SO could have been a place where someone could post a question, and a decent search algorithm could offer answers from previously answered questions; if it was a unique question then it could be opened to answers. Instead, SO decided you needed to earn the privilege of posting a question by answering questions posed by others. That right off the bat excludes a ton of people who don't have the time to wait for a question in their domain, and answer it before 1000 other people.

Sure, it's the Eternal September for tech sites. Comes with the territory. If you don't want people to visit your site (and contribute moderation and content for free), be hostile to new users. Reward aggressive closing of questions. Sure is a good way to drive away anyone but the most pedantic control freaks.

I used to refer people to SO when they would come to me with a question I couldn't answer, (I even have an SO t-shirt hanging in my closet) but now I'd only do that to my worst enemies.

This is false. You can post both questions and answers without any rep.

How people get the basics of SO wrong and still have such a strong opinion on how it works baffles me all the time.

It already does that, though. The current iteration of the 'Ask question' page finishes with box proposing existing questions

And yet, the site died exactly because of that ...

SO's toxic moderation isn't strict.

strict /strɪkt/ adjective demanding that rules concerning behaviour are obeyed and observed.

Proper moderation for rules can be no more strict than are the rules themselves, and SO's are appallingly slack.

E.g. try and find the rule prohibiting duplicates. Mods have fabricated their own definition: "Questions may be duplicates if they have the same (potential) answers" (verbatim).

Using that bogus grounds to close a question that fully follows the delared rules is, yes, toxic.

If ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow and Reddit/Twitter block API access, where will it gets its answers from?

Over time I've got used to it, but my colleagues tend to use me as a personal StackOverflow because I actually read the manuals for things we use/depend on. I regularly "amaze" them by answering obscure questions and when they ask how did you know that, the answer is always some variant on "by reading".

Now I just accept that most programmers hate reading and will prefer either just splashing around until they stumble on the answer by accident, or asking other people. It's frustrating but just how it is. I've had a senior programmer at a well known tech company tell me that now LLMs exist they+their team suddenly feel like writing documentation is worth it, because something will actually read it, and he was serious! They work on the assumption that if they write docs, zero programmers will read them! I don't think that's literally true but it might be directionally true.

I don't quite understand the assumption that LLMs are learning to code by reading StackOverflow anyway. Sure, it sounds plausible but we don't know how ChatGPT was trained. But it seems irrelevant now. GPT-4 has clearly learned programming to the level that it could generate self-training material just by reading the docs, writing experimental programs to try things out, and then summarizing its own findings which can be fed back into the next training round. At the moment it's not wired up to programming environments closely enough to do this, but it could be.

When working with new software components, usually we're able to either work into our sprints an experimentation/PoC task, that'd include reading the doc or we just include into the estimation of the development task some time to read

Usable documentation has to exists in the first place, though.

nowhere, they are cannibalizing their own source of data. They own Github so that's helpful, but still mostly just code, not a whole lot of discussion.