Comment by p-e-w
8 hours ago
> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
Uh, no.
StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
People used to add "reddit" at the end of their search queries, and now I'm sure many of those people just ask a bot. But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.
So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.
Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.
> But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.
I hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.
But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was specifically intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to avoid chatter because that gets in the way of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.
To me your description is mythical reddit. Actual Reddit is every bit as hostile as stack overflow and unlike stack overflow, old questions can not be updated with new answers when existing answers get out of date.
I think Reddit is even worse. You could get banned from SO for using pretty foul insults, but in some places of Reddit, it's business as usual.
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But SO was never a place to just talk to others. It's not a general purpose discussion site. It could have been a friendly place, but users still would have left, because it's just far easier to get an immediate answer from AI, and those answers have only been getting better.
Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.
In the early years it very much was. You could ask just about anything that was programming related and had a question mark. In the middle times of SO a lot of those became "locked for historical preservation" and new ones weren't allowed.
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SO responses were peer-reviewed code snippets or fixes. If something had 800 upvotes and comments outlining pros and cons, that is useful information. The bot gives you whatever it wants to give you, it could be information from a scientific paper or late night TV infomercial.
People like me⁰, who I admit will also soon be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, will still refer to it for some time.
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[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay
[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!
Good luck. What are you thinking of moving on to?
SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.
the obvious reasoning is that the vast majority of common questions were already asked, and then still many, many uncommon questions, until the only things that hadn't been asked were very, very niche. It's the same reason complaints about mods marking lots of questions as duplicates didn't really pick up momentum until the mid/late 2010's.
https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflow...
It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.
It doesn't matter. Even if it were the most friendly community ever, as long as their core value were the same - answering programming questions that with clear answers - it would have been replaced by today's AI completely. It's irrelevant today how bad GPT3.5 once was.
I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI, which it unquestionably was. GPT-3.5 was able to answer some small chunk of my programming questions (like 10-20% of them), which seems clearly reflected in the graph.
> I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI
A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)
Traffic started dropping precipitously in summer ‘20. There were no widely known LLMs then, let alone ones used outside labs. ChatGPT went public in November 2022, well into the decline.
While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.
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Because AI removed what little value it had.
AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.
People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.
If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.
AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.
It's like how everyone hated dialup but still kept using it anyway until there was broadband.
Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.
The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.
It is not obsolete insofar as it is a good source of Q/A material, which is useful to both humans (directly or indirectly) and bots. The only part of it that is obsolete is the search/query part. If the AI companies had an ounce of decency, they would see no problem injecting money into the platform to continue seeding that Q/A material which they have directly profited from. But investing in a commons is not on the playbook for vulture capitalism.