RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/115835690251372850
an additional interesting thing about this graph is that questions were growing steadily until ~2014, then plateaued and actually started falling in 2018, well before AI. people went to Stack Overflow because they had to, not because it was a welcoming and supportive human community.
which is to say, i definitely think there's a "market" for human-centered tech advice/discussion, but the kind of community they fostered at Stack Overflow sucked. i'm pretty happy to have LLMs instead.
SO was really great at first, when it was full of really brilliant experts asking and answering questions. Best of the best.
But then came the not so experts and not so brilliant, and there was a flood of terrible answers and terrible questioners that approved terrible answers. It become an online game where unqualified people made up answers in order to raise levels, so they maybe get a job.
Even worse, at first, all questions had up to date answers, but after a decade, most of the answers are outdated.
Maybe they should have created a newbie and an expert version. Or start deprecating old questions. Who knows.
