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.
They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over
In an alternate universe, where LLMs didn't exist, I bet you SO would be equally dead by this decade. Someone better, with healthier values and a more welcoming community, would come up and steal their lunch.
People here seem to be so emotionally invested in hating stack overflow that they seem to think AI was like ~10% of the reason it died, when it was 95%.
And yes, it's possible AI would have killed it anyway, despite its best efforts. But in this version of parallel universes, AI was only a catalyst. Its fate was sealed well before 2020.