Is Stack Overflow Dead?

It's a tragedy but I think it's true that SO has lost a significant amount of value given AI's new presence. Having said that, it's not like it's dead - it's a community of real people rather than an amalgamation of knowledge in a single tool. What sets SO apart and will always set it apart is that human aspect. For future problems that AI has no knowledge of, there will always be a group of people better equipped to answer questions through real life experience and deductions that AI simply cannot apply. I suspect in the next few years, SO will evolve into a platform that focuses on that human aspect because ultimately that's the only avenue I can see that would work. It's unlikely SO will die any time soon, it's more likely that the platform will find ways of pivoting to keep business flowing. It's not like SO is struggling for questions right now anyway, it continues to be a massively popular platform. Predicting the future is somewhat of a pointless task but I think it's safe to say, for now, that SO is still alive, and will be that way for a while at least.

If SO comes up in search results, I visit it. But I should also add that I usually skip reading "AI" results or summaries. There's usually nuance in SO questions and answers that "AI" leaves out.

It will be used to answer the harder questions that AI models can't answer.

I haven't used StackOverflow hardly at all since ChatGPT came out.

Unrelated to AI, I haven't really had a positive experience on StackOverflow in 7+ years. The way they aggressively close questions as duplicates despite the previous questions having incomplete or outdated answers was already making it a much less useful site.

If not, I bet everyone is waiting for it to die, and take hn with it.

I'm a Stack Overflow elected moderator (one of these users: https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators)

First, a disclaimer: I do not speak for other elected moderators, nor for Stack Exchange Inc. My views are my own.

Site traffic has been declining for a long time and that's not a mystery. Empirically, the rise of Large Language Models has sped up the decline or at least did not reverse the trend. This is both good and bad. Good because LLM's capture the vast majority of questions that would be quickly closed — underspecified, unclear, duplicate, not actually about programming, and so on. This increases the signal-to-noise ratio and average usefulness of SO questions. Bad because of all the implications of declining traffic that everyone can imagine.

Is it dead? No. In fact, SO has a great opportunity to specialize in answering questions that LLMs cannot answer (bleeding edge technology, complex debugging problems, emerging issues, you name it.) The community is still alive. Whether Stack Exchange Inc. is able to understand and adapt to this shift is unclear.

Company aside, the biggest challenge we moderators are facing is to identify and remove LLM-generated content. Keeping SO free of LLM-generated content is critical in helping the site maintain an edge against AI tools that provide quick and confident-sounding answers to whatever problem you throw at them. It's an uphill battle though, and one that is probably unwinnable, but the community hasn't given up yet.

When I was new to AWS and had questions, I found the AWS s subreddit to be a lot better. You have people specifically interested in the topic and you don’t have overzealous moderators.

There is also a higher tolerance for newbie questions and duplicates