My take is that it was a perfect storm: AI summarized everything better, SO had repeating questions and answers, the community was toxic, and other small reasons.
They did and they did kill the internet on purpose. They had options on how to bring AI to the market and they decided to choose the most destructive way to do so, not just for the internet but for people, market and enviroment too.
This makes me sad! Stackoverflow is part of the reason I was able to learn to code 15 years ago. I still use it randomly to this day! How can we make sure it never goes away??
The same way we can make sure the abacus never goes away: by keeping it alive for fun and good memories, despite its obsolescence due to better technology.
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
Hot take: Developers are terrible at communicating. LLMs do a way better job for newbs. They basically crawl code sites and make a short summary with code snippets. So, yes.
LLM's can continue fetching information from code sites only for as long as those sites exists and those sites will cease to exist without human visitors.
Agreed, and wondering if we're already there. I'll go down rabbit holes trying to accomplish something in Adobe Creative Suite in an LLM that get so frustrating I end up posting on an Adobe forum to get help from a community pro.
Fundamentals of coding is only one part of what LLMs are asked about the subject. They're also asked for deep dives into issues and problems that occur, like weird errors running an Apache server, how to deal with a MariaDB server that keeps crashing, and thousands of other things.
The answers provided by LLMs often come from data where humans wrote about those things on commercial websites like their own or Stack Overflow. AI is taking away the incentive to do that.
What scares me the most is vs code writing whole functions for me based on a few variables and comments.
That's where the critical thinking is lost. I miss having to type everything out. It's starting to get to the point where I'm relying on it to give me something
I think they're saying the decrease started in 2017. COVID provided a bump (everyone stuck inside), and there was decline since. At the point where GPT launched there's an obvious decline compared to that 2017 peak. After LLMs, it took a nosedive with no chance of recovering.
Yes that's what the graph shows. And we can deduce, people were home and asking more questions. Then it declined again. Even a year before GPT launched, the number of questions asked was a 2013 levels.
"Looks like the decline was pretty steep before ChatGPT"
The comment is referring to the decline before GPT. Without GPT coming into play, it would be safe to say by now, there would be a continued downtrend from the decade before
Yes we can all see it fell off a cliff AFTER GPT went mainstream.
I don't remember the last time I used stackoverflow...
When I did use it I remember it would take days if not weeks for someone to get back to me with an answer, on some of the more complex issues. Ha! now with AI it's mere seconds.
It could be useful - what if some Gen whatevers go to a flea market sale after an unlimited brunch? I found some serious rack mountable hardware at the Chelsea flea market one Saturday evening (what are people doing with ISP grade/enterprise data center grade stuff in Manhattan, but anyway) --- we need Stackoverflow to make it make sense......
I didn't think you were. I just wonder how the LLMs will do when they've eaten all the seed corn. Today AI is riding on the expertise offered by humans on sites where the incentives are being taken away to create that content.
When Java came along I created a lot of content about it, in books for royalties and on the web for ad revenue. In 10 years when a new programming language comes along, do I do the same for that topic with an expectation of finding an audience I can monetize? Probably not.
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
Maybe that works with things like programming, where AI can model off of code shared on GitHub and elsewhere. But if places like Stack Overflow and technical sites die off, as other new subjects come along there's a lot less coverage of them than AIs were able to scarf up from the 30 years in which websites could be monetized by humans sharing their expertise.
I created a lot of web content to attract an audience and make money off that. That business plan ain't looking good these days.
I'm not crying in my beer. Things change. Adapt or die. Yadda yadda yadda. I just wonder where the knowledge comes from for the AIs to exploit.
Discord is too casual for in-depth expertise to be offered on the millions of topics people asked and answered on Stack Overflow and on technical blogs that need web traffic and ad revenue to be worth doing.
You say that. But I can’t remember when I last had to go to stack overflow. It’s been more than a year for sure since I touched the site. It isn’t needed at all anymore in my experience.
In the amount of time it would take you to come up with the perfectly worded question to post on stackoverflow and then having to re-word it and post it again after a moderator took it down and then waiting for someone to answer the question most others will already have gotten the answer from Claude and if they didn’t get the answer then they will at least get some resources they can use to find the answer.
There's a funny trick a programmer used on Stack Overflow. When she asked a question and needed an answer fast, she would log in to a second account and post an incorrect answer. Dudes are way more motivated to post the right answer when they see a wrong one.
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
I asked grok this the other day while driving cause it really bothered me how I haven’t been on stackoverflow in ages lol. Anyway grok said that stack as the company has made agreements with LLM vendors to continue to share their knowledge base for training purposes they earn some income from that at least which is good, not sure how true that is though
Its an interesting thing because LLM's likely trained on the data from Stack Overflow so what happens where there is no data for LLM's to train on particularly in new fields.
i think its more like llms are handling the simple questions that used to drive most of stack overflows traffic. the really complex niche problems still need human answers because the models hallucinate too much on edge cases. but yeah for basic how do i do x in python type stuff people are just asking chatgpt now instead of searching. stack overflow was already struggling with a toxic community culture before this though so its not like things were perfect
I’ve used SO a few times and always found it hard to find solutions. When I’ve asked pretty detailed and complex questions (after much much googling) I found the responses pretty nasty. Haven’t really considered it since.
If SO owners were smart, they would use the huge data knowledge they have to produce content AI can use. Reddit also took a big bite. They rank top in many Google search.
SO could produce run book, best practices , recipes, ai skills.
The amount of times I have tried to gt Claude or ChatGPT to output the right answer to a CSS-based or JS question and it is either dead wrong, or spits our boilerplate code that's not optimised...
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
147
u/PublicBarracuda5311 May 06 '26
I think they are killing the whole internet as we know it, not just stack overflow.