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> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount. https://d

• DANmode 4mo ago
  Too early to call, but that is a crazy stat. Wow.
  • Gigachad 4mo ago
    Too early to call? It's hit rock bottom. I've never seen a major site die so completely before.
    • antiframe 4mo ago
      MySpace comes to mind. Slashdot maybe.
      • Gigachad 4mo ago
        Both before my time. These days it seems like every site is able to withstand pretty much every controversy. Facebook should have died about 5 times by now but the company is as strong as ever.
        • DANmode 4mo ago
          LifeLog doesn’t ever die, it just takes the form it needs to.
          • DANmode 4mo ago
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog
    • DANmode 4mo ago
      Google Search was looking bleak at one point, recently, based on deltas alone.
    • Grokify 4mo ago
      Digg was a major site that had a surprisingly fast turn of events. There are some good lessons from that.
    • dwd 4mo ago
      Groupon? Did an IPO with a 12.7b valuation and was mostly dead within a year.
• troad 4mo ago
  Did anyone actually like StackOverflow? Any question asked would be edited beyond recognition (and usually into brash rudeness). Half the answers were demanding ever increasing proof of work, and the other half told the OP that they shouldn't even be trying to do what they're doing. The only useful thing were opinion based posts from people with domain expertise, and SO kept trying to ban and remove those. It was the least helpful place online, but the most accessible, and it survived for lack of alternatives. I'm no AI booster, but answering simple questions about well understood topics is a perfect fit for it. Good riddance to StackOverflow.
  • Dig1t 4mo ago
    It was pretty dang useful when there was no alternative, and I’m sure that many people physically could not have performed their jobs without copy-pasting from it. But yeah, I don’t know how anyone could have any affection or nostalgia for it, people were massive jerks and it was not a pleasant place.
  • tayo42 4mo ago
    I was just thinking to my self the other day how it's nice I don't need to stop what I'm doing to make a question that's answerable by someone else. Ai can answer my question without me spending time recreating the problem and stripping out all of the irrelevant context
  • elephanlemon 4mo ago
    StackOverflow was great when I was a very junior dev working on JavaScript apps. Anytime I ran into a roadblock, there was often a relevant post there to help me. As I become more competent though, I realized that reading the documentation directly was usually a much better way to get answers to my questions, and I stopped visiting.
  • _jackdk_ 4mo ago
    I did originally, when it collected a bunch of obscure knowledge and made it searchable and useful. It was fun and rewarding to put things you knew into the common knowledge pool, and everyone celebrated a successful competitor to Experts Exchange. The SO model had a few major flaws that became impossible to ignore after it was entrenched. First, the reward scheme rewards the exact opposite of what it should incentivise: common questions are hit by many users and therefore attract lots of upvotes while answering the really hard stuff often meant you didn't even get your answer marked as "accepted" (because the OP had given up and stopped checking the site). Second, the site deliberately cultivated an "editor caste" in the Wikipedia style before the failure modes of that model were well-known: well-intentioned newbies get shut down by miserable yet untouchable people who play (and sometimes help write) the site's rules. Third, the stated desire to identify canonical answers to questions had no clear way to handle the evolution of the software people were talking about. So you'd have highly upvoted answers that might have been referencing deprecated libraries, and it was very hard for the newer answer to gain traction via either internal or external search. It was also unfortunately before the retro boom of the 2020s, so questions about older arcana were often vulnerable to being closed instead of answered.
• Legend2440 4mo ago
  This is why you never pay $1.8 billion for a social media company. It never ends well for the new owner. Not just Stack Overflow but also Tumblr, Vine, MySpace, Twitter, and more. Instagram might be the only exception. Good job on the founders for selling at the peak though.
  • slashdev 4mo ago
    Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp seemed to work out well. It’s always more complex than you think
    • colonelspace 4mo ago
      Are YouTube and WhatsApp social media?
      • nicce 4mo ago
        Yes, few of the prime examples?
      • kingstnap 4mo ago
        You named the two biggest platforms [0], YouTube and WhatsApp are the social media. This is kinda like asking if Saudi Arabia and Russia are petrostates lol. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
        • womble2 4mo ago
          They were made into social media, but when they were aquired they were just video hosting and sms replacements with little (no?) social engagement aspect.
    • CuriouslyC 4mo ago
      Insta and YT were bought fairly early on the ascent and then pumped hard with some resources and autonomy before being folded in completely. WhatsApp is a legit counterpoint though.
• tholm 4mo ago
  Interesting looking at the data, the questions always seemed to peek in March. Anyone have insight into that?
  • Jeremy1026 4mo ago
    A lot of companies don't hire at the end of the year because of holidays breaking up schedules, coupled with strapped budgets by that point. New year starts, budgets are refreshed, everyone is back to work so hiring pipelines can roll again. Get hired in early February, on-board for a couple of weeks, really start to dig into work at the end of February and early March. You don't want to look like you don't know anything, so instead of asking your coworker sitting next to you or just a Slack DM away, you throw a question up on Stack Overflow and hope to get an answer that gets you unstuck.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• GMoromisato 4mo ago
  Ouch! They are down to ~1,300 questions per month. If we assume a user asks 1 question per year, and we assume 50 lurkers for every one who asks a question, we're at 800K monthly visitors.[1] That is tragically low! [1] 1300 x 12 x 51 = ~800K. x12 because every month, 1 user out of twelve asks a question, and x51 because there are 50 lurkers for each poster. I'm sure my assumptions are questionable, and curious about corrections, but we're still at very low numbers.
• foo12bar 4mo ago
  The crazy thing is AI uses stackoverflow, certain parts of reddit, and other forums for a reference and without it will soon become unable to keep up with modern technology. And they are all dying.
  • tass 4mo ago
    The risk is that beyond hobbyists technology will stagnate. It’s already much more productive using one or two frameworks over the rest of what’s available, and without training data it won’t be able to advance beyond those current popular frameworks.