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.

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jeanlucas an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The sale is relevant. The spike in activity right before the sale already shows the management hand and how they actively ran the org to optimize for this sale. The rebound right after is hard, and it was (right) before chatgpt

They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over

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Jtarii an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

So you think its mostly just coincidence that 4 years after AI is introduced stack overflow is dead?

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guiambros 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

No, of course not coincidence. It's just that people didn't have an alternative until 2021-ish. Users hated SO for many years prior, but had nowhere to go other than small niche communities. When LLMs came into play, it was just the obvious choice.

In an alternate universe, where LLMs didn't exist, I bet you SO would be equally dead by this decade. Someone better, with healthier values and a more welcoming community, would come up and steal their lunch.

	▲	Jtarii 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If stack overflow was universally loved, AI would still kill it. People here seem to be so emotionally invested in hating stack overflow that they seem to think AI was like ~10% of the reason it died, when it was 95%.