It'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.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
51–60 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#52IMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#53Game 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.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#54People are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them.
This 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.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#55For 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?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#56Those 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.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#57Seems like the exit was very well timed. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...
Another 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?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#58They 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
There is an obvious acceleration of the downwards trend at the time ChatGPT got popular. AI is clearly a part of this, but not the only thing that affects SO activity.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#59Not 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.
I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor) contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific issues. The timeline also matches: https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-... https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...
Do we have any stats for the number of GitHub discussions created each month to compare to this?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#60Do 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.
Not zero, but it is smaller than when it launched originally. And this is questions asked, not how many people are visiting and reading posts.