Comment by avereveard
7 hours ago
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as long as their core value were the same - answering programming questions that with clear answers - it would have been replaced by today's AI completely.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.
So you think there is a viable business around technical Q&A even with GPT 6 Astra or whatever existing?
LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.
Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.
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I wonder if AI didn't end up having an impact in other ways. Did they get more aggressive about captchas or bot detection around the time when LLMs came out annoying or keeping out legit users? I imagine they were saw a lot of bot traffic in the years before AI chatbots went public and that probably continues even now that it's a ghost town.
I think you're forgetting of a certain major event that happened in 2020. An event that initially caused a lot of free time around the world and kept people indoors...
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Agreed.
StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".
Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.
After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.
THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.