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The Fall of Stack Overflow

• sakopov 3y ago
  I haven't had an SO account in over a decade. In fact I had mine deleted per my request circa 2010 and it was Jeff Atwood himself who was handling that request. I still have that email interaction with him somewhere in my inbox :)
• hirundo 3y ago
  This is a large decline. It does not correlate well with the rise of LLMs, which have shifted my own habits away from Stack Overflow recently. Looking through the graphs, the most dramatic shift was the large drop in new visits in the first half of last year, by two thirds or more. That seems late to be a Covid effect. There were some political controversies, but it would surprise me if they had such a large effect. What accounts for this?
  • ctoth 3y ago
    Copilot.
  • oxfordmale 3y ago
    I am speculating, an impact this size must be related to a change in Google search ranking. Although there appears to be a Monica effect (2020) in the data too. I stopped contributing myself around that time: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/340906/update-an-agreement-with-monica-cellio https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/340906/update-an-ag...
  • MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
    I wonder if Google started de-ranking them in search results, or changed something similar that caused people to click through to Stack Overflow less frequently. It is also possible there's a methodology issue. There's no source for where this data comes from.
    • ourmandave 3y ago
      I just googled a Microsoft tech question and first was a 3rd party provider plugin, then official MS Learn, then "people also asked...", and 4th was the SO block. I scrolled down a lot and didn't see any scraper site links.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    You trust LLM responses? I feel they are not worth the paper they are written on
    • ripley12 3y ago
      You don't necessarily need to trust them for them to be useful. I can often evaluate a Copilot autocompletion (check that code looks right at first glance, check that it compiles, hover over method+type signatures to see their docs, run the code) in less time than it would take me to find+read a Stack Overflow answer.
    • capableweb 3y ago
      No, no one sane would. Just like no one sane would trust random SO authors with any authority either. You still have to verify the information somehow, but at least in the LLM case I instantly get replies 24/7, and it's been reading more papers than any of the authors on SO.
    • Legend2440 3y ago
      ChatGPT has gotten quite a bit more accurate over the last few months. It does seem to have lost some creativity in the process, but it's much more true to the training data now. Code is easy to verify anyway.
    • vbezhenar 3y ago
      I trust AI as much as I trust random answer on SO. It is a direction for further research and evaluation.
    • rtpg 3y ago
      "ask LLM, then look up the language/library docs to see if the idea makes sense" has worked relatively well for me.
  • crispyambulance 3y ago
    > What accounts for this? IMHO people have tired of the smug dismissive assholes that dominate SO and its its insipid gamification and they have, gradually, found alternatives. For some, it's more welcoming and knowledgeable communities in github issues+discussion. For others it's special-purpose, interactive forums that provide more guidance and non-hostile support for users of certain platforms/tools (eg Posit Community). For many, copilot has been fulfilling that need, Does it always give "the correct" answer? No. Does it provide a sketch of a solution that gets you half-way there when dealing with tedious humdrum stuff that you just forgot because it's so boring? YES. For yet others it's just plain old reddit where you can ask a question and whether it gets smacked down or not depends on how cool the community happens to be.
• readingnews 3y ago
  I was promoted to one of those "mod" type people who reviews new answers, first posts, etc, a few years back. I can tell you that I quit in the last 6 months. All new answers are answers on questions from first time posters, answering questions that have good solid answers from 8+ years ago (mostly 10 years), and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points. The question/answer is not something that has changed in the last 8+ years, they are just doing it to get reputation or whatever. Most good solid questions...I just do not see too many today. I am not saying this is the reason for the decline, but there is a deluge of posts answering very old questions with a slight modification of an old answer. I quit putting effort into it, as it was just non-productive.
  • kibwen 3y ago
    I recall that about ten years ago there were reports that edits to Wikipedia were slowing precipitously. People wondered if this meant the imminent death of Wikipedia. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems more plausible that Wikipedia had merely shifted from its adolescent phase to its mature phase, and that all the low-hanging fruit had simply been harvested. If we look at the stats, Wikipedia's edit velocity maxed out in early 2007 (37 days per 10M edits), then fell to half that in late 2014 (73 days per 10M edits), and has actually increased a fair bit since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits It's entirely possible that the same is happening to SO.
  • robomartin 3y ago
    I wonder if this might be partly because they have not made an effort to make their software be more intelligent about surfacing answers to questions as well as evaluating answers. I would think that, at some point, it isn't necessarily the fault of the question authors or those responding. One of the things I say with some frequency is that all failures are engineering problems. Blaming the users/customers, in the end, fails to take advantage of an opportunity to improve the product, learn from mistakes and improve process.
  • smashed 3y ago
    Thanks for your work as a mod. While I understand it's a lot of work, and some (most?) might be posting low quality answers, my main problem with stack overflow has been exactly that over time, the top answer becomes stale. The question is still relevant, but the best practice or library, platform whatever changed... That is a problem the stack overflow model has a hard time adapting too.. and it just gets worst over time..
• BatFastard 3y ago
  They were and are an excellent resource. Is it inevitable that traffic would decrease as questions are answered? Has traffic gone somewhere else? Has AI replaced it?
  • whynotmaybe 3y ago
    For me, a few months ago, when I had a question, I used to google/bing it and try to find my solution between 2-3 different SO answers (even the questions themselves were often helpful). Now, AI kinda replaced for me, it's copilot first, then ChatGPT if copilot is not enough, then google/bing if ChatGPT is not enough and maybe finally SO. Conservative figure from my side would be 15-25% less stackoverflow in a regular day. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
    • politelemon 3y ago
      I feel SO missed a trick here by not creating a Copilot like integration first.
  • azayrahmad 3y ago
    Not sure about the statistics, but an anecdote for me: I had a specific programming issue at work I need to solve, and I tried googling for answers in Stack Overflow. There are some answers but ultimately none of what I found can actually solve my issue. Then I ask ChatGPT to suggest a solution, and in about 5 seconds it gave me an answer. Not perfect, but with little editing it is solved. Now I'm sure that ChatGPT probably scraped StackOverflow, perhaps using the very same answers I got from StackOverflow, but combined with other answers from other sources resulting in the instant answer. That does not necessary mean AI will replace StackOverflow, it just means that people wouldn't ask redundant questions in StackOverflow anymore, just questions that AI can't solve.
• MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  Where were these data sourced from? As far as I know, StackOverflow does not publicize internal analytics with such granularity. If these figures are real, are they leaked?
  • encomiast 3y ago
    Users with over 25,000 reputation can see site analytics that include charts that look a lot like these. https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/site-analytics https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/site-analytics
    • MontyCarloHall 3y ago
      That must be it. It would have been nice for the original post to include this information.
    • fhoffa 3y ago
      Looking at that source, there's a pretty straightforward explanation of where the page views come from. - Last month, Stack Overflow had ~142,575,642 visits. - Last month, Google gave 127,896,508 visits to Stack Overflow - Last month, Bing gave 7,491,274 visits to Stack Overflow You could say that the Stack Overflow # of pageviews depends mainly on: - How often people are searching Google/Bing for answer. - How often Google/Bing rank Stack Overflow high enough for people to click into it.
    • XCSme 3y ago
      I can confirm: https://i.snipboard.io/0wmnSv.jpg https://i.snipboard.io/0wmnSv.jpg
      • XCSme 3y ago
        We can also see that lately there are more questions than answers, which shows that most experts are no longer that active, or that there are more beginners and fewer experts overall.
  • minimaxir 3y ago
• is_true 3y ago
  I think the problem is google losing the fight with spammers. It's being a while for me that I have to put "stackoverflow" in the search query to avoid sites with scraped content
  • dylan604 3y ago
    >to avoid sites with scraped content especially YouTube links. sadly, it would not surprise me if these people are earning a decent enough money from ads to make it worth their while to be "content creators" solely from search results from Googs
  • abathur 3y ago
    And, IME, these scraped sites often manage to rank above the canonical source.
    • heisenbit 3y ago
      It is both infuriating and sad that Google can‘t figure out a way to compensate for this SEO spam. Is there an easier problem than doing it for SO (and yes, coding is a big enough problem for Google imho to be worth investing a little here).
    • hinkley 3y ago
      Which means they aren't applying any sort of primacy to the information. If three segments of the internet think the same piece of information is relevant, that should affect the score of all 3 copies, not just the largest segment.
      • abathur 3y ago
        I'm not sure I'm reading you right--you're suggesting it should work this way? When content republished on some bizarre/sketchy/unaccountable ~adfarm outranks the site where it first appeared, users of Google's search service end up at higher risk of getting phished or infected with malware. Is there some benefit you see here that outweighs this downside risk?
• NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  All internet forums tend toward shit as time goes on.
  • tickerticker 3y ago
    It's the forum-to-fertilizer decay cycle.
