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

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#411

Post by CamperBob2 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:36 AM UTC

rileymat2 wrote: post #371

gfody wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences. SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...

It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server, and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid solutions. There were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the fourth one failed it gave me the first one again.

You can't use the free chat client for questions like that in my experience. Almost guaranteed to waste your time. Try the big-3 thinking models (ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5).

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#412

Post by smcin » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:37 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #379

nerdponx wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be true on Stackoverflow but not on other network sites like Cross Validated, which was killed by splitting the community into multiple SE sites and longtime users quitting in protest over various policies and not being replaced.

I think there's a basic problem that the original revenue model for the site just didn't work (I mean, they wouldn't have shut down Stack Overflow Jobs if that actually made them any money) and anything they were able to do to fix that pissed people off.

Stack Overflow Jobs was a superb, uncluttered, direct interface to the hiring manager, with accurate details about a position. So when they canned it (but kept their advertising revenue stream plus started "SO for Teams" in 2018), that was a major canary that the whole revenue model wasn't viable, at least for independent developers.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#413

Post by fragmede » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:38 AM UTC

stirfish wrote: post #209

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…

Remember when the R developers would ask and answer their own basic questions about R, essentially building up a beginner tutorial on stack overflow? That was a cool time

Human psychology is fascinating. If I say I'm cool, I'm full of myself. If someone else says that I'm cool, that hits different. So is reverse psychology.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#414

Post by dleeftink » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:40 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means.

Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#415

Post by curvaturearth » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:40 AM UTC

Where will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#416

Post by gfhifd42 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #360

gfhifd42 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

maybe I think those things, or maybe I think totally different things; you have no way of knowing

I know because i click your username and see your email and website.

Click on my name you get nothing.

Yours is full of hope of someone reaching out to you. Mine is idgaf.

I don't need to defend the status quo. I don't want karma pOints.

I want integrity.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#417

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

[deleted]

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#418

Post by gfhifd42 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC

hahn-kev wrote: post #283

gfhifd42 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This response sounds quite toxic actually

Because you don't want to hear it, that's all. It's not toxic, it's idgaf.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#419

Post by skeptic_ai » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:44 AM UTC

I’m glad it’s dead. They were super rude.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#420

Post by flakes » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:44 AM UTC

Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more.

I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board.

With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September).

I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed.