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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
by 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 agogithub copilot was launched in Oct 2021 as well https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1683640691124224000 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1683640691124224000
- krackers 3y agoSEO games resulting in SO clones ranking higher than SO itself?
- julianeon 3y agoAs much as SEO experts would love to do that for their clients, I don't see any way they could've realistically crossed that moat. If you had a programming question, and you went to Google to answer it and found some answers - would you choose Stack Overflow, or PythonIsSuperFun.com? I think the behaviour of Google searching for programming issues decreased overall, and I don't think Stack Overflow suffered more than any other site. Disclosure: I've nearly abandoned SO for ChatGPT myself.
- Foobar8568 3y agoUnless I put a site stack overflow, I only get spam result.
- 3LazTjBv-f 3y ago> would you choose Stack Overflow, or PythonIsSuperFun.com I would choose first result - people are lazy. The problem comes and goes but it is true, spam sites, with content copied from SO, are ranking higher than SO itself. And it is often hard to tell you are viewing a copy on first glance, the layouts are usually more like a forum.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rhplus 3y agoAll of the above, plus tech layoffs and associated loss of motivation/productivity. https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/20/tech-industry-layoffs-2023/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/20/tech-industry-layoffs-2023...
- philbo 3y agoThis sounds right to me. If I were building a Q&A site that genuinely wanted to encourage high-quality answers, I'd implement something like a 1-hour window where all answers are invisible immediately after the question is posted. This is to give people time to work on a good quality answer, without racing to be the first and gain those precious early upvotes. The UI could still indicate how many other people have answered / are answering, and if answer volume became a problem you could perhaps block new answers during that window after the first 20 or so have landed. When the hour is over, answers are displayed in random order and the existing site mechanics around upvotes etc kick in. It feels like that could potentially address the problem of low-effort answers killing off the good ones.
- MandieD 3y agoThat's really clever, and I think would also make things like Advent of Code still fun in the post-ChatGPT world.