  • l0b0 3y ago
    I agree, but I'm afraid the downvotes are inevitable. SO for a long time had by a very long shot the best signal-to-noise ratio of any free-as-in-beer Q&A channel. Basically any live comms channels (IRC, Matrix, and so on) disincentivise clear, thoughtful responses in favour of streams of consciousness. And forums is where information goes to die, as every question turns into a huge back-and-forth until the question is sufficiently refined to receive a useful answer, which is usually extremely specific ("run this command") rather than generally applicable ("you need to frobnicate the foon, for example by running this command"). Unfortunately anything popular is a target, and once they stopped trying to innovate to keep ahead of systems gaming they were going to lose eventually. It's amazing it took this long.
• fishtoaster 3y ago
  Interesting that this seems to have started around Spring 2021 when posts + votes started tailing off, followed by traffic starting to decline around spring of 2022. I can think of a few theories that I don't think hold water: 1. The rise of ChatGPT to answer many questions that StackOverflow would previously have been used for. This seems unlikely, since the timing doesn't really work out. 2. The perennial complaints about StackOverflow's culture of closing everything as duplicates or offtopic. This seems unlikely as well, since those complaints have been common for a decade or more. 3. The prevalence of SEO-optimized scrape sites - the ones that pop up with a "blog post" merely reposting a stack overflow question + answer in a different font. I've seen these for a while, and anecdotally they feel more common that they used to, but I couldn't give any real timeline for that vague feeling. 4. StackOverflow internal politics? I've seen the occasional stack-overflow meta thread pop up periodically on HN or social media, but I don't recall anything earth-shattering recently. 5. Most questions have good answers now and there's less need for new ones. I'd have bought that answer 10 or so years ago when StackOverflow's pile of questions + answers reached maturity. I don't think it suddenly hit some sort of answer saturation point in 2021. My guess is that it's a slow shift in the culture of the StackOverflow userbase: - Being a top answerer confers some cachet and makes you more employable in some places - People notice this and start looking for the most effective ways to become a top answerer - The most effective way is fast, low-effort answers - There's been a rise in such low-effort answers over the last 5 years or so - As a result, the cachet of being an StackOverflow top answerer is a lot lower - The really good, deep, technical answerers (as well as the mods) are leaving as that cachet goes away - Post quality starts dropping around 2021 and views start declining as people react to that in 2022.
  • swyx 3y ago
    github copilot was launched in Oct 2021 as well https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1683640691124224000 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1683640691124224000
  • krackers 3y ago
    SEO games resulting in SO clones ranking higher than SO itself?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  "How to do A?" Comment: "You shouldn't do A, it's better to do B" Closed, duplicate of "How to do C". Yeah sure, in the beginning, there were many more basic questions (how to increase number by 1, how to get division remainder, how to check if file exists,...), and if you're coding in Perl, you can still find all the answers... if you're working in python, you'll find answers for python2, some for python3, some specific to python2.6, etc... if you ask again, it'll be closed as a duplicate. I know it's anecdotal, but after a few bad experiences, people just decide not to use that specific site anymore.
  • grecy 3y ago
    Echos my experience perfectly. It's actually impossible to ask a question and get an answer, also impossible to ask a clarifying question on an existing question/answer. That makes it much, much less useful than it otherwise could be.
  • morkalork 3y ago
    Perl is a good example because it's stagnant. Googling Python or Java? If the result is up to date, it's a low quality content farm. If it isn't from a content farm, it's a page from 2008 that is no longer relevant at all!
    • ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      > stagnant I would call that "stable" :) Or "good enough, that it doesn't need constant fixing" :)
      • morkalork 3y ago
        Fair enough!
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          I'd suggest 'mature'.
• redbell 3y ago
  Interestingly, just a few weeks before launching ChatGPT, ZDNet magazine made an interview [0] with StackOverflow’s CEO to discuss how the site became the world's most popular programming site. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. __________________ 0. https://www.zdnet.com/article/stack-overflow-ceo-on-how-it-became-the-worlds-most-popular-programming-site/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/stack-overflow-ceo-on-how-it-b...
• fbdab103 3y ago
  I wonder how much traffic has been siphoned away from those copy-cats that mirror SO? Out of principle alone, I will immediately hit the back button and look for the genuine article, but I could believe many do not. The other aspect that grinds my gears is the closing of duplicate question. Fine in principle, except when the original was answered 10 years ago and all of the answers are jQuery.
• chimen 3y ago
  All, but all, my recent questions there were flagged and deleted immediately. My account there is 11 year old and has over 11k reputation - not much but not nothing. The site, for the past 2-3 years seems moderated by nazis and bots. Dunno if my timeline matches these graphs but I noticed the decline quite early.
• akokanka 3y ago
  Once every year. I get to ask real question. Every time it's closed immediately. Fuck their policies.
  • teh_klev 3y ago
    Perhaps you could provide an example or two?
    • Const-me 3y ago
      Not GP, but here's 3 questions I managed to recover: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879/finding-coordinate-of-rectangle-in-n-dimension https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879/finding-coordin... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57323981/realtime-video-processing-for-the-complete-windows-desktop https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57323981/realtime-video-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65025858/how-to-fetch-the-message-string-from-win32-provided-hresult-c-sharp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65025858/how-to-fetch-th...
• maxlin 3y ago
  Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT, I sincerely hope it keeps operating, stays strict (even if it causes collateral) and keeps ban on LLM-generated content. The wheels of this kind of stuff turn slowly, but obviously ChatGPT was trained partly with data only gainable from a healthy StackOverflow-kind of site with users actively asking unique questions and enough people answering those unique questions with well-though-out answers. The shittyfuture outcome is that StackOverflow goes out of business and LLM's stagnate on this front, while being capable of answering in fuwwy speawk when prwompted, would still be limited to / biased towards older versions of libraries, software, languages, tools etc.
  • azayrahmad 3y ago
    Hopefully so. As I mentioned in my other comment somewhere here, my optimistic prediction would be that StackOverflow will eventually still keep operating, but only by questions that can't be solved by AI, so hopefully leading into a more high quality discussions.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    > Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT Claim asserted without evidence.
    • maxlin 3y ago
      It has for me, and several developer friends, and considering the fame ChatGPT has gotten, and that StackOverflow's fall has accelerated, it's obvious the milkshake's migrating. Not all of it of course, as I stated, "for the common use case"
      • zacmps 3y ago
        To contrast, I've not once used it where I would have previously used SO (professional developer).
        • 3y ago
• tupac_speedrap 3y ago
  Stack overflow has been dying for a few years, too much sweaty turbonerd stuff and for JavaScript they always seems to give bad examples.
• ddgflorida 3y ago
  With AI we have no need for Stack Overflow - it borrowed all the answers.
• MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  These figures show an extremely precipitous (and permanent) decline in traffic over the course of a few days in May of 2022 [0], during which the number of daily new visits dropped from ~1M to ~300K, the number of total daily page views dropped from ~20M to ~14M, and the number of daily sessions dropped from ~9.4M to ~6.1M. However, there is no commensurate decrease in posts/votes during the same time period. Posts/votes remained relatively constant through 2022 (modulo normal seasonal fluctuations), until February 2023 when both fell off a cliff (I assume due to the rise of LLMs). Traffic data are sourced from Google Analytics, while post/vote data are computed internally by StackOverflow [1]. I wonder if the apparent precipitous drop in traffic in May 2022 is simply an artifact of Google Analytics suddenly changing how it tracks traffic/visitors. [0] https://i.imgur.com/qMj7Lge.png https://i.imgur.com/qMj7Lge.png [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36856249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36856249
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    Drops like that are either due to how bots are tracked, a Google algo change, or a major internal design change.
    • notatoad 3y ago
      or else bad measurement. the post doesn't explain where they got these traffic numbers, and it seems unlikely they have access to stackoverflow's real traffic stats. they're using some sort of estimation here. there's always a chance that their estimates are wrong - especially if they're showing implausible shifts like this.
      • mananaysiempre 3y ago
        > it seems unlikely they have access to stackoverflow's real traffic stats. The question and user profile view stats (among other things) are public on the Data Explorer and included in the dumps: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/database-schema-documentation-for-the-public-data-dump-and-sede https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/database-schem... Not sure what they’re counting as a “visit”, though.
• elforce002 3y ago
  This is interesting. So, train llms on "everything", including SO, and then replace "everything", including SO. I think we'll see companies such as google, bing, etc... paying to scrap different websites.
• 38 3y ago
  Stack Overflow banned my character with 100,000 reputation: https://stackoverflow.com/users/1002260 https://stackoverflow.com/users/1002260 for FIVE YEARS, because of a rollback war on some of my own answers. some idiot was gaming the system and adding minor punctuation here and there, just to get review points. so yeah, good riddance.
  • worthless-trash 3y ago
    Hey, you had helped me out in the past ! thanks. I have since deleted my account on SO, which was actually a somewhat involved process. They did not however allow me to remove the answers that I provided.
  • system2 3y ago
    What was your incentive to dedicate so many hours for this website? Can you list a few if possible?
  • pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    Probably because you were going around antagonizing everyone and then deleting the evidence, Steven Penny.
    • 38 3y ago
      thanks for the valuable comment. I realize now that my 1,800 answers mean nothing, and that the only important thing is my comment etiquette. I will try to do better, random stranger.
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  really interesting as this isn't like digg or myspace, it was built on information, rather than interaction, and will probably fall like the tower of babel. but i suppose it will still be a very valuable dataset to anyone looking to train a coding model. its the single most valuable resource that could be archived for one
• hintymad 3y ago
  Would this not be due to SO’s demise, but due to the fact the tech has become more stable and boring to the point that there are fewer new questions and answers?
• jonnycomputer 3y ago
  My main issue, with the main Stack Overflow site (rather than some of the other stack sites), is that I don't get answers to my questions, possibly because no-one knows the answer. If they did, then it's probably been asked before, and since I always look first, I've found the answer to the question that was asked, and so don't eve pose the question, though I might contribute to the answer I found in some way.
• pentagrama 3y ago
  I remember trying to learn front end development around 2013, was fascinated by responsive web design and twitter bootstrap. Asked some questions on that site, was mostly ridiculed for my amateur questions several times, never touched the site again and also never learned front end. So this is my story with that site.
  • th3byrdm4n 3y ago
    There is some barrier to entry. My friend, a much less skilled developer, was much better at the craft of SO. I just lurk/solve my own issues
  • andirk 3y ago
    I went to a university that basically just handed me the Comp Sci manual and said RTFM. I almost failed out, but then I learned it. I have only had great experience with SO, but regardless, don't get dissuaded by those with less than mediocre tact.
  • wvenable 3y ago
    I had the opposite problem; I'm actually quite skilled in areas but never had enough "karma" to answer any questions so I've never ever been able to.
    • suzzer99 3y ago
      Same. I got put in StackOverflow jail for posting my contribution an answer because I didn't have enough karma to post a comment on a previous answer (or maybe it was the other way around, I forget). Never mind that I was earnestly trying to help the original poster, and pointed out a legitimate mistake in one of the answers. I broke protocol and had to be punished.
    • lordnacho 3y ago
      It seems like there was a time window when you could actually get upvotes, and if you missed it you'll never be able to use the site as a normal user.
• SoftTalker 3y ago
  I don't use SO sites anymore because of the incessant "accept our cookies" popups that aren't even relevant to me because I don't live where EU cookie laws or GDPR applies.
  • rypskar 3y ago
    The "we don't care about your privacy"-popup is the main reason why I also have stopped using SO
• lawgimenez 3y ago
  My SO account is almost 12 years, with just over 2k reputation and I don't really care. Until now I am still somewhat helping answer some basic questions in the mobile development area tags, my only gripe with SO is the hostile nature of some mods with large reputation. Some seem to get a kick out of this and forgot that reputation does not translate to expertise. For 12 years, they have not figured this one out. New users will ask a very valid question and then won't respond anymore. I have seen this one played out every single day. Back in the day, users were generous with the upvotes even for a simple basic question, this is not the case anymore today.
  • culopatin 3y ago
    I think that with the rise of push notifications, no one really goes to a site to check notifications anymore. So the new user may have not developed the muscle memory to go back to SO and participate. I suspect this also has something to do with the decline of forums. Reddit still works because the app sends 200 notifications a day, but without it, I don’t think it would be as popular. Also SO is participation hostile unless you’re a pro, so as a newbie I’m not going to do anything other than ask and lurk, because I’m not worthy
    • galaxyLogic 3y ago
      At least part of the reason for the hostility is that SO is a game. You get points, but you can also prevent others from getting points by voting down or removing their questions and answers. On SO this hostility is pronounced because participants believe that if they get a lot of points they have easier time finding a well-paying job.
      • stulentsev 3y ago
        > participants believe that if they get a lot of points they have easier time finding a well-paying job It’s true, though. I have a high-rep account and I’ve had a few jobs fall in my lap because of that.
    • kzrdude 3y ago
• WoahNoun 3y ago
  Math overflow and math.stackexchange are still pretty fantastic and the content does go "stale" as fast as programming / software engineering.
• Nonlin 3y ago
  I wonder is this is the cannery in the coal mine for the internet as a whole. Will the internet grow more and more quite as folks chat with local AI bots.
  • ianmcgowan 3y ago
    But what will ChatGPT 10 be trained on, if no one is posting blog posts, answering questions on stack overflow, or updating Wikipedia? OpenAI will have to change the logo to a snake swallowing its own tail.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • andirk 3y ago
      We're already losing ton of indexable, searchable content from knowledgeable people due to the content being created and shared via private chatrooms, and now that chat bots can collect a handful of results and put it in a cute spoken language format, I worry that this "information highway" is about to get seriously gate-kept and dwindle into a pay-to-play public library.
      • Nonlin 3y ago
        Yes that is another problem that may cap AI. If they don't create an AGI. There was a chatGPT research paper where it could learn from its mistakes and seek novel solutions.
• Semaphor 3y ago
  The most help I ever got from SO for questions not already there, was because of their (perceived) strictness. The process of writing a high-quality question, with a minimally viable example, clearly lined out thought-processes, and other things tried, solved the question for me in most cases without me ever having to post it.
  • djbusby 3y ago
    Rubber Duck. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
    • Eduard 3y ago
      > The process of writing a high-quality question, with a minimally viable example, clearly lined out thought-processes, and other things tried, solved the question for me in most cases without me ever having to post it. Nevertheless post the question and provide an answer. Everybody wins: you reap the upvotes, and everyone else benefits from the shared knowledge.
      • seanthemon 3y ago
        "marked as duplicate" pointing to a 5yo answer with links that 404
        • einpoklum 3y ago
          An answer relying on links rather than its own text is actually against policy, and should not have stayed up. Unfortunately, there is a moderator strike now so I can't tell you to flag such an answer...
        • JimDabell 3y ago
          You don’t mark answers as duplicates, you mark questions as duplicates. And if it’s a duplicate question, the new answer should be posted to the old question. So it’s correct to mark the question as a duplicate. Otherwise all the people arriving at the original question won’t see the new answer.
• yuiegi 3y ago
  As much as Stack Overflow has helped me in my youth. The community made me feel stupid and I felt so much anxiety asking for help.
  • sieabahlpark 3y ago
    [dead]
  • worthless-trash 3y ago
    Stack overflow hasn't ever been a place to get "help" though, its basically a place to get told that your question is a duplicate even when it isn't.
    • omgomgomgomg 3y ago
      Its pretty annoying, for almost a decade all js questions have j query solutions, if you ask for that in reactjs or god forbid, vanilla js, which also went through many api changes, its still a duplicate. Often itscthe same for css, where grid and flexbox are now standards, the old questions with replies full of vendor prefixes and very hacky solutions should be deprecated or transferred to archives. Btw, how do the blog posts copying so questuons monetize and how does google not shut them down, the pages dont even work, I thought google would know better?
• majikaja 3y ago
  I tried asking a legitimate question before on SO about physics education and it got shut down because it wasn't a question with a definitive answer. What non-trivial question has straightforward answers? It's just a homework help site. No serious discussion is allowed.
  • charcircuit 3y ago
    The point of asking a question on stack exchange is to create a question answer pair as the whole goal of stack exchange is to create a repository of high quality question answer pairs. If it's not possible to select an answer to a question then it isn't a relevant question for stack exchange.
    • majikaja 3y ago
      And the point of this repository created by users for free is to sell it to a 3rd party I suppose? Why would anyone other than undergraduate students spend their time on such a site
      • l33t233372 3y ago
        I think the point is to just spread knowledge, in principle at least.
      • iSnow 3y ago
        At least in software development, SO is/was very useful, as they provide a curated repository of Q/A where the answers follow the current state of tech. Every time I started out learning a new framework, SO would be tremendously helpful, because in software development, you mostly have questions that have correct and incorrect answers.
        • majikaja 3y ago
          I said SO but I should have said SE in my case - it just doesn't work for research fields because these especially are all about exploring unknowns, yet SE doesn't allow this... Maybe software engineering is all solved and there's no more ambiguity left to be discussed.
• JohnMakin 3y ago
  The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago - moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever. - because of the previous bullet, oftentimes the best answer is buried in comments and has very negative feedback despite answering the exact question Due to a combination of these things, filtering against the noise for what I wanted became increasingly more difficult and often the solution to my problem was easier found searching github comments or random blogs.
  • JohnMakin 3y ago
    here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer did it.
    • Eduard 3y ago
      sprinkle in a 100K+ reputation user commenting "this is easily answered with `man Y`" — oblivious to the fact that Y's manpage is a 188 page monster, and manpages being awkward to search in. Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/q/19622198 https://stackoverflow.com/q/19622198
      • Culonavirus 3y ago
        Here's a question maybe someone can answer for me, or maybe I'm just stupid and other people don't need it, but... What's up with the "man Y" aversion towards the usage of examples in the man pages? I don't expect some behemoth like ffmpeg to have a billion examples in the man files, but damn, every other reasonably sized CLI app would be so much easier to use, if you had just a dozen or two of examples at the end of the man file.
