Re: “The Pulse #134: Stack overflow is almost dead”

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.c.]
On 2025-05-21, Sam <sam@email-scan.com> wrote:

Lynn McGuire writes:
>

“The Pulse #134: Stack overflow is almost dead
   https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134
>
“Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data 
at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”
>
“June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor, 
Prosus. In hindsight, the founders – Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky – sold 
with near-perfect timing, before terminal decline.
>
Unreal.

>
It's not the LLM or AI that made Stackoverflow jump the shark. They simply 
failed to achieve sufficient mind share to be able to withstand the natural 
factors that work to collapse every social media platform that employs 
content moderation. Stackoverflow's content moderation policies pissed off 
their most productive contributors, so they all left, and there wasn't 
enough garbage left to support what's left behind.

The main moderation problem on StackExchange sites is the abrupt closing
of questions. This is perpetrated by those contributors themselves.

But a constant stream of fresh question is the lifeblood of the site.
When visitors stop coming to ask quesitons, it dies.

Questions are often closed because they are duplicates. However,
they are often not exact duplicates.

Moreover, people ask duplicate questions because the site's search
function is garbage: the answer is in there, but they were not able to
find it.

StackExchange pushes the narrative that questions and their answers
should be useful to future visitors. But then they rely on Google
for those visitors to actually find them.

When you do that, you are handing (even more) control over your traffic
to Google.

Google served up site summaries without routing visitors to the actual
sites, even before the rise of LLM AI.

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