If you have been delving into the world of programming since 2008, it is highly likely that you have spent a considerable amount of time on Stack Overflow. Perhaps you have been an active and dynamic member of the community, asking various questions or providing answers to assist others while sharing your expertise. Alternatively, you might have simply perused the site to discover solutions to your own coding issues. Regardless of your approach, you have undoubtedly valued the extensive repository of knowledge and the support that Stack Overflow provides.
However, in the past year, there has been a noticeable drop in visitors to the Stack Overflow site (see stack overflow fall in traffic, posts and votes), largely because of the rise in ChatGPT usage . ChatGPT, a cutting-edge AI language model from OpenAI, has revolutionized the way developers get help and solve coding problems. Instead of Stack Overflow’s method of building a community where users wait for others to respond, ChatGPT provides instant and highly relevant answers to a wide array of programming questions.
This trend toward using AI-driven help has caused a noticeable drop in reliance on Stack Overflow, as developers now prefer the quick and easily accessible solutions from ChatGPT. This preference is especially strong among new programmers. When a beginner asks a simple question on Stack Overflow, they might often get replies like “we’re not here to do your homework”, “what a ridicules question” or “why do you need to do this,” which can feel quite discouraging.
The stack overflow solution
To tackle this challenge and stay relevant in the developer community, Stack Overflow has teamed up with OpenAI. This partnership is all about leveraging the vast knowledge built up over the years to push technology forward. Simply put, Stack Overflow is letting OpenAI use its extensive knowledge base from the past 15 years to train the ChatGPT model.
Stack overflow is a community
But will this approach genuinely be advantageous for Stack Overflow? As someone who used to be an active participant in the stack overflow community, I can confirm that I have ceased answering questions in the last year. One of the primary motivations for contributing answers is the recognition and trustworthiness that stem from community votes. Now, consider this: when the volume of votes diminishes, what will sustain my motivation to continue offering answers? When users turn directly to ChatGPT for solutions, and Stack Overflow provides an API to search the answers within the extensive knowledge base created by the community over the years, who will upvote my answers, thereby validating my contributions and enhancing my credibility? Why should I invest my time in answering questions that will ultimately be fed into ChatGPT? I have better things to do with my time.
Do you understand my point? By partnering with ChatGPT, the size of the active community on Stack Overflow will be reduced even further. When developers directly turn to ChatGPT, who will be there to ask new questions and who will verify whether the provided solutions actually work? Who will be available to answer new questions about emerging libraries and technologies? In the absence of fresh data, we are all aware that ChatGPT tends to generate and provide speculative answers that may or may not be correct. So, what human-generated data will be used to train AI about the next generation of technologies?
All the power and influence that Stack Overflow has enjoyed over the years can be directly attributed to its dynamic and engaged community. When the significance of this vital community is overlooked, it is only natural to see a corresponding drop in site traffic. This choice clearly demonstrates that Stack Overflow may not fully grasp the intricacies of the market, and this marks the beginning of the end for Stack Overflow.
