I think it's a combination of both...

Before AI people would still try asking questions on SO despite the hostility because it was the only/main place to get answers. Over this time, SO popularity was deteriorating.

After AI people who had bad experiences with asking questions on SO would ask the AI instead. This is because the AI wouldn't mark your question as a duplicate, wouldn't question its validity [1], etc. It would just answer your question. You could even ask it follow-up questions if the answer wasn't quite what you were looking for. All of this in real time, not waiting to get an answer.

[1] Unless the question triggered the safety gates that the AI companies have in place.

People used to add "reddit" at the end of their search queries, and now I'm sure many of those people just ask a bot. But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.

So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.

Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.

SO responses were peer-reviewed code snippets or fixes. If something had 800 upvotes and comments outlining pros and cons, that is useful information. The bot gives you whatever it wants to give you, it could be information from a scientific paper or late night TV infomercial.

Because AI removed what little value it had.

AI isn’t magic and can’t always give you the right answer. And it can’t give you the why a lot of the time.

People’s actual experience is useful, and stack overflow was great for that. Until they ruined it.

If the site hadn’t been ruined, it still would’ve had value today. Traffic would’ve dropped, but not to near zero.

AI can’t always give you the right answer. But it tries. StackOverflow stopped trying to answer questions.

People like me⁰, who I admit will also soon be as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, will still refer to it for some time.

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[0] I'm leaving tech as a career in the next year¹, I don't care if I have to wait tables on minimum wage, I've been unhappy since ~2020 for a growing number of reasons and the great purloining+cheating+polluting machines are the final bail of hay

[1] Maybe before then end of this year, my notice period is two months and I have some accrued annual leave to use, we'll see how the next week or so goes!

https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflow...

It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.

SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.

It's like how everyone hated dialup but still kept using it anyway until there was broadband.

Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

The product isn't obsolete. It's just been re-packaged by AI companies in a far more useful form.

It is not obsolete insofar as it is a good source of Q/A material, which is useful to both humans (directly or indirectly) and bots. The only part of it that is obsolete is the search/query part. If the AI companies had an ounce of decency, they would see no problem injecting money into the platform to continue seeding that Q/A material which they have directly profited from. But investing in a commons is not on the playbook for vulture capitalism.