No, I do not believe this is the end

The elephant in the room is that Stack Overflow is a business. So the question is not whether we can create something useful here, but whether we can create something useful that is also a viable business.

There are probably a lot of ideas that could work on a small scale and produce something useful. But I don't see how the public sites can remain a viable business without drastically increasing user activity again.

And the more recent features don't inspire confidence in me. They're too half-baked, very buggy and not thought through. Unlike significant parts of the community I don't even disagree with the idea of introducing more subjective content and increasing discussions. But the company is skipping all the hard parts, thinking about how this kind of content could work well within the existing systems.

I have a hard time being optimistic about stack's renewed interest in working on the public platform. Many of the efforts stack presented as being the future in the past 3-6 months are a step away from Q&A, rather than an improvement of it. An abandonment of what made SO different in favor of just doing what everyone else does. None of this is innovative. A chatbot in a sea of chatbots, an unmoderated discussion board for open ended questions with no real answers... I don't see the point.

[This post is not directed to Bella personally - any presence of 'you' in the post is addressed to Stack Overflow - the company.]

I tired of these kinds of posts long ago - I don't want any posts from CMs or middle management trying to sugar coat how bad everything is - this is a just huge waste of everyone's time and won't change anything. Everything I have to say about that can be found here.

Instead why can't the CEO wake up and post these meta threads themselves? Then it might even be meaningful to give feedback. The CEO is ultimately responsible for the fiasco, even though the negative trend started even before Chandrasekar took over. There was a sudden outburst of activity from him one year ago here, which is the reason behind the chat overhaul, opinion-based questions experiment etc etc. Then he turned silent again.

What I really would like to hear from him is him thoughts of why all of these often quite good ideas - I support several of them - end up implemented so poorly. The opinion-based questions, new editor, new graphic design (hot dog theme) and comment overhaul in particular stand out as good ideas implemented in outright horrible ways. And that's without even mentioning AI-something-something, which was not even a good idea to begin with.

It is not isolated occurrences, every good (and bad) idea during the past 2-3 years does not live up to expectations when implemented. As if the implementation was handed over to complete laymen.

You shouldn't need to do a beta launch and get community feedback in order to tell that Stackoverflow AI crashing when started needs to be fixed before launch, or that a new editor shouldn't wildly bounce up and down when typing, or that we can't have a question category named 'advice' together with no moderation instructions, or that opening up chat to 1 rep users means there will be a flood of trash & spam that needs to be moderated somehow.

This wasn't the case some five years back. Is it because the last competent staff left the company with the 2023 layoffs or is it because they started leaving/were fired even before that?

We can't rebuild if there is nobody who has the skills to rebuild. Yes, I do believe this is the end.

The above question post is well-written, but it does not appear to offer any solutions or ideas how to get out of the current situation. Much has been written in other answers already, and I would like to take the chance to add a few personal points.

To slightly counter the discussion about perceived toxicity/steep learning curve/over-moderation on this page: I've become active on SO in 2019; after many years of passive reading and learning I wanted to give back and contribute my own expertise. I never faced any problems when asking and answering questions. I do my own research and only ask when I am sufficiently sure that the solution is not trivially discovered (i.e., I don't waste the time of other experts). Answers should be self-contained and cleanly offer/explain a solution -- exactly what I would like to see myself when researching a problem. If I spend an hour solving a particularly annoying issue, that might be a candidate for a self-answered question.

To be clear, I'm very much in favor of improving the experience for new users; everyone approaches problems differently, and the Staging Ground was a promising start to get them gently introduced into the site's culture. But for me it's certainly not as horrible as some comments or off-site discussions claim.

Side note: On the other hand, the flood of low-quality questions during that time was very frustrating -- I wanted to contribute effectively, but spent lots of time searching for answerable questions that had value beyond that specific isolated problem. Thus, I got involved into moderation/curation. This was an entirely different beast with tons of history, long meta discussions and unspoken rules to be aware of; though doable, it could really use an overhaul. I wrote more about that here.

I seldomly use LLMs for solving problems; I like to understand what I'm doing (and why), and prefer to build my solutions through research. SO is one of my primary and most trusted sources, though recent Google algorithm changes made this somewhat more difficult, and SO's native search function is still notoriously bad.

