Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.
I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial. There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI, and strong reason to believe that we would see it with AI. So we have a model that makes testable predictions, and data strongly consistent with those testable predictions, in the form of an acceleration of existing downward trends. What more do you want?
Hiked interest rates cause a decline in Stackoverflow activity?
My answer doesn't change. Against the background of other phenomena already causing various trends, we see acceleration of those trends consistent with a testable hypothesis about the effects of AI adoption in industry. In most fields of science that's good evidence in favor of the model.
And no I didn't ask AI about it, this is my own opinion and my own perspective.
People love simplistic narratives, i usually don't mind but this is just ridiculous. AI hate is gently overtaking AI hype as the most stupid thing around
It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.
Just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times.
Are you discarding the utility of Gaussian functions in analysis simply because the independent variable is time? A Gaussian curve can be used as a descriptive model without claiming that the observations themselves are a probability distribution
The fit does not prove causation, but it does show that the decline was already well described by a trend that began years before generative AI. If the claim is that 2023 created a separate structural break, it's different claim then the title describes
You mean the fall to a thousand questions per month. Now that the volume is low enough someone has a chance of looking at every single one of them, maybe the StackOverflow community can finally collaborate in peace, safe from the onslaught of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation.
I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.
> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years
Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only
need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it.
AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already
largely prior to AI.
You are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.
Fitting a mathematical function to a dataset does not implicitly adopt the ontological baggage of probability theory. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of applied mathematics
That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?
A bell curve is not an "amortised function." Amortization applies to accounting and algorithmic time complexity, not probability distributions. You're likely thinking of a Probability Density Function (PDF). If you are going to police terminology, it helps to use the correct words. Second, fitting a curve with an R^2 of 0.911 is the exact opposite of "making shapes out of clouds.