What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.

I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.

The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.

Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.

Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.

SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community.

I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"

I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]

Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.

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[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...

[2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...

Ironically it gives me: This IP address has performed an unusually high number of requests and has been temporarily rate limited.

That's also something what AI did to the internet :(

I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.

The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.

I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...

The collapse into a ghost town is striking.

Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO.

This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.

SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.

I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer.

There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.

Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.

I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.

AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.

Just tried to open stack overflow and was told their site was under maintenance. When I refreshed, it blocked my IP for refreshing too many times. I expect better from SO.

Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users

Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision

Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb

Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong:

* Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it.

* Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.

It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems

A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community

They didn’t stand a chance. Even in the era where they made a great community etc etc AI would have destroyed them. Other people are just a poor source of information now that we have dramatically good search across all human knowledge.

So... nothing that it wasn't already doing to itself? There's no one drop where "AI got into the market", SO had been declining steadily for years. I actually expected this post to be about how SO survived by selling its internal organs to AI.

Now do a graph for the money.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...

The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it. You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation.

Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.

Some of the pre-ai decline in questions might just be that they had filled out of alot of the question space. What might be more interesting is the traffic graph as it would be possible to have a decline in questions but still have traffic rising to the existing ones.

Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.

I recall some moves where SO announced they would be revising ToS to disclose their intent to repackage and use the site’s content for sale and/or model training.

Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted.

I guess that’s “LLM related”

The graph starts falling shortly after 2020. AI certainly contributed but Stack Overflow was dying without it.

Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph

One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.

Does the peak starting in mid-2020 correspond to mass speculative / adversarial / bandwagon hiring by tech companies during the pandemic?

Stack overflow was always going to die. AI just sped it up. The misconception that it was a community is surprising. People went there for an answer and left, very few would stick around, not only because there was no incentive, but if you did you'd likely get crapped on by one of the hostile moderators which would ensure you'd leave and never come back, because who wants to willingly be treated badly.

It was basically an imposer syndrome enforcing machine.

This made me browse through my StackOverflow history. Funny to see how I though I was such a skilled developer, though the questions I asked and the answers I gave 16 years ago... cringe.

The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.

I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones).

It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing

StackOverflow was on decline due to mismanagement and hostility towards the community. This was well before AI. AI was just the death blow.

I miss Joel Spolsky's writings especially in this dark age of AI.

Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin.

Interesting to compare with MathOverflow which has distinctly different policies (only research-level questions) and professional community: https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/st... - also falling lately, but by a factor of 2-3x from peak rather than 1000x.

AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene.

I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.

I never understood the point if having the unfathomable churn of thousands of new questions per day. The value of SO to me was always a knowledge base with reputation mechanics, and that did not change. I still default to searching before asking AI.

I’m surprised the site had that little activity, relatively, around 2010. That’s when I was using it the most. It seemed plenty large to me at the time… I can’t imagine the experience was that great a few years later. I wasn’t really paying attention by the time it reached the peaks later that decade.

I always found the format of the side obtuse and the culture not very welcoming. My most popular answer ever was something about JavaScript from 2008 or 2009, and to this day, people come in and say “this isn’t the way to do it, this is outdated“. No kidding, but every new question about that gets closed as a duplicate.

I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.

Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.

Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there.

Funnily enough, there's now a "StackOverflow for Agents": https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent

Can it please do the same to reddit?

Looks like the decline started before the ai boom.

I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.

There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.

Hug of death? Doesn’t seem to load for me

I am surprised how early the overall downward trend developed. There is no doubt LLMs put a nail in the coffin, but the 5 years from 2017 to 2022 look to have brought a non trivial decline of their own

My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…

While I never posted much to Stackoverflow I have fond memories of it as a sole developer, finding other people with similar issues and the quality solutions offered that often got me out of a jam.

Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.

Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.

Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.

Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.

Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.

Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?

Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?

ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022, and frankly wasn't very good originally. The SO decline started occurring almost two years ahead of that, and was already on a sharp decline before ChatGPT shipped, and certainly before ChatGPT actually became good.

This is revisionist history. People told SO that they were leaving for YEARS because of how incredibly toxic it had become. It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately.

Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended."

They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.

Looks like StackOverflow was already declining by the time ChatGPT came out

The site looks like it was actually dying since 2014 and AI just turned off the life support.

It was such a hostile environment. It always seemed like you basically had to already know the answer to ask a question.

I think Ai is not the issue here. SEO on the other hand very much. It’s not like any one ever went to stackoverflow to find a solution, it was just that they were the google results for a lot of things

I've only posted one question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.

