to make you feel like a genius so you keep coming back is alien to most of how humans got here. I think the decline of stack exchange is less about a change in traffic patterns and more reflective of a continuing change in culture. I'm also guilty of course. But when I was reminded of my old bookmark, I went back and browsed other old stackexchange bookmarks. I did miss the very human nature of these questions and answers and comments. Yes including the occasional scolding and bickering. Sort of like this site. Filled with humans, yet not a complete cesspool. Oddly hopeful in our present age.

S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive

You have much more eloquently put the same feeling I had about the site.

It was a good resource but absolutely toxic to newcomers.

Good Riddance to SO.

That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.

Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.

It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.

One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.

SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people.

Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.

There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.

It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"

Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.

Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."

Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.

Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever.

They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.

It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.

In an age where we all get the same generic answer from LLMs, SO could have been the place to have meaningful conversations on tech topics. Instead they became irrelevant

>"no conversation please"

Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that

I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.

Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?

Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.

So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.

I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.

The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.

Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.

IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.

But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.

As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.

And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.

SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.

And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.

Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI?

I don't buy it.

I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.

> SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form

SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.

Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.

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.

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

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

I see people talking about the negative experiences, and I'm sure they are real, but I also had some very positive experiences.

I remember being amazed that some internet stranger took the time to understand my question and provide some great solution where I was stuck. It gave me a little encouragement and social connection as I plugged away on a project alone.

I miss that feel good human connection when an LLM can quickly get me an answer.

But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out.

I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.

It is curation process, so when you search you are not overwhelmed by 100 identical answers.

Being stupid in this case is irrational self-(mis)-perception.

Probably they really meant to say you are lazy and shift work on mods.

Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.

Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.

Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.

LLM's are the primary cause of SO decline. Largely due to LLM's having scraped SO (and everything else available on the WWW). It's the reason there is a decline in traffic across the web i.e. Wikipedia. LLM's surface the required search query or info directly.

I guess AI sycophancy does contribute to its success.

I feel like I've seen this comment before...

Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.

The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.

> The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.

That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.

There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.

I remember a time when people were posting their SO link and karma on their resumes. O how have the times changed.

> This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.

Literally describing how academia has worked since time immemorial.

check the graph and superpose the ai adoption curve, you're right to be skeptical

The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.

It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.

Yes.

At the same time, this is graph is something that really should not look anything like a bell curve. So the format is probably just a coincidence.

Except if the "all the questions have been asked" hypothesis is correct. What I really doubt.

this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.

You don't just fit a Gaussian distribution to a timeseries dataset. That's not what a Gaussian curve is designed for at all. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regr...

This isn't really a bell curve.

It definitely seems like politics ruins everything. Nerds once thought they'd transcended politics and then discovered they hadn't.

"Politics" being another word for "game theory when it's about humans"

> were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities

And the solution turned out to be putting every user in their own safety bubble of recommended conten and expanding the bubble only when user gets adventurous. And TikTok became gold standard for that that everone tries to emulate with varying degrees of success

Might be a vocal minority. I used to visit SO every day, several times a day, for like 10+ years, got so much value from it and would not have changed anything to the site. "AI Overview" in Google completely killed it tho and I don't really see what they could do about it other than completely change the site into something else. RIP.

> They don't acknowledge this was a problem.

Most people who came to SO wanted the site to be something it fundamentally wasn't supposed to be; that it in fact specifically existed not to be, to provide an alternative, because the thing that everyone wants (a discussion forum) is actually bad.

When the site was launched, lots of people seemed to agree with Atwood and Spolsky that discussion forums are bad and that they knew better. But in the long run, this still proved to be a minority opinion, by a long shot.

In short, I don't acknowledge that it was a problem because it wasn't. It was expected and okay that lots of people didn't want to engage with the format. The format was not for them. The purpose of the format was to produce an artifact that would benefit them indirectly, for free, by improving Google search results (until Google fucked it up).

