[cthalupa]

This is an article that I agreed with more reading the headline than I did when I finished reading the article itself.

Stack Overflow peaked in 2014 before beginning it's downward decline. How is that at all related to GenAI? GPT4 is when we really started seeing these things get used to replace SO, etc., and that would be early 2023 - and indeed the drop gets worse there - but after the COVID era spike, SO was already crashing hard.

Tailwind's business model was providing a component library built on top of their framework. It's a business model that relies on the framework being good enough for people to want to use it to begin with, but being bad enough that they'd rather pay for the component library than build it themselves. The more comfortable it is to use, the more productive it is, the worse the value proposition is for the premium upsell. Even other "open core" business models don't have this inherent dichotomy, much less open source on the whole, so it's really weird to try and extrapolate this out.

The thing is, people turn to LLMs to solve problems and answer questions. If they can't turn to the LLM to solve that problem or answer that question, they'll either turn elsewhere, in which case there is still a market for that book or blog post, or they'll drop the problem and question and move on. And if they were willing to drop the problem or question and move on without investigating post-LLM, were they ever invested enough to buy your book, or check more than the first couple of results on google?

[worik]

I feel no nostalgia for Stackoverflow.

I always found it very frustrating that for a person at the start of the learning curve it was "read only"

Actually asking a naive question there was to get horribly flamed on the site. It, and the people using it, were very keen to explain how stupid you were being

LLMs on the other hand are sweet and welcoming (to a fault) of the naive newbie

I have been learning to use Shell script with the help of LLMs, I could not achieve that using SO

Good riddance

[apercu]

That was sort of my experience as well. I already had more than a decade of development experience, asked maybe two questions in a 6 month window (not easy ones), and instead of answers got negative remarks. Never logged in again.

I should note that the first time I asked question, I also spent hours reviewing other unanswered requests - and if memory serves me - while I didn't have solutions for any of them, I gave concrete examples of how to debug the problem(s) to narrow down the variables.

I'd estimate that this was around 2012. Never went back after that.

[georgefrowny]

It was very strange to me how StackOverflow consistently, every time it was mentioned everyone had exactly the same complaints and nothing changed. They can't have been unaware of the reputation or the sinking activity rates.

[shagie]

There are multiple groups on Stack Overflow with different (and sometimes conflicting) goals and desires.

Corporate measured "engagement" and has been trying things to make that number go up.

The curators of the site... if they could have tools to measure would be measuring the median quality of the questions being asked and the answers being given.

People asking questions on the site have changed from the "building a library goal" with the question as a prompt to "help me with this problem" - but rarely not sticking around.

---

The sinking activity rates have had alarms going for many years... but remember that engagement was being measured and while that's sinking, comments were engagement so the numbers (ad impressions) at corporate level were getting measured differently.

The reputation has been something, but there's a disconnect between what "hostile" means and what "toxic" means between the people making the claims and how it's being interpreted.

That reputation was interpreted (by corporate and to an extent, diamond moderators) as "people are mean in comments" - and that isn't the case. People are not mean in comments. However, the structure of the site being focused on Q&A rather than discussion for someone who wants discussion with the people who are there to provide answers to questions will find the environment innately hostile.

Without changing the site from a Q&A (and basically starting over - which corporate has tried, but the people who are providing quality answers aren't going there because they don't want discussions - if they wanted discussions they would be commenting on HN or Reddit), that change can't really be done. The attempts to try to change how people are approaching the site run into a "this would reduce 'engagement'" and people asking questions to get help for their problem not accepting the original premise of building a library. ... And that's resulted in conflict and decreasing curation (which are often the people who were the ones providing the expert answers).

----

So while they have been aware, (I believe) corporate has been trying to solve the wrong problems at odds with both the people asking questions ("help me now") and the remaining curators.

[geoduck14]

>So while they have been aware, (I believe) corporate has been trying to solve the wrong problems at odds with both the people asking questions ("help me now") and the remaining curators.

This feels spot on

[pixl97]

>They can't have been unaware of the reputation

Management can be idiots longer than a site can remain solvent.

[direwolf20]

For years every single company announcement has been downvoted to -500 and flooded with comments and answers saying it's terrible and what the real problems are. They don't care. Now they are finding out.

[kamaal]

>>Actually asking a naive question there was to get horribly flamed on the site. It, and the people using it, were very keen to explain how stupid you were being

AI's biggest feature is being able to ask it question and not getting humiliated and judged in the process.

[nomadygnt]

I see what you mean, but the problem is that the LLM provider is trying to provide all the value from the book to the user without the user needing to look at the book at all. I agree if the LLM fails to do so then there is a market for the book. But the LLM provider is trying to minimize that as much as possible. And if the LLM succeeds at providing all the value of the book to the user, without providing any value to the book creator, then in the future there is no incentive to create the book at all, at which point the LLM has no value to provide, etc etc etc.

[cthalupa]

Sure - but I think this makes it a self equalizing problem, more than it eating it's own tail.

[randomNumber7]

Regardles of the graphs, if there would be no LLMs junior devs would still use stackoverflow at least sometimes.

Before the LLM time there was actually the problem that google often showed SEO spam sites that harvested content from stackoverflow.