All these things haven't changed for me, and I would gladly continue contributing as I did in the past years. There may be fewer questions due to LLM assistants, but the remaining questions are more likely to be interesting, and worth the time salvaging them. However, something has changed, and that is the treatment of the company towards us experts and volunteers. It always had its ups and downs, but in the recent years it has reached a new quality.

See, I'm a developer. I think logically, and I like to spend my time efficiently. When something unnecessarily gets in my way, I become annoyed and want to automate it away. Unfortunately, the company has done everything in its power to get in my way, and at some point it was just enough.

To list just a few:

• Profile page and question list re-designs - I absolutely support getting rid of tech debt and modernizing the design, but not at the cost of information density and utility. I managed to fix most of that with user scripts.
• Prominently announced but poorly thought out features like collectives and discussions - they honestly had potential, but constructive community feedback was mostly ignored.
• All that AI stuff that no one asked for, and that binds precious developer resources.
• Cancelling the data dumps - I even understood the rationale for that, but the communication was catastrophic, and we still don't have the unified data dumps again, despite contrary promises. This does not so much get in my way, but it irrevocably broke trust.
• The comment redesign - I like threaded comments, but the design is horribly inefficient w.r.t. to screen space and quick skimming. Highly upvoted comments take significantly more time to spot, and I need to do much more scrolling to get to the next post. All this was noted shortly after rollout, but of course the bug reports have been sitting unattended for months, while the feature is live. I don't have the energy to try to fix this via a user script. But it improved engagement metrics at least, as I now have to login each time just to get rid of this new view. (sorry for being cynical)
• Most recently, native ads - I know you need money to keep the lights on, but this is just not the way.

On the other side, the Staging Ground and the outdated answers project/trending sort were rare silver linings, which unfortunately weren't fully concluded.

We tried complaining on meta, wrote dozens of well-conceived proposals, pointed out obvious flaws in the company's agenda -- but it was mostly met with silence. Instead, yet another broken feature was pushed out, and long-standing conventions were broken.

This causes frustration, as it is so incredibly unnecessary. Many recent changes are objectively bad, and that was repeatedly pointed out, alongside constructive proposals for adjustments. At some point, the tolerance for that runs out. I may have to endure the very same problem in real-world politics right now, where well-thought out solutions are ignored in favor of (from a scientific perspective) nonsensical and actively harmful actions -- but I don't need to do this in my free time as well.

This really only left one option: Walk away and hope that the company may finally have an epiphany amid declining contributions. I did this more than a year ago.

I genuinely admire anyone who is still staying and keeping the site running, even if I don't have the capacity to do so at the moment. I'll still be around, if nothing else, for solving my day-to-day programming problems; I really treasure the site as the valuable resource it is, and I learn something new every other day, sometimes from decades old anwers. And maybe, if the situation improves one day and the company takes serious steps to make using the site a pleasant experience again, I can once again commit some of my free time and meaningfully contribute new questions and answers.

This reads very poetically, I enjoyed the lecture. But as with many company updates, I don't see much of a vision or strategy for what's next. None of the people I know personally enjoy Stack Overflow for the community. They enjoy it because it's useful.

Now something else has taken the stage for "appearing to answer questions usefully". The question graph reminds me of Nokia after the iPhone took off. But they don't fare too bad currently:

With patience though, I believe you have a chance when this happens:

Apparently I've been on StackOverflow long enough that my account is as old as User #1's, and I remember listening to the podcasts before the private beta was even announced. So with that being said, if you really want to develop StackOverflow - and associated sites - as a community, Stack Exchange, Inc really needs to be backing off the push for AI. Ideally the company would be spinning off StackOverfow into something like Wikimedia Foundations 501(c)(3) non-profit since that would decouple the Q&A from the business side of things. Otherwise you have a for-profit enterprise that is trying to find a way of monetizing what is effectively volunteer work.

Tagging this company-update is spot on here. People heard those stories before. People heard those promises before. People heard those pep talks before.
People believed this. People supported this. People lived this.
And yet here we are.

You've had your chance to create something new.
You've had your chance to embrace a fresh start, a bold reimagining.
You've had your chance to take the lessons of the past and shape a brighter future.
You've had your chance for a future where the community not only survives but thrives.

You've had your time to create something extraordinary.

