alt Hacker NewsWhat AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
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asking why SO declined is itself a question that would get closed as a duplicate on SO
Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.
Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
AI and ridiculously aggressive moderation. If it had been a more welcoming place it probably would have lasted longer.
When an ecological shoes company pivot to AI, I wonder why StackOverflow executives don't pilot for AI now.
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.
Perhaps the harshest lesson of stackoverflow is that it represented what happens when you give programmer-types unfettered control of a culture. A bitter pill indeed.
As others said it wasn't just AI but their excessive moderation
Yeah, I don't remember when was the last time I even visited stackexchange. AI is so much better, it's not even a contest. The real question is where AI will get its knowledge in 10 or 15 years when there is no training material anymore...
Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
Should read what Google did to remove sites from search results.
SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc
And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.
AI didn't start the decline, it just finished it.
Did anyone use the site search? Whenever I tried it it was disappointing. After ~two attempts I always went back to Google. Having the answer is of no use if you refuse to give it. LLMs didn't happen overnight. With all the aging questions, perhaps it was always doomed to be replaced by something.
Discussion in January:
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345
And previously in 2025:
Stack overflow is almost dead
I can't see any specific "and then AI happened" in this graph? SO made a lot of dumb choices that made it less and less useful for people independent of forcing AI in there, nothing in this graph is a clear indicator that AI was even a blip on the rapid decline of a service intent on making itself as poor an experience as possible for folks wanting to help other folks.
no wonders, this will keep going on same trend
The site for lazy code monkeys is dead.
They had a good run!
Slightly accelerated their decline. You have a drop around chatgpt release then the slope returns to its previous pace of decline.
Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
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.
Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.
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.
people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird.
i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.
StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.
Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.
I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.
By now I’m more and more starting to wonder how this graph looks for Google itself
Sadge
joining the space and getting to know this site in 2015ish it was toxic af, well deserved
that must be depressing to the owners and the investors.
same story for blogs
AI didn't kill SO, SO was already declining due to toxic users and lack of organization. The toxic users were dunning-krugerian anal-retentive mini-Napoleons who delighted in locking anything slightly off-topic and merging slightly-related questions, and the lack of organization was a tendency for people to give incorrect answers but still get upvoted (due to Google search surfacing the page in the wrong context).
There's always going to be lots of latent insecurity among amateurs when a pro shows up.
Honestly because of this and the relative lack of actual pros on the site, real pros will get pushed out and the site will actually build a collection of misinformation. That's probably why pros feel that software quality has dropped so much in since stackoverflow.
SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet.
I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too.
And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes.
Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help.
Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely.
There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high.
Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.
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.
The company my friend works for has a slack channel for help with code, like an internal stackoverflow. It’s almost inactive now.
I asked to see one of the questions from 2024 - it could have been solved with one LLM search.
We have eliminated a whole genre of peer to peer communication.
Now that Stack Overflow is mostly dead, what's the experience of asking a question there? Will you still get berated or are people chilled out?
It wasn't only LLMs it was also the downright user-hostile attitude prevalent on many sites on the SE network: https://ibb.co/WWgwNBpX
Yeah, bro, I'm not a statistics professor so I can't provide you with the "details or clarity" you need. I tried my best and if that's not enough, fuck it. Same story on history.SE: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60710/how-did-hi... If you're gonna require "evidence of prior research" I won't bother. The bots are way friendlier and just as knowledgeable.
The golden goose were users asking questions, not the anal-retentive content curators. SO let the latter drive away the former.
Stackoverflow deserved to die
This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in 2008, and I would reason it took a few years, say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.
It still has some value today, as sometimes you can find useful information on SO, but its peak days are long over and I don't see how it can manage to come back, with or without AI slop. It would basically require a lot of re-design and some things that never worked, such as the karma system, should be changed. Also moderators - they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.
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The move the current companies are missing is to have a legislation declaring ai as a person. Just like how corporations are people, if ai is a person then they don’t have to show number of people fired, can argues content creation and engagement is through the roof and so many other possibilities. /s
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Wikipedia seems to be going the same way.
Picking on SO and the mods in particular is a popular HN pasttime. I'd like to add that I interacted a bit with SO (1k points) and never really had any problems with them. I must be lucky...
Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.
Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.
Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.
Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.
Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.
Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?
Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?
AI was the final nail but SO was already on a downward trajectory imo. Too much angry rule setting and confident jerks.