@nixCraft I don't agree with that narrative. ChatGPT didn't kill Stackoverflow : managers of SO did.

After ChatGPT launched, SO team decided that from now on, every question and answer on the site were going to be used to train a local LLM model. Everybody was angry at this, and everybody left. Including me.

I posted questions and answers on SO for more than ten years. After that decision from the team, I just logged out for the first time in years and never came back.

@nixCraft

I still don't get why everyone is still carrying that false "AI killed Stackoverflow" framing?

Stackoverflow was slowing as most RTFM questions were already asked, so anyone able to search didn't have to ask a new one - AI just made the finding those answers ahead of time much more likely.

SO (and other SE sites) are simply down to a higher degree of real questions.

@nixCraft There'll be few tears shed by people who were starting out with a new technology, wanted a place where they could ask a question to clarify their understanding, and then got told:

• "read the fucken manual, it's all in there"
• "this question has already been answered, did you bother searching? "
• "don't do that, do this instead"
• "this question is off topic, closed"

They could have remained relevant if they provided genuine value and true knowledge, not rewarded gatekeeping.

@nixCraft Not exactly to your point. I'm just wonderening: Wouldn't the numbers before ChatGPT be exactly what to expect from a knowledgebase platform? As soon as there is a solid stock of answered question, the need to ask new questions diminishes.

I created my account 12 years ago and asked exactly one question, but found many others already answered.

@nixCraft I hated asking questions on SO. Every time I asked a question along the lines "How do I do X in Y without Z?" a bunch of smartarses would pile on saying "You should really do Z or Q instead".

I'll be happy to see it go. The brigading trolls can go moderate reddit or some other shithole.

@nixCraft Idk the wack mod stuff came in once the questions got pretty niche. For years you could answer obvious questions and score huge rep, which, imo, helped drive the site’s actual growth — the growth of its knowledge base.

Then once the knowledge base was lain and questions became more user/use case-specific (or, yes, unf, also super simple ones that were often poorly written dupes, probably b/c there’s a correlation between bad search skills & bad composition), it felt like the good-natured, selflessly motivated answerers lost interest and moved on to more rewarding tasks.

TL;DR: It wasn’t the moderation that was killing SO before AI. It was SO’s natural conclusion.

(And, sure, b/c Joel & Co. sold the company, but don’t get me started on that disaster.)

@nixCraft this is going to back fire spectacularly or things will evolve.

Who knows. There's more accessible self hosting solutions than ever before. Maybe we just end up creating a more decentralized version of the web.

Imagine getting rid of having to pay for a registered domain and having a system of automated and endlessly federated domains.

@nixCraft

One can clearly see that the trend had started much earlier - then COVID gave it a shot in the arm, but then it just continued. LLMs only hastened that