Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

Personally I haven't asked or answered on stackoverflow for a long time. Just one data point.

Discussion might be slowly dying off because most questions have already been answered. Maybe StackOverflow reached a state where it is mostly done and implicitly transitioning into a Wikipedia-style programming encyclopedia. This should show up in the logs, maybe somebody here has enough reputation on SO to have access to them.

If that is the case then new questions are mostly on new frameworks and new languages which are often niche tags and don't have as much engagement as the popular tags once had.

Almost all questions newbies could ask are ripe for getting closed as duplicate and complicated questions are rarely getting answers since they require too much context to fit into SO's format.

Not sure about stack overflow, but search result quality feels to be in decline. Lately I deliberately try to rely on official documentation more (i.e. have it bookmarked and browse it for answers) instead of trying to look something up in search engine. Which honestly is a good idea anyway.

I've noticed this trend for years, basically :

- for reference I land on official documentation

- for issues I usually land on GitHub issues and source code

- for random stuff I still hit SO - like some SQL problem, CSS, algorithm implementation

- for design stuff I land on blog posts

Personally I see stack overflow value reduce with good reference documentation and GitHub issues/open source dev discussions.

The fact that SO is purely QA and closes opinionated/discussion topics makes it less valuable. It made sense in the past when you couldn't communicate with devs so easily or when reference documentation wasn't that good. Especially for closed source stuff.