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.
I believe it’s more of a generational shift.
The age groups who used to rely on SO are now skilled enough not to rely on it as much (or they more often have the types of questions SO can’t answer).
Younger age groups probably prefer other means of learning (like ChatGPT, Discord and YouTube videos).
Yeah I’m working in some niche and there is a stackoverflow that they refer newbies to because "no developer support on their discord“. But if you ask a question there no one will ever answer, otoh if you know where and how to ask you’ll actually get help on discord. I feel like SO is pretty much dead with anything where change happens quickly.
There’s also only so many ways to ask how to sort a list or whatever and SO removes duplicate questions. So at some point the number of unique questions asked begins to plateau. I think that explains the slow drop before LLMs came on the scene.
I assumed it was because stackoverflow already had all the answers I needed except for the things too obscure to search for that result in my crying and trying to piece it together from scraps of info on 50 different tabs.