23 ms·
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
- beeboop0 9mo ago[dead]
- vjvjvjvjghv 9mo agoThe decline is not surprising. I am sure AI is replacing Stackoverflow for a lot of people. And my experience with asking questions was pretty bad. I asked a few very specific questions about some deep detail in Windows and every time I got only some smug comments about my stupid question or the question got rejected outright. That while a ton of beginner questions were approved. Definitely not a very inviting club. I found i got better responses on Reddit.
- cracki 9mo agoWould you care to link to any of those, even ones that might appear to be deleted?
- _nhh 9mo agoit died
- vintagedave 9mo agoDo I read that correctly — it is close to zero today?! I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.
- Bratmon 9mo agoIt can be both. Push and pull factors work better together than either does individually.
- nikanj 9mo agoMaybe the graph doesn’t include questions that get closed by moderators?
- ForHackernews 9mo agoIt's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going to train the AI for free.
- eterm 9mo agoIt's surely both. Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest Most questions have negative karma. Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem. All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders. SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them. SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls.
- braiamp 9mo agoMost? 3 out of 15 is most? What's wrong with youngsters today?!
- marcosdumay 9mo agoRight now, at the first 15 one has a positive vote, 6 have negative votes, going down to -3. The 8 at 0 are just taking longer to amass those negative votes. It's incredibly rare that a positive one ever goes somewhere.
- braiamp 9mo agoSo, I reviewed the questions list again but this time, since the time I did view it about 9 hours ago [1]. 10 were negative scored, 5 positive scored, 15 0 scored, 4 has received answers. This is better than normal for those ~30. Usually it's 80% without votes, without answers, without comments. So, this is a significan improvement... which I suspect is due the time of the day, as the US and most of Europe were asleep. So, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in the positive direction. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest
- cracki 9mo agoIt is not "karma". It is not to be taken personally. It represents the objective usefulness of the question, not the personal worth of the person asking it.
- 8organicbits 9mo agoThere are tabs to change to a table view. I see a peak of 207k in 2014 and the last month was only 3,710.
- tom_ 9mo agoThe decline has been pretty surprising: more questions asked in May 2021 (133,914) than in the whole of 2025 (129,977).
- acessoproibido 9mo agoStill a couple thousand away from 0. But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available. I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there
- system2 9mo agoReddit is a forum morphed into social media. I usually use "question + reddit" on Google to confirm my suspicions about a subject. It is a place to discuss things rather than find answers. It is extremely politicized (leftist/liberal), but that's a whole other story.
- fabian2k 9mo agoNot zero, but it is smaller than when it launched originally. And this is questions asked, not how many people are visiting and reading posts.
- eviks 9mo agoThe steep decline started way before llms
- threeducks 9mo agoThe last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun. If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small difference is probably due to the turn of the year.
- ethagnawl 9mo agoIt's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now for confirmation. I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_.
- gn4d 9mo agoAI didn't necessarily kill SO because it was strictly better at giving technical answers (and it certainly wasn't better when GPTs initially burst onto the mass-appeal scene several years ago), but that it provided an alternative (even if subpar) where users could actually get responses to their questions (and furthermore not be ridiculed by psychopaths while doing so was the cherry on top).
- personjerry 9mo agoApproaching 0 is wild
- nikanj 9mo agoModerator team must be over the moon
- teamx 9mo agoProbably similar for google. My first line of search is always chatgpt
- mohsen1 9mo agoPeople are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them.
- the8472 9mo agoThis is concerning on two fronts. The questions are no longer open (SO is CC-BY-SA) and if Q&A content dies then this herds even more people towards LLM use. It's basically draining the commons.
- jondwillis 9mo agoYup. This, to me, provides another explanation for why the social contract is being used as toilet paper by the owner class. They literally see the writing on the wall.
- Mistletoe 9mo agoEverything we have done and said on the internet since its birth has just been to train the future AI.
- goldenarm 9mo agoNow that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough? Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Vaslo 9mo agoThey would just use documentation. I know there is some synthesis they would lose in the training process but I’m often sending Claude through the context7 MCP to learn documentation for packages that didn’t exist, and it nearly always solves the problem for me.
- nicoburns 9mo agoThe brilliance of StackOverflow was in being the place to find out how to do tricky workarounds for functionality that either wasn't documented or was buggy such that workarounds were needed to make it actually work. Software quality is now generally a bit better than it was in 2010, but that need is ultimately still there.
- robryan 9mo agoAssuming these end up in open source code llms will learn about them that way.
- bluedino 9mo agoAren't a lot of projects using LLMs to generate documentation these days?
- gitaarik 9mo agoThey pay lots of humans to train the LLMs..
- maxloh 9mo agoThe result is not surprising! Many people are now turning to LLMs with their questions instead. This explains the decline in the number of questions asked.
- Retr0id 9mo agoWow. I was expecting a decline but not to that extent.
- Someone1234 9mo agoThey will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620
- brickers 9mo agoIf you ignore the early pandemic bump, it even looks like the decline started in late 2017, though it's more variable than after the bump
- IshKebab 9mo agoIt is sort of because of AI - it provided a way of escaping StackOverflow's toxicity!
- jtrn 9mo agoCould view it as push/pull dynamics: pushed away by toxicity, pulled to good answers from AI.
- nospice 9mo agoRight. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange. At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on top.
- gfhifd42 9mo ago[flagged]
- 9mo ago
- porcoda 9mo agoNot a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
- palata 9mo agoAgreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
- eurekin 9mo agoSame here. I just didn't want to expend energy racing trigger happy mods. It was so odd, to this day remember vividly how they cleanup their arguments once proven wrong on the closing vote. Literally minutes before it would the close threshold.
- lysace 9mo agoGen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996) Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008) Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)
- econ 9mo agoYahoo answers Google answers And the horrific Quora
- lysace 9mo agoNone of those worked as programming tools. I really miss Google Answers though, with the bounties. Random example: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/762357.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/762357.html It's remarkable how similar in style the answers are to what we all know from e.g. chatgpt.
- Bratmon 9mo agoSomewhere out there, there's an alternate universe in which the Stackoverflow community was so friendly, welcoming, helpful, and knowledgeable that this seems like a tragedy and motivates people to try to save it. But in this universe, most people's reaction is just "lol".
- elevation 9mo agoThere are still airgapped places in the world where transferring information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they’re not worth using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for engineering teams working in these environments.
- Bratmon 9mo agoBut surely transmitting information to actual SO is just as forbidden? And if you're making an internal-only site, it doesn't really need to be name-brand SO.
- elevation 9mo agoStack overflow was useful with a fairly sanitized search like “mysql error 1095”. Agentic LLMs do there best work when able to access your entire repository or network environment for context, which is impossible to sanitize. For a season, private environments will continue to be able to use SO. But as LLMs capture all the good questions and keep them private, public SO will become less and less relevant. It’s sad to see a resource of this class go.
- Bratmon 9mo agoI just typed the literal phrase "mysql error 1095" into ChatGPT with no context, and it gave an answer that was no worse than SO for the same search. No need to give it anything about my repository, network environment, or even a complete sentence.
- esafak 9mo agohttps://stackoverflow.co/internal/ https://stackoverflow.co/internal/
- oezi 9mo agoSeems like the exit was very well timed. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-happen-to-stack-overflow-now-that-it-has-been-sold-to-prosus-for-1-8 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- wood_spirit 9mo agoAnother plausible explanation is that the new owners didn’t develop the community in a good way. Instead of fixing the myriad of issues that were obvious to almost all contributors they instead basically let it die?
