No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit.

If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline for recruiting new users to your forum or Q&A site.

Stack overflow was a shit show way before LLMs became popular.

Stuck overflow may not be the greatest example. I have switch to using GitHub discussions and Discord on the "where to get help for my projects" side of things. I ignore SO when it comes to support. Lots of other open source projects doing similar.

This trend was happening before LLMs entered the arena.

Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.

Inevitably too you'll get someone scolding you to "check the pins" which you then do and get introduced to that hellish nightmare.

Discord is great for chatting with your friends, gaming, etc. but man it's a horrible knowledge repository.

There are question/answer channels, not everything is chat on Discord

> horrible knowledge repository

I don't disagree, but that does not change the fact that people have moved from sites like SO to Discord for this purpose.

There are Q&A channels, so not everything is chat, but Discord search is abysmal

Slack is another place where former SO content / answers are happening. Discourse too. The tl;dr is that it has become more fragmented, for better or worse

SO has a related problem to Reddit. Some mods high on their status and power

That brings up the unstated part of the original comment. There's this obsession with ossifying the Internet because we're so afraid of losing something like SO.

The people who made SO are not going anywhere, there will always be a SO, a wikipedia, a search engine. Let it evolve to the next thing.

Surely part of that is because most tech related questions have already been asked and answered on SO. I'd say a decline in new question is stack overflow working as designed. A large part of what makes SO so good is the searchability of old questions. There will always be new questions to ask, as new technologies confuse Devs in new ways, but to expect new questions to be asked at the same rate as peak is to misunderstand what SO is at it's core.

But that's just like, my opinion, dude.

The move has happened because SEO rotted out The Internet to the point there’s been a “theory” that the Internet died a decade ago. If the current Internet is unsustainable under new technology trends then the new parts need to and will evolve to thrive inside the new ecosystem.

Especially with main SO I really wonder if accepting natural cycle of online platforms would be best. When culture gets to point that there is enough negative views on platform, maybe it is time to let it be replaced.

Those are not easily searchable either

I hate that about Discord. It is a fun comms application, but it is severely lacking as a community.

Once, before I realized this, I recommended users of a forum use Discord. The impact was severe and fortunately brief. We all realized we would not be leaving the usual, often high value info for others, and ourselves to benefit from in the future.

We unwound that mess and now carry on in the usual way.

Discord has carved out a huge chunk of discussion people will wish was available in the future.

It depends very much on the discord. I'm in several discords which are excellent communities. They're really good places to hang out, get to know people interested in the same hobby, build a subculture etc.

I haven't really tried one as a QA or knowledge sharing site, perhaps they're much less good at that.

That explanation totally fails to account for SO's usage suddenly falling off a cliff as soon as ChatGPT arrived on the scene.

Oh I know, it's one of my top 3 complaints. Information gardening is hard

> Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak.

...which might be beneficial. A problem they'd been trying to deal with for over a decade was the massive influx of low quality duplicate and "do my homework for me" questions from people who don't even bother looking for a solution. If they've all moved off to AI things, problem solved and maybe SO can return to its high-quality origins?

They too busy editing questions to fit their answers.

>Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline

This is because they're a big bunch of assholes and no one wants to deal with that. Their decline started way before ChatGPT came in.

because the answer to so many questions can be distilled from the content already on SO

Frankly it’s not really great even for that, but they have captured the audience and now we are stuck with it.

Every time I boot into Manjaro to do some gaming, almost always there’s a new update for Discordavailable and guess what? The updates to Manjaro are always lagging behind a few days to a week, and Discord won’t run with a slightly out of date client.

The only way to get is working is using the snap, and who doesn’t want use some 3rd party package manager just to send some kbit/s voice data?

Additionally the interface sucks and is really bloated

With one quite significant issue IMO

If there's an old question the most upvoted answer will be at the top. Better solutions are often available if the previous answer was 10 years ago, but they will be buried.

Solution is obviously to scroll down as well as read the comments, but that can be time consuming.

I am with you on this the amount of answers I got from people that actually have knowledge about the libraries I am working with was always overshadowed by some semantic questioning. Do really need to? This tool might be better etc.

That's why I still prefer IRC without retention there is more freedom for discussion.

They can be excellent, but only in the moment.

The excellent communities I have been a part of can be searched. People can read it and learn. The Discord ones, unless they publish to a wiki or something, just don't exist.

Interesting point. The main one I'm part of started out as a wiki and is now both. The wiki is kind of the long term memory of the community, but it's so painful to have conversations there.