Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.

Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”

  • @ramble81@lemm.eeEnglish
    60•3 days ago

    So here’s what I don’t get. LLMs were trained on data from places like SO. SO starts losing users ,and thus content. Content that LLMs ingest to stay relevant.

    So where will LLMs get their content after a certain point? Especially for new things that may come out or unique situations. It’s not like it’ll scrape the answer from a web page if people are just asking LLMs.

    • db0English
      24•3 days ago

      The need for the service that SO provided won’t go away. Eventually people will migrate to new places to discuss. LLM creators will either constantly scrape those as well, forcing them to implement more and more countermeasures and GenAI-poison, or the services themselves will enshittify and sell our content (i.e. the commons) to LLM-creators.

      • DojanEnglish
        23•3 days ago

        I worry that the replacement is more likely a move to platforms like Discord. I mean it’s already happened in a lot of projects.

          • DojanEnglish
            17•3 days ago

            I hate Discord with a passion. Trying to get everyone I know away from it.

        • @cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          8•3 days ago

          If they move to Discord, nobody will ever be able to find the answers. They must use a website that is indexable by search engines or it will be pointless.

          • DojanEnglish
            2•2 days ago

            Yeah. But this already happens, unfortunately.

        • db0English
          4•3 days ago

          Yes, it’s what I was referring to in the second part.

          • DojanEnglish
            10•3 days ago

            I’ve never been accused of being a smart man.

    • @vala@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4•3 days ago

      You are assuming that people act in logical ways.

      This is only a problem right now if you think about it.

    • dantheclammanEnglish
      1•2 days ago

      They’re probably hoping to use people’s submitted code for training. But that seems like it will be diminishing returns

    • @fubarx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6•3 days ago

      Same question applies to all the other websites out there being mined to train LLMs. Google search Overviews removes the need for people to visit linked sites. Traffic plummets. Ads dry up, and the sites go out of business. No new content to train on 🤷🏻‍♂️