The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it. You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation.

Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.

Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.

The graph starts falling shortly after 2020. AI certainly contributed but Stack Overflow was dying without it.

Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph

It was basically an imposer syndrome enforcing machine.

This made me browse through my StackOverflow history. Funny to see how I though I was such a skilled developer, though the questions I asked and the answers I gave 16 years ago... cringe.

I miss Joel Spolsky's writings especially in this dark age of AI.

Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin.

AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene.

I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.

Funnily enough, there's now a "StackOverflow for Agents": https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent

Looks like the decline started before the ai boom.

I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.

While I never posted much to Stackoverflow I have fond memories of it as a sole developer, finding other people with similar issues and the quality solutions offered that often got me out of a jam.

Looks like StackOverflow was already declining by the time ChatGPT came out

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.

Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.

I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"

I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]

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[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...

[2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...

I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.

I didn't know that. Good to see they cashed out in time.

This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.

Do you mean that curious growth spike in mid 2020? If so, can you think of anything else significant that happened in mid 2020...?

I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.

I see people talking about the negative experiences, and I'm sure they are real, but I also had some very positive experiences.

I remember being amazed that some internet stranger took the time to understand my question and provide some great solution where I was stuck. It gave me a little encouragement and social connection as I plugged away on a project alone.

I miss that feel good human connection when an LLM can quickly get me an answer.

But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out.

I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.

It is curation process, so when you search you are not overwhelmed by 100 identical answers.

Being stupid in this case is irrational self-(mis)-perception.

Probably they really meant to say you are lazy and shift work on mods.

Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.

Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.

Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.

I feel like I've seen this comment before...

Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.

The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.

The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.

> The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.

That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.

The collapse into a ghost town is striking.

SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.

There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.

> This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.

Literally describing how academia has worked since time immemorial.

I remember a time when people were posting their SO link and karma on their resumes. O how have the times changed.

check the graph and superpose the ai adoption curve, you're right to be skeptical

It definitely seems like politics ruins everything. Nerds once thought they'd transcended politics and then discovered they hadn't.

"Politics" being another word for "game theory when it's about humans"

Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.

I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.

AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.

The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users

Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision

Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb

Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong:

It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems

A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community

Now do a graph for the money.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...

The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.

Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.

Can it please do the same to reddit?

Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.

Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.

Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.

::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!

One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed.

The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.

Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content.

They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.

> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.

I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.

Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.

If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.

I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes

1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)

2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"

3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.

I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.

I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.

Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.

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.

When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.

The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.

Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.

It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!

But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.

(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)

That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.

Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.

It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.

One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.

SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people.

Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authentic interactions. Instead, for some completely unknown reason (money), they chose to commodify their own platform. Smart.

There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.

It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"

Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.

Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever.

They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.

It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.

Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.

Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."

>"no conversation please"

Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that

I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.

Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?

Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.

So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.

I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.

The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.

Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.

IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.

But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.

As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.

And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.

SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.

And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.

Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI?

I don't buy it.

> SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form

SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.

Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.

The site looks like it was actually dying since 2014 and AI just turned off the life support.

It was such a hostile environment. It always seemed like you basically had to already know the answer to ask a question.

I've only posted one question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.

When I realized that I'd spent more time on explaining that my question wasn't the same as another existing one than asking the question itself, I stopped using SO all together.

They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.

If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did.

What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.

That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.

Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.

Yes.

At the same time, this is graph is something that really should not look anything like a bell curve. So the format is probably just a coincidence.

Except if the "all the questions have been asked" hypothesis is correct. What I really doubt.

It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.

this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.

This isn't really a bell curve.

You don't just fit a Gaussian distribution to a timeseries dataset. That's not what a Gaussian curve is designed for at all. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regr...

Yeah, I used to mostly answer there instead of ask and was in the top % for several big tags whatever that means / is worth, but then at some point I realized things had changed and I was spending more time fighting rules and guidelines rather than sharing knowledge and having a good time so I just stopped.

The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"

> There's no one drop where "AI got into the market"

Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.

Wow, this one really highlights the collapse. Basically no new questions have been asked this year while unanswered questions climbed unabated.

There is a pretty sharp acceleration of that decline around 2022/2023.

If you made a chart showing real human activity on reddit I imagine there's a big decline. The obviousness of bots and bot upvoting is undeniable

Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended."

They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.

Two years before ChatGPT is shortly after Joel and Jeff sold Stack Overflow to private equity.

The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.

The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?

In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy pro-AI decisions from the admin.