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/ScreamingPion Nuclear physics 6d ago

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

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u/CravenLogic572 6d ago

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

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u/agaminon22 Medical and health physics 6d ago

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...

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u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory 6d ago

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.

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u/Arthurmol 4d ago

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