Comment by wisemanwillhear
11 hours ago
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.
I think so too, but many people have many oppositions to AI and would prefer knowledge to be in the hands of knowledgeable community, rather than AI companies. SO was poised to be this alternative, but leadership showed they did not see value in knowledge-work for its own sake.
But SO had already been acquired by PE when LLMs went mainstream, so I doubt they would have made any strategic growth bets rather than trying to squeeze all the monetization they could out of the site.
This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.
Having experienced the SO culture, I like to think the culture caused it - schadenfreude - but it was probably inevitable given AI.
Even if SO was the most wonderful friendly place in the galaxy, would you rather post a question and wait hours for a response, or get one instantly?
If the answers were better, you might.
They weren't. The most common answer was a hyperlink to an unrelated question followed by everyone being banned from answering your question
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Very new, beta stuff - AI can be helpful but too creative sometimes
And in some ways AI "search" works like SO - you ask a question, you get an answer. If you don't understand the answer or something in the answer you ask for clarification and it provides it. And you don't have to wait a day or a week for it. (Ofcourse, the AI gets it answers from human curated info pools like SEs, pirated books etc ... but if these sources shrink / die to AI, it may not be able to provide new and current information, and we'll be back to SEs and Reddits and HNs again).
Push factors and pull factors do much more work together than either do on its own.