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.
During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.
I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.
That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants
I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:
1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.
2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.
S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.
> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
thanks in advance,
--
znpy
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.
I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.
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.
I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Is clearly there in the graph, but everyone arguing the ChatGPT side conveniently ignore the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.
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"
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.
> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"
Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
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.
> 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.
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.
It was also the rise of Github and the importance of the software hosted there. More consistent documentation and transparent issue trackers/PRs helped a lot dealing with evolving software.
The data showed Stack Overflow declined from 2017. This followed GitHub's rise distantly.
GitHub made documentation more consistent how? GitHub issues were more transparent how? A PR answered a question I would have asked Stack Overflow never I think.
People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
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.
I stopped posting there around then. Multiple times in a row I asked a question, got it closed as a duplicate/pointed to another thread/met with "why are you even trying to do that" despite being clear about my problem. It was obvious the people answering/closing the question skimmed it and I already gave a ton of context. It just stopped being useful
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."
Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too.
Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.
They're slowly boiling the frog, I've been expecting old. to work for maybe 1-2 more years then it'll also be going away.
Probably in the same way as they're actively removing r/all, at first it just didn't show up in the sidebar on mobile, but you could go to r/all manually by clicking links in the client. Then those stopped working, but r/All (uppercase A) worked. Then that went away. By now I think it's impossible to see r/all at all in the mobile client or the modern website, you can only access it via old.reddit.com.
What’s strange is that they’ll try to verify with Persona even after Apple has shared an age range with them.
If you trust Apple, why verify with Persona above that? If you don’t trust Apple, why bother integrating the Apple age check? The answer must be something silly like “we did it because Apple asked us to but we don’t trust what Apple tells us because we’re not sure if it’s compliant”.
It’s too bad, because I trust Apple with my data way more than Reddit and infinitely more than Persona. I hope Reddit comes to their senses because I’m never giving my data to Persona.
It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.
It's so weird how slightly different usage can create vastly different experiences and impressions of a site. I wouldn't really describe Reddit as "politically biased to the left", but I never go to the front page, just a few select subs. I don't see any political bias in subs about Hollow Knight or weed. I DO see bias in my country's political site, but it swings all over the place depending on who's in power at the given time.
I see a similar thing on X (well, I would if I still used it) where my personal feed is very, very different from the curated 'for you' one.
I'm not sure why that would kill reddit? It's an inherent feature of the political left that an echo chamber is preferable to any reasoned debate. Any space that allows flowing debate will lean conservative and leftist will complain, downvote, etc and ultimately spend less time on the platform.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.
yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world
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.
I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial. There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI, and strong reason to believe that we would see it with AI. So we have a model that makes testable predictions, and data strongly consistent with those testable predictions, in the form of an acceleration of existing downward trends. What more do you want?
People love simplistic narratives, i usually don't mind but this is just ridiculous. AI hate is gently overtaking AI hype as the most stupid thing around
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.
You mean the fall to a thousand questions per month. Now that the volume is low enough someone has a chance of looking at every single one of them, maybe the StackOverflow community can finally collaborate in peace, safe from the onslaught of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation.
Just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times.
Are you discarding the utility of Gaussian functions in analysis simply because the independent variable is time? A Gaussian curve can be used as a descriptive model without claiming that the observations themselves are a probability distribution
The fit does not prove causation, but it does show that the decline was already well described by a trend that began years before generative AI. If the claim is that 2023 created a separate structural break, it's different claim then the title describes
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.
That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?
A bell curve is not an "amortised function." Amortization applies to accounting and algorithmic time complexity, not probability distributions. You're likely thinking of a Probability Density Function (PDF). If you are going to police terminology, it helps to use the correct words. Second, fitting a curve with an R^2 of 0.911 is the exact opposite of "making shapes out of clouds.
You are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.
Fitting a mathematical function to a dataset does not implicitly adopt the ontological baggage of probability theory. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of applied mathematics
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.
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.
