178
StackOverflow activity down to 2008 numbers
(aussie.zone)
from 10b0t0mized: I miss the days when I had to go through a humiliation ritual before getting my questions answered.
Now days you can just ask your questions from an infinitely patient entity, AI is really terrible.
Is the drop all due to AI?
Yes. But not just in the "obvious" way.
I first started to contribute back when LLMs first appeared. Then SO allowed became LLM training grounds. Which made me stop contributing instantly.
I guess a not-insignificant amount of people stopped answering questions, which means less search results, which ends in less traffic.
I'm sure the fall wouldn't be as big as it is if they didn't allow LLMs to train on their data.
How do you disallow LLMs to train on their data while still allowing humans to train on their data?
If they can charge for it. It means they can block it. https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/
You can also rate-limit. Blacklist known scrapper IPs.
And if it doesn't work. You make signing-in not optional. Which makes rate-limiting way easier.
The rate of human data consumption is much lower than LLM's. The humans won't even notice that they have a rate limit. At most they would only notice the need to create a stack overflow account.