• jatins 3y ago
  As long as OpenAI and others in the LLM space are for profit companies should start charging them heavy fees for their data. Surely there will be more novel knowledge in the world produced after 2023, and these companies will need that
• raincole 3y ago
  Every time I posted on SO(or other SE sites) I always have to clarify my question with something like "I know it's probably not good idea to do A, and I understand B could be a better solution, but in my specific situation I really want to do A." Then people will still try to close my question because it's a duplicate of B.
  • sixothree 3y ago
    I've literally included the search terms I used to ensure it wasn't a duplicate. Other times ice explained why this is clearly not a duplicate . Nope. Closed for being a duplicate.
    • lopis 3y ago
      Sometimes it can be as simple as "version 2 of this software does things this way, but I'm using version 14, how can I do this?". "Closed as duplicate: [question from 12 years ago]".
      • pasc1878 3y ago
        I now only use a smaller sites and you just mark these to be reopened. The issue is that all users are moderators and the newcomers are the ones not reading questions etc. I would flag this sort of thing for a real moderator.
  • bunga-bunga 3y ago
    People just skip that part. The flow is: read title, skim code example, post answer. Then you point out that they completely disregarded what you wrote and blame you for misdirecting them. Then you get the downvotes. The SO way.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• andirk 3y ago
  Let us all increase our questioning, answering, voting on Stack Overflow! With private chats like Discord and Slack, and chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT, a lot of the shared knowledge is not indexable. That's bad.
  • bayindirh 3y ago
    I don’t want to be constantly low-key insulted because I already don’t know the best approach and the answer to my own question, thank you.
• Lazare 3y ago
  I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top. I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleasant, but somehow the actual result is the exact opposite. That being said, I don't think the culture or moderation has got worse recently, so I suspect the traffic decline is either a change in Google's algorithms or the impact of ChatGPT (or both).
  • anticodon 3y ago
    I think moderation culture changed for a reason. About 8-10 years ago quality of answers started to decline because HR started to source SO for candidates. This created incentive for posting thousands of answers moments after the question is posted that were simply not right. More often than not those wrong answers were upvoted anyway. And HR won't check the quality of answers, they are concerned only with your total score. Once I was researching something and found wrong answer on SO from some junior dev from India. The answer was wrong and it was evident that the author of the answer didn't even fully read the question. Out of curiosity I checked the author's profile and found out that it was a deliberate strategy: e.g. when there's a question about working with files, he'd post an answer with a link to the language page on "open". I politely asked the author in the comments to stop posting wrong or useless answers. Instead, he wrote very aggressive response, opened my profile and downvoted as many of my answers as he could. And there were many similar cases, probably still are.
    • suzzer99 3y ago
      Everything went downhill once people had real incentive (like actual money, not just internet cred) to game the system for reputation points. The mods had to come up with ever-evolving layers of rules on top of rules that lowered the answer quality and put up huge barriers for an average user to contribute.
      • 3y ago
• blobbers 3y ago
  I think google has started to downrank them. Try asking a few programming questions and SO won't be the top link anymore.
• nomilk 3y ago
  Site traffic basically dropped by ~50% in 1 year! Yikes!
• throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  I wanted to post about StackOverflow here but apparently my comment was a duplicate of another comment
• gsky 3y ago
  I used to answer questions until they kept telling me that answers should not be short but long with examples. I didn't want to waste my time so i stopped answering all together
• kristopolous 3y ago
  The technical qualifications of the responses are lacking. They usually seem to only know magical incantations that will get things to work and don't have deep familiarity because really competent people aren't googling for answers like we are so they never land on the page to give their 2¢ There needs to be different exclusion and barriers but not through the wacky constitutional sheriff system they are using. Mailing lists are decent because you know you're going out on blast so social norms kick in. If you mail say LKML, most people imagine important kernel people taking their time to read your blabberings and that likely stops those who can't improve the silence. SO OTOH seems too unbounded and freewheeling where popularity is more important than responsibility. It's the wrong cadence between invitation and expectation. Anyways, grumble grumble.
• aperture147 3y ago
  Proactively asking on SO is a no go to solve any problem. Just digging for anyone who already answer your question, or open a issue on the github repo which host the library you use. SO used to be a place where people could ask anything they want, but now only difficult questions could be answered, or else it will be downvoted, marked as duplicated or answered by some toxic people, definitely not a good beginner experience.
• monkin 3y ago
  I think Discord has had a huge impact on Stack Overflow as there are many communities created for specific technologies, languages, frameworks, or topics, where most users can get answers from direct contributors or people who have the best industry knowledge on the topic in question. Not to mention how beneficial it is for brands and products to create such closely-knit communities for their users. There's no need to Google things or ask on SO, as one can chat in real time and go back and forth for solutions with other users.
  • orangussyy 3y ago
    Yeah except Discord is toxic as fuck and should be banished...
    • asaddhamani 3y ago
      Not to mention unsearchable, poor discovery, a chat platform is not a replacement for message boards. SO is well suited to the Q&A format and Discord just isn’t.
      • monkin 3y ago
        From my experience, most questions and answers are asked and solved in forum channels, which are quite easy to search for anything you need.
        • GuestHNUser 3y ago
          On Discord? Really? My experience has been that if I don't know what the popular community discord is and what channels to search, I will simply not find an answer. For me, my Discord experience really suffers from Discord not being indexed by search engines.
    • monkin 3y ago
      Toxic? I sit mostly in tech/product servers, so I didn't spot that, but maybe you're right about places that are just "general".
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• wodenokoto 3y ago
  As an analysis, I think a lot of things could be improved. I'm sceptic that having having to choose between seeing upvotes or downvotes is helpful for the reader to draw conclusions. It would be nice to see this on the same chart. It is hard to see how much voting and posting follows overall traffic trend. But, posting and accepted voting had a huge uptick in May 2022, seemingly without any change in traffic. That is interesting. What happened? In the overall traffic chart, it would be interesting to post some landmark events. Covid shutdown in US (assuming traffic is mostly US), release of ChatGPT 3 I'm not sure what the histograms in the tables are supposed to tell us.
• Scarblac 3y ago
  What I haven't seen mentioned yet is Discord. Many simple questions can be answered in chat, and there are active Discords for many things. Personally I hate it, but it is popular.
• richardw 3y ago
  I mostly gave up a very long time ago. Craft an answer, update it to stay relevant and some mod turns it into a wiki. Another mod decides it’s time to move it to a different Stack site so it stops attracting cred on the site I posted it. Honestly I have better things to do.
• ivolimmen 3y ago
  SO is weird. Or the people on it are weird. I once provided an answer but without code. Someone posts the same answer with code (effectively my answer); he gets upvoted and since then I get down voted. I get most of my reputation from a really really old answer about what the right mime type should be for JSON[0]. When I look at the question now there are a more than a dozen answers added...and loads of edits by moderators. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/477816/which-json-content-type-do-i-use https://stackoverflow.com/questions/477816/which-json-conten...
• PeterStuer 3y ago
  SO by design gets its traffic from Google Search. If Google for whatever reason is sending less traffic, then SO will decline. Yes, AI coding assistants will mean less frequent Googling occurs during development, but also, when Googling is required it usually goes beyond SO and more towards primary sources as the former's results strongly overlap with the AI assistants capabilities.
• megamix 3y ago
  Maybe people just got better
  • Sosh101 3y ago
    Thanks, I needed a laugh with my morning coffee.
• invalidname 3y ago
  This is 100% because of ChatGPT but the problem is that ChatGPT got all its information from StackOverflow... That means fewer people contributing to SO which means ChatGPT will deteriorate and people won't know why.
  • jonwinstanley 3y ago
    Yes, both ChatGPT and GitHub Co-pilot have decimated my use of StackOverflow
  • jackdh 3y ago
    How can it be 100% ChatGPT? The release dates (November 2022) does not match up with the large drop in traffic starting at around April 2022?
    • invalidname 3y ago
      The graph bounces back and forth through the year. This might have been a bigger dip but notice it was on the way up around when ChatGPT launched. But yes, you're correct 100% might be a bit over the top.
  • aiappreciator 3y ago
    Don't worry. GPT written code gets committed to github (After human review, so its working code only). Github data gets shared with OpenAI (Microsoft). So GPT continues to improve. The recent deterioration is due to reduction in parameter count for GPT-4 to save money.
    • invalidname 3y ago
      GitHub is now getting filled with code generated by ChatGPT which is often not-great. It will keep polluting itself and deteriorate further. Yes, I agree that isn't what we're seeing now. But we will see it.
• luckystarr 3y ago
  The absolute "best" answers are snarky that this problem is not applicable because they would be Facebook in scale or something if they had this problem. The person answering like that can do this because they've got lots of "Karma" and get tons of upvotes because other people want to feel superior to the one asking the questions. And the question or answer doesn't get removed, even when reported. Stopped being active then. That was a few years ago.
