The Fall of Stack Overflow

BenLloydPearson@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 647 points –

Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow

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the search engine ignores -string

WHAT? Why would they do that? WTF no wonder....

Hyphen (-) means you don't want to see this word, while words surrounded by quotes (") means you want these phrases exactly.

Most symbols are also ignored, which is great for an average user but terrible for programmers.

Yeh, suddenly you need to know what the language calls the operator within the context you want to use it.
At which point, you probably don't need to Google the symbol!

I'm still pissed over removing +words. Like, G+ is gone, guys, so revert that mess.

It was a really dumb move but you can can still get the same effect by putting a word in quotation marks.

UI-wise, though, it's toxic, and therefore slower and more stressing. It's something that can be fixed, and ergo essentially a bug. ;-)