111–120 of 267 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We may need to create a community driven version of SO. Hard for it to be a successful business these days.
https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...
Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.
Agree. But I asked a couple questions about a year ago and got zero response. It's not just people asking questions who deserted SO, it is also people answering them (probably a chicken and egg problem - reversal of network effects).
I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...
Clicking through to the query for the first chart, I see the peak of ~300k in May of 2020, and it was ~3k in April of 2026 (the last complete month). I’m flabbergasted. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/193252...
The Ghost of Expert Sexchange gets its revenge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
That's the thing though, it was voluntary. If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you reall…
That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time: If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only t…
Early years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.
Call me crazy but sometimes I still find a better solution on StackOverflow than what Claude Code insists to do. I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.
I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.
The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.
LLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway). Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc. But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment. Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually ge…
> Wikimedia-like foundation