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    "without a reoccurring influx of new users" - Maybe SE's Q/A model has finally found its limit. Nowadays the "average user" doesn't want to search through a well stablished knowledge base. Instead, they prefer to ask the same question again and again, either here or to an AI (even if the former can give better solutions, they still choose the latter). I believe it's an irreversible trend, and there's not much more to do. Maybe SE should close the sites to new content (as most of the new posts are crap) and leave them in read-only mode (as most pageviews are from non-logged users anyway). Commented Dec 11, 2024 at 19:09
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    For what it's worth, @hkotsubo, if true, it's not a new phenomenon. People have been struggling with that since the days of IRC. "RTFM" first appeared around 40 years ago. The desire to ask one's question in a personal way and receive an answer from another person is timeless, and a perennial problem for spaces that claim to offer those answers. (I'd guess that it partially explains some friction users have with duplicate closures: whether or not the closure is right, it feels like a system redirecting them instead of a person responding to them.) Commented Dec 11, 2024 at 19:14
  • I generally agree that dupe handling is necessary, but I fear that by only allowing novel or new questions severely hampers the community’s ability to grow. By having such a tight hold on new answerers to the point where they often receive comments lamenting that they answered a dupe, it chokes out newer answerers from being able to grow and improve in the same way I did when I was new here. I don’t know what the solution is (or that it’s even a problem), this is just my observation. Commented Dec 11, 2024 at 19:18
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    @hkotsubo I think you'd find "people these days..." just echoes the same concerns as in the olden days. The network has been struggling with duplicate questions since its inception. Because it's the same thing as before SE existed. It was created partly in response to incessant repeat questions over and over. So there would finally be a place on the internet you can find the question before you asked it. Trying to blame "modern users" for this trend shows blindness for why SO exists at all. Commented Dec 11, 2024 at 19:20
  • @Slate and VLAZ: Sorry for the misunderstanding, let me try to rephrase it. I didn't mean that only new users are responsible for that. My point is that currently, most users behave this way (regardless of when they started participating). The prefer-to-ask-again behaviour must be an old thing, but my perception is that in the past they weren't the majority in SE sites (or at least the problem was more manageable), and now they are, to the point of making the Q/A model unfeasible. Commented Dec 11, 2024 at 19:32
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    People ask again because they haven't found an answer, if they had an answer they wouldn't be asking. unfortunately it's a nearly impossible thing to fix, because you can't just make people good at finding answers or understanding what exactly it is they even need to ask. the Stack Overflow solution to it with dupe closure was a revolutionary solution, 15 years ago, and still mostly works. Commented Dec 11, 2024 at 19:40
  • @hkotsubo the general explanation of the plateau we saw in 2014 was that SO reached it's limit... that user attrition finally caught up with user growth, that SO had somehow reached it's limit in terms of how long it could keep an engaged user compared to yearly user growth. That it was more or less doomed to, each year, lose a larger number of engaged users. but... I'd argue what we're actually seeing is less and less new users. Less new users who find reason to pick up the torch. Less new users who even bother to click through the quick answer to SO to see the source. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 6:36
  • In a sense, mission accomplished, for better or worse, in a world where SO is no longer that new and shiny place everyone wants to be a part of and is instead that place search engines and LLM's get their source data from until it's too old to be relevant. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 6:37
  • @Slate "it feels like a system redirecting them instead of a person responding to them" - I've seen people complaining about that and saying that AI is better because "it's polite and doesn't close my question", even if the AI answer is worse or simply wrong. Which makes me think that people don't really want the best, more accurate answers. If you're "polite" enough, they'll accept anything that "works". SE has the power to change this mindset. Instead, they're embracing the AI hype, and quality (and also attribution) no longer seems to be a priority. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 11:56
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    I think that's probably somewhat true, @hkotsubo. I'd be inclined to hypothesize that many people, in practice, don't actually care for what's true in the "thorough, vetted, attributed" sense, but rather what's true enough in the "I can make something with this" sense. If an LLM is wrong, some people probably believe it will either be so wrong as to be obviously useless or not wrong enough to worry about. As a knowledge service we are, of course, most interested in the "thorough, vetted, attributed" sense. Maybe there is a diverging need there - but then, I'm just speculating. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 15:55
  • As someone in the forgotten middle - not a new user (12 years), but nowhere near a power user either (6k network karma) - SO's moderation taught me over time that for anything remotely near the 'borders' of the allowed areas it's not worth asking a question - looking outside the SO network would be far more productive. Unfortunately, over time that allowed region has gotten smaller and smaller, to the point where I haven't asked a question on the SE network for over a year. Commented Jan 23, 2025 at 17:23
  • @hkotsubo - worse by whose metric? Yours, or the person asking the question's? Commented Jan 23, 2025 at 17:24
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    @TLW theirs, obviously. Some people are perfectly happy with ai slop. Commented Jan 23, 2025 at 17:39
  • @KevinB And here's where we get to the disagreement. For some people an answer they "are perfectly happy with" is their end goal, and so it is not "worse", pretty much by definition. This is not the SE ethos, to state the obvious. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 13:30