• hknmtt 3y ago
  they moderated themselves out of relevancy
• hans_castorp 3y ago
  I left SO because I was downvoted to oblivion for an answer that took me 2 minutes to write - but I had answered a similar question several years before (which I actually didn't remember). Searching for my own answer would have taken way more time than it took to write a new one. When I pointed out that it's not the responsibility of the one answering to search for dupes, but for the one asking, I was told that I should still invest the time or otherwise don't answer at all.
  • rmbyrro 3y ago
    That's why most developers now prefer ChatGPT. It's way faster and more convenient. Like a super smart search engine. SO will remain as a library for unseen problems, which is what's supposed to be good for.
    • mewse 3y ago
      I'd also like to highlight "non-hostile" as a reason why folks might prefer ChatGPT. Stack Overflow has a lot of stridently opinionated jerks contributing to it, and if I can just ask ChatGPT a question and get an answer that works rather than having to deal with being belittled by those people, then I'm probably having a much better day as a result.
  • pasc1878 3y ago
    Yes especially if you know you have answered the same thing before. You look for your original. Remember all users are moderators. There are some explicit moderators but they don"t close or downvote often they deal with other problems - or on smaller sites just use normal user powers to vote and close.
    • metabagel 3y ago
      OK, but the person you’re replying to left SO over this policy, and you didn’t seem to register that at all, just repeated the policy. The fault finding culture of SO is toxic.
• darepublic 3y ago
  Stack overflow is still usually the best answer, but surrounded by a bunch of derivative ai generated stuff.
• tylerneylon 3y ago
  This post, to me, is about the rise of ChatGPT — but I do think over-moderation is a huge problem. I had a hard moment on the gamedev stackexchange where I was stuck trying to learn how to do something in OpenGL. A moderator immediately closed my question as a duplicate because there was a similar question about OpenGL ES, which is a (related but) different API. I tried to plead my case, but was shut down. Shortly after that, I gave up on the game I'd been working on for a couple years. The mod's decision contributed to that. I felt stuck by a wall between me and answers to some of my game programming questions. Over-moderation is more than an inconvenience. It can destroy the ability of users to get things done.
  • lph 3y ago
    The graphs in the post show the traffic decline starting around May 2022, months before ChatGPT was available. I'd wager the cause is a change in Google's algorithm. Most of the time I end up on Stack Overflow, it's because I've typed a question into a search engine.
    • consp 3y ago
      The top search resuls used to be either a SO answer, or a forum post or the actual docs having the answer to the question. These days it's either a dupe site copy pasting ad verbatim, a recurgitated and slightly modified variant of the former, or a "AI" generated answer, all full of ads. And to make it worse, none of them are useful as they obfuscate the answer or are simply wrong. Looks like Google started to prioritise ads even more than actual useful results is what changed mostly.
    • tylerneylon 3y ago
      Oh, you're right about the timing. It's probably not ChatGPT.
    • coffeebeqn 3y ago
      Anecdotally it seems like Google is favoring spam sites that have crawled answers from SO
• metalrain 3y ago
  I wonder if recent drops in traffic are partly due to Google search rankings updates: 2022 May and 2023 March.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  Sadly, I'm sure ChatGPT wouldn't be as good without SO but now SO is far outshone. The problem is that the community got mostly Eternal Septembered. So for things like OptaPlanner it's great because the guy uses it as his Q&A site (great idea) and he's obviously very knowledgeable and skilled. But for everything else, it's mostly filled with folks who are not smart enough to comprehend the question and therefore often answer some other thing which they've pattern matched. ChatGPT 4 can do that instantly instead.
• vr46 3y ago
  Documentation has definitely gotten better, especially as people realize that this drives adoption and sales of the language/library/product. For more complex problems that are better served by a call-and-response loop, Discord seems to be where conversations are happening.
• meddlin 3y ago
  With such a stark barrier to entry, why would I spend much time on there? Also, at the beginning of my career I got much more value from "explaining articles", and much less from ultra-specific answers. Later on when I had more experience, I wanted to give back: - try to answer -> "you need cred" - okay, upvote -> "you need cred" - try to comment -> "you need cred" - Ask a question -> "Duplicate. You should RT(Free)M we built."
  • hans_castorp 3y ago
    I never understood why it's allowed to post a question (even without an account), but not allowed to add a comment.
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
      Comments are not searchable and difficult to moderate. A lot of people asked follow up questions in comments.
• Ultimatt 3y ago
  Lots of people discussing tech or quality reasons for the decline. I'd like to suggest something far worse, there is a huge decline in the number of junior professionals in our field due to global economic pressures. There are less people needing to ask a question because they already know the answers.
• somecommit 3y ago
  It probably started declining when the first page on google is an answer asking you to google for the response...
• catsarebetter 3y ago
  I used to rely on StackOverflow to stay plugged in to the developer world. But now with newsletters, developer influencers, and more forums with code block formatting, it's just not necessary anymore. I think the status of having stackoverflow points has been translated to twitter followers.
• revskill 3y ago
  Stackoverflow is just pure lucky with a dump tech stack (.net ? wth), which leads on unusable user experience. Use SPA for the best UX for a forum. Forget the dumb Google SEO.
• noufalibrahim 3y ago
  The culture of programming has been changed by much of these "quick answer" tools. The first generation of SO people were folks who cut their teeth pre (or early) internet when it required quite a bit of effort to learn a technology. Mistakes without googlable solutions, patchy documentation, bad or non existent internet forced people to work hard to figure things out that it's in that effort where, in my experience, learning happens. These people contributed to the early SO and genuinely enriched it. Made it a source of high quality topical information. Over the years though, it's become a source of cut/paste code and then perhaps cut/pasted code (driven by the gamification). Few people go there anymore to contribute well written deeply thought out answers. It's mostly fly bys I imagine. I used to train freshers and over the years, I can distinctly see the decrease in quality and the increasing tendency to have SO, ChatGPT, whatever just "solve this problem for me" rather than "I want to learn this and get better at my job".
  • _xivi 3y ago
    You seem to blame the users and relieve SO of any responsibility or inefficiency. Sure, times change, but it's definitely not the fault of users that a platform is becoming obselete. This like a chef saying: "People in the past used to like it" in response to anyone criticizing the meal
    • noufalibrahim 3y ago
      Partially. I think, SO, for the most part was a genuinely well intentioned effort with really good outcomes. Spolsky's earlier talks describing his philosophies about a good QA site, I thought, were insightful. To their credit, they did organically reach the top of Google rankings and for a long time, the quality of answers and insights on the site were really good. I learned a lot of from reading answers to various questions by Alex Martelli and Raymond Hettinger (of Python fame). I'm sure they made some mistakes along the way and those contributed to the current downfall. My larger point, however, is that this and other tools and sites which make things "easy" have contributed to a decline in the quality of (especially new) programmers and that has indirectly taken a toll on the site. To extend your chef analogy, the rant would be "Here I am trying to create interesting dishes with modern ingredients but people these days haven't tasted really food and can't digest anything other than a quick burger, canned soda and frozen fries."
• homami 3y ago
  I don't understand why they killed their job board. We used to pay them a few hundreds a month for a a couple of job ads that we were quite happy with. But then they "decided to focus on enabling our community of developers and technologists to discover and learn about companies rather than just giving them a way to apply to an open role." Which meant they became a platform for recruiters that can spend monthly 10Ks+. That killed Stack Overflow for me.
  • walthamstow 3y ago
    Where do you post your SmallCo jobs these days?
    • homami 3y ago
      We mostly use recruiters now
• TheDudeMan 3y ago
  They had a hellava run. I remember the before times, and it was bad.
• fairity 3y ago
  Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8b on June 2, 2021, 3 months after the all-time high for traffic.
  • mmahemoff 3y ago
    It’s possible the post-acquisition operation did something that made the search engine gods mad.
• chrismsimpson 3y ago
  Did we all learn to actually program?
• lbriner 3y ago
  The problem for me is not that SO became difficult as all popular/large systems inevitably become, it's the seeming lack of action to solve some of the issues involved. The reputation thing is still nonsense. I can ask a noob question and end up with 10K reputation because of the likes it gets or I can answer a complicated question that takes all 25 years of experience to articulate well and get nothing. People can offer a bounty but it should also be possible to "reward" people who obviously know what they are doing and not reward people for asking questions. The problem with duplicate questions is big, but again, the search isn't great at finding them, especially if you don't quite know how to ask the question. They don't do much about people who just appear with 1 reputation asking something like "What does Null Reference Exception mean?". I ended up being allowed to moderate questions but the moderation queues get stuck constantly so I couldn't even help with that - after all, the crowd-sourcing is a great way to solve the volume of moderation needed and some of us are happy to help but as soon as you start seeing "Moderation queue full" after only moderating 2 posts, then you give up.