But the site (the platform itself, and the people implementing it; not the community) fucked up by failing to recognize that most people really do want a fundamentally unproductive, unfocused social environment (and a help desk!) after all.

More importantly, it fucked up by presenting a UI that misleads people into thinking they could have that experience (post a question and there's space for answers under it; obviously that means that people are answering directly for your benefit and not anyone else! and of course we can go back and forth about this, and they'll help me solve my problem! and there are votes, like Reddit!)

In any case, business perspective prevailed, subject matter experts stopped sticking around. Personally, I think the (slow but steady over many years) switch from b) to c) is what doomed the site.

There was a few noteworthy company post, especially those after the mass layoffs / private equity takeover on the meta site that acknowledged the problem, so its certainly not a), even when you apply a strict standard about the terms in which to acknowledge the problem (which was well-known long before). Those company statements had some rather clear and well-received community commentary below that essentially questioned whether any of the suggestions on tackling the problem should even be tried. The very-much-not-welcoming onboarding experience, while it had great potential for improvements, was yet serving the sites unique needs quite well. Two weeks of persistence and reading the manual were not much of a detrimental filter.. not to those that would eventually go on to contribute back for many years. And those were the ones that ultimately mattered. Not those one-off solve-my-homework posts that only saw indifferent/annoyed moderation action. That probably still wonder why nobody took their hand and spent their evening guiding them through the steps necessary to make their post useful to anyone other than just the original author.

In my opinion:

a) they choose a certain very specific ideal as a target, but utterly failed to convey that to a majority of site visitors;

b) their picked target and path visually and functionally matched by like 90% with a thing already existing for decades previously and very familiar to a majority of internet users - with a regular forum with sections and treads;

c) they make fundamental errors even inside the scope of their own ideal and vision - like for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;

d) while they copied forum structure (failure B) they also failed to envision (or did a mistake in that) how the ideal target result would look like a long time in the future;

e) they failed to acknowledge all of the above, reflect on and fix own mistakes, instead they declared those mistakes "a culture" and persisted in deepening them;

Basically they picked a forum format, known at those times to literally everybody on the internet and decided to use it to make something vastly different, while failing both at communicating that intention and also failing at actually adapting UI and tools to better suit their target.

If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did.

What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.

That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.

It was always intended to be a documentation site, see https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and similar.

Yeah, I used to mostly answer there instead of ask and was in the top % for several big tags whatever that means / is worth, but then at some point I realized things had changed and I was spending more time fighting rules and guidelines rather than sharing knowledge and having a good time so I just stopped.

The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"

> There's no one drop where "AI got into the market"

Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.

>failed to protect from the LLM crawlers

Never meant to be protected. I only contributed there because it specified in no uncertain terms that everything was going to be CC BY-SA licensed and posted in a public archive every now and then, so you do not need to scrape to use & redistribute if you intend to adhere to those terms. That would have been sufficient protection, if only governments had not u-turned from Walt-Disney-Copyright straight to "Open"AI-Copyright.

Two years before ChatGPT is shortly after Joel and Jeff sold Stack Overflow to private equity.

The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.

The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?

In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy pro-AI decisions from the admin.

503 and then rate limit here for refreshing once.

The platform in question was openly hostile to people asking questions and made discussions against the rules. That's why people left the moment a better option came along

Wow, this one really highlights the collapse. Basically no new questions have been asked this year while unanswered questions climbed unabated.

Often the people curating the questions are also the ones who are answering them.

Their goal (loosely described) was so that if you pulled up the front page of the site, you'd find questions that are interesting to read and answer.

If you, as a professional visiting the site went to it and found the front page with things that were trivially answered by reading the documentation or "how do I draw a triangle with stars?" ( https://stackoverflow.com/q/10932962/ type things) you, as a professional, are less likely to stick around.

In the period, Stack Overflow was reducing the ability for people to curate content and trying to boost "welcoming". https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

Part of this is that much of the early writing style was intended to mirror technical writing. In reading https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/devel... one doesn't find "Hope that helps" at the end of the page.