- shawn_w 9mo agoThe new owners (well, not really new any more) are focused on adding AI to SO because it's the current hotness, and making other changes to try to extract more money that they're completely ignoring the community's issues and objections to their changes, which tend to be half-assed and full of bugs.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bean469 9mo agoLove this comment [1] under the post > $1.8 billion? So do those of us who contribute get any of that? 1. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-happen-to-stack-overflow-now-that-it-has-been-sold-to-prosus-for-1-8#comment846688_408138 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...
- RomanPushkin 9mo agoMany users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow. So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]
- vbezhenar 9mo agoIt's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.
- baud147258 9mo agoI spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it.
- antonymoose 9mo agoOnce StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers. I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.” To their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- 1a527dd5 9mo agoI mean, I kinda of miss it. But man it was a hostile place for newcomers. Only ever asked one question and I tried to answer more than a handful but never really clicked with the site. I do wonder if it would have faired better under the original ownership before it was sold in 2021-06-02.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo agoLLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls
- imiric 9mo agoIf by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure. In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time. What should worry everyone is what system will come after LLMs. Data is being centralized and hoarded by giant corporations, and not shared publicly. And the data that is shared is generated by LLMs. We're poisoning the well of information with no fallback mechanism.
- Dylan16807 9mo ago> If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure. You know that's not what they meant, but why bring up the license here? If they were over the top compliant, attributing every SO answer under every chat, and licensing the LLM output as CC BY-SA, I think we'd still have seen the same shift. > In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time. Best case it gives you the same level of content, but more customized, and faster. SO being wrong and wasting your time is also common.
- teekert 9mo agoI do use Claude a lot, but I still regularly ask questions on https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/ https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/. It's often just too niche, LLMs hallucinate stuff like an entire non-existent benchmarking feature in Snakemake, or can't explain how I should get transcriptome aligners to give me correct quantifications for a transcript. I guess it's too niche. And as a lonely Bioinformatician it can be nice to get confirmation from other bioinformaticians. Looking back at my Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (never really got the difference) history, my earlier, more general programming questions from when I just started are all no-brainers for any LLM.
- maximgeorge 9mo ago[dead]
- w10-1 9mo agoWhile AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding. So some possible reasons: - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask. - Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users. - Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam - Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn. - Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented Some non-reasons: - Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).
- jasongill 9mo ago> - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask. I think this is one major factor that is not getting enough consideration in this comment thread. By 2018-2020, it felt like the number of times that someone else had already asked the question had increased to the point that there was no reason to bother asking it. Google also continued to do a better and better job of surfacing the right StackOverflow thread, even if the SO search didn't. In 2012 you might search Google, not find what you needed, go to StackOverflow, search and have no better luck, then make a post (and get flamed for it being a frequently-asked question but you were phrasing yours in a different / incorrect way and didn't find the "real" answer). In 2017, you would search Google and the relevant StackOverflow thread would be in the top few results, so you wouldn't need to post and ask. In 2020, Google's "rich snippets" were showing you the quick answers in the screen real estate that is now used by the AI Overview answers, and those often times had surfaced some info taken from StackOverflow. And then, at the very end of 2022, ChatGPT came along and effectively acted as the StackOverflow search that you always wanted - you could phrase your question as poorly as you want, no one would flame you, and you'd get some semblance of the correct answer (at least for simple questions). I think StackOverflow was ultimately a victim of it's own success. Most of the questions that would be asked by your normal "question asker" type of user were eventually "solved" and it was just a matter of how easy it was to find them. Google, ChatGPT, "AI Overviews", Claude Code, etc have simply made finding those long-answered questions much easier, as well as answering all of the "new" questions that could be posed - and without all of the drama and hassle of dealing with a human-moderated site.
- Avicebron 9mo agoAre there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed. AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions). SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?
- IshKebab 9mo agoThey're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion". Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.
- eYrKEC2 9mo agoStackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck.
- loa_in_ 9mo agoIt's surprisingly tame still given it interests tens (hundreds?) of millions of people at varying age and background and mostly when the mind is occupied by a problem. I always found it surprising there's not more defacing and toxicity.
- etamponi 9mo agoI spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix. This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions. Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.
- ianbutler 9mo agoIt's flat wrong to suggest SO had the right answer all the time, and in fact in my experience for trickier work it was often wrong or missing entirely. LLMs have a better hit rate with me.
- danver0 9mo ago[flagged]
- johnsmith1840 9mo agoI mean when I was pure SO debugging I would say a solid 70% of the responses did not work. Different stack different bug ect. LLMs even if they can't guess the right answer can search the documentation really well.
- ianbutler 9mo ago[flagged]
- GaryBluto 9mo agoI'm not sure he intended it as an insult. Despite not using LLMs for HTML or JavaScript often (if at all), I was under the impression that it was one of their strong areas.
- 8organicbits 9mo agoIt's unfortunate that SO hasn't found a way to leverage LLMs. Lots of questions benefit from some initial search, which is hard enough that moderators likely felt frustrated with actual duplicates, or close enough duplicates, and LLMs seem able to assist. However I hope we don't lose the rare gem answers that SO also had, those expert responses that share not just a programming solution but deeper insight.
- vbezhenar 9mo agoI think that SO leveraging LLMs implicitly. Like I'll always ask LLM first, that's the easiest option. And I'll only come to SO if LLM fails to answer.
- zurtri 9mo agoIMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community.
- lastdong 9mo agoGame over. I didn’t notice all the toxicity mentioned in the other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe. It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its name is part of web history, and there’s no denying that.
- chrsw 9mo agoFor me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose. Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me. But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?
- mgrat 9mo agoFind the relevant discord and search.
- vbezhenar 9mo ago> Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days? I don't think such generic place exists. I just do my own research or abandon the topic. I think that in big companies you probably could use some internal chats or just ask some smart guy directly? I don't have that kind of connections and all online communities are full of people whose skill is below mine, so it makes little sense to ask something. I still do sometimes, but rarely receive competent answer. If you have some focused topic like a question about small program, of course you can just use github issues or email author directly. But if you have some open question, probably SO is the only generic platform out there. To put it differently, find some experts and ask which online place to the visit to help strangers. Most likely they just don't do it. So for me, personally, LLMs are the saviour. With enough forth and back I can research any topic that doesn't require very deep expertise. Sure, access to an actual expert willing to guide me would be better, but I just don't have that luxury.
- nicoburns 9mo agoThose saying that StackOverflow became toxic are absolutely correct. But we should not let that be it's legacy. It is IMO still today one of the greatest achievements in terms of open data on the internet. And it's impact on making programming accessible to a large audience cannot be understated.
- gfhifd42 9mo ago[flagged]
- Alex2037 9mo agowhat the fuck are you talking about? SO, remarkably, did not get enshittified.
- hahn-kev 9mo agoYeah I agree, it did fail, but it's not worse because the people running it were trying to ring money out of it's users. Maybe they did take their eye off the ball trying to make it something else though
- casey2 9mo agoProbably about https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336526/stack-overflow-is-doing-me-ongoing-harm-its-time-to-fix-it https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336526/stack-overfl... and the ensuing shitstorm
- gfhifd42 9mo agoNah. Farther back in time and psychologically deeper. Its in my, very short, comment history. They told their community their motivation was to combat the selfish monetization of digital sharecroppers and then they monetized their digital sharecroppers. They are frauds and eventually frauds are exposed and they exposed themselves for $1.8billion. And SO it collapsed. But thanks for speaking for me. Albeit incorrectly, ironically.
- strenholme 9mo agoGood riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost never being asked on Stack overflow). The most annoying example I can think of (but can’t link to, alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question, and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn’t answer the question, telling the person to just Google the answer.
- FrustratedMonky 9mo agoIf nobody is on StackOverflow, What will LLM's train on for new problems?