• middle_earth 3y ago
  I will get only two results of asking questions in SO. No answers or marked as duplicated. Haven't used `site:stackoverflow.com` for a long time but using `site:reddit.com` to get more informative and generous answers.
• low_tech_punk 3y ago
  In the meanwhile, product specific forums seem to be doing well. I especially enjoyed my time spent on various Discourse servers, e.g. Figma: https://forum.figma.com/ https://forum.figma.com/ CodeMirror: https://discuss.codemirror.net/ https://discuss.codemirror.net/ Compared to SO, those single product servers have much better signal to noise ratio and the community are very welcoming.
• wil2095 3y ago
  Stack Overflow ought to be Google's dream site since it deals directly with questions and answers in reasonably natural language. But I find the moderation a little heavy handed and an unhealthy amount of people using the platform to be a 'smart ar5e' while offering solutions based on their idea of best practice and not directly answering the question. Classic case is anything to do with a strict vanilla JavaScript requirement being solved by something like jQuery. Or a PHP requirement being solved by yet another layer of abstraction.
• yankput 3y ago
  People has complained about bad moderation on StackOverflow since forever so I don’t think it’s that. What I see recently is that the answers start being out of date, and Google sometimes bizarrely returns these weird copies of StackOverflow instead of the main site. Can it be that?
• brap 3y ago
  Why is it that SO moderation is so awful? What incentivizes SO mods to be jerks?
  • personalityson 3y ago
    Feels good to moderate others
• wood_spirit 3y ago
  I can’t remember the last time I saw the accepted answer being up to date and relevant. Things change, and the things you needed to work around in Java or whatever ten years ago are now approached in an entirely different way etc, but SO is stuck in a time warp.
• alecco 3y ago
  Besides suffering from mod hell, I stopped answering SO questions mostly because: 1. it takes time to write a good answer; 2. fast copy-paste answers, often wrong, get upvoted anyway; 3. picking the accepted answer, out of many, is done by the person who asked it... who usually doesn't have the knowledge to do this! 4. also many times no answer is accepted, like the person who asked it stopped bothering. And the hard blowback for that old post on how to game the SO point race, instead of SO trying to figure out how to fix their broken system. Just like SO was a move out of Experts Exchange and others, this is a good time for the community to start a post-SO Q&A site.
  • alecco 3y ago
    Ask a dumb question about a trendy JS framework and you get hundreds of votes. Answer a difficult question on a barely documented part of software (e.g. low-level) and you'll get a couple of votes, at most. And you're lucky if the answer gets accepted. There are a few unsung heroes on certain hard/obscure SO tags. They dedicate a lot of time and get little reward. Whatever follows SO should find a way to fix this.
• kjuulh 3y ago
  I've noticed I haven't used stackoverflow that much, I've always been a lurker, but the answers have gotten less and less highlighted. Now instead I am nearly always in the github issues of the project I am working with. Also ChatGPT has really been a big help, as for most basic questions I can just ask it and get a fair result. This is more tricky to do when searching on google. I.e. chatgpt: How do i sort a slice of structs in golang with an inner field of "Name" Usually somewhat correct the first time. google: golang sort slice struct (I hope to find a good answer, but I usually have to go through 1-3 pages This is more documentation based, but this is also what stackoverflow did in the past quite well, that is answers to common questions for a language.
• stevage 3y ago
  I'm a huge contributor to SO, with over 100k rep. But I stopped contributing seriously maybe 2 years ago. I just got so sick of SO behaving like complete jerks again and again, and lost any desire to keep enriching their shareholders.
• Henk0815 3y ago
  Stack Overflow was the "what is wrong with the api?" "What api to use?" "How to improve api usage/syntax?" place. "Whats is wrong with the api?": moved to github, because its the source. "What api to use?": stackoverflow is still the place to go (or chatgpt). "How to improve api usage/syntax?" stackoverflow / chatpgt. Github could really dominate with its own LLM in the web and Stackoverflow could regain some shares with an integrated LLM. PS: I don't like Github Copilot because of UX and code upload.
  • deely3 3y ago
    I'm afraid "What api to use?" will be closed immediately as discussion, and "How to improve api usage/syntax?" as too general.
• blockchainZaid 3y ago
  [dead]
• 0dayz 3y ago
  The biggest reason beyond moderation is honestly that SO has an identity crisis. Back in the day SO would be practically the ONLY place you would ask any questions regarding issues in programming or tech, but over time things like asking for help about specific frameworks or open source products has become more common to ask it on those projects github or discord. And then you got LLMs being able to summarize an entire manual for you.
• otikik 3y ago
  I have used SO for years, since early on. I have asked a lot of questions, got good and useful answers on some. I have also answered a lot. Some of my answers and questions have been edited afterwards, most of the edits where good. My experience was not perfect. Some of questions have been marked as duplicate when in fact they were not duplicates, but only superficially similar to other questions. Some of the edits people did to my answers where incorrect. But overall, my experience with the site is still mostly positive. It saddens me to see that others are not enjoying the site as I did.
• kebman 3y ago
  I used to contribute a lot to Stack Overflow, but then I noticed that I’d get flamed for even asking simple questions; stuff that can really stand between actually getting somewhere with your code, and where a helpful comment could really make a difference. At some point regular replies were replaced by administrators and mods who are seemingly far more interested in finding faults with your question rather than to actually answer it. The worst one was probably those times I’d ask a question, and then it got labelled “not a question.” Honestly, this unhelpful, bureaucratic, and down right nasty attitude has really disgusted me with the site. Apparently new users are having even bigger problems, and they get flamed really hard for asking newbie questions. Often people are rudely asked to read the manual, when the entire cause of their problems is that the manual is so poorly written that it’s impossible to make any sense for it—even if answering questions like that is the “raison d’être” of a place like Stack Overflow... Now, with the prevalence of ChatGPT and services that will give you great answers to almost any code-related question, I honestly think that the fall of Stack Overflow is well deserved.
  • kzrdude 3y ago
    Another observation is that sometimes it feels like you get answers to your question in contempt. Someone writes an answer but at the same time assure you that your question is not good enough. Or they answer it but don't upvote the question. (If the question is not worthwhile, why answer it? Probably for rep.)
    • cutemonster 3y ago
      (I personally upvote questions because I had the same problem. I've never upvoted a question just because it was well written. More interesting to see "how many has this problem" than "is the question well researched / well written" I think. So I would still be happy, related to that, if I were you :-))
  • xkcd1963 3y ago
    There was a hn post once where OP wrote all questions are already answered on SO. Hence nobody should ask questions (especially newbs)
• bcoughlan 3y ago
  I used to follow topics to try to answer questions. It's a great way to learn a topic in depth. But I find that the bulk of questions about {topic} have already been asked, and the stream of questions are like "How do I get {topic} to work with {other niche tool}?". The Venn diagram of people who know both topics is way smaller. If you want an answer, narrowing the question to a single topic really helps. But I have asked a few questions, and the quality of answers have really declined, mainly because people are rushing to answer and not reading the question. They could address this by delaying voting on answers.
• AtNightWeCode 3y ago
  ChatGPT. Both that people use it instead but also that some people try to game SO with answers from it. So the moderation of the site has probably become harder. SEO is another factor. At least I don't get as many results on SO as I used to. That may be because of many reasons but if the popularity of a site starts to fall Google search might speed that up. EDIT: I see now that the drop started long before ChatGPT became relevant. But it won't help SO I think. Github copilot and Google featured snippets may also be factors.
• lando2319 3y ago
  Lots of great stackoverflow comments here. For me, I would say over 5 years ago I would post a question and get a flurry of activity within the first 10 minutes. Now I post and I get no activity at all, and I end up answering my own question a day later.
• tekkk 3y ago
  I like SO but asking or answering questions there can be highly annoying. There's always some very pedantic gate-keeper who might be technically proficient but lacks any common social skills and nails you down for any slight errors. It's good people care but seriously, there's a difference between constructive criticism and just being an a-hole. It's the hamburger feedback but without any buns around it. And I just wanted to contribute, on my own time often, to help somebody else with the same problem...
• zmxz 3y ago
  In limited topics I took part on SO, what frustrated me the most were the "users". I deliberately put word users in quotes because I worked as a consultant and often saw guides on how to ask questions on SO (i.e. use an account with female name and picture, deliberately misspell words/interpunction). There was this Magento company and I was consultant for their (UK) client, one of the devs gave me the tour of how they use SO. What was frustrating is that day in and day out, similar questions were asked - ones that are googleable. One day I received a comment from such "user", under a question I answered and explained in detail. The "user" went to discredit me, without arguments or links and was pretty rude through all of the misspellings he did to avoid some automatic triggers. I replied rudely as well, asking him to read other people's answers before discrediting and providing no info. Result was that I was sent to "cool off" for 2 weeks, and was given a speech from mod as if I was a child. At that point SO changed their ToS and claimed that all content was theirs, including answers I provided. And that's where I departed from SO because from my experience - I was free debugging service for various agencies who went a little bit overboard with claims of their experience and in case someone was rude to me - I get no protection, however if I'm rude to "users" then I get slap on the wrist. Working for free, being patronized, interacting with people who are too lazy to read - that were my reasons for abandoning SO. Besides, when it started - all of the big questions about nearly every language were covered fast and there was very little to do except write SQL for other people and get praise for it as form of payment.
