Summarizer

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 moderation from the beginning. The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO. I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers. Reddit is kind of a dark horse here, as I began seeing answers on Google to more modern technical questions link to a Reddit thread frequently along with SO from 2016 onwards. I also suspect Discord played a part, though this is harder to gauge; I certainly got a number of answers to questions for, e.g., Bun, by asking around in the Bun Discord, etc. The final nail in the coffin is of course LLMs, which can offer a SO-level answer to a decent percentage of questions instantly. (The fact that the LLM doesn't insult you is just the cherry on top.) - I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but what happens now? Despite stratification I mentioned above, SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions. What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?

Thing is, if that's how you are greeted at stackoverflow, then you'll go elsewhere where you're not treated like an idiot. Stackoverflow's decline was inevitable, even without LLMs.

And thus SO dies as people will go somewhere they can actually get their question answered.

Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before. Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time. Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content. One thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example. Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate.

Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy? There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created. What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term. It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site.

Deadness is the symptom, not the cause. Users don't avoid SO because it's dead, but rather, SO is dead because users avoid it. It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. There's another thread on the front page about IPv6 where someone had a good analogy: IPv4 vs IPv6 is like Python 2 vs 3. The Python 2 diehards continued arguing furiously to an emptier and emptier room. They never felt they were proven wrong, and the intensity of the argument never diminished but the argument was with fewer and fewer people until they were just arguing with themselves as the world moved on without them. And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026, after the horse is long gone. Everyone has left, the lights are off in the empty debate hall and you're standing there at the podium telling a bunch of chairs and desks why everyone actually agrees with you. You might want to reflect on why you hold such fervent beliefs that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. Can I guess you had a lot of reputation points and you desperately don't want to believe they're worthless now? The referenced comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477920

Thanks for replying. I find your point of view for all this fascinating. With your experience, why do you think the site is failing? What could or should be done to save it?

The "nuh uh" attitude also helps explain the usage graph drop. "The users simply wanted the wrong thing than what the site is for" is also something

Exactly... I'm getting a laugh out of this thread because it's so easy to spot the power-trippers who are enraged at how their fiefdom is rapidly going extinct.

What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers. (As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)

I’m sad SO died, even if they deserved it.

One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other services and spaces before the widespread use of AI doesn’t sound very compelling to me. Be more creative than AI.

If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones: 1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions. 2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.

> Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology. This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times than I can count.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers. I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.

Look at the data - it had already been on the downslide for years before LLMs became a meaningful alternative. AI was the killing blow, but there was undoubtedly other factors.

The decline was much slower, not the following exponential decline that can only have been caused by LLMs.

It was bad enough that many people resorted to asking their questions in Discord instead which is a massive boomerang back to trying to get help in IRC and just praying that someone is online and willing to help you on the spot. Having to possibly ask your question multiple times before you get some spotty help in a real time chat where it's next to impossible to find again seems unimaginably worse than using an online forum but the fact of it remains and tells us there was something driving people away from sites like SO.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with.

"I suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers." I think at least one other reason is that a lot of the questions were already posted. There are only so many questions of interest, until a popular new technology comes along. And if you look at mathoverflow (which wouldnt have the constant shocks from new technologies) the trend is pretty stable...until right around 2022. And even since then, the dropoff isn't nearly so dramatic. https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/edit/19272...

There's another significant forum: GitHub, the rise of which coincided with the start of SO's decline. I bet most niche questions went over to GH repos' issue/discussion forums, and SO was left with more general questions that bored contributors.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO. Plus they might find the answer on SO without asking a new question - You probably would expect the # of new questions to peak or plateau even if the site wasn't dying, due to the accumulation of already-answered questions.

I don't think "good moderation or not" really touches what was happening with SO. I joined SO early and it had a "gamified" interface that I actually found fun. Putting in effort and such I able to slowly gain karma. The problem was as the site scaled, the competition to answer a given question became more and more intense and that made it miserable. I left at that point but I think a lot people stayed with dynamic that was extremely unhealthy. (and the quality of accepted questions declined also). With all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening.

