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Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#131

Post by jtrn »

ianbutler wrote: post #79
etamponi wrote: post #49

I 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 (…

It'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.

No point in arguing with people who bring a snowball into Congress to disprove global warming.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#132

Post by make3 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #114
porcoda wrote: post #13

Not 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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.

That depends on what you mean by "came along". If you mean "once that everyone got around to the idea that LLMs were going to be good at this thing" then sure, but it was not long ago that the majority of people around here were very skeptical of the idea that LLMs would ever be any good at coding.

What you're arguing about is the field completely changing over 3 years; it's nothing, as a time for everyone to change their minds.

LLMs were not productified in a meaningful way before ChatGPT in 2022 (companies had sufficiently strong LLMs, but RLHF didn't exist to make them "PR-safe"). Then we basically just had to wait for LLM companies to copy Perplexity and add search engines everywhere (RAG already existed, but I guess it was not realistic to RAG the whole internet), and they became useful enough to replace StackOverflow.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#133

Post by gfhifd42 »

nospice wrote: post #35
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

They 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

Right. 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…

[flagged]

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#136

Post by nutjob2 »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #83
porcoda wrote: post #13

Not 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.

>For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.

I think the industry is quickly moving to syntheticly derived knowledge, or custom/systematic knowledge production from humans.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#137

Post by johnsmith1840 »

I 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

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#138

Post by nness »

kqgnkqgn wrote: post #113

Everyone 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.

I 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.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#139

Post by tom_ »

8organicbits wrote: post #25
vintagedave wrote: post #4

Do 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.

There are tabs to change to a table view. I see a peak of 207k in 2014 and the last month was only 3,710.

The decline has been pretty surprising: more questions asked in May 2021 (133,914) than in the whole of 2025 (129,977).

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#140

Post by [deleted] »

encom wrote: post #128
Alupis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chal…

>toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes >zombie community Like Reddit post 2015.

[deleted]
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