Comment by bzbee10

But if the traffic to SO is reduced significantly because of Google, there will be a death spiral. There wouldn't be a site to go and ask new questions, and even if the site is still there, nobody will bother to answer. The core problem is that the people who create the new knowledge (the answer writers) and the people who aggregate the knowledge (StackOverflow) will not get any concrete return for their efforts, since they are cut out of the consumption loop.