The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could.

> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left. Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwood was the one who wanted to keep things strictly on mission and Spolsky was the one more interested in growing a community. Yes? I do get the impression that there was a serious ideological conflict there; between the "library of detailed, high-quality answers" and the, well, "to every question" (without a proper understanding of what should count as a distinct, useful question that can have a high-quality answer). But also, the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out for the "library" goal ( https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex... ). And I suspect they both shared blame in that. A lot of it was also ignored for too long because of the assumption that a) the site would just die if it clamped down on everything from the start; b) the site would naturally attract experts with good taste in questions (including maybe even the ability to pose good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dixer questions) before the beginners ever cleared the barrier of trying to phrase a proper question instead of using a forum. (Nowadays, there are still small forums all over the place. And many of them try to maintain some standards for the OP. And they're all plagued with neophytes who try to use the forum as if it were a chat room . The old adage about foolproofing rings true.) Around 2014 is when the conflict really seems to have boiled over (as new question volume was peaking). Notably, that also seems to be when the dupe-hammer was introduced ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589 ).

Also: the bigger the corpus of already answered questions, it’s more likely that you can just look up an answer instead of asking. Eventually SO becomes a site exclusively for lurkers instead of a platform for active participation

On the other hand, another week another JavaScript framework, amirite? There continues to be new stuff to ask questions about, but stack overflow failed to be the default location for new stuff. I guess now there's more discussion directly on GitHub and discord.

I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced. I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.

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.

If SO wanted to keep experienced developers on their site and contributing content for free, it shouldn't have been unthinkable to find some model to fund SO Jobs. Yahoo is one cautionary tale of what happens when a site pursues more or lower-quality advertising revenue without regard for losing users. "Sunsetting Jobs & Developer Story" 3/2022 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...

Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I still pop into SO when in learning a new language or trip into new simple questions (in my case, how to connect and test a local server). But when you're beyond the weeds, SO is as best an oasis in the desert. Half the time a mirage, nice when it does help out. But rare either way. I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.

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

Gen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996) Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008) Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)

It was a more innocent time. Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...

The same is true for reddit imo, it became impossible to post anything to a subreddit way before LLMs

Long before LLMs. Setting aside peak-COVID as a weird aberration, question volume has been in decline since 2014 or maybe 2016.

I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor) contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific issues. The timeline also matches: https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-... https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...

They will, but model updates and competition help solve the problem. If people find that Claude consistently gives better/more relevant answers over GPT, for example, people will choose the better model. The worst thing with Q/A sites isn't they don't work. It's that they there are no alternatives to stackoverflow. Some of the most upvoted answers on stackoverflow prove that it can work well in many cases, but too bad most other times it doesn't.

StackOverflow answers are outdated. Every time I end up on that site these days, I find myself reading answers from 12 years ago that are no longer relevant.

This change was happening well before LLMs. People were tired of being yelled at and treated poorly. A cautionary tale for many of these types of tech platforms, this one included.

I agree there was some natural slow down as the corpus grew - the obvious questions were answered. But if the community was healthy, that should not have caused growth to stop. New technologies get created all the time, each starting with zero SO questions. (Or Google releases v2.0 which invalidates all answers written about v1.) SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though.

The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant to post when they were working from home?

More people spent lot more time learning new tech skills (at every experience level). The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc) and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.

I’d guess it’s also because it’s not as easy to ask your random question to a coworker when they’re not sitting next to you in the office.

A huge amount of people were just starting to learn programming, because they were stuck at home and had the time to pick something up. If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.

If you ignore the early pandemic bump, it even looks like the decline started in late 2017, though it's more variable than after the bump

I wonder what is the role of moderating duplicate questions. More time passes - more existing data there is and less need for new questions. If you moderate duplicate questions, will they disappear from these charts? Is this decline actually logical? 2020 there was new CEO and moderator council was formed: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-o...