- etyhhgfff 9mo agoGitHub Issues and Disscussions + searching the code base, fetching the docs and some reasoning on top. Maybe even firing up a sandbox VM and testing some solutions.
- FrustratedMonky 9mo ago"firing up a sandbox VM and testing some solutions" If the LLM can start up a VM and test a solution, to identify a new unique problem, and find it's own solution. That would be pretty impressive. I'm not sure they are really to that point. But some AI's are winning the Math Olympiad, so maybe it is happening. I'm sure this is the overall goal.
- agumonkey 9mo agoI wonder if google search saw a similar hit
- terminalshort 9mo agoI doubt it. If I want to ask AI a simple question I type it into Google now.
- agumonkey 9mo agoanecdotally, i personally stopped using google a lot in the last few years
- garganzol 9mo agoMy personal bet is that traditional search engines face a -70% usage drop at the moment.
- Rexxar 9mo agoMaybe the average question will be more "high level" now that all simple questions are answered by LLMs ?
- dvh 9mo agoEternal September is finally over =) It was impossible to ask certain programming questions. Asking there was truly last resort.
- osakasake 9mo agoThis is a great example of how free content was exploited by LLMs and used against oneself to an ultimate destruction. Every content creator should be terrified of leaving their content out for free and I think it will bring on a new age of permanent paywalls and licensing agreements to Google and others, with particular ways of forcing page clicks to the original content creators.
- sublinear 9mo agoWas already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again. AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with. When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer. This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.
- gn4d 9mo agoCode golfing on SO was fun, too! I just looked it up, and "Note: This tag is currently blacklisted and can no longer be used." lmfao, what a braindead site, so glad I left years ago, after many years of greatly reduced activity. Source (at the top): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf?tab=Newest https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf?tab=New... Look at fun stuff like this from 2010: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2440314/code-golf-%cf%80-day https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2440314/code-golf-%cf%80...
- shagie 9mo agoYou do realize that they made an entire site for CodeGolf that is reasonably active (and has its own culture... and lead to the creation of specialized languages for it... and even pushed the bounds of OEIS a few times - https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5318 https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5318)? https://codegolf.stackexchange.com https://codegolf.stackexchange.com The issue is that code golf didn't fit well into the intended design of the library and it split off 15 years ago https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#oldest https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#oldest
- gn4d 9mo agoI am fully aware that it's split off. My entire point of mentioning it was that even a bit of extra fun got excised from the site. >The issue is that code golf didn't fit well into the intended design Exactly! The intended design of SO was to be a hellhole, even though it was able to stave off this fate in its infancy by virtue of having too many optimistic new users.
- johnnyfived 9mo agoI really admire that they publicly posted this data, and hope that the platform can find a new type of pivot or draw to bring back a community.
- jondwillis 9mo agoAI is a vampire. Coming to your corner of the world, to suck your economic blood, eventually. It’s hard to ignore the accelerated decline that started in late 2022/early 2023.
- juliangmp 9mo agoI've never once asked a question on there Mostly because you can't unless your account has X something-points. Which you get by answering questions. This threw me off so much when I got started with programming. Like why are the people who have the most questions, not allowed to ask any...?
- jmount 9mo agoI fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/ https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/
- junon 9mo agoStackExchange forgot who made them successful long ago. This is what they sowed. I don't have any remorse, only pity. When Hans Passant (OGs will know) left, followed by SE doing literally nothing, that was the first clue for me personally that SE stopped caring. That said, it is a bit shocking how close to zero it is.
- ok123456 9mo agoHow is Experts Exchange doing?
- bmitch3020 9mo agoAs someone that spent a fair bit of time answering questions on StackOverflow, what stood out years ago was how much the same thing would be asked every day. Countless duplicates. That has all but ceased with LLMs taking all that volume. Honestly, I don't think that's a huge loss for the knowledge base. The other thing I've noticed lately is a strong push to get non-programming questions off StackOverflow, and on to other sites like SuperUser, ServerFault, DevOps, etc. Unfortunately, what's left is so small I don't think there's enough to sustain a community. Without questions to answer, contributors providing the answers disappear, leaving the few questions there often unanswered.
- tantalor 9mo agoWhat if we filter out all the questions closed as dupes, off topic, etc?
- block_dagger 9mo agoI suspect a lot of the traffic shift is from Google replacing the top search result, which used to be Stack Overflow for programming questions, with a Gemini answer.
- kqgnkqgn 9mo agoEveryone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse? The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.
- nness 9mo agoI think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to "get to the bottom" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism. All of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered. I remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/discussion board, which feels more appropriate for the current state of the industry.
- bluedino 9mo agoThe question askers got stupider and stupider.
- mnau 9mo agoYes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood: > Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered! https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-we-hate-fun/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w... > Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year. https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... > Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn’t always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive. > All the content on the site must exist to serve the mission of learning over entertainment – even if that means making difficult calls about removing some questions and answers that fail to meet those goals, plus or minus 10 percent. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
- int32_64 9mo agoI'm glad I learned how to program when you could coax useful answers from Google searches. Whenever a Stack Overflow result comes up now the answer is years old and wrong, you might as well search archive.org.
- merek 9mo agoBetween 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be? The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?
- netsharc 9mo agoI wonder what the April 2020 spike is about... maybe lockdowns meant people started learning new stuff?
- gregdoesit 9mo agoInterestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched! It’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower? [1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackoverflow-irrelevant/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover...
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- culi 9mo agoI guess I'm the only one that was a fan of SO's moderation. I never got too deep into it (answered some TypeScript questions). But the intention to reduce duped questions made a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of a "living document" where energy is focused on updating and improving answers to old versions of the same question. As a user looking for answers it means I can worry less about finding some other variation of the same question that has a more useful answer I understand some eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette but overall I'd say about 90% of the time I clicked on a SO link I was rewarded with the answer I was looking for. Just my two cents
- garganzol 9mo agoThe problem with duplicate questions is that they weren't duplicates at all, and mods weren't competent enough to tell a difference.
- braiamp 9mo agoShow me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I will tell you exactly what happened.
- sockaddr 9mo agoI think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof that you're right.
- braiamp 9mo agoNo, but it will show, as someone else already responded, that they don't understand SO systems and processes at all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the question. Most questions aren't even closed by moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as community user. The community user gets attributed of all automated actions and whenever the user agrees with closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4] This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and how long it has been working this way, you will see that cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get resolved once they are known. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element-width-without-px https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element... [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element-width-without-px#comment53267968_32711321 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element... [2]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-in-moderation https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-... [3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250922/can-we-clarify-to-the-op-that-their-question-is-not-yet-closed-and-the-duplicate/250930#250930 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250922/can-we-clari... [4]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/213575 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/213575
- jonas21 9mo agoSeems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold to a private equity firm.
- johnsmith1840 9mo agoI think the bigger point we should realize is LLMs offer the EXACT same thing in a better way. Many people are still sharing answers to problems but they do it through an AI which then fine tunes on it and now that problem solution is shared with EVERYONE. Far better method of automated sharing of content
- andreyandrade 9mo agoInteresting timing. I just analyzed TabNews (Brazilian dev community) and ~50% of 2025 posts mention AI/LLMs. The shift is real. The 2014 peak is telling. That's before LLMs, before the worst toxicity complaints. Feels like natural saturation, most common questions were already answered. My bet, LLMs accelerated the decline but didn't cause it. They just made finding those existing answers frictionless.
- pfdietz 9mo agoWow, that's not just collapsing, that's collapsed.
- garganzol 9mo agoSigns of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity. Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their practical value and original intent. Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing products. As a result, answers from genuine users that recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience were frequently removed altogether. Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction and discourages broader user participation.
