What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph • Hacker News Board

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#111

Post by mort96 » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:15 PM UTC

f311a wrote: post #96

wtfHN26 wrote: post #29

Looks like SO was already dying since 2017. I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards. AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.

The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.

Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#112

Post by amelius » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:17 PM UTC

nolok wrote: post #9

SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community. I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"

Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI?

I don't buy it.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#113

Post by mort96 » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:17 PM UTC

avaer wrote: post #32

The collapse into a ghost town is striking. Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO. This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transfo…

There still are worthwhile questions to answer! People just don't ask them on SO because SO chased away everyone who wanted to ask questions, long before ChatGPT.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#114

Post by amelius » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

I miss Joel Spolsky's writings especially in this dark age of AI.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#115

Post by Snoopfrogg » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

Sadge

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#116

Post by erelong » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

As others said it wasn't just AI but their excessive moderation

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#117

Post by baq » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #112

nolok wrote: post #9

SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community. I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"

Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI? I don't buy it.

People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#118

Post by emanueleielo » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#119

Post by antonvs » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

j_maffe wrote: post #68

khalic wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

check my other response, it's very much a bell curve, statistically speaking https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb

> statistically speaking 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 the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standard deviation.

The general notion of a bell-shaped curve is broader than that. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function

> “typically continuous or smooth, asymptotically approach zero for large negative/positive x, and have a single, unimodal maximum at small x.”

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#120

Post by baq » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 1:23 PM UTC

executivevice wrote: post #85

lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system real…

It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.