Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

Absolutely 100% this. I've used them on and off throughout the years. The community became toxic, so I took my question to other platforms like Reddit (they became toxic as well) and elsewhere.

Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open source, I've written everything from emulators and game engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc.

The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in documentation, specifically related to undocumented behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO, I received either no response and downvotes, or negative responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back, so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button if folks were super negative and didn't answer the question.

Later on, most of my answers actually have come from Github,and 95% of the time, my issues were legitimate ones that would've been mentioned if a decent number of folks used the framework, library, or language in question.

I think the tl;dr of this is this: If you can't provide a positive contribution on ANY social media platform like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Github, etc. Don't speak. Don't vote. Ignore the question. If you happen to know, help out! Contribute! Write documentation! I've done so on more than one occasion (I even built a website around it and made money in the process due to ignorance elsewhere, until I shut it down due to nearly dying), and in every instance I did so, folks were thankful, and it made me thankful that I was able to help them. (the money wasn't a factor in the website I built, I just wanted to help folks that got stuck in the documentation hole I mentioned)

EDIT: because I know a bunch of you folks read Ars Technica and certain other sites. I'll help you out: If you find yourself saying that you are being "pedantic", you are the problem, not the solution. Nitpicking doesn't solve problems, it just dilutes the problem and makes it bigger. If you can't help, think 3 times and also again don't say anything if your advice isn't helpful.

I suppose all sites that have a voting component run the risk of becoming unpleasant.

Hacker News, and we who frequent it, ought to have that in mind.

As 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.

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.

The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes.

The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions.

Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.

Are you sure? You can post questions even with a completely new blank account. It's comments that require some reputation, maybe you were thinking about those?