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"
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.
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.
It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.
> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years
Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only
need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it.
AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already
largely prior to AI.
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.
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.
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.
SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc
And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.
Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.
This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before
AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a
peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in
2008, and I would reason it took a few years,
say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to
about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.
It still has some value today, as sometimes you
can find useful information on SO, but its peak
days are long over and I don't see how it can
manage to come back, with or without AI slop.
It would basically require a lot of re-design
and some things that never worked, such as the
karma system, should be changed. Also moderators -
they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave
up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.
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"
>"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
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"
As noted by others, the initializer for the curt communication culture was "don't ask stupid questions, idiot."
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.
Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users
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.
It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
It just accelerated the trend, and I am sure that reddit took over for a lot of new users. The different problems with SO has been well documented.
And they killed maybe one of the most side features of it : https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
So yeah metakill your own brands with stupid policies.
There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
Definitely this. The moderators seemed to have the Lock Question button connected to their dopamine pathways.
That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.
Wikipedia seems to be going the same way.
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.
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.
check the graph and superpose the ai adoption curve, you're right to be skeptical
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
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.
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.
https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073
I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.
> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years
Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it. AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already largely prior to AI.
this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.
This isn't really a bell curve.
Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph
The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.
When an ecological shoes company pivot to AI, I wonder why StackOverflow executives don't pilot for AI now.
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc
And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
They had a good run!
Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.
Careful - the LLM companies are also modern day dictators and pharoahs.
Slightly accelerated their decline. You have a drop around chatgpt release then the slope returns to its previous pace of decline.
same story for blogs
The company my friend works for has a slack channel for help with code, like an internal stackoverflow. It’s almost inactive now.
I asked to see one of the questions from 2024 - it could have been solved with one LLM search.
We have eliminated a whole genre of peer to peer communication.
AI and ridiculously aggressive moderation. If it had been a more welcoming place it probably would have lasted longer.
Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.
Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.
The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.
That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.
Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.
The trend might've stalled or even reversed if it weren't for AI, we can't just assume the same end was written in stone.
If there is not allowed to be duplicate questions isn't it by design that as the site and industry matures the number of posts go down.
This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in 2008, and I would reason it took a few years, say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.
It still has some value today, as sometimes you can find useful information on SO, but its peak days are long over and I don't see how it can manage to come back, with or without AI slop. It would basically require a lot of re-design and some things that never worked, such as the karma system, should be changed. Also moderators - they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.