There is an obvious acceleration of the downwards trend at the time ChatGPT got popular. AI is clearly a part of this, but not the only thing that affects SO activity.

OP here: I had the same thought, but noticed a very similar trend in both [0]; I think this graph is more interesting because you'd expect the number of new users to be growing [1], but this seems to have very little effect on deleted questions or even answers [0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927371#g... [1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927375#g... The second graph here ([1]) is especially interesting because the total montly number of new users seems completely unrelated to number of posts, until you filter for a rep > 1 which has a close to identical trend

> When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard This would be true if programming were a static field, but given that new programming languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make sense.

Programming is not a static field in the answers side, but it's in the question side. "How to print characters on a terminal with python?" is the same problem today as it was 25 years ago. The answer changed but the problem remained. That's what people saying that programming isn't static is missing: the problem space grows significantly slower than the solution space.

> which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation. I would say that this graph looks a lot more extreme, actually!

You had me looking through my history. Here is an example from 12 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-my... Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.

Those saying that StackOverflow became toxic are absolutely correct. But we should not let that be it's legacy. It is IMO still today one of the greatest achievements in terms of open data on the internet. And it's impact on making programming accessible to a large audience cannot be understated.

Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded. > Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked. > I wrote a program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for the next five years curating the content it held. For another five years a collection of people did the same work with love for what was there. But that was the end. A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content suffered. A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the collective effort of a small group, worked in the mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30 years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place, that I'd like to visit on the web. :( [0] https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/issues/51#issue...

> To some extent that was Stack Overflow Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?

You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own questions, too. And there are more sites like this (see e.g. https://codidact.com — fd: moderator of the Software section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a reason to stop doing it.

When I grew up shakes fist at clouds I had a half dozen totally independent forums/sites to pull on for any interest or hobby no matter how obscure. I want it back!

It's true though, and the information was so deep and specific. Plus the communities were so legitimate and you could count on certain people appearing in threads and waiting for their input. Now the best you have are subreddits or janky Facebook groups .

Yeah, I suspect that a lot of the decline represented in the OP's graph (starting around early 2020) is actually discord and that LLMs weren't much of a factor until ChatGPT 3.5 which launched in 2022. LLMs have definitely accelerated Stackoverflow's demise though. No question about that. Also makes me wonder if discord has a licensing deal with any of the large LLM players. If they don't then I can't imagine that will last for long. It will eventually just become too lucrative for them to say no if it hasn't already.

I can relate. I used to have a decent SO profile (10k+ reputation, I know this isnt crazy but it was mostly on non low hanging fruit answers...it was a grind getting there). I used to be proud of my profile and even put it in my resume like people put their Github. Now - who cares? It would make look like a dinosaur sharing that profile, and I never go to SO anymore.

SO in 2013 was a different world from the SO of the 2020's. In the latter world your post would have been moderator classified as 'duplicate' of some basic textbook copy/pasted method posted by a karma grinding CS student and closed.

My experience as well: Stack Overflow used to (in practice) be a place to ask questions and get help and also help others. At some point it became all about some mission and not only was it not as useful anymore but it also became a whole lot less fun.

Reddit is my current go-to for human-sourced info. Search for "reddit your question here". Where on reddit? Not sure. I don't post, tbh, but I do search. Has the added benefit of NOT returning stackoverflow answers, since StackOverflow seems to have rotted out these days, and been taken over by the "rejection police".

I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too.

I often forget just how much smaller and less siloed the internet was just ~13 years ago.

I was an early adopter. Have over 30k reputation because stack overflow and my internship started at the same time. I left because of the toxic culture, and that it's less useful the more advanced you get

Once StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers. I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.” To their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community.

Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here. There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention. Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now. If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it. Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts. I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system.

