alt Hacker NewsThe graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.
Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.
It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!
But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.
(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)
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> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated
[citation needed]
Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.
The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.
StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.
SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.
Yeah, this is much more accurate to what was actually happening. During that high period they struggled to get people to stop posting low-quality "do my homework" style questions - despite what people on here say the barrier for entry was extremely low and those made up the vast majority of what was posted.
I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.
You aren’t downvoted on Wikipedia. And people have been complaining about heavy handed editors and mods there for a long time. Same with SO.
It’s pretty much a meme now.
It's the same thing. Why did AI compete so aggressively with them? It's because their system was one that produced confident misinformation from hobbyists while gatekeeping actual experts.
The same thing is not yet happening to wikipedia as you can see with the pageview tool. You may be confusing a covid bump. At most any drop is within an order of magnitude.
Ouch, great, you should show that protocol you used to get causation out of an observational study to the entire scientific community! It's unclear what area will give you a Nobel Prize for that, but several of them will rush to do it first.
You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.
This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.
A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.
The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.
But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.
Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.
The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.