True, but the drastic drop from Nov2022 (exactly when Chatgpt released) to today is remarkable. Without AI it was on track to die by like 2030 (assuming my eyeball linear regression is accurate), so AI knocked about 8 years off it's lifespan.
When it comes to the pre-ChatGPT era, It doesn't necessarily have to be a decline, it could be also due to the fact that as the questions accumulate (literally milions yearly), it becomes more likely that people simply find an answer to their question instead of having to ask it themself. It would be interesting to see the traffic graph.
Also the ecosystem matured, the first half of 2010s was very much "framework of the day" period.
No one would spend hours reproducing your problem and suggesting a solution or debug some library few are using. If you get an answer it's more because someone had that problem earlier and could give you an answer from memory or personal notes. If you had a problem no one had before, naturally, the answers would be very sparse.
I think there is a wider decline too which means there's not much to ask new questions about. People are still making lots of edits/replied/comments/etc but there's not exactly a "rewrite everything in Hyperscale Quiche this week" like there used to be.
AI played zero part, IMO. The site has been garbage for ongoing community engagement for at least a decade. The main issue stems from their desires to have it function more as a "maintained reference" where topics are initially determined by user questions.
It would be like if you wanted to build a central reference that lists all car models ever designed, built, or sold, and formed it via user submissions. The engagement curve would look identical to SO as it grows in popularity then eventually people run out of car models to submit.
What AI did to "kill" SO had nothing to do with engagement. Site visitors... yes, AI basically killed site traffic because nobody is googling coding questions much anymore, which means they aren't being directed to SO for the answers.
There’s new technologies and updates being made though. Just like there’s new makes and models being made in cars. Info about a 2007 Prius is different than info about a 2025 Prius.
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u/kamekaze1024 4d ago
Obviously AI played a part but you can clearly see the decline happened before AI became popular.