I'm OK being left behind, thanks

Re:I'm OK being left behind, thanks by disgruntledphd2 on Friday March 20, 2026 @10:45AM (#47455330)

> It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time.

It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. Certainly I remember having to go down a few results to get SO results for a while, even when the top results were just copypasta from SO.

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Re:I'm OK being left behind, thanks by locknitpicker on Friday March 20, 2026 @11:54AM (#47456403)

> It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads.

I don't think that's it. SO was the go-to page for troubleshooting, whose traffic was not exactly originating from web search. Also, the LLM-correlated drop in traffic is also reported by search engines. Stack Overflow just so happens to be a specialized service with a very specialized audience whose demand is perfectly dominated by LLM chatbots.

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Re:I'm OK being left behind, thanks by disgruntledphd2 on Saturday March 21, 2026 @04:27AM (#47465148)

I mean the first decline happened well before ChatGPT so it can't just be that.

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