> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

Uh, no.

StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

▲ Unai a day ago | parent | next [-]

People used to add "reddit" at the end of their search queries, and now I'm sure many of those people just ask a bot. But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.

So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.

Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.

▲ zahlman a day ago | parent | next [-]

> But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.

I hear they're drowning in AI bots. I guess a fair amount of people also don't mind talking to those.

But SO was never intended to be a place where people "talk to each other". It was specifically intended and designed (sort of; the design was faulty) to avoid chatter because that gets in the way of others coming by later and finding a question and reading its answer.

▲ socalgal2 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To me your description is mythical reddit. Actual Reddit is every bit as hostile as stack overflow and unlike stack overflow, old questions can not be updated with new answers when existing answers get out of date.

▲

cwnyth a day ago | parent | next [-]

I think Reddit is even worse. You could get banned from SO for using pretty foul insults, but in some places of Reddit, it's business as usual.

▲

mahboi a day ago | parent | next [-]

Reddit is full of rage and also people getting banned for no reason. But crashing out on StackOverflow, now that's when someone needs help.

▲

cwnyth a day ago | parent [-]

I'm a mod on two SE sites. It definitely happens. And yes, (imo) they typically need help.

▲

8n4vidtmkvmk a day ago | parent [-]

What kind of help? Mental help, or getting their server back online?

	▲	mahboi a day ago \| parent [-]
		I meant mental, but now that you mention it, probably both

▲

a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲

a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲ cwnyth a day ago | parent | prev [-]

But SO was never a place to just talk to others. It's not a general purpose discussion site. It could have been a friendly place, but users still would have left, because it's just far easier to get an immediate answer from AI, and those answers have only been getting better.

Yeah, the place could be very hostile, but that hostility didn't crater questions before ChatGPT was released.

▲ cowlevel a day ago | parent [-]

In the early years it very much was. You could ask just about anything that was programming related and had a question mark. In the middle times of SO a lot of those became "locked for historical preservation" and new ones weren't allowed.

▲ zahlman a day ago | parent [-]

It wasn't supposed to be like that. Atwood and Spolsky had an insufficiently refined concept of what makes a good question, that was overly tied to "keeping the riff-raff out" and insufficiently based in having a searchable reference that covers a full spectrum of "difficulty levels" but still having every question clearly posed and properly scoped.

Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.

It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.

▲ NoMoreNicksLeft a day ago | parent [-]

And yet it was best when it was before everyone really developed an "understanding of how questions for a Q&A site were supposed to look like". That's the time everyone in this thread is looking back at fondly.

▲ zahlman 9 hours ago | parent [-]

No, no it really wasn't. People were yelling about the flood of crap back then, too.

For reference, here is the verbatim (except for code formatting for HN) Markdown of the initial version of a question asked in 2010, my answer to which became my highest-ever scoring answer (and which ended up getting over 2 million views):

  if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ]
  and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2
  and for the second
  (2+3)/2
  third
  (3+4)/2
  ...... etc

  how can do as that ?
  like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?

  also how can i sum a list of number ?
  a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]

  is it:

  b = sum(a)
  print b

  in i get one number !?
  it doesn't work with me 
  help me plz

▲ MBCook a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because AI removed what little value it had.

AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.

People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.

If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.

AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.

▲ scubadude a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SO responses were peer-reviewed code snippets or fixes. If something had 800 upvotes and comments outlining pros and cons, that is useful information. The bot gives you whatever it wants to give you, it could be information from a scientific paper or late night TV infomercial.

▲ dspillett a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People like me⁰, who I admit will also soon be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, will still refer to it for some time.

--------

[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay

[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!

▲

theteapot a day ago | parent [-]

Good luck. What are you thinking of moving on to?

▲

dspillett 19 hours ago | parent [-]

No idea. I'm doing the “running away, worrying about the to later” thing to an extent. I'm thoroughly burned out so the first thing I'll do is take a break to rest my head and sort a few personal things. The mortgage is paid, I have a small but useful chunk of savings, and no dependents apart from the cats, so I have the luxury of being able to seriously consider that.

I'm not qualified for anything else that isn't also remote, full of AI and getting more so, or both, so I may quite literally end up waiting tables, I have friends who can help me skip the queue there with an “he's a good bloke” recommendation. While I was in hospital recently (gallbladder trouble and liver infection) talking to one of the porters who was wheeling to & from the CT scanner, they apparently need more bodies ATM, I could certainly do that (other than the temporary issue I was in there for I'm fit & healthy) and might actually find some enjoyment in it. Both involve dealing with real people who are in the room with me. Anything I do once I leave here will be result in a massive pay cut, but if the change saves my sanity then that will have to be acceptable.

▲

JsonDemWitOster 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah sincerely good luck. Thought of this a few times but so far I can still sincerely say I still love the game, grind, and hustle. Upper management and immediate TL has been pretty pushy when it comes to GenAI use tho; almost every 1:1 comes with the question of if and what I discovered about AI lately. I have no idea how to answer the question honestly and my stock phrases are starting to show signs of wear at least in my mind. Flat out saying no comes with a canned admonition about how it improves productivity.

I don't contest productivity benefits and there's a time and place for Claude in my workflow but I fear sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day. Half joking. But it makes 1:1s even more awkward now when I have to put on a show for the GenAI parade.