- travisgriggs 9mo agoI misread the title at first and thought it was hacker news questions [comments] that were being graphed. That’s what I would be interested in seeing
- travisgriggs 9mo agoWhile I generally agree with the narrative of the negative arc that stack overflow took, I found (and have as recently as a few months ago) that I could have enjoyable interactions on the math, Ux, written language, and aviation exchanges. The OS ones in the middle (always found the difference between Linux and superuser confusing).
- oxag3n 9mo agoAre we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge? A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources. However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb. LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO. Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?
- diabllicseagull 9mo agoit is indeed a shame. if you are doing anything remotely new and novel, which is essential if you want to make a difference in an increasingly competitive field, LLMs confidently leave you with non-working solutions, or sometimes worse they set you on the wrong path. I had similar worries in the past about indexable forums being replaced by discord servers. the current situation is even worse.
- shawn_w 9mo agoThere's https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ for the more academic CS questions btw.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoWeb has been solved for a decade imo.
- notepad0x90 9mo agoI still would like to get other humans' experiences and perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO doesn't go away entirely. With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that, but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".
- system2 9mo agoThe most toxic, degrading, and insulting forum for people. My questions, as well as my answers, always got poisonous criticism. Good.
- superkuh 9mo agoSeems like there are "blocked by cloudflare" number of questions per month. Their blocking of everyone not using chrome/etc from accessing their website probably contributed quite a bit to the implied downturn I'm reading in other comments.
- dpkirchner 9mo agoEven if you get on the site you'll end up dealing with Cloudflare's BBBaaS (breaking back buttons as a service).
- bachmeier 9mo agoA lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of accountability for everyone that influences the product, it eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with common sense stepped in to put an end to it.
- wtcactus 9mo agoI ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000. I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated. This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people using R, this seemed like something completely new. So, they just downvoted the question and told me I was wrong. I ended up answering my own question… but was also told that was wrong and that all points must have the same error interval. Instead of answering a programming question, people just went around denying experimental physics. I think that was the beginning of the end of SO for me.
- xasey45 9mo agoThis entire thread is fantastic. I felt nostalgic, angry and then concerned all at once. I love LLMs. But I miss SO. I miss being able to have that community. How do we bring it back? If anyone from the Stack Overflow team is reading this (I assume you are): what’s the plan? My take: stop optimizing for raw question volume and start optimizing for producing and maintaining “known good” public knowledge. The thing SO still has that Discord and LLMs don’t is durable, linkable, reviewable answers with accountable humans behind them. But the workflow needs to match how devs work now. A concrete idea: make “asking” a guided flow that’s more like opening a good GitHub issue. Let me paste my error output, environment, minimal repro, what I tried, and what I think is happening. Then use tooling (including an LLM if you want) to pre check duplicates, suggest missing details, and auto format. Crucially: don’t punish me for being imperfect. Route borderline questions into a sandbox or draft mode where they can be improved instead of just slammed shut. Second idea: invest hard in keeping answers current. A ton of SO is correct but stale. Add obvious “this is old” signaling and make it rewarding to post updates, not just brand new answers. Last thing that I don’t see an easy answer to: LLMs are feasting on old SO content today. But LLMs still need fresh, high quality, real world edge cases tomorrow. They need the complexity and problem solving that humans provide. A lot of the answers I get are recycled. No net new thinking. If fewer people ask publicly, where does that new ground truth come from? What’s the mechanism that keeps the commons replenished? So… TLDR…my question to this group of incredibly intelligent people: how does SO save itself?
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo agoGee...I wonder why it's almost dead (again)?
- steve_adams_86 9mo agoI'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often at one time. These days I don't even think about it.
- econ 9mo agoThe SO mission is complete. It's now an LLM training set. Things would be different if we didn't.
- wartywhoa23 9mo agoThis is the elephant in the room most commenters chose to turn their blind eye to.
- cindyllm 9mo ago[dead]
- yakattak 9mo agoThere's no doubt that generally LLMs are better. In addition SO had its issues. That being said I can't help but worry about losing humans asking questions and humans answering questions. The sentimentality aside, if humans aren't posing questions and if humans aren't recommending answers, what are the models going to use?
- rfmoz 9mo agoThey had pretty neat infra, maybe it still runs in the same clever way. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...
- junto 9mo agoNotably the default Redis client for most .NET developers is still StackExchange.Redis.
- robocat 9mo agoRecently they've chucked out their own servers: https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-saying-goodbye-to-the-servers-at-our-physical-datacenter/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-sa...
- johnfn 9mo agoSome comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO. I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers. Reddit is kind of a dark horse here, as I began seeing answers on Google to more modern technical questions link to a Reddit thread frequently along with SO from 2016 onwards. I also suspect Discord played a part, though this is harder to gauge; I certainly got a number of answers to questions for, e.g., Bun, by asking around in the Bun Discord, etc. The final nail in the coffin is of course LLMs, which can offer a SO-level answer to a decent percentage of questions instantly. (The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top.) - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?
- timcobb 9mo ago> I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? I've wondered this too and I wonder if the existing corpus plus new GitHub/doc site scrapes will be enough to keep things current.
- 999900000999 9mo agoGood. This is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic. LLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup.
- downboots 9mo agoMakes for a good conspiracy theory. Bad actors intentionally making the internet hostile. https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE
- pbw 9mo agoSO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.
- journal 9mo agothey pretend like everything is fine at HN too wouldn't surprise me looking similar in the future.
- 0xfaded 9mo agoI once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-given-point-to-given-ellipse#answer-46007540 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time. It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.) Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.
- emmelaich 9mo agoYou should write it up and submit it to some journal officially. Doesn't matter if it mostly duplicates your own (technically unpublished) work.
- jvanderbot 9mo agoYou can write a paper, submit the arxiv, and you can also make a blog post. At any rate, I agree - SO was (is?) a wonderful place for this kind of thing. I once had a professor mention that they knew me from SO because I posted a few underhanded tricks to prevent an EKF from "going singular" in production. That kind of community is going to be hard to replace, but SO isnt going anywhere, you can still ask a question and answer your own question for permanent, searchable archive.
- paulgerhardt 9mo agoI would imagine the endorsement requirement reduces submissions by a few orders of magnitude.
- gucci-on-fleek 9mo agoLots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same decline [1]. [0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/ [1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph
- bachmeier 9mo agoHate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX site.
- cracki 9mo agoI would ascribe that to these communities evolving differently. There is no reason to assume that the popularity of LaTeX tracks the popularity of programming languages. It's a type setting system. And that doesn't even take into account communities that exist parallel to SO/SE. Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.
- gucci-on-fleek 9mo ago> Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life. Yup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both are still somewhat active. [0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax [1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Nebasuke 9mo ago
- austin-cheney 9mo agoI used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off. What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed. Unfortunately it happens to every online technical community once they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoHN is a sponsored marketing outlet for YC first and foremost.
- austin-cheney 9mo agoHN has full time staff that provides moderation and does an excellent job. Nonetheless there are numerous users who take it upon themselves to determine what content should be available to the rest of us, as if they were heroes in their own mind. It’s a form of narcissism. While they think of themselves as community saviors everyone else thinks they are censoring assholes. Just let the moderators do their job. Unwanted content will naturally fall off either by downvoting or it will be ignored. All the rest of ask for is just don’t be an asshole.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoThat has nothing to do with the fact that this forum exists to promote YC and its associated ventures.
