[embedding-shape]

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.

[j_maffe]

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.

[ipaddr]

Right around the time Google rolled out new search results removed many information based sites.

[khalic]

"How AI precipitated SO's downfall" would be a correct title then

[pydry]

Add it to the list:

- the downfall of junior devs

- bad hiring market

- layoffs in practically every sector

theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.

[gwerbin]

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?

[pydry]

>I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial

I think if you actually look at the data for these trends rather than asking AI what it thinks you might experience some cognitive dissonance.

>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

It's called hiked interest rates. The economy is not doing so great for several reasons but the main one is wars.

[gwerbin]

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.

[khalic]

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

[pydry]

AI hype is still a million miles ahead and a million times dumber, especially thanks to online astroturfing.

[khalic]

By volume sure, a part of the anti AI crowd is pretty extreme though, death threads, bomb threads, etc.