The Fall of Stack Overflow

trashhalo@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 341 points – The Fall of Stack Overflow
observablehq.com

Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.

The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.

What happened?

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If this and Reddit are going downhill, where will we look for our tech questions?! (/s, there will always be others)

My bets for the future:

  • RTFM
  • Have ChatGPT RTFM
  • Read a book about general principles
  • Ask ChatGPT to apply general principles to its own answer after RTFM, then ask it to double check it
  • Spin up a VM, just try the thing. If it doesn't work, ask ChatGPT why.

When everything else fails...

  • Ask a question at any random place (SO, Reddit, Discord, Mastodon,Lemmy, etc.)
  • Feed the answers to ChatGPT and have it summarize them, then double check its own answer