Comment by hatthew
6 hours ago
SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.
I remember when SO had codegolf on the main site. Maybe if they weren't such killjoys people would have still been interested in participating in some programming oriented community even though AI displaced the actual writing of computer languages.
> SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming.
They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.
I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).