Stack Overflow's Uncertain Fate and Overflow AI

Is this the end of hubs like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia? Certainly the beginning of the end most likely.

Hey Everyone,

Watching Stack Overflow the in 2023 has been a bit painful to see. It may be a casualty of ChatGPT. About 10 days ago this article went viral on Hacker News outlining it. We knew since at least April that traffic was way down.

After being critical of AI content and not knowing how to handle it in a moderator sense (e.g.hallucinations), it was peculiar in late July to see Stack Overflow release their own AI.

While traffic to OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been growing exponentially, Stack Overflow has been experiencing a steady decline – losing some of its standings as the go-to source developers turn to for answers to coding challenges.

So what is Overflow AI? For Stack Overflow for Teams, and brand new product areas, like an IDE integration that brings the vast knowledge of 58 million questions and answers from our community right into the area where developers find focus and get work done. They’re putting all this work under the umbrella of OverflowAI. 

How can we have arrived at this point of A.I. scrapping everything without recourse? Some AI models that compete against Stack Overflow were partly trained on the company's own data. 

And I’m not sure OverflowAI can make a difference.

For 15 years, Stack Overflow has been the online community where software engineers go to ask questions and get tips from fellow coders. It doesn’t however have the reputation it once did. On some level I think the traffic reflects that, and just the variety of what’s possible in 2023 with ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and other tools. It’s easier to get information out of a chatbot than a peer, for quick answers.

"Some of them (competitors) are very explicit about calling out Stack Overflow as a primary source.”

Actually, traffic to Stack Overflow’s community website has been dropping since the beginning of 2022. That may be in part because of a related development, the introduction of the CoPilot coding assistant from Microsoft’s GitHub business. What else could it be?

Microsoft used their monopoly power in their acquisition of GitHub and in developing Copilot it’s been a bit awkward for some of the rest of the internet. CoPilot is built on top of the same OpenAI large language model as ChatGPT, capable of processing both human language and programming language. A plugin to the widely used Microsoft Visual Studio Code allows developers to have CoPilot write entire functions on their behalf, rather than going to Stack Overflow in search of something to copy and paste.

A Less Personal Internet

Overflow AI is a human-centered search, but it may be too little too late. Online communities, like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia, thrived as hubs for experts and curious browsers to come together and share information freely, but Generative A.I. shifts the pendulum back to A.I. and not human sources per se, although all of this is really plagiarism in a blender, if you think about it.

ChatGPT’s rise has been a well documented phenomenon and marks 2023 as different and almost belonging to an exponential age of A.I., as compared with 2022. ChatGPT doesn’t have a year-over-year track record, having only launched at the end of November, but its website (chat.openai.com) has become one of the world’s hottest digital properties in that short time, bigger than Microsoft’s Bing search engine for worldwide traffic. We knew there would be casualties and there will be more.

The Hacker News comments were blunt and obvious. You don’t really rebound from something like this, the arrival of a different sort of beast and a different sort of era of how search and interactions take place.

According to (Business) Insider, this also perhaps reveals a looming problem at the heart of the AI revolution: With less incentive for people to go online and answer questions, the rich, human data that AI needs for training will whither and the quality of these models could degrade. Even the controversy at Reddit ensures human data and human conversations could wane. It’s a scary thought.

Generative A.I. Might Reduce Human Community Online

Overflow AI is a noble attempt at holding on. But how do you respond to such a future when consumer behaviors adapt to new tech? In 2021, Prosus, a major backer of Chinese tech giant Tencent, bought Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. Visits to the GitHub CoPilot free trial signup page more than tripled from February to March, topping 800,000, just as traffic to Stack Overflow began to plummet.

Microsoft elbowing smaller competition out of existence is nothing new. But if Microsfot could acquire GitHub and super-charge OpenAI with $10 billion and likely another $4 Billion by now, what does it all mean for community online? They acquired LinkedIn too, and have started to train scientists to act like teenage creators. I never knew A.I. researchers could act like threadboise, but it turns out all they needed was a nudge. The AI of corporations can hack people too, it turns out, to change their behaviors and to post in a certain way.

Microsoft Killed Stack Overflow

SO served its purpose for a certain stage of the internet. It feels like in the second half of 2023 we’re building another layer of the internet. I don’t like the platform monopolies that we have going, but there you have it. Stack Overflow’s future is likely not so bright and Microsoft have a bunch of new subscriptions to earn even more revenue, and it is anti-competitive and no they won’t likely get called out for it.

Thanks for reading!