I would definitely be surprised if people who've been asking good questions on StackOverflow so far would suddenly ask them elsewhere, since part of what makes a question good for StackOverflow is that it cannot be easily answered elsewhere. E.g. MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk about their research, they're unlikely to use LLMs for that anytime soon.
So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying, it might very well be a sign that they finally succeeded in their war to keep everyone else out.
Probably bad for the company milking the community for profit, though.
After being bullied about a couple of questions which were not already answered in Stack Overflow, I stopped participating StackExchange completely.
The point system which meant to motivate people to contribute became the bar itself. Lower score meant you were not taken seriously or considered a noob who stopped using pacifiers and started using computers 30 minutes ago.
So, I returned to what I did best. Digging documentation and taking my notes. They can pat themselves on the back for keeping the purity and spirit of the network.
> MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk...
When StackOverflow was new I visited frequently to enjoy the community talking about programming. For others, the goal was always to build the ultimate wiki.
The people who wanted the ultimate wiki won, and the community left, and that's where we see SO today. No community, but it is the ultimate wiki filled with programming wisdom from 2014.
Ironically, they insisted at a very narrow definition of the question and answer format and consequently failed at creating a good wiki. There is no way to approach broader topics. It’s always „how do I do x“, and the accepted answer since 2013 is a jquery plugin which is missing a maintainer since 2015.
The rules there just don't encourage updating answers or re-asking things already asked. I've always said, StackOverflow is a great resource if your specific question is "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2010?"
Ironically, I predicted this already back in 2010 (or whenever the site started). I knew from the outset that disallowing duplicates forever was not future-proof, and that the voting mechanism will favor answers posted earlier, not answers that are more correct or up to date.
It was not. A lot of the questions that would now be rejected for “subjectivity” were initially allowed, then at some point migrated to a separate instance, called “programmers.stackexchange.com” and deleted from the main site. Of course, over time, even that website lost the community and was later renamed to https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ and became the same kind of hostile hellhole.
The fact that you added “for good reason” implies that you agree with the sentiment that the website shouldn't have a community that socializes, so I'm not surprised that you tuned it out and didn't notice it being driven off the website. From your perspective this may be a case of “good riddance”, but for many including myself, it was quite sad (and still is).
I don't even think it's been about asking good questions, at least not for many years. I used SO regularly and even when I wasn't asking a question at all, it was an incredible slog to just find a concise and correct answer instead of sniping comments from people who wanted to flex knowledge, or others answering from some oblique perspective that had nothing to do with the original problem. Asking good questions is always important, yes, but if the community does not know how to provide good answers, seekers seek elsewhere.
Side note, great html book here on asking good questions, since we still absolutely have that problem to deal with even when using Gen AI as a starting point; http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
>So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying,
If you're not growing, you're dying. Businesses completely perverted that saying, but the basis for it is still true. People move on, change inerests, or simply die. You can't have a healthy long term community without new members coming in.
Seeing the culture of StackOverflow, I would choose to be dead in the ground rather than ask a question there, even a question that can't be easily answered elsewhere. Volunteer-run sites need a mix of enthusiasts who do the real work of the site and janitors who keep things from being too chaotic, but enthusiasm dims while the desire to impose order never does, so eventually the janitors take over.
MathOverflow has a much better culture, so I ask (and answer) questions there. I'm not quite sure why it's worked out better there, though I suppose it's something to do with the population.
So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying, it might very well be a sign that they finally succeeded in their war to keep everyone else out.
Probably bad for the company milking the community for profit, though.