The Fall of Stack Overflow
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The Fall of Stack Overflow
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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#2This is a large decline. It does not correlate well with the rise of LLMs, which have shifted my own habits away from Stack Overflow recently. Looking through the graphs, the most dramatic shift was the large drop in new visits in the first half of last year, by two thirds or more. That seems late to be a Covid effect. There were some political controversies, but it would surprise me if they had such a large effect.
What accounts for this?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#3I was promoted to one of those "mod" type people who reviews new answers, first posts, etc, a few years back.
I can tell you that I quit in the last 6 months. All new answers are answers on questions from first time posters, answering questions that have good solid answers from 8+ years ago (mostly 10 years), and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points. The question/answer is not something that has changed in the last 8+ years, they are just doing it to get reputation or whatever.
Most good solid questions...I just do not see too many today. I am not saying this is the reason for the decline, but there is a deluge of posts answering very old questions with a slight modification of an old answer. I quit putting effort into it, as it was just non-productive.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#4They were and are an excellent resource.
Is it inevitable that traffic would decrease as questions are answered? Has traffic gone somewhere else? Has AI replaced it?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#5Where were these data sourced from? As far as I know, StackOverflow does not publicize internal analytics with such granularity. If these figures are real, are they leaked?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#6I think the problem is google losing the fight with spammers.
It's being a while for me that I have to put "stackoverflow" in the search query to avoid sites with scraped content
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#7All internet forums tend toward shit as time goes on.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#8I think the problem is google losing the fight with spammers. It's being a while for me that I have to put "stackoverflow" in the search query to avoid sites with scraped content
>to avoid sites with scraped content
especially YouTube links. sadly, it would not surprise me if these people are earning a decent enough money from ads to make it worth their while to be "content creators" solely from search results from Googs
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#9This is a large decline. It does not correlate well with the rise of LLMs, which have shifted my own habits away from Stack Overflow recently. Looking through the graphs, the most dramatic shift was the large drop in new visits in the first half of last year, by two thirds or more. That seems late to be a Covid effect. There were some political controversies, but it would surprise me if they had such a large effect.…
Copilot.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#10This is a large decline. It does not correlate well with the rise of LLMs, which have shifted my own habits away from Stack Overflow recently. Looking through the graphs, the most dramatic shift was the large drop in new visits in the first half of last year, by two thirds or more. That seems late to be a Covid effect. There were some political controversies, but it would surprise me if they had such a large effect.…
I am speculating, an impact this size must be related to a change in Google search ranking.
Although there appears to be a Monica effect (2020) in the data too. I stopped contributing myself around that time:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/340906/update-an-ag...