Stack Overflow's forum is dead thanks to AI

Summary

Interesting article: [Wayback/Archive] Stack Overflow’s forum is dead thanks to AI, but the company’s still kicking… thanks to AI – Sherwood News. with this important quote: The complex questions still get asked on Stack because there’s no other place. If the LLMs are only as good as the data, which is typically human curated, we’re one of the best places for that, if not the best for technology. I wonder about how far it has declined now, and also think these are reasons for the decline as well: Anyway, the graph in that post is just a sexy version of a query you can create yourself on the SEDE (Stack Exchange Data Explorer). That’s why I included both below. Graph: Stack Overflow’s Forum’s Decline Started Years Ago, But Al Killed The Platform For Good; Horizontal data: year; Vertical data: Number Of Questions Asked [Monthly, including deleted questions]; Rise from 2008-24, peak during Covid-19 in 2021/2022, decline from 2024 when ChatGPT got launched If you are like me, you also want other measures, like seeing answers and comments: are these also dropping, if so do they drop at the same rate, and what’s the ratio over time of answers over questions, and comments over questions and answers? Generating graphs like these yourself If you want to regenerate a very similar graph, check out the query [Archive] Questions per month including deleted – Stack Exchange Data Explorer SELECT DATEFROMPARTS(YEAR(CreationDate), MONTH(CreationDate), 1) AS [Month], COUNT(*) AS [Questions] FROM PostsWithDeleted WHERE PostTypeId = 1 GROUP BY DATEFROMPARTS(YEAR(CreationDate), MONTH(CreationDate), 1) ORDER BY [Month] ASC That was my starting point after a quick search, and the base of all my queries below. The above query resulted in this graph: [Archive] Questions per month including deleted – Stack Exchange Data Explorer (graph) [Wayback/Archive] 536362203-4db75341-a0c7-4b64-a6ec-e67f80575005.png (1003×535) Answers per month including deleted The is a similar graph as the above one, ...