- gn4d 9mo agoFellow OG! And it's been happening on HN since the mid-2010s, too. Moderation went out of control everywhere, but at least this site isn't branded as some strictly technical site. Can't believe I'm even saying this, but moderation on a site that encompasses a cornucopia of topics is their prerogative. The mind-boggling thing to me about SO was that the moderation used non-technical criteria (such as failing to recognize why certain problems were asked and were not dupes, and later to shoehorn in political and sexual ideologies) to shape a technical site.
- xyproto 9mo agoIt was a good 16 year-ish run.
- groundzeros2015 9mo agoPeople are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also don’t forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push his personal political agenda.
- parpfish 9mo agoHere’s how SO could still be useful in the LLM era: User asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation to add additional insights and correct mistakes. If you’re a user that asks a duplicate question, it’ll just direct you to the good conversation that already happened. A symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS human generated content that dives deeper and provides reassurances in correctness
- leowoo91 9mo agoOr they can start claiming copyright on the training content
- mentos 9mo agoShould probably email this to the CEO of SO
- knallfrosch 9mo agoUsers could upvote whether Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT provided the best answer. The best of three is surfaced, the others are hidden behind a "show alternatives." However, I can see how this would be labelled "shoving AI into everything" and "I'm not on SO for AI."
- marjipan200 9mo agoFor those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM" https://sosimulator.xyz/ https://sosimulator.xyz/
- coldblues 9mo agoEveryone here talks about LLMs, but for me, the reason why StackOverflow became totally irrelevant is because of dedicated Discord servers and forums.
- braiamp 9mo agoActual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these: - The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard. - This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells you of the questions that survived at this point in time, this [0] is the actual graph which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation. - This is actually a Good Thing™. For years most of the questions went unanswered, non-voted, non-commented, just because there was too many questions happening all the time. So the general trend is not something that the SO community needs to do anything about. Almost 20% of every question asked is marked as duplicate. If people searched... better™ they wouldn't ask as many questions, and so everyone else had more bandwidth to deal with the rest. - There has been a shift in help desk style of request, where people starting to prefer discord and such to get answers. This is actually a bad thing because that means that the knowledge isn't public nor indexed by the world. So, information becomes harder to find, and you need to break it free from silos. - The site, or more accurately, the library will never die. All the information is published in complete archives that anyone can replicate and restart if the company goes under or goes evil. So, yeah, such concerns, while appreciated, are easily addressed. At worst, you would be losing a month or two of data. [0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926729#graph https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...
- gwern 9mo ago> which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation. I would say that this graph looks a lot more extreme, actually!
- sallveburrpi 9mo agoAt my place of work we use an indexing service for discord that creates an index of searchable static pages for all discord interactions. So while I agree the help desk style system isn’t really better it also doesn’t necessarily mean that it is lost forever in a silo. Before you ask, we use https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ but I’m sure there are other similar solutions by now
- deadbabe 9mo agoStackOverflow cemented my fears of asking questions. Even though there were no results for what I needed, I was too afraid to ask. Good riddance, now I’m never afraid to ask dumb questions to LLM and I’ve learned a lot more with no stress of judgement.
- avazhi 9mo agoLLMs are dogshit in many ways but when it comes to programming they are faster than people, respond instantaneously to further information, and can iterate until they understand the problem fully. Bonus is that you don’t get some dipshit being snarky.
- Legend2440 9mo agoThe founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way that site is worth $1.8 billion now.
- MeetingsBrowser 9mo agoWhenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246333
- junto 9mo agoI joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards .NET and I’ve been working with Microsoft web technologies since the mid 90’s. My SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through it, I also thoroughly enjoyed helping others. I also started to publish articles on CodeProject and it kicked off my long tech blogging “career”, and I still enjoy writing and sharing knowledge with others. I have visited the site maybe once a year since 2017. It got to the point that trying to post questions was intolerable, since they always got closed. At this point I have given up on it as a resource, even though it helped me tremendously to both learn (to answer questions) and solve challenging problems, and get help for edge cases, especially on niche topics. For me it is a part of my legacy as a developer for over 30 years. I find it deeply saddening to see what it has become. However I think Joel and his team can be proud of what they built and what they gave to the developer community for so many years. As a side note it used to state that was in the top 2% of users on SO, but this metric seems to have been removed. Maybe it’s just because I’m on mobile that I can’t see it any more. LLM’s can easily solve those easy problems that have high commonality across many codebases, but I am dubious that they will be able to solve the niche challenging problems that have not been solved before nor written about. I do wonder how those problems get solved in the future.
- agentifysh 9mo agoi've been using SO for 17 years as well but ultimately gave up out of frustration, and a lot of comments here are correctly pointing at the toxicity but the real-time chats were on a next level, it was absolutely maddening how toxic and aggressive these moderators were.
- nomilk 9mo agoApparently it was removed to reduce the load on the database see [0], [1]. The top voted response points out that SO are [2]: > destroying a valuable feature for users. Kinda wild they allowed it. As that answer also suggests, perhaps rather than remove it entirely, they could just compute those stats at a lesser frequency to reduce load. [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/399661/389220 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/399661/389220 [1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/437862/5783745 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/437862/5783745 [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/400024/389220 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/400024/389220
- zerofor_conduct 9mo agoSpolsky and co. sold SO in 2021 - timing IS everything.
- ronbenton 9mo agoCouldn’t have happened to a meaner community
- knallfrosch 9mo agoYou're clearly excluding gaming communities such as DotA2.
- rayanboulares 9mo agoBefore writing the comment I had in my head I did a CTRL+F search for "toxic" in the comment section here. 42 occurences. It says everything about what's happening to SO.
- moralestapia 9mo agoCool, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344599 Wonder why my submission wasn't featured and this one went to #1 immediately ... oh wait I actually know :^)!
- LordRatte 9mo agoWhy?
- nine_k 9mo agoWhile SO is mostly dead, narrower stackexchange communities may be very much alive. E.g. the Emacs community is responsive.
- HeavyStorm 9mo agoGood times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show proof, etc.) Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting questions and making snark comments.
- BoppreH 9mo agoThe graph is scary, but I think it's conflating two things: 1. Newbies asking badly written basic questions, barely allowed to stay, and answered by hungry users trying to farm points, never to be re-read again. This used to be the vast majority of SO questions by number. 2. Experiencied users facing a novel problem, asking questions that will be the primary search result for years to come. It's #1 that's being canibalized by LLM's, and I think that's good for users. But #2 really has nowhere else to go; ChatGPT won't help you when all you have is a confusing error message caused by the confluence of three different bugs between your code, the platform, and an outdated dependency. And LLMs will need training data for the new tools and bugs that are coming out.
- casey2 9mo agoI think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a recreational journal or BB. The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.
- yatopifo 9mo agoI’m going to argue the opposite. LLMs are fantastic at answering well posed questions. They are like chess machines evaluating a tonne of scenarios. But they aren’t that good at guessing what you actually have on your mind. So if you are a novice, you have to be very careful about framing your questions. Sometimes, it’s just easier to ask a human to point you in the right direction. But SO, despite being human, has always been awful to novices. On the other hand, if you are experienced, it’s really not that difficult to get what you need from an LLM, and unlike on SO, you don’t need to worry about offending an overly sensitive user or a moderator. LLMs never get angry at you, they never complain about incorrect formatting or being too lax in your wording. They have infinite patience for you. This is why SO is destined to be reduced to a database of well structured questions and answers that are gradually going to become more and more irrelevant as time goes by.
- shevy-java 9mo agoA death graph. Kind of sad that they ran out of ideas how to fix SO.
- paulryanrogers 9mo agoSurprising to see it bottom out so hard. I imagine at least some of the leveling off could be due to question saturation. If duplicates are culled (earnestly or overzealously) then there will be a point where most of the low hanging fruit is picked.
