You can even see the decline in posts and votes before GPT became mainstream. This definitely look more like search engine failing to get rid of those cheap copycats.

It feels like they're trying to be a sort of "wikipedia" of every programming problem and solution.

That is exactly what stackoverflow is supposed to be. It's not there to answer your question about "why is my IF statement not working", it's there to be a resource for all developers. How is a question about your specific problem gonna helps anyone ? If you haven't, take the time to read the "how to ask" section, it describes what kind of questions are acceptable and what kind are not.

There is, obviously, some proper questions that should not have been deleted, but most of them are not suited for the site, as they don't bring anything to the rest of the community.

The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.

I don't think they see that as a problem, that's the goal

You lack vision, but I see a place where people get blocked and their questions opened then immediately closed as duplicates. Opened and closed, opened and closed all day, all night. Soon, where the internet once stood will be a string of condescending experts, admonitions that "you shouldn't do that, do Y instead", pleas for information closed as off-topic. Passive aggression, spiteful ego contests and wonderful, wonderful karma meters reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.

Well, for starters, the fall started six months before ChatGPT launched. And there was a brief uptick in traffic after ChatGPT's launch.

For me the real problem with Stack Overflow, as someone who was one of the earliest users of the service, is when you ask a question now you don't actually get a good answer anymore. Often your question just gets deleted by moderators. And even when I've answered someone's perfectly good question, the question (and my answer) have been deleted by mods.

All I can say is thank god ChatGPT came when it did, because we needed something to replace Stack Overflow.

I really like this, never saw it before. Thanks!

Does it really though? It seems to me that once you nail the general intelligence, you'll just need to provide the supplemental information (e.g. new documentations) for it to give an accurate response.

Bing already somewhat does this by connecting their bot to internet searches

We will go to the documentation.

Hey, if people are going to go back to reading manuals like we're in the 1980's again is it such a bad thing? /s

It's insane how a single tool managed to completely destroy the value collectively created by people in over a decade.