The newbies vastly outnumber the experienced people (in every discipline), and have more to ask per-capita, and are worse at asking it. Category 2 is much smaller. The volume of Stack Overflow was never going to be sustainable and was not reasonably reflective of its goals. We are talking about a site that has accumulated more than three times as many questions as there are articles on Wikipedia. Even though the scope is "programming languages" as compared to "literally anything that is notable". But there are other places people can go, such as https://software.codidact.com (fd: I am a moderator there).

So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my comments. Is deleting comments allowed?" For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain how that's not toxic? Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then?

I think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a recreational journal or BB. The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.

Another plausible explanation is that the new owners didn’t develop the community in a good way. Instead of fixing the myriad of issues that were obvious to almost all contributors they instead basically let it die?

Lots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same decline [1]. [0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/ [1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph

A similar but not as strong decline. Taking the one but last datapoint for both (stackoverflow/tex respectively): 4436 and 394. If you compare this to how it looked like between 2015-2020 you get (my guess from scanning): 160,000 and 1700. So Stackoverflow as a whole went from 160K -> ~4.4K. That's like a 35x drop, compared to tex, where it's a 1700 -> 394, 4x drop.

Hate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX site.

I would ascribe that to these communities evolving differently. There is no reason to assume that the popularity of LaTeX tracks the popularity of programming languages. It's a type setting system. And that doesn't even take into account communities that exist parallel to SO/SE. Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.

I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off. What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed. Unfortunately it happens to every online technical community once they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN.

Some commenters suggest it's not the moderation. I think it is the key problem, and the alternative communities were the accumulated effect. Bad questions and tough answer competition is part of it, but moderation was more important, I think. Because in the end what kept SO relevant was that people made their own questions on up to date topics. Up until mid-2010s you could make a seriously vague question, and it would be answered, satisfactory or not. (2018 was when I made the last such question. YMMV) After that, almost everything, that hadn't snap-on code answer, was labelled as offtopic or duplicate, and closed, no matter what. (Couple of times I got very rude moderators' comments on the tickets.) I think this lead some communities to avoid this moderator hell and start their own forums, where you could afford civilized discussion. Discourse is actually very handy for this (Ironically, it was made by the same devs that created SO). Forums of the earlier generation, have too many bells and whistles, and outdated UI. Discourse has much less friction. Then, as more quality material was accumulated elsewhere, newbies stopped seeing SO on top of search, and gradually language/library communities churned off one by one. (AI and other summaries, probably did contribute, but I don't think they were the primary cause.)

Interestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched! It’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower? [1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover...

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.

Not zero, but it is smaller than when it launched originally. And this is questions asked, not how many people are visiting and reading posts.

Most? 3 out of 15 is most? What's wrong with youngsters today?!

So, I reviewed the questions list again but this time, since the time I did view it about 9 hours ago [1]. 10 were negative scored, 5 positive scored, 15 0 scored, 4 has received answers. This is better than normal for those ~30. Usually it's 80% without votes, without answers, without comments. So, this is a significan improvement... which I suspect is due the time of the day, as the US and most of Europe were asleep. So, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in the positive direction. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest

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

It's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now for confirmation. I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_.

The last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun. If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small difference is probably due to the turn of the year.

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).

The steep decline started way before llms

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

SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.

I recall when they disabled the data export a few years ago [0], March 2023. Almost certainly did this in response to the metrics they were seeing, but it accelerated the decline [1]. [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-da... [1] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...

One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..? Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it).

StackExchange forgot who made them successful long ago. This is what they sowed. I don't have any remorse, only pity. When Hans Passant (OGs will know) left, followed by SE doing literally nothing, that was the first clue for me personally that SE stopped caring. That said, it is a bit shocking how close to zero it is.

AI is a vampire. Coming to your corner of the world, to suck your economic blood, eventually. It’s hard to ignore the accelerated decline that started in late 2022/early 2023.

As everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI, and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before looks similar Also not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?) but that's definitely one of the things that made me default reach for other links instead of SO. [0] https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png

Those popups were a big contributor for me to stop using SO. I stopped updating my uBlock origin rules when LLMs became good enough. I am now using the free Kimi K2 model via Groq over CLI, which is much faster.

Web has been solved for a decade imo.

SO peaked long, long before LLMs came along. My personal experience is that GitHub issues took over. You can clearly see the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022. That was the final nail in the coffin. I am still really glad that Stack Overflow saved us from experts-exchange.com - or “the hyphen site” as it is sometimes referred to.

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.

Game over. I didn’t notice all the toxicity mentioned in the other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe. It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its name is part of web history, and there’s no denying that.

I fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/

Seems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold to a private equity firm.

Good riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any alternative. And that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking questions because they didn't want to run the moderation gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing. LLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will oblige. Looking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve.

Wow. I was expecting a decline but not to that extent.

The corresponding answers graph: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/a...

The number of active users at StackOverflow started dropping in the middle of 2020, i.e. long time before ChatGPT release in the end of 2022. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/192836...

Wow, that's not just collapsing, that's collapsed.

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 used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?

Approaching 0 is wild

I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.

Why do you think people stop creating new posts just because SO collapsed? People on GitHub issues and Reddit answer programming questions everyday. SO was dying even before ChatGPT was released. LLMs just accelerated that process.

I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016. I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.

Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be? The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?

Interesting timing. I just analyzed TabNews (Brazilian dev community) and ~50% of 2025 posts mention AI/LLMs. The shift is real. The 2014 peak is telling. That's before LLMs, before the worst toxicity complaints. Feels like natural saturation, most common questions were already answered. My bet, LLMs accelerated the decline but didn't cause it. They just made finding those existing answers frictionless.

I am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me as much over the last ten years. It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I for one will mourn its loss. I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to be shared.

There will be a generation of coders that will never have heard of stack overflow.

Everyone is saying LLMs did this site in, but what if we just asked all the questions already? We should be celebrating how we solved programming!

I wonder what the April 2020 spike is about... maybe lockdowns meant people started learning new stuff?

Surprising to see it bottom out so hard. I imagine at least some of the leveling off could be due to question saturation. If duplicates are culled (earnestly or overzealously) then there will be a point where most of the low hanging fruit is picked.

So it seems all the questions have now been answered– Great!

It's amazing to think that in the next few years, we may have software engineers entering the workforce who don't know what StackOverflow is...

Stagnation started around 03/2014 and downward trend started around 03/2017. Looking at dates, it doesn't seem like AI caused those trend changes.

While the decline started a decade ago in 2014 and accelerated in 2020, the huge drop since 2023 is remarkable

It's funny to see people's new year's resolution to learn how to code in the graph

It was a good 16 year-ish run.

End of an era. :-(

Someone turn off the lights on the way out

A death graph. Kind of sad that they ran out of ideas how to fix SO.

Gee...I wonder why it's almost dead (again)?

Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again. AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with. When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer. This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.

It makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time as people google questions and get results. It would be interesting to look at the number of comments and views of questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have driven declining engagement and discussion.

Why did SO traffic halve from it's maximum till the ChatGPT release date? Also, for a long time after initial release, ChatGPT was pretty much useless for coding questions. It only became more or less useful ~2 years ago. So there's about 4x decline from peak to explain with reasons that do not involve LLMs. What these could be?

Good riddance. I stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the community was such a pain in the ass to deal with.

Seems like there are "blocked by cloudflare" number of questions per month. Their blocking of everyone not using chrome/etc from accessing their website probably contributed quite a bit to the implied downturn I'm reading in other comments.

I really admire that they publicly posted this data, and hope that the platform can find a new type of pivot or draw to bring back a community.

What an incredible graph

I not even hearing stack overflow survey for 2025 damn bro, its sad how "tradition" is gone now edit: I know they still doing it but usually there is "viral" post,yt video etc for developer talking about it in my feed now??? less people talk about it anymore

it died