Not gonna keep going back and forth when you seem to agree but are choosing to be difficult. We agree SO was falling before LLM's hit the market. We agree LLM's accelerated SO's demise.
You seem to think they weren't failing before LLM (simply rapidly losing member activity), which is a narrative that I won't follow.
Then explain the usage chart declining since ~2015?
As I said in my original post, LLM was the final nail in the coffin. I'm not arguing they aren't related. I'm saying they SO was falling long before LLM's took over. This isn't difficult logic.
IMO the community will fracture in two directions. Reddit's differentiator over Instragram, twitter etc. is that it's community based rather than individual based (with the algo making psuedo communities)
I feel some users will leach into platforms that created even more walled gardens, i.e. Discord, or platforms that reduce the sense of walled gardens i.e. Twitter.
> I think Stack Overflow went dead because of AI specifically
This doesn't hold up when looking at usage charts. There is a clear peak around ~2015 with a steady decline through to now. LLM's came to market in their current form in the last couple years, and took a couple years to be broadly adopted. There was a clear and obvious market fall off way before AI / LLM.
> Reddit isn't comparable
I agree with that in isolation; but since I don't agree with the AI premise this isn't especially relevant. I don't think AI will replace Reddit, I think one of the other major platforms will absorb it's users like Reddit / Hackerrank / better documentation / back searching absorbed SO's users through 2015-2021
When you load a random content page, the top 50% of the page is a question, the bottom 50% is an ad that is designed to look like a comment, and the entire right panel is ads. Quora is more ads than content, you have to scroll and decipher what is or isn't an ad based on their greyed 2px font ad disclaimer.
When I was in college, I was asked to be a founding engineer. The other two involved were business guys that were pursing a $1Mil grant and needed the MVP in 9 months. I asked for 33% and they laughed me off. A few months later I saw many salty posts on their socials about "engineers expected to own the company when they don't contribute any vision or direction".
It's like captaining a ship and not being willing to repair the ship. Good luck on your own I guess.
It's different when they already have a product and are looking to expand. That's closer to hiring a sailor to manage the sails. But when you're hiring a ship builder expect a ship builders wage.
Also, don't hire a college kid to build your MVP. That's a big enough red flag right there.