[Avamander]

In one recent thread about StackOverflow dying, some people theorized that the success of LLMs and thus failing of SO could mostly be attributed to the amount of sycophancy of LLMs.

I tend to agree more and more. People need to be told when their ideas are wrong, if they like it or not.

[StableAlkyne]

There's also the communications aspect:

SO was/is a great site for getting information if (and only if) you properly phrase your question. Oftentimes, if you had an X/Y problem, you would quickly get corrected.

God help you if you had an X/Y Problem Problem. Or if English wasn't your first language.

I suspect the popularity is also boosted by the last two; it will happily tell you the best way to do whatever cursed thing you're trying to do, while still not judging over English skills.

[bsder]

SO is dying simply because SO became garbage.

It became technically incorrect. You couldn't dislodge old, upvoted yet now incorrect answers. Fast moving things were answered by a bunch of useless people. etc.

Combine this with the completely dysfunctional social dynamics and it's amazing SO has lasted as long as this.

[thephyber]

The technically incorrect issue is downstream of their rigid policies.

Yes, answers which were accepted go Python 2 may require code changes to run on Python 3. Yes, APIs

One of the big issues is that accepted answers grow stale over time, similar to bitrot of the web. But also, SO is very strict about redirecting close copies of previously answered questions to one of the oldest copies of the question. This policy means that the question asker is frustrated when their question is closed and linked to an old answer, which may or may not answer their new question.

But the underlying issue is that SO search is the lifeblood of the app, but the UX is garbage. 100% of searches show a captcha when you are logged out. The keyword matching is tolerable, but not great. Sometimes Google dorking with `site:stackoverflow.com` is better than using SO search.

Ultimately, the UX of LLM chatbots are better than SO. It’s possible that SO could use a chatbot interface to replace their search and improve usability by 10x…

[nurettin]

SO is officially dead according to the graph of number of questions posted per month.

Google+SO was my LLM between 2007-2015. Then the site got saturated. All questions were answered. Git, C# Python, SQL, C++, Ruby, PHP, most popular topics got "solved". The site reached singularity. That is when they should have frozen it as the encyclopedia of software.

Then duplicates, one-offs, homeworks started to destroy it. I think earth society collectively got dumber and entitled. Decline of research and intelligence put into online questions is a good measure of this.

[JohnMakin]

> People need to be told when their ideas are wrong, if they like it or not.

This is one of those societal type of problems rather than a technological one. I waffle on the degree of responsibility technology should have (especially privately owned ones) in trying to correct societal wrongs. There is definitely a line somewhere, I just don’t pretend to know where it is. You can definitely go too far one way or another - look at social media for an example