• alkonaut 3y ago
  I still use SO as much as I ever did, but I rarely/never ask/answer/comment because it’s very often already answered. The answer to my question is often 10 years old. So my activity these days makes less traffic (I don’t need to visit to reply to a comment etc) but it’s still useful. Another reason I rarely ask is of course as others have pointed out: the amount of pedantry is around 10x the amount needed to keep the quality of the site high, and often enough to make the quality worse. Often these days I ask a question, and get attacked despite it not being a dupe or off topic or low quality (I’m a top 1% account as I assume many of us are so I know my way around). Then a perfect answer comes and I can’t accept it because it’s already jumped on by mods. Somehow a useful exchange with a reasonable question and accepted answer has been completely drowned by mods. It’s infuriating.
• rho4 3y ago
  Nowadays my questions are much more likely to get closed and it is impossible to get them reopened. This takes a pretty big emotional toll, as I usually invest quite a bit of time to describe my problems. People vote to close and then move on. I don't mind editing my questions to satisfy the moderator's demands, but not if it has zero effect and just wastes my time. I think people should be required to confirm their close/down-votes after a question or answer was edited, or else the votes should be automatically reverted. This mechanism should probably only apply within a limited time period after the question/answer was posted (or until a certain period of inactivity has passed). It saddens me deeply, but currently I prefer not to ask questions, because the experience is so jarring.
• ThereIsNoWorry 3y ago
  Imagine gatekeeping what and how you can ask questions because of some fear of redundancy. Who the fuck cares if the same questions comes up each month, that means it's an important fundamental topic and can be handled differently than just shooting down the poster. The same for answers. It's a horrible website full of elitists. I never really used it often but I did roll my eyes everytime I saw a shut down thread that would coincide with the question I wanted to find an answer for.
• collaborative 3y ago
  One of the bad side-effects of this is the effect on "free" support channels like GCP SO tags. Questions rarely get answered, and you often will get an "answer" reminding you this is a volunteer forum. This can be quite bad when the question is "what does error xyz mean and why is it crashing everything". It makes community driven support a no-go
• thumbuddy 3y ago
  I use stack overflow every other day and it's fine? It's imperfect advice but there are some gems on there and it's pretty easy for me anyways to spot when something is dated, not right, or whatever. Maybe it's less useful to me now because I understand the domains I'm in better?
• pythonist42 3y ago
  It's not fallen, I still use it everyday!
• keithnz 3y ago
  For me, I stopped contributing just before the downfall and was in the top <0.1% . Basically, the mods wrecked the whole thing for me, they obliterated a lot of answers from multiple people that were really good. There is no way to challenge that at all. Not to mention the mods got into big silly dramas with each other. So I just stopped. Now it feels like there is a lot of stale content is on there.
• charbull 3y ago
  I now find so many answers on geek for geeks website, it comes with a well written documentation
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Well, there's a few issues. Some, may be sour grapes, on my part, but some, were inevitable. SO has been a great site for me. Not too long ago, it was always my first stop, when looking for correct solutions to difficult problems. I'm a highly experienced engineer, and a first-class debugger. I always get my bug ... eventually. What SO would give me, was a correct solution, very quickly. I would ask a question, and have two or three excellent answers, in a matter of minutes. I could definitely have found the answer, myself, but I would have had to do stuff like set up playgrounds, or even full applications. Nowadays, they require question askers to do exactly that. In The Days of Yore, I could ask a question, without having to have gone through an hour of debugging and prototyping, and have a great answer. But, at its heart, it's another wiki documentation site, and wikis don't age well. The WordPress Codex is damn near worthless, and even the great PHP docs are showing their age.
• turquoisevar 3y ago
  Oh man, SO, where to start. I guess I’ve always interacted with SO in a relatively passive way. There’s just too much toxicity that’s plausibly deniable. And with it, lost much of its usefulness. Every time I try to look for an answer against knowing better, I still get disappointed. Either the question isn’t there or someone asked it but it was marked as duplicate with a link to a decade old (and for some reason never more recent) question that is vaguely of a similar topic if you squint hard enough. It’s silly anyways because some of the frameworks I work with are extremely volatile in the sense that they fundamentally change from year to year, so the chances that an older question is stale are all but guaranteed. I don’t even bother asking the question myself because I see the copious amounts of pedantry while I browse. Never mind discussions about “the right way” of doing things, I’m talking about entire comment threads about the right terminology of the “well akschually” variety. Think arguments about whether something should be called a method or a function or whether MVVM is possible with framework X because the author had intended X, Y or Z, when none of it is even remotely relevant nor helpful to the question at hand. Other forms of pedantry are entirely rewriting the OP’s question because a variable name or function name was disliked, even though the original question as asked was not confusing in the slightest. The single time I asked a question, it was genuinely challenging and relatively low-level matter, or as close to it as you get in my field. Crickets, aside from 1 extremely low quality answer that didn’t actually answer anything that is. I tried to focus on answering people’s questions instead, especially on a few relatively new frameworks that come with new conventions as those generate a lot of questions and I managed to become really proficient in them. I figured it would be a good way to give back to the developer community as a whole since it was that very community that enabled me to become proficient in it in the first place. But stopped doing that too because it’s useless. Either good questions get closed, mods fuck around editing things around or the high level clique just upvotes each other’s low effort drivel. SO is all but completely useless to me, it has become my last resort and only if I’m really stuck, and every time I dread it like I dread pulling teeth because every time it proves to be an exercise in wasting my time.
• tanbog5 3y ago
  I thought it was just me but lately every question I asked seemed to get closed by moderators or I would get irrelevant answers. This wasnt an issue I remember in the past. I've just kind of drifted away as a result.
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  The comments im seeing here cite moderation practices and scrutinizing culture as reasons for the downfall. But those arent new. I think its safe to say its largely ChatGPT.
  • jkukul 3y ago
    Also: Chatgpt can give you answers based on what’s already on SO. In other words based on the content that is a result of the very moderation practices being criticised
• andrey_utkin 3y ago
  Super interesting charts! I was surprised to see big humps over early springtimes. As if springtime causes people to feel more willing to open up and communicate, similarly to how we associate springtime with heightened romantic drive. Another cool thing I've discovered by reading this right after the Usenet thread[0] is that it is typical for large-scale social networks to stop being humanity's darlings after ~15 years of age. Which is also surprisingly similar to how people are supposed to become completely self-sufficient around 16, as if there's no reasonable expectaction of substantial external care for them. Usenet: born in 1979 [u1], stagnated in 1993, 14 years later. XMPP: born in 1999 [x1], stagnated in 2013 [x2], 14 years later. Stack Overflow: born in 2008 [s1], stagnation reported today here, 15 years later. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36859510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36859510 [u1] "Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet [u2] "Segan said that some people pointed to the Eternal September in 1993 as the beginning of Usenet's decline" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet [x1] "released the first version of the jabberd server on January 4, 1999." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#History_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#History_and_development [x2] "In May 2013, Google announced XMPP compatibility would be dropped from Google Talk for server-to-server federation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#History_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#History_and_development [s1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow
• avereveard 3y ago
  So demise is a pretty standard story of bureaucratic takeover It was not sudden either, I remember by 2014 it was mostly pointles to try to ask any complex question.
• fredgrott 3y ago
  one of the things that changed is Google is using results from other SM platforms. I just noticed that my medium flutter articles pop up on flutter subject searches.
• pastacacioepepe 3y ago
  StackOverflow lost 90% of the relevance to me the day they shut down their jobs section. It was brilliant and it worked really well, got me several jobs and possibly shaped my life for a few years.
• boredumb 3y ago
  My unbaked opinion is that a majority of the forum was a javascript help board and with the advent of more advanced and silly web frontends the ability to 'copy paste' a snippet is less viable for javascript guys and so a lot of the value of being a front end snippet repository is lost to the fact you now need a primer on the flavor of javascript, the build tools, the package management and it's 200 LOC across three files to get your react bloat to work.
• nottorp 3y ago
  It's not ChatGPT. It's stuff like: - do not post a "teach the man how to fish" answer - closing this question as duplicate because i'm in a hurry and i didn't read that the poor poster has already mentioned the possible duplicates and explained why theirs is different - do not post an answer with links to the original docs that have context, instead copy/paste 3 lines that don't explain enough here Basically... it's the moderation.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  It’s LLMs/ChatGPT, they were chugging along before that. I haven’t used it much unless gpt doesn’t give me results
• nilslindemann 3y ago
  SO will be closed as not constructive.