And that’s why this matters. This place serves as a reminder of what it means to squander the effort of humans. It’s not always easy to accept this, and it’s not always perfect to accept this, but it’s real. And that’s why loads and loads of people have given up. Because what happens here matters. It matters to the people who come here looking for answers, and it matters to the people who stay to share them. This place is a testament to the power of human connection, and that it needs fighting for – not empty phrases.

Too bad SO Inc has shown time and time again they don't consider this effort, this connection, these people worth believing in.

It’s a community

There's the problem, right there.

When this site was buzzing, I got many answers from the likes of Hans Passant and John Skeet. Do you think they need to be part of a community? No way. We had access to rock stars in the field, and quality answers as a result. Lone wolves who racked up gold badges without even trying, just based on the quality of their answers. Some of those guys were pretty blunt, I would say even hurt a few feelings. Takes me back...

They are gone. The high performers aren't interested in community. There's nothing egalitarian about wanting to craft a great answer just to see the updoots.

You can take your "community". Do I go to a library to join a book club, or to gain knowledge in a quiet corner alone? Maybe some need a support group. The good ones don't.

Atlas has shrugged.

Stack Overflow is not a community. It is a business that is attempting to monetize some communitarian behaviors. This isn't necessarily exploitive: there can be a fair exchange of a technology platform in return for volunteer effort. However, for years, the business has done a stunningly terrible job of fostering the community it is trying to monetize, and perhaps we now see chickens coming home to roost.

One source of the terrible management of the community is a contradiction between two definitions of the community. One 'community' is the persistent, committed, collection of more-or-less experts who answer questions and curate. Another definition of 'community' is the potential mass of people who are new, learning, confused, or failing to do their homework. I won't assert that it's impossible to foster a communal sense that extends to both, but I will assert that the site mechanics were built for the former, and then the business has spent years flailing around trying to address the later.

When you read, for example, the academic papers on the experience of women using the site (e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2950290.2950331), you will find that the authors assume the second form of community. New askers expect to be welcomed, guided, assisted, and perhaps even aided in collaborating with others in the same situation.

That is not the design of the site. The design of the site is that askers deliver coherent, discrete, questions, and answerers answer them -- and that askers who don't have, or don't know how to make, these question get downvoted and closed. Askers hate it. Of course they hate it.

On the other hand, many of the members of the 'original' community are fiercely committed to a vision of 'building a library' -- which is at odds, again, with community #2. No one likes to be told: 'your question is (just) a duplicate.'

When people write that 'the community' is toxic or nonexistent, I claim that they are thinking about community #2. Community #1 exists and not especially toxic. There is an esprit de corps, if of late it has started to have an air of Morituri te salutant.

The business has responded to this situation with:

• browbeating the answerers and curators
• ineffective, half-cooked, attempts to adjust tooling to allow for welcoming, guiding, etc.
• browbeating the answerers and curators
• browbeating the answerers and curators (repetition intentional)

To succeed in any attempt at the second bullet, the business would have to do three things:

1. Spend the necessary money on the necessary developers (or AI tokens, I don't care) to actually design, implement, and iteratively refine something like 'Staging Ground' or 'discussion questions.'

2. Spend the necessary money (blah blah) on the site mechanics to allow the curation they want to take place with less stress, so that the curators and answerers don't feel exhausted and overwhelmed by the constant effort to pull weeds. This might be the same thing as #1, if indeed, as claimed by some SO staff, many of the 'weeds' can be pruned into flowers.

3. The hard part: the business must find some way to construct an alternative form of community #1 that is actively willing and interested in providing the experience that community #2 is looking for. Continuing to try to pound the square peg of the Q&A community into the round hole of a hypothetical mutual assistance site is going to continue to fail. And, perhaps to state the obvious, the experience of reading posts like this question, juxtaposed with the sporadic pounding, reads as gaslighting.

All this happens in a context of a series of truly epic faux pas over the years, in which the business actively attacked community #1, and/or adopted policies or practices which were seen as inappropriate or hostile by significant swaths of it. I'll be specific: for me, Monica still looms over the landscape. For others, it's LLMs or licensing questions.

So enough of the long posts from SO staff. Let's see some small, concrete, progress, in any good direction, and let's see it sustained and iterated.

Ónen i-Estel Edain, ú-chebin estel anim

I do believe that the network can and is worth saving but it's worth considering not just that this and other graphs are used to celebrate the downfall of SO - and frankly often by toxic folks but very few people have the energy to counter that narrative.

We have a community that's exhausted, beaten down, and constantly told 'there's a plan, trust us' - often going opposite to what we ask for, or need.

The network is ailing, and while it has strong bones - we've had a fairly long period where we've been in survival mode, and many decisions have alienated the community.

We're never going to win over the folks for whom "SO mods close everything as dupes" is both a meme, and an article of faith. But losing people who see a problem and go "OOH SHINY" or understand what sharks means hurts us.

The platform and changes to the platform, both cultural and mechanical need to take into account the needs of the folk using it as much as the folks who might use it.

And while we have people who'd still fight for this place - a lot of us are tired and could use some good news, and some respite. I'd reflect on that, and the why we're where we are - if we're to consider how we are going to get where we need to be.

Stack Overflow, the community, has been progressively killed off by Stack Overflow, the company, for years now. It should be of no surprise that yes... it's done.

We, the community, have all but screamed about it here in meta for years. We have protested everything from bad UX tweaks to improper moderator interventions. Most importantly, we have tried desperately to refocus the attention on what really matters.

You, the corporation, should have spent more time seeing yourselves as the facilitators. You took all of our human-to-human efforts in raising up our co-workers, peers, friends, in this industry... and you tried to package it up as some product. Instead of realizing your small-but-critical role in this community, you failed to understand, took out a ton of debt, and tried to squeeze it out of us. You killed it.

I've spent about 17 years here, along with the thousands of others, learning and teaching. Stack Overflow has had the most significant impact on my career and beyond. I'm afraid it's too late now to pivot to a new model. We've proposed on several occasions to make this a truly community-ran non-profit, but have failed to get anything serious off the ground.

I don't know where we go from here, but I'm afraid we've come to a dead-end on this path.

I know things aren’t perfect right now. The once-unrelenting tidal wave of knowledge sharing has slowed to a trickle, and it feels like the world is moving faster than ever, leaving places like this behind.

I agree; falling site traffic will not kill Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow has a huge archive of high-quality answers; people could stop posting right now and I would still be coming here for answers for the next decade. Stack Overflow will not die unless it is killed.

We have better than something new: We have something old. All problems eventually come back to first principles, and Stack Overflow's huge archive of knowledge addresses an extremely basic problem. LLMs cannot replace Stack Overflow, but only pipe information from it; if they somehow choke it off, they will have pinched off their own airline of knowledge.

A community is a group of people who share the same goals, interests, or mission. It's a place where individuals come together to contribute to the whole.

Why would I answer people's questions here instead of spending my time helping people elsewhere? That's a sincere question, not rhetorical negativity. Sell me on the company's vision for the community keeping in mind that I'm an engineer and literally have trouble understanding fluffy, aspirational language.

The company should communicate an explicit mission to the community so that we can decide if we want to be part of it or not. I don't believe the company when it says the core mission hasn't changed, because its actions say otherwise.

What I do believe is that the company wants free (as in beer) human created and curated knowledge, which is like printing money in the AI age. On top of that, only the company and people who pay them get to use this human-curated knowledge in it's most accessible form. The community can't even get a full data dump for personal use. Even if we jump through all the hoops, the data is tainted with fabricated data

As I have said before, Stack Overflow has plenty of meat left on its bones, so you will be able to dine off its corpse for probably many years to come. That doesn't mean it's not dead. On the other hand, it may be possible to keep enough of an audience to make enough money to stay in business, but I doubt that business is going to be creating a library of knowledge for the world or look anything like what I signed up for 11 years ago. Which is fine, things change, but it's infuriating to get strung along because the company wants to have its cake and eat it too.

I am not anti-AI by the way. I am simply opposed to companies making money from my expertise and effort without compensating me in some way. Soft compensation is fine. I have no regrets about what I have already contributed to Stack Exchange. I traded my time for enjoyment, connecting with people and attempting to build a lasting knowledge resource. I don't contribute any more because I no longer believe the mission is to create a lasting public source of knowledge.

No, I will not answer low-effort questions just because chatbots now tell barely literate people everything they type is awesome. I will not feel bad about closing those questions no matter how hard someone cries about it or how much the company scolds me for not being more welcoming of help vampires. I will donate my time somewhere where it is more appreciated and it feels less like shoveling water.

