GoKawiilInteresting article: [Wayback/Archive] Stack Overflow’s forum is dead thanks to AI, but the company’s still kicking… thanks to AI – Sherwood News. with this important quote:
The complex questions still get asked on Stack because there’s no other place. If the LLMs are only as good as the data, which is typically human curated, we’re one of the best places for that, if not the best for technology.
I wonder about how far it has declined now, and also think these are reasons for the decline as well:
a lot of fundamental questions for each topic have already been asked
few new programming languages gained popularity over the last decade (I think golang was the last major one)
discussions on GitHub and to a lesser extent GitLab have taken over a lot of traffic
toxic behaviours on mainly the Stack overflow and meta site I mentioned in The toxic reactions to “What would be good alternatives to Stack Overflow for questions about software solutions to drive hardware? – Meta Stack Overflow”
Anyway, the graph in that post is just a sexy version of a query you can create yourself on the SEDE (Stack Exchange Data Explorer). That’s why I included both below.
If you are like me, you also want other measures, like seeing answers and comments: are these also dropping, if so do they drop at the same rate, and what’s the ratio over time of answers over questions, and comments over questions and answers?
Generating graphs like these yourself
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