- atomicbeanie 9mo agoHas AI summarization led to people either getting their answer from a search engine directly, and failing that, just giving up?
- throw-12-16 9mo agoRTFM
- wartywhoa23 9mo agoTFMs are not a thing anymore. Most of them are merely collections of sparse random dots one might join by sheer luck only, granted no other knowledge of the system being attempted to document.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoI don't know what you are building, but if a thing doesn't have comprehensive docs it doesn't make it into my stack.
- bdangubic 9mo agoglad I don’t work at any place that would make a professional write this comment
- CGamesPlay 9mo agoI recall when they disabled the data export a few years ago [0], March 2023. Almost certainly did this in response to the metrics they were seeing, but it accelerated the decline [1]. [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-data-dump-is-missing/390023#390023 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-da... [1] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926873#graph https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...
- metalliqaz 9mo agoWhat an incredible graph
- Night_Thastus 9mo agoNot surprising. It's very often a toxic, unhelpful, stubborn community. I think maybe once or twice in years of use did I ever find it genuinely welcoming and helpful. Frequently instead I thought "Why should I even bother to post this? It'll just get either downvoted, deleted, or ignored."
- culebron21 9mo agoSome commenters suggest it's not the moderation. I think it is the key problem, and the alternative communities were the accumulated effect. Bad questions and tough answer competition is part of it, but moderation was more important, I think. Because in the end what kept SO relevant was that people made their own questions on up to date topics. Up until mid-2010s you could make a seriously vague question, and it would be answered, satisfactory or not. (2018 was when I made the last such question. YMMV) After that, almost everything, that hadn't snap-on code answer, was labelled as offtopic or duplicate, and closed, no matter what. (Couple of times I got very rude moderators' comments on the tickets.) I think this lead some communities to avoid this moderator hell and start their own forums, where you could afford civilized discussion. Discourse is actually very handy for this (Ironically, it was made by the same devs that created SO). Forums of the earlier generation, have too many bells and whistles, and outdated UI. Discourse has much less friction. Then, as more quality material was accumulated elsewhere, newbies stopped seeing SO on top of search, and gradually language/library communities churned off one by one. (AI and other summaries, probably did contribute, but I don't think they were the primary cause.)
- gn4d 9mo agoOne might even say that Joel and Jeff created their very own puts on shades coding horror yeaaahhhh with SO, and it is indeed ironic that them building Discourse has created far better communities than SO ever was.
- saltymimir 9mo agoThe obvious culprit here are the LLMs, but I do wonder whether Github's social features, despite its flaws, have given developers fewer reasons to ask questions on SO? Speaking from experience, every time I hit a wall with my projects, I would instinctively visit the project's repo first, and check on the issues / discussions page. More often than not, I was able to find someone with an adjacent problem and get close enough to a solution just by looking at the resolution. If it all failed, I would fall back to asking questions on the discussion forum first before even considering to visit SO.
- k1w1 9mo agoI am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me as much over the last ten years. It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I for one will mourn its loss. I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to be shared.
- Hnrobert42 9mo agoOn what will the LLMs train, now?
- knallfrosch 9mo agoOn the same 14 year old Java questions like the rest of us.
- sillyfluke 9mo agouser chat logs clearly. They are not much diffent than the SO Q&A format.
- adamddev1 9mo agoThis is a huge loss. In the past people asked questions of real people who gave answers rooted in real use. And all this was documented and available for future learning. There was also a beautiful human element to think that some other human cared about the problem. Now people ask questions of LLMs. They churn out answers from the void, sometimes correct but not rooted in real life use and thought. The answers are then lost to the world. The learning is not shared. LLMs have been feeding on all this human interaction and simultaneously destroying it.
- hedayet 9mo agoAnd still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - "too broad". I mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds? Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well.
- 0x1ceb00da 9mo agoFlag it as off topic
- nomilk 9mo agoWonder if this is a good proxy for '# of Google Searches'. Or perhaps a forward indicator (sign of things to come), since LLMs are adopted by the tech-savvy first, then the general public a little later, so Stack Overflow was among the first casualties.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- curvaturearth 9mo agoWhere will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration.
- sodafountan 9mo agoIdeally, you'd train them on the core documentation of the language or tool itself. Hopefully, LLMs lead to more thorough documentation at the start of a new language, framework, or tool. Perhaps to the point of the documentation being specifically tailored to read well for the LLM that will parse and internalize it. Most of what StackOverflow was was just a regurgitation of knowledge that people could acquire from documentation or research papers. It obviously became easier to ask on SO than dig through documentation. LLMs (in theory) should be able to do that digging for you at lightning speed. What ended up happening was people would turn to the internet and Stack Overflow to get a quick answer and string those answers together to develop a solution, never reading or internalizing documentation. I was definitely guilty of this many times. I think in the long run it's probably good that Stack Overflow dies.
- nromiun 9mo agoWhy do you think people stop creating new posts just because SO collapsed? People on GitHub issues and Reddit answer programming questions everyday. SO was dying even before ChatGPT was released. LLMs just accelerated that process.
- skeptic_ai 9mo agoI’m glad it’s dead. They were super rude.
- flakes 9mo agoMaybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more. I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board. With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September). I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed.
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoSO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now.
- ar_turnbull 9mo agoEnd of an era. :-(
- lurk2 9mo agoIt was a good idea ruined by the compulsively obtuse and pedantic, not unlike Reddit.
- carlsborg 9mo agoAcquired in June 2021 for $1.8 billion usd. Hurts but acquirer Naspers is a prolific tech investor, its stake in TenCent is worth > $150B usd today.
- mindaslab 9mo agoIt's a very toxic place, you ask a doubt, and someone will abuse you, down vote you, make you feel you are not for to be a human. Better it's dead.
- eviks 9mo agoWhile the decline started a decade ago in 2014 and accelerated in 2020, the huge drop since 2023 is remarkable
- throw-12-16 9mo agoGood riddance. I stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the community was such a pain in the ass to deal with.
- lofaszvanitt 9mo agoIt is always good to see other cultured people who structure their SQL queries the right way.
- weatherlite 9mo agoThis is incredible. Anyone who claims LLMs aren't useful will need to explain how come almost every programmer can solve 95% of his problems with an LLM without needing anything else. This is real usefulness right here. EDIT: I'm not saying I'm loving what happened and what is becoming of our roles and careers, I'm just saying things have changed forever; there's still a (shrinking) minority of people who seem to not be convinced.
- mr_toad 9mo agoMaybe we had too many programmers who weren’t capable of actually solving their own problems. Maybe only one in twenty programmers were ever actually any good at their jobs.
- mherrmann 9mo agoNow imagine what happens when a new programming language comes along. When we have a question, we will no longer be able to Google it and find answers to it on Stack Overflow. We will ask the LLMs. They will work it out. From that moment, the LLM we used has the knowledge for solving this particular problem. Over time, this produces huge moat for the largest providers. I believe it is one of the subtler reasons why the AI race is so fierce.
- zkmon 9mo agoStagnation started around 03/2014 and downward trend started around 03/2017. Looking at dates, it doesn't seem like AI caused those trend changes.
- sedatk 9mo agoSO has lost against LLMs because it has insistently positioned itself as a knowledge base rather than a community. The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it. They basically made a bet because they wanted to be the full anti-thesis of ad-ridden garbage-looking forums. Pure information, zero tolerance for humanity, sterile looking design. They achieved that goal, but in the end, they dug their own grave too. LLMs didn’t admonish us to write our questions better, or simply because we asked for an opinion. They didn’t flag, remove our post with no advance notice. They didn’t forbid to say hello or thanks, they welcomed it. They didn’t complain when we asked something that was asked many times. They didn’t prevent us from deleting our own content. Oh yeah, no wonder nobody bothers with SO anymore. It’s a good lesson for the future.
