SO was invented as a Q&A site, where human experts might answer specific technical questions, in a precise, preferably provable way. This is what machines now do well enough.

But there's a need to talk to human experts, learn their opinions, personal experience, non-obvious bits. E.g. I enjoyed asking certain questions at Software Engineering and Emacs SE sites. Sometimes I just ended up talking with a maintainer of a specific package I had questions about. This is something Claude and ChatGPT cannot easily replace, and maybe something that may keep certain SO communities alive. (Unless Reddit eats the remnants of their lunch.)

OK, let's get this out of the way:

1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.

2. AI clearly finished the job.

I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.

SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It dropped off a cliff when, 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow. Even then, it looks like 4 months of ChatGPT speed-ran about a year's worth of traffic decline, and then the slope went back to approximately the pre-AI angle.

I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/DN5N90L

You're underselling it. It's less than in their second month of existence - and that has been true every month for the past year. For the last few months it's also lower than their first month. Stack Overflow, effectively, no longer exists.

And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.

No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.

I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.

I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.

When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)

Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.

Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.

Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.

Reddit is going the same way.

I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.

Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.

Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.

But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.

StackOverflow jobs was great when it existed, found great opportunities through there. So dumb they killed it especially with LLM's eating their core business.

Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use

StackOverflow is great if your question is "How would we have done X back in 2012?" Because you can't re-ask or re-answer questions that have had their correct answers change as technology changed. So the sites is stuck back in time when each question was first answered.

Related discussion What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph (483 points, 3 months ago, 595 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949

They should reboot, focused on

1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and

2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)

This does four things simultaneously:

1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model

2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)

3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.

4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems

Fewer than 1,000? To be honest, even before AI, I'm surprised it ever got more than 50 or a 100 in some StackExchanges. It was on borrowed time especially after reading a lot about the moderator drama/issues.

SO has been useless for years now, but the other Stack Exchanges can be interesting, they deserve more spotlight.

And how much was AI trained on their data? That's the sad part. Nobody asking new questions, so not much more for AI to train from.

as a student i remmeber ikept getting my questions removed even after trying to follow every rule. this one time i decided i will use their top questions as a template just to test it, so i did i made sure it was a new question, following each rule

It was also deleted, die already stack overflow

This might be the saddest, non-family related thing ive seen in years.

I love you stack exchange and all related sites.

All yall need to keep learning

SO turned into a place that heavily favoured their experienced answerers over new answerers and askers. Admittedly, I fell into the former camp: someone with some excess time on his hands and an itch to answer interesting questions - and like most of the experienced answerers, I ended up being very disinterested in answering homework questions, “lazy” questions, and the like. “Downvote and move on” was the motto.

In hindsight, one thing we could’be done - as a community - was leave easy questions to be answered by new answerers. There’s still a lot of careful design to consider here - how do you avoid “broken windows” for newbies (and search engines), how do you moderate posts that the experienced users don’t/won’t interact with, etc. On the other hand, it would get those questions answered, give new answerers a chance to gain experience (and points) without getting beaten to the punch by some 100k’er, and generally reduce that air of unfriendliness and elitism that eventually permeated the site.

In any case, for better or for worse, I guess we have LLMs now. The real loss is the deep expertise embodied by all the answerers on SO. While 90+% of questions can probably be answered now by an LLM, it was nice to have a place where those remaining few questions could get a real, deep answer.

I do not miss StackOverflow. It wasn’t a community, it was a toxic environment that rewarded asshole behavior.

If there is any proof that no one will be writing code, this is it.

I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.

I'm curious if the quality of AI answers will get worse without public sources like Stack Overflow or if LLMs have gotten to a point where that doesn't matter as much.

Still over $100M in revenue, now mainly from AI and Enterprise customers.

https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...

Deserved.

Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:

* 1 trip to mars

* 10 trips to the Moon

* Converted water to wine

The worst system until you can finally help others.

Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.

A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.

They get that many?!

Stackoverflow wasn't killed by AI, it's long dead because of those "Closed Question" bummbers.

I've never seen an online community incentives vandalism rather than contributions.

Yeah, this is definitely due to AI.

But let me address the "toxic" moderation. They needed something like appeals courts. SO should have installed a layers above the community mods that could review and rebuke the decisions of the "lower" mods to steer things.

Oops, all assholes.

Mods are finally happy.

It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated. Just like a bronze sword.

Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.

I have some wishful thinking for everyone reading this: what if the people at StackOverflow built one of the best bot protections out there? I would honestly expect the graph to go up with all the LLMs and automated content spamming..

I do have a webarchive of StackOverflow on some backup disc somewhere - just in case :D

I blame that one Jon Skeet dude for answering everything.

And here's why: https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-ove...

LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:

Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?

A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]

I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.

Woooow. That makes me feel... old.

Meh… you can't create duplicated questions on SO so obviously 20 years later there is not much left to ask.

A better metric would be visits per month… which probably doesn't look very pretty too. I used to visit SO every day several times a day for like 15 years: ask a technical question on google, click on the first SO result, get the solution I was looking for. Now I still ask google but I just have to read the AI Overview to get the solution I'm looking for…

I don’t think they’re gonna be long for the world

I answered a number of questions on there. Some non-native English speaker started going my answers and making language editing suggestions. The grammar was fine. I refused all the changes because they were at best basically the same or at worst incorrect. I refused maybe 4-5. The next day the guy got on and had done a bunch more then went to some of my answers and made hostile comments about my answers on simple things like Pandas for Python.

That was that for that site.

good, make it die faster

This question has already been asked?

Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.

It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.

It is sad because it was such a well designed community. But its lessons live on.

The highly technical sites -- StackOverflow, Unix & Linux, MathOverflow -- see little use.

Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.

Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.

I am amazed it's still that high

The question that a lot of people aren’t asking, these AI models were trained on human actual data, researches, answers, and books. Now AI removed the need to create those and people aren’t incentivized to make any new ones, the newer models say in a year or so will be trained on slop, piles and piles of slop, how’s their intelligence will be?

SO suffered from its success and, bluntly, the laziness of humans.

I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.

I stopped contributing.

I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).

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