Mastodawn

This chart shows the total number of Stack Overflow questions asked each month. As you can see, AI summaries in Google and AI coding tools have nearly killed the site. It is only a matter of time before the site shuts down completely. The golden age of independent news, blogs, forums, and specialized sites like Stack Overflow is over. Whether this is good or bad, only time will tell. Personally, I think we are now restricting all internet traffic to just a few Gen AI apps https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph

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nixCraft 🐧Jan 4

Independent sites cannot compete with companies like Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI, which have unlimited money. Even Wikipedia has mentioned this problem. They are losing a massive amount of traffic from Google. These AI apps do not give credit or send users back to the original source on the web. As a result, people are stopped from creating new Q&A or editing and adding information to Wikipedia.

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lazyraccoon83 Jan 4

@nixCraft perhaps that is the exact solution - legislation that forces all search based LLMs to provide hits, include commercial content or exposure provided by said website mandatory, or maybe just direct compensation in a b2b model. This data could be used in a class action lawsuit.

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The Penguin of Evil

@lazyraccoon @nixCraft it's been said from the start by copyright maximalists that 'AI' search should be giving answers like 'according to XYZ there is a relationship between A and B, would you like to purchase the paper', or 'I think the song you mean is Foo, would you like to play it on spotify.

Now it seems however we are going to go from no credit to 'Here are five songs from our advertisers that are vaguely related to your query'.