- knallfrosch 9mo agoIMO people underestimate the value of heavy moderation. But moderation heavy or light, good or bad. Why wait hours for an answer when an LLM gives it in seconds?
- zahlman 9mo agoFor those who have historically wondered about or objected to "moderation" (people usually mean curation here; as the overwhelming majority of the actions they're talking about are not performed by moderators) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-picked list of important discussions from the meta site explaining some policy basics: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 If your question was not well received, read this before you post your next question https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254358 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254358 Why the backlash against poor questions? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 What is Stack Overflow’s goal? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262446 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262446 Are we being "elitist"? Is there something wrong with that? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791 The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high (N.B.: linked specifically for the satire in the top-voted answer) https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 Why is "Can someone help me?" not a useful question? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/309208 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/309208 Are there questions that are too trivial to answer? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 Why isn't it required to provide comments/feedback for downvotes, and why are proposals suggesting this so negatively received? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366757 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366757 On the false dichotomy between quality and kindness https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 Can we make it more obvious to new users that downvotes on the main site are not insults and in fact can help them help themselves? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 Comments asking for clarification or an MCVE are not rude/abusive https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/370792 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/370792 Is this really what we should consider "unwelcoming"? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (fd: my self-answered Q&A) Note that IDs are in chronological order. The rate of new meta.stackoverflow.com posts fell off dramatically at some point because of the formation of a network-wide meta.stackexchange.com. The earliest entries listed here are from 2014.
- sixhobbits 9mo agoAs everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI, and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before looks similar Also not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?) but that's definitely one of the things that made me default reach for other links instead of SO. [0] https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png
- threeducks 9mo agoThose popups were a big contributor for me to stop using SO. I stopped updating my uBlock origin rules when LLMs became good enough. I am now using the free Kimi K2 model via Groq over CLI, which is much faster.
- finalhacker 9mo agollm killed stackoverflow
- anonu 9mo agoSo the question for me is how important was SO to training LLMs? Because now that the SO is basically no longer being updated, we've lost the new material to train on? Instead, we need to train on documentation and other LLM output. I'm no expert on this subject but it seems like the quality of LLMs will degrade over time.
- lblume 9mo agoIt has often been claimed, and even shown, that training LLMs on their own outputs will degrade the quality over time. I myself find it likely that on well-measurable domains, RLVR improvements will dominate "slop" decreases in capability when training new models.
- wartywhoa23 9mo agoYep, exactly. Free data grabbing honeypots like SO won't work anymore. Please mark all locations on the map where you would hide during the uprise of the machines.
- dw_arthur 9mo agoWhy publish anything for free on the internet if it's going to be scanned into some corporation's machine for their free use? I know artists who have stopped putting anything online. I imagine some programmers are questioning whether or not to continue with open source work too.
- steve-atx-7600 9mo agoSomeone turn off the lights on the way out
- theturtlemoves 9mo agoIt's funny to see people's new year's resolution to learn how to code in the graph
- Uhhrrr 9mo agoDerivative of S curve
- anovikov 9mo agoWhy did SO traffic halve from it's maximum till the ChatGPT release date? Also, for a long time after initial release, ChatGPT was pretty much useless for coding questions. It only became more or less useful ~2 years ago. So there's about 4x decline from peak to explain with reasons that do not involve LLMs. What these could be?
- tonyhart7 9mo agoI not even hearing stack overflow survey for 2025 damn bro, its sad how "tradition" is gone now edit: I know they still doing it but usually there is "viral" post,yt video etc for developer talking about it in my feed now??? less people talk about it anymore
- ph4rsikal 9mo agoThere will be a generation of coders that will never have heard of stack overflow.
- rplnt 9mo agoOne factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..? Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it).
- ahmetomer 9mo agoFor this occasion, I just logged in to my SO profile; I've been a member for 9 years now. To me, back when I started out learning web dev, as a junior with no experience and barely knowing anything, SO seemed like a paradise for programmers. I could go on there and get unblocked for the complex (but trivial for experts) issues I was facing. Most of the questions I initially posted, which were either closed as duplicates or "not good enough," really did me a lot of discouragement. I wasn't learning anything by being told, "You did it wrong, but we're also not telling you how you could do it better." I agree with the first part; I probably sucked at writing good questions and searching properly. I think it's just a part of the process to make mistakes but SO did not make it better for juniors, at least on the part of giving proper guidance to those who "sucked".
- ertucetin 9mo agoI recently wrote a blog post similar to this situation: https://ertu.dev/posts/ai-is-killing-our-online-interaction/ https://ertu.dev/posts/ai-is-killing-our-online-interaction/
- lcian 9mo agoHoly shit.
- aussieguy1234 9mo agoNow the real question is... Which AI company will acquire whats left of StackOverflow and all the years of question/answer data?
- wartywhoa23 9mo agoIt is already acquired. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partnership-with-openai https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
- frays 9mo agoIt's amazing to think that in the next few years, we may have software engineers entering the workforce who don't know what StackOverflow is...
- hartator 9mo agoI think the disallowing of “controversial” technical questions might have helped as much as the AI boom. So frustrating to be reading a deeply interesting technically and intense debate to be closed down by an admin.
- noduerme 9mo agoThis is horrifying. Given the fact that when I need a question answered I usually refer to S.O., but more recently have taken suggestions from LLM models that were obviously trained on S.O. data... And given the fact that all other web results for "how do you change the scroll behavior on..." or "SCSS for media query on..." all lead to a hundred fake websites with pages generated by LLMs based on old answers. Destroying S.O. as a question/answer source leaves only the LLMs to answer questions. That's why it's horrific.
- hnmullany 9mo agoI think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016. I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.
- jdthedisciple 9mo agoSo it seems all the questions have now been answered– Great!
- carra 9mo agoI find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.
- majani 9mo agoLooks like they sold right before the end. Wonder whether the AI deals they've struck make up for the difference
- computersuck 9mo agoSomeone needs to archive the entirety of StackOverflow and make it available over torrent so that it can be preserved when the site shuts down. Urgently.
- computersuck 9mo agohttps://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange Found it
- shagie 9mo agohttps://archive.org/details/stackexchange_20250930 https://archive.org/details/stackexchange_20250930 > As of (and including) the 2025-06-30 data dump, Stack Exchange has started including watermarking/data poisoning in the data. At the time of writing, this does not appear to apply to the 2025-09-30 data dump. The format(s), the dates for affected data dumps, and by extension how the garbage data can be filtered out, are described in this community-compiled list: https://github.com/LunarWatcher/se-data-dump-transformer/blob/master/docs/meta/Known%20watermarks.md https://github.com/LunarWatcher/se-data-dump-transformer/blo.... If the 2025-09-30 data dump turns out to be poisoned as well, that's where an update will be added. For obvious reasons, the torrent cannot be updated once created.
- pabs3 9mo agoArchiveTeam got alerted to this thread on IRC and may do something. Current non-updated docs about SO. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Stack_Exchange https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Stack_Exchange
- Flow 9mo agoStackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me. Actually I think it never did. It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account. And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile. I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities.
- sevenseacat 9mo agoI don't think the reputation system ever worked that way - new users could always answer questions, but comments required more reputation.
- Flow 9mo agoOK, you might be right and I got it backwards. It still felt wrong at the time before I got enough points.
- egorfine 9mo agoObviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to. LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact. And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder. I'm not sad.
