The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it. You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation.

Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.

Some of the pre-ai decline in questions might just be that they had filled out of alot of the question space. What might be more interesting is the traffic graph as it would be possible to have a decline in questions but still have traffic rising to the existing ones.

Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.

Wrong, what SO did to themselves in a graph!

You cannot reply to a post to either provide correction or solution because you don't have enough "points" to do so.

You were forced to complete an insane list of requirements just to comment. Let that sink in.

Interesting that you can see COVID in the graph

The graph starts falling shortly after 2020. AI certainly contributed but Stack Overflow was dying without it.

AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene.

I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.

The hostile moderators killed stack overflow.

Pretty sure they did it to themselves with terrible policies and moderation. AI was merely the final nail in the coffin.

Interesting to compare with MathOverflow which has distinctly different policies (only research-level questions) and professional community: https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/1953768/st... - also falling lately, but by a factor of 2-3x from peak rather than 1000x.

They didn’t stand a chance. Even in the era where they made a great community etc etc AI would have destroyed them. Other people are just a poor source of information now that we have dramatically good search across all human knowledge.

One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.