> You know how StackOverflow is dead because AI provided an alternative? That's happening in search too.

Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback and then doubled down by going after respected, unpaid contributors like Monica.

Would they have survived AI? Hard to say. But the truth is, they were already busy burning down their own community long before AI showed up.

When AI arrived I'd already been waiting for years for an alternative that didn’t aggressively shut down real-world questions (sometimes with hundreds of upvotes) just because they didn’t fit some rigid format.

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4ggr0 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> and then doubled down by going after respected, unpaid contributors like Monica.

if like me you didn't know what this was referring to, here's some context: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-...

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IshKebab 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback

It is dead because of both of those things. Everyone hated Stackoverflow's moderation, but kept using it because they didn't have a good alternative until AI.

> When AI arrived I'd already been waiting for years for an alternative that didn’t aggressively shut down real-world questions

Exactly.

	▲	goku12 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not sure that AI has as much impact on resources like SO as one might imagine. There is one reason why I resort to using AI, and two reasons why I always double check its answers. The reason why I resort to AI is to find out alternative solutions quickly. But quite honestly, it's more of a problem with SO moderation. People are willing to answer even stale, actual/mistaken duplicate or slightly/seemingly irrelevant questions with good quality solutions and alternatives. But I always felt that their moderation dissuaded the contributors from it. Meanwhile, the first reason why I always double check the AI results is because they hallucinate way too much. They fake completely believable answers far too often. The second reason is that AI often neglects interesting/relevant extra information that humans always recognize as important. This is very evident if you read elaborate SO answers or official documentation like MDN, docs.rs or archwiki. One particular example for this is the XY-problem. People seem to make similar mistaken assumptions and SO answers are very good at catching those. Recipe-book/cookbook documentation also address these situations well. Human generated content (even static or archived ones) seem to anticipate/catch and address human misconceptions and confusions much better than AI.

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dabockster a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback and then doubled down by going after respected, unpaid contributors like Monica.

They also devolved into a work friendly variant of 4Chan's /g/ board. "Work friendly" as in nothing obviously obscene, but the overall tone and hostility towards newcomers is still there (among other things).