AI didn't kill Stack Overflow

Summary

The downside of gamification Initially, gamification was a booster rocket. It took a beautiful aspect of software development culture—the mysterious joy of giving and receiving help for its own sake—and added a fun new way to score reputation. But what drove that helping culture? I remember a non-programmer looking over my shoulder once when I was on Stack Overflow. “Why do people help? Just for nothing?” The joy of being able to help someone by sharing what you’ve learned is something you must experience yourself to understand. Possibly the best analogy is seeing someone whose car has broken down on the side of the road. You pull over to help because you’ve been there; you know what being broken down on the side of the road feels like. Maybe you can help, and even if you can’t, at least the stranded driver knows someone cares. And then there is the boost of discovering the source of the problem: “Look, here’s a loose coolant clamp.” That shared thrill is what we lost when Stack Overflow let the reputation game win. Software development and the culture of helping Whether the culture of helping each other will survive in this new age of LLMs is a real question. Is human helping still necessary? Or can it all be reduced to inputs and outputs? Maybe there’s a new role for humans in generating accurate data that feeds the LLMs. Maybe we’ll evolve into gardeners of these vast new tracts of synthetic data. But returning to Stack Overflow and the community it once represented: Is there some radical resurrection in its future? Before AI entered the scene, it was clear Stack Overflow needed to back out of a dead-end street of its own creation. It’s possible the site could have returned to greatness by embracing what once made it great: the community and culture of software development. That culture thrives on making people feel welcome. Practically speaking, it means letting people with foolish or off-topic questions interact with those with more experience. Someday, they’ll...