[_mocha]

I'm a top 5% contributor to SO with around 300-400 answers (haven't actively answered a question in a while). One of the highlights of my career was seeing people benefit from those answers, post commentary, and update my answers. In the last year, there's actually been 0 engagement on all of my questions. One of the rare/sad aspects of how ChatGPT has impacted our community.

[BrenBarn]

I agree it's sad. There were a lot of positive aspects to the SO community.

[fooqux]

I have a love/hate relationship with the site, and I'm likewise conflicted by its eventual demise.

On one hand, it's an incredible place full of smart people and has some of the best rabbit holes to fall into. On the other hand, portions of the site (programming among them) has the worst culture imaginable and has likely turned as many people off from learning as it has helped.

[Waterluvian]

Not only does GPT lack the pretty nasty culture of SO, it’s so much faster to work with.

I anticipate SO will go into decline and get worse as a result. I wonder how much GPT will suffer without it as a source.

In a way, they’re kind of a match made in heaven: domain experts who share experience and knowledge not found in the user docs alone, cleaned of the antisocial nastiness usually filtered by tech writers and PR peeps.

[sien]

That's a very good point.

The AI chatbots could, with user approval, arguably create a new database of asked questions that they could research and add to.