[ropable]

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing.

I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered. There was an enormous existing corpus of accepted answers around fundamental topics, and technology just doesn't change fast enough to sustain the site. Then the LLMs digested the site's (beautifully machine-readable) corpus along with the rest of the internet and now the AIs can give users that info directly, resulting in a downward spiral of traffic to SO, fewer new questions, etc.

Vale, Stack Overflow. You helped me solve many tricky problems.

[PeterStuer]

SO was great for a while, then went down the toilet, not because 'eveything had been answered', but because it became a playground of power hungry mods vs resume grinding freshmen patronizing and shutting down 90% of 'normal' users.

Even current AI is a 100x better experience than SO ever was.

We can all see how post knowledge scarecity and automated contextual niche adaptation reduces exploitation potential for knowledge production (often itself mere regurgitation), but the 'cures' proposed in the article feel very much worse than the disease.

[thr0waw4yz]

The issue with SO is also that the quality of the answers degrades over time. Asking similar questions will get closed as dupes while the referenced 2011 answer is basically useless nowadays.

[rcxdude]

I didn't help that SO had some very quirky expectations of how it should run, and failed to communicate those well, causing a constant friction between moderators and users. Also, there was often friction between the site admins and moderators, causing them to lose a lot of moderators over time as well.

[ralph84]

Prior to SO we had Usenet, mailing lists, and IRC. They weren't so bad before spammers found them.

[BrouteMinou]

Funny enough, you think that irc is dead, like most people, and the spammers... but let me tell you a little secret here:

[go_photon_go]

Stack Overflow should pivot to be an AI agents/local LLM information board and advertise the non-stack overflow stack exchange sites. There is a lot they could do.

[raincole]

> I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered

I believe that the rise of SO was mostly a miracle. A once-in-an-era thing. The evidence is all the other Stack Exchange sites. They all have the same UI and the same moderation model. If SO has some secret sauce they have it too. But most of them were pretty dead and never became an enormous corpus.

[sharadov]

At one point I was in the top 10 in the Experts Exchange Leaderboard! It sucked as a platform, but I did learn a lot helping answer questions.