What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

hbcdbff

Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph

mid-kid

Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.

xyzsparetimexyz

Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users

ReptileMan

Slightly accelerated their decline. You have a drop around chatgpt release then the slope returns to its previous pace of decline.

IshKebab

AI and ridiculously aggressive moderation. If it had been a more welcoming place it probably would have lasted longer.

nolok

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"

khalic

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

simianwords

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.

pknerd

Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.

Kuinox

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.

Someone1234

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 It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately.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.

lynndotpy

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.

charcircuit

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.

wtfHN26

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.

pluc

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...

avaer

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.

shevy-java

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.

5701652400

same story for blogs

vcryan

They had a good run!

Alien1Being

The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.