Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time • Hacker News Board

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#11

Post by Someone1234 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

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

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#12

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

goldenarm wrote: post #8

Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough? Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.

[deleted]

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#13

Post by porcoda » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#14

Post by mohsen1 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:02 PM UTC

People are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#15

Post by Bratmon » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:02 PM UTC

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.

It can be both. Push and pull factors work better together than either does individually.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#16

Post by Vaslo » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

goldenarm wrote: post #8

Now that StackOverflow has been killed (in part) by LLMs, how will we train future models? Will public GitHub repos be enough? Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where it lives nowadays.

They would just use documentation. I know there is some synthesis they would lose in the training process but I’m often sending Claude through the context7 MCP to learn documentation for packages that didn’t exist, and it nearly always solves the problem for me.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#17

Post by Bratmon » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe in which the Stackoverflow community was so friendly, welcoming, helpful, and knowledgeable that this seems like a tragedy and motivates people to try to save it.

But in this universe, most people's reaction is just "lol".

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#18

Post by nikanj » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

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.

Maybe the graph doesn’t include questions that get closed by moderators?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#19

Post by elevation » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

There are still airgapped places in the world where transferring information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they’re not worth using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for engineering teams working in these environments.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#20

Post by ForHackernews » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

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.

It's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going to train the AI for free.