This chart shows the total number of Stack Overflow questions asked each month.

[nixcraft@mastodon.social]

This chart shows the total number of Stack Overflow questions asked each month. As you can see, AI summaries in Google and AI coding tools have nearly killed the site. It is only a matter of time before the site shuts down completely. The golden age of independent news, blogs, forums, and specialized sites like Stack Overflow is over. Whether this is good or bad, only time will tell. Personally, I think we are now restricting all internet traffic to just a few Gen AI apps https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph

[nixcraft@mastodon.social]

Independent sites cannot compete with companies like Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI, which have unlimited money. Even Wikipedia has mentioned this problem. They are losing a massive amount of traffic from Google. These AI apps do not give credit or send users back to the original source on the web. As a result, people are stopped from creating new Q&A or editing and adding information to Wikipedia.

[77nn@goto.77nn.it]

@nixCraft

Of course there's no game. But do Google and a community of, just to say one, programmers or people passionale about anything, really need to measure the same metrics? All went to shit when said communities sold their soul to VCs since they only know the metric of money.

I personally see the future with a reflourishing of small (probably hyperfocused) communities run for the knowledge and experience sharing and not for profit.

[morl99@hessen.social]

@nixCraft while you have a point, what you write dos not apply in full intent to all of them. ChatGPT for example gives citations and links to web findings so the user can jump to the original content when performing web research.

[dreamos82@mastodon.world]

@nixCraft am i wrong or they made an agreement with open ai? I think that many people were disappointed by it. Even because in thisway stackoverflow willingly decided to give their own data to openai models.
Lot of people deleted their account for this reason. So...

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@dreamos82 @nixCraft and when users disagreed with their content being used for training and started removing their posts in protest, SO locked them out of their account. That decline is as much the responsibility of SO's own choices than it is of external LLM scraping.

[77nn@goto.77nn.it]

@morl99 @nixCraft

Yeah, they can jump to an Ai-slop filled website optimized for Ai crawlers. Or to an advertised website? Or there is any way to tell what is what if you never had to scroll three of four pages of search results on old search engines? You gotta develop some instinct and sensitivity, why should you stop at the first citation by an LLM and call it a day?