Earlier rant: StackOverflow is losing traffic because of obvious reasons.

Today: OverflowAI https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/07/...

https://jlericson.com/2023/07/...?

Tech-specific discords were the initial nail in the coffin.

But chatGPT, copilot X, and other coding related AI definitely humbled them.

Stackoverflow used to be a place where genuine experts hung out,to answer genuinely interesting questions.

Those days ended long ago, and ever since it's become more and more of a place where beginner, samey questions are asked and answered in the same way by rep whores wanting to reach that 100k mark. So no wonder they're doing this, really.

@Nanos It's where SO *used* to be different. Beginner questions were shut down as duplicates because they'd been asked already, and the site was marketed towards professional and enthusiast devs - not beginners.

It's where you could go to get in-depth answers on the inner workings of Hibernate sessions, or GCC optimisations with particular versions, or JVM bytecode hacking - complex stuff that would have got you tumbleweed elsewhere. Experts in loads of fields generally hung around there and it showed.

Problem is, the latest swathe of management essentially shut the experts out, focused on driving traffic instead, went down the "SO is for everyone!" route and went for the short term gains. Those gains are now over, all the experts have moved on, and so the platform has lost all of its ongoing value. Now they're just trying to grasp at straws to extract value from the old content that remains by using AI. honestly, I suspect the whole thing will be dead within another 5 years or so.

@AlmondSauce well they tried that SO for teams. That seems like it flopped. And now they're jumping on the AI bandwagon. Seems like it's already the beginning of the end.

@gagan-suie Yup, absolutely. SO for teams tries to monetise the Q&A *format* rather than the expertise the platform used to have. If they'd have tried that 10 years ago, there might have been some merit in it - the format was greener and more hyped back then, and companies would have likely bought into it more.

They might hit upon a niche or a gimmick that keeps them going a bit longer, but the core principle of a place where professional programmers could ask, and answer professional, tough questions is long since dead.