Stack Overflow Is Almost Dead

I've never asked a question on stackoverflow, but I use the answers all the time. Their answers don't hallucinate api/function names and are far more likely to have been vetted by a compiler.

A lot of questions I wanted to ask stack overflow were already answered in previous questions by other users

I created a stackoverflow account just to upvote an answer that I found helpful, and it told me I need like 10xp or something to upvote 😂

The 2014 inflection point was around the time that Google started to dramatically up-rank stackoverflow. Before that, you'd search some programming problem and would get a lot of unhelpful results, then give up, and ask the question directly on SO. After that update, your searches would much more reliably yield a helpful SO post. It drew significantly more traffic to SO to read answers to existing questions, but also reduced the need for asking new questions.

if no one is asking and answering questions and creating new content for ai to consume, and ai is trained on this content, there is no new input into ai, so we get stuck in local optimum and get no further

Stack overflow is a place full of great answers full of people who seem to hate answering questions.

With all its flaws, there is something nice about questions being asked and answered in public and people discussing alternative solutions.

I remember more than once looking up a question on Stack, finding someone had asked it, only see the mods had killed the question because "it had already been answered", yet I couldn't find the answer anywhere. It prompted me to post answers on my own personal webpage, whenever I came across such instances. I kind of felt bad about killing my blog/webpage, because I was getting thousands of hits from people who hit similar walls that I did.

SO isn't lacking in new questions, but answers. Piling on better answers often goes unrewarded (in fictitious internet points, that is).

Stack Overflow was unbearable. How many questions you would just see people being arrogant & putting users down. My favorite type of interactions. “did you even try it yourself?” Yes “You even look it up?” Yes but I am getting the following result & I am stuck. “You need to go learn/practice. Closing for duplicate question” Can you share the duplicate question so I can see? “Closed” This was a real type of interaction in the 2010’s that made my default geek2geeks & Reddit.