Ask HN: Is Stack Overflow Dead?

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.

A year or more ago some poor guy asked a simple SO or SE question. I studied that for a while, tried multiple carefully crafted Google queries until I found one that gave a good correct AI result, posted a reply NOT POSTING THE AI RESPONSE, that would break their rules, ONLY telling the person what query to do to get an answer and urged them to study and test this carefully, and I posted that. Moments later I got a stern warning that my post had been torn down, likely because their AI hunter bots had seen the word AI in it, almost certainly before the original poster ever saw this. Nobody else ever even tried to help the person. Later, only slightly related, I realized it had been most of a year since anyone posted a question in the little SO and SE corners that I used to watch and so I scanned my last five years of posting little mostly trivial attempts to help users, many of those were "I think you've made a very simple mistake here..", some of those probably resulted in trivial fixes, usually the person didn't even respond to me. SO I thought I'd raise the average quality of posts slightly by going through and deleting my trivial posts. On both SO and SE their hunter bots immediately flagged me for doing this and I got messages from both telling me that all the stuff I had tried to help people by putting up over the last 5-30 years WAS THEIRS (SO and SE) AND BELONGED TO THEM!!! And I believe they put back some or all of my trivial stuff. And I stopped watching SO and SE.

I wouldn't want an answer like that, if I wanted AI replies of any kind I would ask AI myself instead of writing a question on StackOverflow.

Many subreddits are better organized than SO because they funnel newbie questions and duplicates to FAQs, wikis or daily question threads. SO does alert to similar questions during composition, but they're not often what the user is actually asking or not recognizable. subreddit wikis can better respond to that kind of perennial confusion.

Anecdote time:

I wanted to do a pause of 1 second in Chez Scheme, but I din't know the spell. I tried Google and Gemini gave me an example. It didn't work because the parameter were in the reverse order (seconds vs nanoseconds). So after looking at the manual and trying both orders, I got the result I wanted. (And reduced the time to .2 seconds, because 1 second was too long.)

In an hypothetical case that it were a SO question, I don't see why my answer would not be good.