	▲	dspillett 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Yeah sincerely good luck. Thanks. I might need it! > sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day We track who uses what AI and how much. For billing/expense tracking purposes, as we've gone from “use it as much as you can” to “use it as much as you need to but don't waste it”, but there will be a table somewhere with my name in the bottom section next to a bit fat 0. > has been pretty pushy when it comes to GenAI use tho … Flat out saying no comes with … You'll have to deal with that or get out, eventually, how soon depends on your management. AI is not going away, even when/if the costs rise when all that investment capital starts being clawed back. If it is any help in choosing an exit strategy: under UK employment law (if you are elsewhere you'll have to verify how things work in your jurisdiction) they can't force you to use AI or punish/sack you for not as it can be argued to be a material change of role (as it is described as revolutionary, or in less breathy terms “like becoming a manager”, etc.) not just a different tool. But if you refuse then the same argument can be used to make you redundant (“we need more AI people and fewer traditional devs, traditional devs are being declared redundant, would you like to switch roles instead?” would be perfectly legal). As much as the payout for my long years in the same place would be nice, personally I don't think I can sit it out long enough for that to happen.

▲ avereveard a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflow...

It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.

▲

raincole a day ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't matter. Even if it were the most friendly community ever, as long as their core value were the same - answering programming questions that with clear answers - it would have been replaced by today's AI completely. It's irrelevant today how bad GPT3.5 once was.

	▲	avereveard 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It does because the claims that AI killed it are wrong. Would have died from AI anyway probably yes but it doesn't make the AI scapegoat any more true. Why do you have such an interest in blaming AI that you argue from a false position just because it might have happened?

▲

johnfn a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI, which it unquestionably was. GPT-3.5 was able to answer some small chunk of my programming questions (like 10-20% of them), which seems clearly reflected in the graph.

▲

dspillett a day ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't understand the motivation to reattribute the death of SO to anything other than AI

A lot of people are rather bitter that they couldn't get the response they wanted from questions in the format they wanted to ask them, and would rather think that this slight against them is part of what killed the site. If it is all due to AI then they can't tell the tale of how SO rued the day its community deemed them off-topic :)

▲

kstrauser a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Traffic started dropping precipitously in summer ‘20. There were no widely known LLMs then, let alone ones used outside labs. ChatGPT went public in November 2022, well into the decline.

While AI was probably the last straw, it only hastened the collapse that was already underway.

▲

cwnyth a day ago | parent | next [-]

I think you're forgetting of a certain major event that happened in 2020. An event that initially caused a lot of free time around the world and kept people indoors...

▲

kstrauser a day ago | parent [-]

You mean, the kind that made them more likely to sit around asking and answering questions because there wasn't anything else do to, and which caused an initial spike of traffic?

▲

cwnyth a day ago | parent [-]

I think it's pretty clear that was the cause of the 2020 spike and fall. Once people started going back to work (summer 2020 for us), questions dropped back to pre-2020 levels.

	▲	kstrauser a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but it rapidly fell before its pre-COVID levels and then kept dropping rapidly for the next year or so, and then AI really kicked in.

▲

autoexec a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if AI didn't end up having an impact in other ways. Did they get more aggressive about captchas or bot detection around the time when LLMs came out annoying or keeping out legit users? I imagine they were saw a lot of bot traffic in the years before AI chatbots went public and that probably continues even now that it's a ghost town.

▲

Jtarii a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So you think there is a viable business around technical Q&A even with GPT 6 Astra or whatever existing?

LLMs so obviously make any type of the business model of SO unviable.

Attributing the death to mismanagement really does just seem like motivated reasoning due to hating SO.

	▲	kstrauser a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If there is, I’m not creative enough to imagine it. I don’t contend that SO could survive AI. You’ll never hear me arguing that. However, that graph shows that it was already dying before AI became widely available. AI 100% certainly kicked it while it was down. It just cannot have been the cause of the downturn because the downturn was in full swing before AI could’ve had any effect at all.
	▲	11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

▲

bsder a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed.

StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".

Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.

After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.

THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.

▲ rhdunn 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's a combination of both...

Before AI people would still try asking questions on SO despite the hostility because it was the only/main place to get answers. Over this time, SO popularity was deteriorating.

After AI people who had bad experiences with asking questions on SO would ask the AI instead. This is because the AI wouldn't mark your question as a duplicate, wouldn't question its validity [1], etc. It would just answer your question. You could even ask it follow-up questions if the answer wasn't quite what you were looking for. All of this in real time, not waiting to get an answer.

[1] Unless the question triggered the safety gates that the AI companies have in place.

▲ kelnos a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.

	▲	listenallyall a day ago \| parent [-]
		the obvious reasoning is that the vast majority of common questions were already asked, and then still many, many uncommon questions, until the only things that hadn't been asked were very, very niche. It's the same reason complaints about mods marking lots of questions as duplicates didn't really pick up momentum until the mid/late 2010's.

▲ Bratmon 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Push factors and pull factors work together far more effectively than either do on their own.

▲ cowlevel a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's like how everyone hated dialup but still kept using it anyway until there was broadband.

▲ unrented7977 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L

▲ reaperducer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.

▲ grg0 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It is not obsolete insofar as it is a good source of Q/A material, which is useful to both humans (directly or indirectly) and bots. The only part of it that is obsolete is the search/query part. If the AI companies had an ounce of decency, they would see no problem injecting money into the platform to continue seeding that Q/A material which they have directly profited from. But investing in a commons is not on the playbook for vulture capitalism.