Beyond AI tools in IDEs, the reputation of the site's attitude towards new question posters definitely doesn't help. Neither does the site's pivot towards AI that alienated a bunch of the power users. The reputation issue isn't new though, and I'm not sure of when the AI pivot started.

I'm also not sure if it's a great metric. Personally, anything complicated enough for me to want outside help with is usually so far into the specifics of my work environment that it's not safe to ask about online. It'd either be too revealing or devolve into the classic "I refuse to answer your question because I refuse to believe your starting scenario and limitations". Otherwise it tends to be stuff I can sort out by piecing together stuff from blogs, documentation, and tangentially related stackOverflow answers. Not always easy, but easy enough that I'd rather work through it myself instead of asking the internet for help.

Question... what were all those AI tools in IDEs trained on?....

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Is that before or after all the closed due to duplicate?

Meanwhile, Discourse forum software continues to grow in popularity an doesn’t have the reputation for toxic communities.

Jeff Atwood co-founded both StackOverflow and Discourse.

Answering the easy dumb questions is now done by AI pretty good. I would say even better because the AI does not care about flagging your question for duplicate or mocking you for not being precise.

StackOverflow needs to refocus on those questions not answered by AI easily. They need to adjust their business to fewer questions that need thorough investigation and specialist solutions. That is a hard thing to do with only volunteers to answer these questions, so maybe they need to switch to a paid model which pays the correctly flagged answer a cut of the fee…