I've been on Stack Exchange for a while now and have tried my best to ask good questions, and I think at that I've been better than the average question-asking account (yes, accounts, since this is often gamed), which is to say I'm no newbie expecting to do minimal research and have basic questions answered like we're on Reddit. The effort needed to ask a "good" question and then be prepared to defend it while the "community" downvotes it and throws every close reason it can until one sticks (let's not get into how often that community actually upvotes good questions) used to be worth it just to get a high-quality answer, but since the advent of LLMs that's no longer true, and I find myself asking most questions to them nowadays, and saving myself a lot of time and headache as a result.

SO's value was never its "community", which is arguably the worst thing about it. This is why the company over the years has tried its best to reform it into the more "empathetic" community you mention in your question, precisely because it has long had the reputation of being the complete opposite - cold, clinical and only sometimes logical. See my last Meta question for an example of how selectively SO's rules are applied and how much they hinge on the biases and whims of the most active power users in the "community"... and that's assuming a user even gets to the point of caring enough about a closed question to open a Meta question for it.

SO's only real value for the vast majority of programmers in the world was its curated, high-quality code, which the LLM companies ran away with while cutting SO out of the equation, and now programmers are fleeing from it in droves because they no longer need to put themselves through the same old masochistic, bureaucratic rituals to get the same code. I don't know whether SO has a future as LLMs only get better and the window of questions that can only be answered on SO gets smaller and smaller, but at least in its current form, I see it as highly unlikely.

This is one of those graphs that's used because it's easy to generate, not because it's a good representation of reality. There's a lot going on here that isn't obvious, and that makes it easy to jump to the wrong conclusions.

First of all, that's exactly what I would expect the graph to look like for a Q&A site. Every question that gets answered is a question that doesn't need to be asked again. A mathematician might describe it as the set of as-yet-unanswered questions is shrinking. This naturally leads to fewer questions that need to be asked, and thus fewer answers required. That's not a sign of decline, that's the whole point. This isn't a social media site where value is derived from new content. A 10-year-old tweet is practically worthless, but a 10-year-old answer on why you shouldn't parse XML with regular expressions is as valuable now as it was when it was written. There are answers I wrote 15+ years ago that still get upvotes and comments to this day. So many people over-focus on "engagement" and value as connected with new content creation. Those things are easy to measure, whereas the value associated with existing content is harder to measure. Reality doesn't always have easy metrics. It would be silly to criticize the Louvre museum as dead because they don't add new content often enough. There is tremendous value in what already exists.

New technologies will bring with them new question opportunities, which should "recharge the pool" so to speak. This was generally true at the beginning, when Stack Overflow was the site. However, we have grown over time to a network of over 100 sites. Many new technologies spawn their own dedicated sub-site. The chart only looks at "StackOverflow posts", so all of this other content is missed.

A high-level query like this is also incapable of measuring the most important things. Primarily, a database can't tell you anything about quality. If the numbers drop and the delta is mostly low-quality content, then that's a sign that the site is thriving. As moderation tools improved over time, we got better at identifying and blocking spammers, sockpuppets, and other malicious users, at discouraging duplicate questions, and at migrating content to other sites where it's more on topic. Now, it's impossible to judge the quality of content that was never posted, but our moderators and bots have done a tremendous amount of work over the years and I can't fathom how that work wouldn't have a measurable impact on the amount of low-quality content being posted. If the new content rate drops to 10% of the peak value but that content is 10x more likely to be high-quality, then the overall value of the site has increased tremendously. Nobody wants to dig through a dumpster to find the one morsel of knowledge that they need. It's the difference between Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Urban Dictionary. Our value is in being the former, whereas over-focusing on new content creation is how you become the latter.

Why not focus on more meaningful things? For instance, what is the trend in the percentage of questions that receive an answer (or multiple answers)? That should be one of the most important metrics. Similarly, how many new users have a question answered, then go on to contribute more questions/answers? What is the average time it takes for a question to receive an answer that gets accepted? If someone can come here, post a question, and get an answer to it in a reasonable time, then the site is still very much alive and well.