The users being generally unhelpful wasn't an issue for them, since they were still significantly more helpful than users anywhere else on the internet. Reddit was and still is filled with completely unvetted answers (on pretty much all topics not just programming), Quora was/is a joke, Yahoo answers had some funny posts I guess but nothing you could actually learn from, what else really was there? Before AI, Stack Overflow was as good as it gets.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?"
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.
Picking on SO and the mods in particular is a popular HN pasttime. I'd like to add that I interacted a bit with SO (1k points) and never really had any problems with them. I must be lucky...
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.
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
Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.
Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.
Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
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.
I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.
I noticed the same thing. Another thing that seems to have disappear: lunch and learn focusing on the tech stack. And I mean specifically about "how to do this in <programming language", not product/company focused.
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.
Somehow I feel that whole idea was 50% broken from start. In field changing as fast as programming you simply cannot have canonical source that is done. There are areas which are constant or slow moving. But too many others are in churn. Trying to apply same rules for both is clearly insanity. And this is really the failure of SO...
Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it might have worked... But can't remove power from those who had it for years...
You also have to think that SO was very early in gamification and changing things around that never got political will afaict - people love their points.
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.
I disagree. From what I see, company specific stackoverflow like mailing lists or slack channels are also dead.
The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.
One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.
FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.
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.
Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:
1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.
2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.
This was long before LLMs.
I hope somebody saves it all.
i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
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-...
I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
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.
Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
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.
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.
It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"
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.
GitHub made documentation more consistent how? GitHub issues were more transparent how? A PR answered a question I would have asked Stack Overflow never I think.
Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that
I don't buy it.
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.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."
BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.
Probably in the same way as they're actively removing r/all, at first it just didn't show up in the sidebar on mobile, but you could go to r/all manually by clicking links in the client. Then those stopped working, but r/All (uppercase A) worked. Then that went away. By now I think it's impossible to see r/all at all in the mobile client or the modern website, you can only access it via old.reddit.com.
I think this may depend on your country, I've never seen this (Spain), not on the new website nor old.reddit.com or anywhere else, NSFW or not.
If you trust Apple, why verify with Persona above that? If you don’t trust Apple, why bother integrating the Apple age check? The answer must be something silly like “we did it because Apple asked us to but we don’t trust what Apple tells us because we’re not sure if it’s compliant”.
It’s too bad, because I trust Apple with my data way more than Reddit and infinitely more than Persona. I hope Reddit comes to their senses because I’m never giving my data to Persona.
I see that and I instantly go to rotten tomatoes, pure idiocy, pure stupid. You can just tell when those in charge, never ever dog food.
You want to blow off some steam, and there is a laundry list of rules to read through.
Yeah, not bothering with all that.
I see a similar thing on X (well, I would if I still used it) where my personal feed is very, very different from the curated 'for you' one.
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.
That was before AI.
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...
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 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.
I don’t buy this.
Programming as an industry is famous for constantly evolving and changing.
- Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library
- Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked
- Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs
- Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP
- Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong
Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
- the downfall of junior devs
- bad hiring market
- layoffs in practically every sector
theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.
Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073
It's very much a bell curve
I'm going to assume this is bait...
The fit does not prove causation, but it does show that the decline was already well described by a trend that began years before generative AI. If the claim is that 2023 created a separate structural break, it's different claim then the title describes
> 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.
https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?
The general notion of a bell-shaped curve is broader than that. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function
> “typically continuous or smooth, asymptotically approach zero for large negative/positive x, and have a single, unimodal maximum at small x.”
You are doing that implicitly by fitting a Gaussian curve.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community
Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.
It was such a hostile environment. It always seemed like you basically had to already know the answer to ask a question.
Now do a graph for the money.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...
Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.
Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
Funnily enough, there's now a "StackOverflow for Agents": https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent
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.
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.
The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.
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.
The title of this thread is "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph." That's a narrative. At least before the mods change it.
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.
Mods were so shitty I always wanted to have my schadenfreude on them.
That's primarily due to AI answering my technical questions.
Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it might have worked... But can't remove power from those who had it for years...
That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.
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.
The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.
One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.
FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.