Why did stackoverflow die?

Mods murdered it with excessive gatekeeping. Things were getting flagged as already answered when they were not, for example.

So it was already an unfriendly place when AI came along, and AI knows how to adapt the answers to your specific case without calling you a noob.

It was declining steadily before AI because the mods tolerated widespread bullying by many, even most, hi-rep contributors. I built up a pretty solid score answering questions that they considered "duplicates" before those gangs could close them.

When LLMs came along, people realized they could get answers without being abused. So they did, enmass.

The original SO had a nice cooperative vibe (2008). But but by 2015 or so it started getting very toxic.

It didn't die, but it lost quite big amount of traffic because of LLMs.

The founders did not listen. When developers got upset at the excessive and useless moderation they did nothing and lost support of developers that could have delivered good answers. This was way before AI became ubiquitous.

Apathy by the owners, being sold to a PE firm, and AI.

It wasn't any of the nonsense by people here complaining about moderation; those are just the people who can't read or follow basic instructions.

Ai for me. I loved stack. Didn't like some of the holier than though mods but you can't get ideal these days, they used to be the place to learn and solve problems. Now it's just way slower to go that route. I got killed by tech myself. Lost my whole action script freelance skills overnight. Well lost the customers not the skills.

I considered getting into SO around 2019, at which point I had more than a decade of software experience, and having gotten help from SO posts in the past, I wanted to contribute as well. My account was 8 years old. Still I was not allowed to answer question or even upvote answers. If a volunteer run community refuses to acknowledge even an experienced person looking to help, then it won’t last, RIP…

It did! That's so ducking awesome! It was absolutely trash.

It died because their moderation rules were oriented towards not boring the senior users, and not annoying the site janitors. This constantly tripped people who actually wanted to ask questions, and participation became a huge chore.

It was before the AI hype. What I can recall is that they started selling/monetizing user's work and people didn't like it.

But I have never been too deep in that ecosystem. I did a few contributions. I've always seen it as an overrated discussion forum.