Slightly accelerated their decline. You have a drop around chatgpt release then the slope returns to its previous pace of decline.

I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones).

It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing

AI and ridiculously aggressive moderation. If it had been a more welcoming place it probably would have lasted longer.

I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.

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.

What I like about AI is that it doesn't close my chats as "duplicate" and link to something unrelated. It doesn't refuse to tell me how to do something just because there's another way to do something else that I am not interested in and didn't ask for.

There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.

Just like stackoverflow saved developers from experts exchange, it might be able to save us from what is coming from AI being an averaging engine by default and generating average code. Hopefully it's average but always works.

My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…

Looks like the decline started before the ai boom.

I can relate. I was active there from 2009 until about 2014, which looks rather like a plateau in the graph. It still showed up in Google searches but I mostly just lost interest in participating.