Well I have been using SO for now more that 10 years, and IMHO there are at least 3 ways to use it to solve problems:

1. use Google to make a research, and browse through articles from SO. It has always been my highest use, and is still the best way I know to solve a problem, because of the high quality of upvoted answers, and the number or questions already asked and solved
2. after doing that research ask a precise question with some context and a summary or the current research: it is the best way to add new nice Q&A topics
3. ask a question without any research and little effort

The problem is that 1 and 2 are fine for people educated to those researches, but are not what beginners do. And I do believe that there are many more beginners seeking for help, than old fashion educated ones. And question from 3rd category are not really well received on SO, simply because the users that accept to spend their time to answer questions on SO want to contribute to a nice quality Q&A site. So beginners just wanting a little help for solving a basic question quickly learn that AI are much more friendly.

This is not really a problem for users: educated ones can still use SO, and beginners can use AI which can make use of the Q&A database. But it is a real problem for the company owning the site, because the generated revenue directly depends on the number of direct accesses. So if the majority of users access the database through an AI the revenue cannot reach the expectations. I am sorry, but I cannot imagine a simple and clean solution. The best way would be that AI engines accept to pay something when they use information from a third party site but I do not believe that they want to go that way, and I am not sure that it would simply be possible, beyond a flat rate voluntary contribution.

This seems to be pure company rhetoric, gaslighting or bullshit bingo. A general's bold speech before sending the troops into certain oblivion.

How about:

• Specific diagnosis (why did the usage/contribution fall)
• Clear strategy (product/community changes, positioning vs. AI)
• Concrete initiatives (which concrete changes are planned)
• Metrics and targets (how many questions are needed to keep the watermark above 0; when will it be known whether there was success)
• Timeline, ownership, resourcing (who's doing what till when)

"Seeing is believing."

Looks like SO Co. has its eyes closed. You don't "believe" this is "the end" because you don't want to believe. Wake up. If you don't want this to be the end, then actually pay attention and do work to revive the community you've been mistreating for the last decade. Stop whetting your tongues claiming you care and try caring.

In the end, just remember:

"I am the cause and effect of my problems." ~Anoop S. Rana

This is as applicable to SO as humans. The mess(or whatever we can call it) created by SO will be sorted by SO through the efforts of its members(community, mods, staff etc).

Me neither I don't believe it's "the end", unless the company will deliberately "end" it. You mention

(...) graph that is making the rounds. The question posed.

but do we also have the graph of "useful questions posed"? I don't have the access to statistics, but my feeling is that (under the tags I observed)

• a few years ago there were maybe 50-100 new questions per day, most of them downvoted and closed, among them most were downvoted and closed because of absolutely no research effort (no mcve, no expected input/output, sometimes even no explanation, just "I clicked something and I got error"); 5-10 questions that remained with positive score were good enough to get straightforward answers, upvotes, and stay on site
• yesterday I believe saw ~10 new C++ questions (not sure how many might have gotten deleted), and today I only see 2 of them with negative score; around half of them got meaningful answers, and those that didn't at least got some meaningful suggestions in the comments

For me today's situation looks cleaner and without much difference in added value to the site.

The decline in number of useless questions is most likely caused by availability of LLM tools (e.g. ChatGPT) that can answer them straight away without forcing the user to do tremendous effort of googling the answer and processing available SO knowledge by himself. But I fail to see why would it be considered "bad" for SO.

This isn’t just a website. It’s a community.

I think this might be why many people are going to AIs rather than sticking here.

AIs are cheerful and helpful even when you make a mistake.

Make a mistake here and you seem to be immediately surrounded by people who make you feel bad.

Once upon a time a cute little shark sang a song as she left her current persona behind her.
Like you she told us that "this is not end". So we waited for her. We searched for her. And now we are with her again. Laughing. Playing. Being happy together.
Because we trusted her. We loved her.

You lost this long ago.
Most of us don't trust you anymore.
Most of us don't love the AI-centric network you are attempting to build.
Most of us are still here just because inertia keeps us here.

"Is he friend or is he foe?" the pony wonders. I can assure you... I am no friend." (MLP S4E25)

This is not the end. The end started long ago when the site mission changed to "make tons on $$$ by whatever way possible, people will provide us with content to sell no matter what".
This is just another spin in a long tantrum spiral, and you keep rowing towards the center.

If you really want to embark in a desperate struggle to escape the maelstrom you willing entered, empty words about how you love "the community" won't cut it. Because there is no "community" anymore: there is only the "you" and the "us" you created by alienating your own users. We are not in the same boat anymore, it just happens that our old, rusty dinghy is being towed by your big ship as you sail towards the mouth of the kraken, thinking there is gold to be found there.

