just today I googled "convert PDF to Jpg" and the first stackoverflow answer was a hit on google and the question was "CLOSED, NOT APPROPRIATE".

The company my friend works for has a slack channel for help with code, like an internal stackoverflow. It’s almost inactive now.

I asked to see one of the questions from 2024 - it could have been solved with one LLM search.

We have eliminated a whole genre of peer to peer communication.

Should read what Google did to remove sites from search results.

Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.

It wasn't only LLMs it was also the downright user-hostile attitude prevalent on many sites on the SE network: https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX

Yeah, bro, I'm not a statistics professor so I can't provide you with the "details or clarity" you need. I tried my best and if that's not enough, fuck it. Same story on history.SE: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hi... If you're gonna require "evidence of prior research" I won't bother. The bots are way friendlier and just as knowledgeable.

The golden goose were users asking questions, not the anal-retentive content curators. SO let the latter drive away the former.

AI didn't start the decline, it just finished it.

They had a good run!

Perhaps the harshest lesson of stackoverflow is that it represented what happens when you give programmer-types unfettered control of a culture. A bitter pill indeed.

This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in 2008, and I would reason it took a few years, say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.

It still has some value today, as sometimes you can find useful information on SO, but its peak days are long over and I don't see how it can manage to come back, with or without AI slop. It would basically require a lot of re-design and some things that never worked, such as the karma system, should be changed. Also moderators - they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.

AI didn't kill SO, SO was already declining due to toxic users and lack of organization. The toxic users were dunning-krugerian anal-retentive mini-Napoleons who delighted in locking anything slightly off-topic and merging slightly-related questions, and the lack of organization was a tendency for people to give incorrect answers but still get upvoted (due to Google search surfacing the page in the wrong context).