It takes a while for a person to understand the norms of writing for a given audience. In the early days, people either came to it with that mindset or were able to be given more attention and guidance as to what the expectations for the site were. When Stack Overflow become extremely popular with college students and people outsourcing their work ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960245 ) the ability for the... for lack of a better term "elders" of the site to try to get people to understand how the site worked and its expectations.

Many of the new users expected Stack Overflow to work much like forums - with a back and forth between people and a chat like environment... that wasn't so. The use of the curation tools to try to help onboard a person were deemed as unfriendly and "toxic" started getting tossed around.

Stack Overflow corporate, trying to be sensitive to the broader cultural movements at the time and the "we need to make this a more inclusive space" made it harder to curate and began a campaign of removing or limiting curation tools as part of "welcoming".

During this time, there was one tool that was enhanced in its effectiveness. If you had a gold badge on a tag you could close it as a dup of another question categorically. Rather than "this question is poorly written and it is unclear what you are asking" (requiring 5 close votes from different people - that would never happen if it didn't happen in the first few minutes because few went to the review queues) they could close the question as a duplicate of what it might be.

That didn't help things when it came to the perception of the site. It was a last ditch effort to try to make it so that the front page was the well asked questions.

Combining the reduction of curation tools, labeling their use as gatekeeping, the growing ratio of new users to elders, and corporate quite literally saying that those people who were doing the curation were the bad guys... well, a lot of them left or reduced their activity.

That in turn made it so that it was harder to find the well asked questions and fewer people were around to answer questions. Note I write "well asked" not "valid" - a lot of people claim to have a valid question but don't ask it in a way that is well suited to the Q&A format.

Combine that again with reductions in staff, various awful "experiments" in the name of improving engagement. That was akin to firing half of a construction team at a house while having them add a new patio... all the while the basement is flooded.

And so you've got what is there today. Very few curators left compared to 2016. Few caring answer new difficult questions. The easy college homework questions (how do you draw a triangle) and the outsourcing of work to free labor is now done with an LLM... and there's no coming back from that. ... And few people believe in the mission goal of Stack Overflow - and those who do, don't believe Stack Overflow corporate believes in that mission goal.

If you made a chart showing real human activity on reddit I imagine there's a big decline. The obviousness of bots and bot upvoting is undeniable

There is a pretty sharp acceleration of that decline around 2022/2023.

They have been. Very aggressively. The community hates it. Their attempts have been ham-handed and offer zero value added over putting your question into chatgpt dot com instead of the SO submission form; but they would be hated anyway.

They are trying I guess: https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/06/10/announcing-stack-overf...

There's still a question of what that would do for them. I haven't used SO in years because I haven't needed it in years.

That's primarily due to AI answering my technical questions.

Yes, still down. The HTML loads eventually with the query contents, but no CSS, much less query results

They still have it, and just sent it out

I noticed the same thing. Another thing that seems to have disappear: lunch and learn focusing on the tech stack. And I mean specifically about "how to do this in <programming language", not product/company focused.

AI is smart enough to figure out many answers from docs or code prototypes.

Smaller fraction of novel questions are still submitted on SO, github discussion and mailing lists.

Right, there's a lot of schadenfreude about SA not being so popular and serves them right for being mean when I asked them a question... but it was also no doubt a gold mine of AI training data. Stands to reason this may be an agentic AI golding age, as future models just eating their own data.

I disagree. From what I see, company specific stackoverflow like mailing lists or slack channels are also dead.

The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.

One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.

FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.

Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.

Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.

The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.

That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.

Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.

The trend might've stalled or even reversed if it weren't for AI, we can't just assume the same end was written in stone.

Careful - the LLM companies are also modern day dictators and pharoahs.

I tried looking it up but "“sadge” The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary." Care to say more than whatever slang I presume this is?

Are you a X-ennial? I've only ever heard my little brother say that. Just curious.