Comment by piva00

I've been using SO since it first launched, and through time it has changed a lot already. It used to be simple to ask questions and get answers, when it grew and the huge influx of questions required moderation it was a nice smooth change but over time the pearl clutching of mods to mark many reasonable questions as irrelevant started to grip the usefulness.

I used to answer a lot of the basic questions just to help others as I've felt I had been helped, the moderation shift applying more and more rules started to make me feel unwelcomed to ask questions and even to answer. I do understand why it happened, with the influx of people trying to game the platform to show off in their resumés they were at the "top" of whatever buzzword was hot in the industry at the time but it still affected me as a contributing user out of kindness.

By 2018 I would not even login to vote or add comments, and I feel it was already going on a slow downhill path, and LLMs will definitely kill it.

We will definitely suffer, SO has been an incredible resource to figure out things not covered well in documentation, I remember when proper experts (i.e. maintainers of libraries/frameworks) would jump in to answer about a weird edge case, or clarify the usage of a feature, explain why it was misuse, etc.

Right now I don't see anything else that will provide this knowledge to LLMs, in 10-20 years time there will be a lot missing in training datasets, and it will be a slow degradation of knowledge available in the open for us all to learn from.