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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I think you just fell for quite an obvious case of sarcasm.

It isn’t obvious unless it has the slash s!

We should leave the /s back on reddit

Sadly, it really is necessary if one wants to be sure nobody actually takes the sarcasm seriously. It's hard for people to tell in a textual medium.

Heck, my style of humor in RL is often sarcasm or deliberately ludicrous comments and people still sometimes go "wait, really?" Even though they know me well.

I'm going to go without it from now on. I can handle clarifying myself if it's absolutely necessary for someone.

Yeah but those people who take the sarcasm seriously are fools and you can’t make things foolproof.

Encouraging and putting up with hair-splitting lawyerly un-generous readings of comments is what leads to people just straight up interpreting any “Plus I’m being genuine here” messages as lies.

We need to trust our readers, else we end up in an echo chamber culture where any deviation from the Party line is interpreted as “disruptive person who must be banned to protect our community”.

These things are linked.

The ability to deliver and detect sarcasm without training wheels is a layer of communication we need and can’t afford to abandon, in order to maintain a productive conversational environment.

Yeah but those people who take the sarcasm seriously are fools and you can’t make things foolproof.

Or you know, have a legitimatly very hard time distinguishing it for actual reasons.

Actual reasons like their stupidity? Yeah I admit that’s a real thing. But if we all give up on it then we all lose the ability and we lose the benefits of it.

Damn bro you're right, I'll just stop being autistic. I'm cured!

chinesescholarshadasimilarst
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iningwheelswasalayerofcommun
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otaffordtoabandoninordertoma
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letoreflectuponanddiscernthe
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation

(This is a lesson in history, so I'll let the discerning reader to decide for themselves whether there is sarcasm contained in it)