Well... let me tell you something.

Hic sunt dracones.

A few (probably well known) issues that could be solved already.

1. Outdated answers on often searched topics, outdated answers make SO look like a relic from the past.
   • Let curators vote to pin an answer and let curators vote to make questions subject to these votings.
2. Join forces. Splitting programming related topics seems to be a bad idea.
   • Let's have it all on the same site, implement tabs for it. Most people never heard of other SE sites, besides SO. There are people loving these topics but the implementation of them is somewhat hiding what SE has to offer.
3. New quality standards for closing and opening question has to be implemented.
   • The issues and opinions of the community are well known.

Traffic started falling off when moderators started treating Joel Spolsky's impractical ideals like scripture. I have always maintained that this site was more valuable and "welcoming" during its first five years when it was a de facto help desk. People asked and answered more questions when they weren't afraid of aggressive moderation. The larger user base produced a lower percentage but larger quantity of exactly the kind of content that the idealists consider righteous and pure Q&A. Frankly, it's astounding that the idealists can't seem to comprehend this.

I'm looking forward to the Archive feature. I hope you will consider my suggestion of allowing every user to curate their own archive of "good" content and, if they choose, to view the site through the lens of other users' curation. Since traffic is lower than it was in SO's first months of existence, now is the perfect opportunity to completely rethink the back end if necessary.

Meanwhile, the fastest and cheapest way to bring users back would be to ditch the "advice" feature with its terrible UX and spin up a new SE for experience-based Q&A. The haters can simply not look at it.

I agree, and a comment from Ewan on a Software Engineering meta post sums it up best:

It's easy to get AI to fix your code for you now, or answer any objective question based on published documentation. The questions that are left are the more opinionated, human questions which are naturally not 100% settled. AI will avoid giving a direct answer to "which is best scrum or kanban" but you can bet humans have some strong opinions and experiences on those options

^{(emphasis, mine)}

I think Q&A's days are numbered. I see sooooo many long-time members willing to die on the hill of Q&A, but the rest of humanity has simply moved on to a different hill; in fact, they were moving on to a different hill before AI. In 2008, we had nothing but opinions and very few facts on the Internet. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow largely filled that gap for the masses, but Stack Overflow comes with a toxic community; a community hyper-focused on quality content at the expense of the people contributing that content.

People who ask questions are people too, and too often I see them get treated as if they were the pre-AI versions of slop mills — churning out low quality content in an endless river of sewage expecting us experts to filter it into drinkable water. Oh boy, did we not know what was to come...

Artificial intelligence has replaced the knowledgebase. It has fulfilled the Stack Overflow prophesy of "Ask questions. Get answers." Human Q&A is obsolete, I'm afraid. The bar is too high compared to LLMs. You can ask AI a fantastically stupid question, and it will not berate you, and it provides a detailed and (simulated) thoughtful answer.

I've written a number of questions over the years on SO. Many of those questions were well-received, but it sometimes took me days of painful debugging and research to be able to communicate what the problem is, and half a workday to write those thoughts into a question that was definitively answerable by total strangers. That's a lot of labor by querents for a comparatively small payback; and so, the questions have stopped coming in.

I feel like we are standing on the Q&A hill to defend it, but nobody else seems to want it. We defend a hill surrounding by empty countryside with nary a soul in site willing to threaten it. The masses have congregated in the cities orbiting the tech giants who produce LLMs. Every once in a while, we get a stray soul who isn't satisfied with what AI produces, but they come up to our hill and are met with rattling sabers and torches; a nice warning sign to stay away. So they do.

As Ewan said, "The questions that are left are the more opinionated, human questions which are naturally not 100% settled." The messy ones. The ones with no right answer. The vague ones written by people who are plenty smart enough but lack the knowledge to formulate a Q&A post.

Let's not forget that many in the younger generation are dealing with AI and remnants of the pandemic where everyone worked from home. Those random situational conversations with colleagues didn't happen during the formative years of their careers. These are the holes left behind by AI and the pandemic. There's no dearth of questions out there; they just don't fit the Stack Overflow Q&A model.

So, what will we do atop our lonely hill? Dig in? Entrench ourselves against an enemy that doesn't exist, damning ourselves to chasing windmills for eternity until Stack Overflow goes broke?