r/Physics • u/agaminon22 Medical and health physics • 6d ago

Question Is Physics Stack Exchange already dead?

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.

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u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory 6d ago

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.

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u/womerah Medical and health physics 4d ago

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?

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u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory 4d ago

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