- wartywhoa23 9mo agoLLMs did not eat SO, it was SO that fed the LLMs too well. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partnership-with-openai https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
- sevenseacat 9mo agoI feel like I'm taking crazy pills, reading some of these comments. It looks like a pretty clear divide between the people that wanted to ask questions to get solutions for their own specific problems; and those who were aware of what the site wanted to be and how it actually operated, and were willing to put in the time and answer questions, etc. The sheer amount of garbage that used to get posted every day required some pretty heavy moderation. Most of it was not by actual moderators, it was by high-reputation users. (I have 25K reputation on StackOverflow, and was most active between 2011 and 2018.)
- cracki 9mo agoI think 95% of comments earnestly using the word "toxic" can be disregarded. They were unaware of or unwilling to follow the rules of the site. They mistook SO for reddit, a place for socializing.
- andomar 9mo agoGarbage was never moderated on StackOverflow, it was always ignored. Moderation was used by the insiders to keep new people out.
- causal 9mo agoAnd half the garbage is from people "moderating"! You are literally rewarded points for doing moderating activities, so of course every post is flooded with BS edits, votes to close, etc.. Cobra effect and whatnot.
- shagie 9mo agoWhat points do you get for moderation activity?
- sevenseacat 9mo agoNone, we found the leeches
- 9mo ago
- wartywhoa23 9mo agoStackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs. Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of course, but I wanted to do so out of principle. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partnership-with-openai https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
- janaagaard 9mo agoSO peaked long, long before LLMs came along. My personal experience is that GitHub issues took over. You can clearly see the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022. That was the final nail in the coffin. I am still really glad that Stack Overflow saved us from experts-exchange.com - or “the hyphen site” as it is sometimes referred to.
- cracki 9mo agoLLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing. The steep decline in the early months of 2023 actually started with the release of ChatGPT, which is 2022-11-30, and its gradually widening availability to (and awareness of) the public from that date. The plot clearly shows that cliff. The gentle decline since 2016 does not invalidate this. Were it not for LLMs, the site's post rate would now probably be at around 5000 posts/day, not 300. LLMs are to "blame" for eating all the trivial questions that would have gotten some nearly copy-pasted answer by some eager reputation points collector, or closed as a duplicate, which nets nobody any rep. Stack Overflow is not a site for socializing. Do not mistake it for reddit. The "karma" does not mean "I hate you", it means "you haven't put the absolute minimum conceivable amount of effort into your question". This includes at least googling the question before you ask. If you haven't done that, you can't expect to impose on the free time of others. SO has a learning curve. The site expects more from you than just to show up and start yapping. That is its nature. It is "different" because it must be. All other places don't have this expectation of quality. That is its value proposition.
- fireflash38 9mo agoWhen you see AI giving you back various coding snippets almost verbatim from SO, it really makes you wonder what will happen in the future with AI when it can't depend on actual humans doing the work first.
- eightys3v3n 9mo agoI certainly use it less now that I get a CloudFlare check every time I go and sometimes it fails or loads forever. I usually just go back to search results and look elsewhere after a second or two.
- blondie9x 9mo agoIt makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time as people google questions and get results. It would be interesting to look at the number of comments and views of questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have driven declining engagement and discussion.
- fHr 9mo ago>This post was not virtue signaling enough and therefore closed as duplicate. SO had the greatest minds but the shitiest moderation
- Tostino 9mo agoClicked on the link and got stopped by cloudflare. Guess I won't be giving them any more traffic either.
- a3w 9mo agoSince the trend must go on, we expect StackExchange to now offer answers, and the user responses need to be questions. We could even make a quiz game show out of that! /s
- andomar 9mo agoStackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable. Instead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This killed the pub and with it the business. The most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old timers took when they joined. And duplicates allow anyone with a grudge to take revenge. After all, there are no new questions, and you will always find a duplicate if you want to. To create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by itself.
- nolok 9mo agoAnother exemple being "Comments are not for extended discussion ! if you want to actively bring value by adding information, later updates, history, or just fun that cultivates a community, please leave and go do that somewhere else like our chat that doesn't follow at all the async functionnality of this platform and is limited to the regular userbase while scaring the newcomers."
- wavemode 9mo ago"comments are not for extended discussion" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided "yeah, let's kill this". The people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes just letting a community do what it wants (within reasonable boundaries, of course) leads to a better and more successful product than actively trying to steer things in a certain direction.
- causal 9mo agoOh absolutely - when it becomes clear you have high engagement somewhere, adapt that feature to facilitate the engagement! They could have made comments threaded or embedded ways to expand it into the right forum, but instead they literally shut down engagement. Bonkers.
- trashface 9mo agoGood riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any alternative. And that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking questions because they didn't want to run the moderation gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing. LLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will oblige. Looking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve.
- andrewaylett 9mo agoThe corresponding answers graph: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/answers-by-month#graph https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/a...
- johnnylambada 9mo agoOne thing you won’t get with in an LLM is genuine research. I once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code of vim to see how the poster’s question could be resolved. [0] [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619423/backup-restore-the-current-repeat-action-in-vim https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619423/backup-restore-th...
- wojciii 9mo agoI have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time. I use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago. I used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time. So perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP. I don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components.
- thomasingalls 9mo agoEveryone is saying LLMs did this site in, but what if we just asked all the questions already? We should be celebrating how we solved programming!
- griffzhowl 9mo agoA decline in number of questions asked can also be because most people's questions are already answered in the database. How would you query this for post views over time?
- runxel 9mo agoAnother note to add here: The whole system was stupid, too! What do you mean, I can only give answers, but not comment? While there is much more to say about SO's demise, the "interaction" on the platform was definitely not one of its strengths, either.
- shagie 9mo agoComments have less visibility in moderation. This has made them spam / link farming targets in the past. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow with the mindset that it is a forum to discuss something and have tangential discussions in the comments. https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour > This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. The "no comments until you get a little bit of rep" is to try to help people realize that difference from the start.
- JazCE 9mo agoAs one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0]. I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a discussion site, rather than the Q&A site that it was set out to be. I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile or that they unfairly closed questions without bringing the citations required. I'm not saying at all that SO was without it's flaws in leadership, moderators, community or anything else that made the site what it was. But if you're going to complain, at least bring examples, especially when you have someone here you could hold somewhat accountable. The problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Discord chats, StackOverflow or GitHub issues. People still don't know how to ask questions: * [1] * [2] * [3] [0]: https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-ask-for-it.html https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-as... [1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670 https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670 [2]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649 https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649 [3]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515 https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515
- darubedarob 9mo agoStackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom. Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is mainly about asking and answering questions.
- Cort3z 9mo agoI fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.
- sixseven 9mo agoI was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but got stuck in one particular function. It was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I couldn't find anything on Google. Had no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time. (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I didn't understand the documentation) It was a fond memory of the site for me.
- atomicbeanie 9mo agoI used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?
- bschmidt25010 9mo ago[dead]
- bschmidt25012 9mo ago[dead]
- xnx 9mo agoDon't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses? It should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible.
- troyvit 9mo agoMan after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard, but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I, as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM instead of being able to peruse great answers from different perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.
- valyala 9mo agoThe number of active users at StackOverflow started dropping in the middle of 2020, i.e. long time before ChatGPT release in the end of 2022. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/1928368/2369160/new-vs-lost-users-over-time#graph https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/192836...
- MangoCoffee 9mo agoStack Overflow set out to be a better Q&A site but has turned into a user-unfriendly, gatekeeping platform where questions are often marked as duplicates because a similar question was answered 15 years ago. Everything and every question is banned, gatekeep, or marked as a duplicate.
- lunias 9mo agoWhen StackOverflow dies, who will train the LLMs?
- neoromantique 9mo agoMonica has the last laugh it seems