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.

I think Ai is not the issue here. SEO on the other hand very much. It’s not like any one ever went to stackoverflow to find a solution, it was just that they were the google results for a lot of things

I've only posted one question to SO, and it was enough to dislike the whole platform. LLM didn't kill it. SO killed itself with the broken community structure.

If there is not allowed to be duplicate questions isn't it by design that as the site and industry matures the number of posts go down.

Hug of death? Doesn’t seem to load for me

Wow!! I checked for English learners, Artificial Intelligence and GenAI as well and even they suck :D

Guess where these people went? Reddit?

Stack Overflow abuse and the rage it generated in me is sort of nostalgic. Kind of sad in a way that I can't quite recall the rage anymore.

By the way, at least as far as what it is showing me，SO is an AI site now. Home page Ask a question goes straight to an LLM doing RAG against Stack Overflow.

Edit: actually they tricked me into asking AI. The text box to ask AI is right next to what is actually an Ask A Question button that skips the AI.

It's training data seems limited or out of date because it had no idea what Gemma 4 E2B was. It just said that wasn't in the SO data and could I explain wtf I was talking about please. I guess not Gemma 3 either. And no web search. So it's useless for me today.

Interestingly, the Stack Overflow AI answer is provided by OpenAI, and these may be the most useless responses I have seen any time recently.

Whaddyaknow. Got me a little twinge of the good ole' rage tingles after all!

AI was the final nail but SO was already on a downward trajectory imo. Too much angry rule setting and confident jerks.

Hehe, I'm so glad I blew the lid on this thing some time ago.

Mods were so shitty I always wanted to have my schadenfreude on them.