What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.

Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.

> 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.

This was long before LLMs.

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

I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.

You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues.

I hope somebody saves it all.

> 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.

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.

This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.

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.

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.

There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.

It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"

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.

Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI?

I don't buy it.

>"no conversation please"

Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that

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.

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."

I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.

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.

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 remember a time when people were posting their SO link and karma on their resumes. O how have the times changed.

check the graph and superpose the ai adoption curve, you're right to be skeptical

The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

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?"

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.

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.

this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.

This isn't really a bell curve.

You don't just fit a Gaussian distribution to a timeseries dataset. That's not what a Gaussian curve is designed for at all. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regr...

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.

That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.

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.

> There's no one drop where "AI got into the market"

Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.

There is a pretty sharp acceleration of that decline around 2022/2023.

Two years before ChatGPT is shortly after Joel and Jeff sold Stack Overflow to private equity.

The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.

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.

If you made a chart showing real human activity on reddit I imagine there's a big decline. The obviousness of bots and bot upvoting is undeniable

There's still a question of what that would do for them. I haven't used SO in years because I haven't needed it in years.

That's primarily due to AI answering my technical questions.

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.

The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.

That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.

Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.

The trend might've stalled or even reversed if it weren't for AI, we can't just assume the same end was written in stone.

Careful - the LLM companies are also modern day dictators and pharoahs.

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.