According to stats that you are not allowed to see, the flow of questions coming into StackOverflow on a daily basis has dropped by two-thirds since rise of large language models (LLMs).

In February 2023, SO saw 6,000 questions per day on average.  Now it’s down to 2,000 per day.

It’s not hard to figure out why.  If you have a technical question today, you have three options:

1. You can post on StackOverflow, sit back, and wait.  Hours or days later, you’ll get a response which may or may not be good.  You may not get a response at all.  The more obscure your problem, the less likely it’ll get a response.
2. You can ask ChatGPT, Copilot, or whoever and get a response in seconds.  It may not be right, but it’ll be actionable and you’re certain to get a response.  And it’s getting better all the time.

Even worse for SO, ChatGPT will happily answer any question you ask it.  It’s not going to complain that your question is too opinion-based and is not allowed on the site.  If you ask for the “best PHP framework” or example, it’ll give you an opinion you can research, not downvote you.  It’s not going to carp that you should have searched.  And you’re not going to run into some developer having a bad day who decides to downvote you for no reason.

Even better, once you have your answer, you’re under no moral obligation to vote up, mark it answered, etc.  You don’t need to feel obligated to answer other people’s questions, either.

Of course, this isn’t to say that it isn’t often more pleasant to get a well-thought-out answer from a human on SO.  Such answers reflect real-world experience and are not generally subject to hallucinations (though they are hardly infallible).

Then again, ChatGPT and other models train on SO answers, so…

And Now Comes the AMA

There are other problems in the community.  They banned AI answers, and then recently reversed the policy.  They endured a moderator revolt that was overshadowed by the Reddit drama at the time but was nonetheless highly disruptive.  The founders have largely left the community and the leadership seems more interested in adding signups than listening to its membership.

The upcoming AMA is already full of spicy questions:

• “Why do you seem to regularly implement features or experiments to Q&A that have overwhelmingly negative receptions when announced, instead of adjusting (or canceling) those features/experiments to address the concerns of your product users, or instead of implementing the features your products users are actually asking for?”
• “Why don’t you ever participate on meta or the rest of the network like the original founders did, in order to be able to get feedback from the community directly?”
• “Why, in your mind would anyone take the time to verify an AI answer rather than writing an answer or asking an AI themselves? And why would anyone ask a question on Stack Exchange to get an answer from an AI when they could ask that AI directly?”
• “Is there a reason the company doesn’t make use of the community it fosters here? It’s always touting how great/full of experts the community is, yet, both historically and certainly recently, it’s never really been a part of the company’s processes outside of surfacing bugs and marketing for SaaS.”
• “Most of our interactions with the CEO, and most senior staff seem to be stage managed and filtered to an extent at best (with exceptions), and rare or non existent at worse, and even if there’s good coverage of topics, it lacks a certain directness. We don’t really know most of the decision makers as we have in the past. Both quantity and quality of these interactions have value for mutual understanding.”
• “Will you actually take the time to personally read every one of these answers, or is this just another empty scheme attempting to ‘gain the trust of the community’?”

Should be entertaining.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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