@nixCraft AI's current "knowledge" comes from stolen content online. When StackOverlow shuts down, how will AI update itself and "know" new things?

@nixCraft …and once that is complete: they can charge for access whatever they want!

@nixCraft
Innovation succeeds only when it improves our lives AND conserves resources. since the current, corporate AI does neither, it must be reinvented.

@nixCraft

It's bad...don't need to wait for time. We all know the garbage "AI" generates. Actual skills and knowledge will have no voice, no outlet. Any attempts will be stolen by the scrapers and regurgitated in mutated forms.

@nixCraft I feel like they brought that on themselves with their attitude toward both AI, and their claim that all Qs and As on the site belong to "the community" and can never be deleted. At least #reddit lets people delete posts as an act of protest.

I'm currently on a 1 year ban from the stack exchange system, but don't worry, once the ban is up I'll be back to protest and get banned again.

@nixCraft while you make an interesting point, I can't help but remember the uncountable sites and resources, both technical and social, that died long before LLMs were a thing.

I suspect that the current crop of Assumed Intelligence behemoths will choke on their own bile sooner rather than later, causing new resources to be developed.

@nixCraft Good riddance!!!

That is one site I won't be sorry to see go at all. I massively regret supporting it and filling it with data in the early years, allowing that jerk to sell it and get rich. It destroyed everything else and gets in the way of finding out information....by design.

I loathe that site and the fact I have to use it because it sucked up all answers everywhere. Bye!!! I really hope AI kills this one.

@nixCraft I don't think that this graph shows AI killing SO. Partly because the downward trend starts around 2014, about 7 years prior to the current LLM hype.

The graph just shows questions asked, not questions answered. It seems more likely common questions have already been answered so people are finding answers without asking questions. (I've used SO hundreds of times, but never asked a question.)

Plus SO answers are often low quality these days and people are probably going elsewhere.

@nixCraft
A good portion of ai generated code is going back into git repositories. Sites like github and codeberg will become the training sources. Repo information like stars, forks, issues, and stable releases will be used to evaluate if code is "good". Microsoft has an advantage because they own github and can access the private repo code. I'm not saying they do that, but let's be real.

@nixCraft Don't know how that could be estimated, but I would want to see how much GitHub and Reddit also contributed to that trend. I use exclusively DuckDuckgo (with "AI" disabled) and Searxng for search and still rarely end up on SO. The best answer is usually on GitHub or Reddit. Also docs seem to have really risen in quality over the past few years since people can freely host them on GitHub and easily generate with tools like Sphinx or rustdoc, so sometimes the docs are just enough.

@nixCraft The site has become unusable even without AI. Over the years, the atmosphere became more and more unwelcoming. My questions often got deleted or downvoted because they were (falsely) labelled as duplicates, or not relevant.

@nixCraft the fate of the times in a photo report https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-saying-goodbye-to-the-servers-at-our-physical-datacenter/

I don't lament the downfall of stackoverflow.
This meme perfectly encapsulated my experience with the site.

@nixCraft The same thing is happening to Reddit, Quora, and Medium.

@nixCraft to be fair, asking questions in #StackOverflow is stressfull, I remember my first time asking something there when I was at university, sudenly you get a lot of "your question is wrong" or "why are you trying to do this, better do that", downvotes, you also need to wait for someone to reply, etc so it is understandable that instead of going through that time consuming process people just ask some AI that just instantly answers your questions no matter how shitty they are

@nixCraft @bordfunk nothing related to software is findable or debuggable without a SotA LLM at this point. Beyond value capture that already occurred, at some point we will have an implosion of complexity that will take the world’s infrastructure only one without anybody knowing what to do and we will have to piece it back up together from zero.

@nixCraft The internet is just 5 LLMs, each full of garbage generated by the other 4.

With apologies to unknown.

@nixCraft @nixCraft It’s not “a few Gen AI apps”, it’s “a few US Gen AI Corporations”, and any region outside of the US would be wise making efforts to counter the influence of these companies. I’m sorry to say this, but we’re bound for an era of insularity. The rest of the world can’t trust the US anymore. US oligarchs rule now.

@nixCraft This isn’t just decline, it’s enclosure. AI tools absorbed sites like Stack Overflow, answer without sending traffic back, and centralize knowledge. Convenient now, but bad for the open web long-term. If this topic resonates and you’d like to exchange ideas or explore opportunities, you can find me on Telegram. username on my Bio.

@nixCraft The problem is much much larger. All AI tools simply regurgitate what's already on the independent sites. If these sites shut down, there will be no more new information, and we will all be stuck in 2025 forever