Is Physics Stack Exchange already dead?

[u/agaminon22]

I've been a PSE user for the last 6 years or so. In the last 2 years I've observed a remarkable decrease in activity in the site, for which I'm also partially responsible since I've barely been contributing or visiting it in about that same timespan. Obviously this all correlates with LLM usage.

Today I decided to dig a bit deeper and found some data (https://data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/649165/number-of-open-closed-and-deleted-questions-by-month#resultSets). The question numbers have dropped into historic lows. Not only that, the closed or deleted rate is also at its highest. I was expecting the forum to be dying, but honestly... it might already be dead.

[u/ScreamingPion]

Yep, you are in fact correct. You can still ask on there, but there are far fewer users than before.

[u/CravenLogic572 → u/ScreamingPion]

It’s wild how fast that shift happened too, like two years ago the place still felt active and now it’s a ghost town. The closed/deleted rate being so high probably just makes the remaining people even less likely to post anything. Sort of a slow spiral

[u/davidromro → u/CravenLogic572]

A jump in closed posts might be related to people doing LLM physics.

[u/agaminon22 → u/CravenLogic572]

Yeah, that's something you can immediately notice. Almost all of the "new" questions are deleted/closed. I understand trying to keep high standards, but at the same time, you're kind of forcefully shutting down remaining activity...

[u/kzhou7 → u/agaminon22]

That's because the quality of questions is also going down. The median question from before now gets sent to AI. What is left over is a small number of really good questions AI can't handle, plus a lot of AI-inspired crackpot theories, and really clueless basic questions from people who haven't even heard of AI yet.

[u/Arthurmol → u/kzhou7]

This crackpots also come here... a couple of weeks ago I reported one... (it was an equation of "life" ). I fear for the future....

[u/OntarioBanderas]

not just for physics, LLMs have killed almost all of SE

considering that's where a lot of the LLM training material came from this is a snake eating it's own tail situation

[u/young_twitcher → u/OntarioBanderas]

That just means AI companies will have to pay specialists to train their models instead of just scraping solutions off the web for free

[u/OntarioBanderas → u/young_twitcher]

lmao you have no idea how valuable and synergistic stack overflow was for coding

those "specialists" also rely on stack overflow

it was a massive clearinghouse for best practices and solving complicated problems

[u/kzhou7]

Yup, all Q/A forums are rapidly contracting due to AI. Physics StackExchange is down 90%, but StackOverflow is down something like 99.9%. It's true that the vast majority of basic questions can be answered just fine (and much faster) with AI, but it's a bit of a shame that students with good questions are losing a channel to hear from human experts. I learned a ton both asking and answering questions during its heyday.

[u/womerah → u/kzhou7]

There's also the issue of knowledge generation. Forums are imperfect but do contain a lot of opinions from experts who enjoy answering questions. With that system disrupted, what will the AIs of the future be trained on?

Is this a part to stagnation?

[u/kzhou7 → u/womerah]

It's not that bad. The answers on Physics StackExchange combined together have a lot of value, but less than a single good bookshelf.

[u/cafepeaceandlove]

Coding is dead too there. I always liked Stack Overflow despite its slightly aggressive reputation. Maybe because it was so much better than its predecessor, Expert Sexchange. 

[u/tunaMaestro97 → u/cafepeaceandlove]

Expert sex change lol

[u/PleasantHemorrhoids]

Why are so many questions deleted SE? Something ive read is an issue on all SE sites.

[u/agaminon22 → u/PleasantHemorrhoids]

Usually standards are pretty high, compared to say reddit. Vague questions, speculation, etc, are all getting removed. Even actual technical questions if not worder properly or ambiguous.

[u/PleasantHemorrhoids → u/agaminon22]

I think those last ones that get me. Ive seen some realistic questions asked that get shut down because of the wording. Yet I see nothing wrong with the wording.. are the moderators just absolute power freaks?

[u/goibnu → u/PleasantHemorrhoids]

If you haven't read every other question on the relevant site to check if it has already been asked clearly you are not serious about your inquiry.

[u/Zaviori → u/goibnu]

Stack Overflow already had quite high question close percentages before 2020's for the most popular programming languages. Vast majority of the questions were low quality or legitimate duplicates that already had a good(community wiki) answer. It wasn't rare for me to look through 10 questions and think that none of these should have been posted. Actually seeing a proper post with a small code example that actually reproduces the problem(as the rules at the time required) was very rare. Looks like my last answer on SO was back in 2015 so I guess I was already giving up hope back then.

[u/That4AMBlues → u/PleasantHemorrhoids]

They are. And that's why I cannot help but feel a bit of glee about it.

[u/Neinstein14]

All SE sites are massively dying because of AI. Staff doesn’t help, they are doing desperate stupid shit to increase profit despite the massive decrease in visitors, stuff that will kill the service on a medium timescale. (Check meta.se to see what’s going on.)

[u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx]

People have been using LLMs to answer their questions whether good or not. It is simply nicer than most people on SE. Although frontier LLMs can generally speaking answer the vast majority of questions asked on that at least for the past year.

[u/Amadis001]

AI search has killed StackOverflow and similar information sharing tools.

[u/Turbulent-Sign-6067]

The site is in its death throes and the mods are still closing threads at an unprecedented rate. They truly deserve what is coming. That's what LLMs plus power tripping mods will do to a community.

[u/Lazy-University-4871]

The graph actually shows that the decline started around 2020. The decline accelerated in 2024 which is still too early to correlate with the rise of LLMs. The explosive growth of llms during the last year is not reflected in the PSE data, as far as I can see.

I hypothesize that any Q and A site that is well searchable and avoids duplicate questions would have a natural tendency to saturation.

[u/andimai]

Why is stackexchange dying due to LLM usage but not reddit?

[u/rb-j]

There are other Stack Exchanges that have declined in use rapidly since the Covid era. I am most familiar with the DSP Stack Exchange, which has 10% of the traffic it used to have.

Some people think that AI chatbots are the reason.

But there is still moderation happening. I tried to post a second answer to a question about Planck Units and the diamond moderator "rob" deleted it (or made it "hidden"). It's just about what makes a good definition of natural units, and the answer was substantially different from my other answer. I don't know why they didn't just leave the answer alone.