Really feels like Stack Overflow lost a huge bet for their cultural relevance in how late they were to embracing AI. An idea I saw at the time when ChatGPT was

Really feels like Stack Overflow lost a huge bet for their cultural relevance in how late they were to embracing AI. An idea I saw at the time when ChatGPT was picking up steam was to generate an automatic AI to every question, then have contributors edit/vote up/vote down the AI response - basically treat it like any other response but have it built in. Wonder where it would be if that approach was taken. Instead of anything that, they let mods use a bullshit sniff test, then changed their mind on that and got into an embarrassing war with their mods. Obviously there's a little bit of empathy to be had for the mods in terms of dealing with generated answers, but the answer of banning them outright seemed very kneejerky and a plainly bad idea and entirely ignorant of where the winds were blowing. An awareness of how the mods were responsible for turning SO into the... interesting place it was at the time and being prophylactic about fixing the culture they had created towards the end of the 2010s would have helped prevent this. Instead here we are, a year removed from the beginning of this and it really feels like the Stack Overflow is a much, much smaller part of my life than it once was. Sure, in a few years the training data for GPT will be worse, but it's not like I don't still find Python 2.x answers when clicking on SO links, and I can paste in the new docs, and not worry about whether some random moderator is having a good day or not. It's sad, really. In time we'll see Stack Overflow's decline as preventable (at least to an extent), and view it as a case of what happens when the strong leadership that's needed to disagree with a loud minority is absent. Whatever you think SO should have done, I'm sure that you think what they did end up doing was not what was the best play for them.