• tcgv 3y ago
  This downward trend makes me wonder where is all that traffic going to? Surely developers are still searching for answers, where are they finding them? It can't only be ChatGPT since the trend started in February 2022, but it surely is a really strong contender now.
  • apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
    For me at least, I often go directly to the official docs. They're much better in 2023 than they were in 2013, pretty much across the board. And if that doesn't work, it seems you're more likely to find your specific problem being asked in the issues of the official Github, Gitlab, etc. than you are on SO. Even Reddit and some language/technology-specific forums will have better results now. The fun thing is... I think SO saw that coming. They made that huge push to be the central documentation hub for everything from huge projects to internal teams. It just wasn't well thought out and expensive iirc, and had an abysmal adoption rate as a result
• sirsuki 3y ago
  Why can’t we just Pair Program more? There is enough open source out there. Enough user groups meeting. Enough hack-a-thons. Just make them Pair Programming sessions. Please! please I beg of you!
• whitepaint 3y ago
  The moderation became absolutely abhorrent.
• H8crilA 3y ago
  See "new visits" in the first chart. You can reduce the window for extra clarity. Something very specific must have happened in that week, nothing that can be explained with a "grand theory of decay".
• cassepipe 3y ago
  Well, I must be the only one left to think Stack Overflow is great then. Sure, you may encounter the occasional rough moderator but having to correspond with random people on the internet in writing as my daily job, I can't blame them. If you don't have a rep, it's up to you to gain some by crafting the best question, linking to the relevant docs, transcribing screenshots, correcting typos etc. The only issue with SO imho is that it's getting too big and there should be a lot to gain from further splitting to other StackExchanges like computer science, computer graphics, databases, infosec, Vim etc. It would be great if there was a way to transfer a SO question over the more relevant community I guess
  • mcv 3y ago
    I also think Stackoverflow is great, but to be perfectly honest, I haven't used it much in the past year and a half. And I have no idea why.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • Turing_Machine 3y ago
    Those rough moderators would close off discussions for the most trivial reasons, yet SO still allowed those discussions to be indexed by Google (despite rel="nofollow" having been a thing since 2005 or so). Presumably this was because SO still wanted the Google juice. It was irritating as hell to have the top several Google links go to SO discussions that had been shut down by the moderators. > I can't blame them I'm sorry, this is like saying you can't blame cops for beating up the occasional suspect because they encounter a lot of genuinely bad people every day. If you can't do the job in the presence of shitheads, you have no business being a cop. Or a forum moderator.
    • hermannj314 3y ago
      For police and moderators, having a false positive rate that equals 0 seems impossible. There are lots of ways to respond to a positive indicator that could reflect a aelf-awareness of your own false positive rate. Being trigger happy probably isn't the correct response. It isn't clear how SO moderates the moderators, do they have an IA team that investigates corruption?
• byronic 3y ago
  I would point directly at two culprits kind of under the same umbrella -- Google usurping StackOverflow answers in its search results (as in, displaying a Q&A format where google's 'answer' is just a portion of a StackOverflow accepted answer) and the general SEO poisoning of search results (ad networks / LLMs scraping and rehosting the content, Google failing to return relevant results etc.) Until seeing this article, though, I hadn't thought about how much I had unconsciously changed my habits to work around the aforementioned issues -- I swapped to DuckDuckGo, started appending site:stackoverflow.com to searches, performing multiple searches around the same content (like grabbing a few keywords from a scraped article and then feeding that into a search of the official documents), and also more aggressively searching GitHub issues With the caveat that I still use SO relatively frequently -- everything from 'I can't remember this specific syntax' to 'I have an intractable terraform/AWS/k8s issue and need to see if anyone else is experiencing it'
• dmingod666 3y ago
  As a full time Dev. I'm on ChatGPT (paid) and use co-pilot. My teams first go-to is ChatGPT as well. SO is no longer 'that site' to go to ( been on SO for 10+ years ). I have 0 love for that site. It was 'The resource' before, now it's just another site..
• anonu 3y ago
  Do you think there may be secular trends here? We do see COVID-induced peaks in that data around 2020. I'm not suggesting that "less people are coding" - but just that lots of media-related sites are coming down from 2020/2021 peaks.
• tlogan 3y ago
  ChatGPT offers an effective substitute for Stack Overflow, fully encompassing its role for simple questions. For more compelx problems, Stack Overflow was never a good solution; it's better suited for tackling simpler questions. But for simpler questions you have chatGPT.
• sevenf0ur 3y ago
  SO has been around so long a lot of the answers are no longer relevant. I don't place much trust that an answer from 2010 will solve my problem. You often see [2023 UPDATE], but that answer is usually buried or hidden within other answers. I firmly believe that ChatGTP is the SO killer. You get your answer instantly, it's usually good enough, and you don't have to worry about a mod closing your question as low quality or duplicate.
  • redsaber 3y ago
    > SO has been around so long a lot of the answers are no longer relevant. I don't place much trust that an answer from 2010 will solve my problem. I did have problem like this before too and I just made my search better by appending the `after:<insert year here>` to my google search to ensure the latest info
• diemechanist 3y ago
  "Do you not read the documentation?" - everytime I posted a question on that holy portal.
• cubefox 3y ago
  If you select window size "7 days" and filter the Traffic section for "new visits", you see a massive and permanent two-thirds drop between end of April and mid May 2022. Apparently some change in the Google algorithm pushed down Stack Overflow heavily.
• blondie9x 3y ago
  One of two things is happening here. I'm not sure if its one or the other or really both. 1. Copilot and LLM trained on code is reducing usage of StackOverflow. 2. People are just coding less and searching for less with layoffs and slow down due to burnout. But it's definitely connected to these points. The degree of magnitude for either though is difficult to assess. If it is mostly #1 though that's the worst thing isn't it? Because SO is weakened and then the LLMs gradually become less effective. We generate less curiosity and public discussion overtime as people use AI and LLMs more. That's sad for software engineering as a whole. One of the best parts of this job is collaboration and problem solving. Not just individually but as a community as well.
• antonyh 3y ago
  I'm in the top 4% this year based on a Q/A I wrote in 2021 which it gathers a few votes a month. The ranking is an indicator of how pointless SO has become if I'm globally in the top 4% this year having posted nothing. For me, there's no incentive to answer questions. It takes too long to get an answer, and the reply is usually some snide comment because too many assume it's an XY problem. It's generally worse than asking ChatGPT even when the AI gets it horribly wrong. As for answering questions, I'd rather do that on my blog. Posting to SO is a time investment with zero return.
• raydiatian 3y ago
  The problem with stackoverflow is simple: it eschews it’s core use case to be something unnecessarily autistic. Instead of being a platform that encourages those with experience to mentor and lead, and those without to seek experience, without punishment, it takes the opinion that “dumb questions are the ones that have already been asked and it’s the responsibility of the newbie to know if their question has already been asked.” It seeks to be the training set for its replacement rather than be its replacement. Then a new product comes around to support the core use case newbies want more directly: Yeah, of course we fucking left. Because surprise, if you’re constantly learning, you’ll always be a newbie at another thing. If SO had been an actual community, it would merged with an LLM rather than being eaten by them.
• w0mbat 3y ago
  As it ages, Stack Overflow is developing a problem where the accepted answers to questions are obsolete and no longer work. APIs get added and removed, new languages change syntax, etc. This is particularly the case in mobile. Stack Overflow has no good mechanism for ousting obsolete answers in favor of the current right answer.
• bryanlarsen 3y ago
  There's still lots of good stuff on Stack Overflow. For example, I just ran into this answer while looking for something else. What a great answer to a beginner level Rust question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/75202816/91365 https://stackoverflow.com/a/75202816/91365
• travisgriggs 3y ago
  "Every institution fails due to an excess of it's own first principle." I have watched/experienced SO go from a super useful/helpful site with a balance that pitted people's desire to be recognized with a desire to be helped, and slowly be subsumed by those overbent on organization and bureaucracy. And is it did so, it became less useful, to me as a questioner as well as an answerer. Now I have to put up with stochastic parroting from GPTs to try and steer me in the right direction. Yay.
• worldischngexx 3y ago
  [dead]
• beefman 3y ago
  The Aviation Stack Exchange contains the only clear statement on the web about the power dissipation of jetliner engines.[1] Unfortunately, the value given is low by a factor of 2 due to a simple calculus mistake.[2] And even though my Stack Overflow account is more than a decade old, and I posted a slightly successful question on MathOverflow back in 2017, and signed up separately for Aviation, I was not able to comment on the answer or interact on the topic in any way. [1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-kilowatts-to-get-an-electric-747-8-airborne https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-... [2] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/191826/derivative-of-kinetic-energy https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/191826/derivativ...
• uraura 3y ago
  Apart from ChatGPT, I can find answer in reddit instead of SO.
• brachika 3y ago
  I don't know if the charts presented in the link are misleading or not, but I did notice a visible reduction in quality of answers (during a period of 5-6 years) as I can't find relatable questions to issues I'm facing.