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 bet Google searching in general has gone down too. It's often times quicker to just ask ChatGPT for an answer, and usually you can tell when an answer is correct or not. It's like the old days of manually searching on Google for StackOverflow questions and then finding answers, and then trying to determine which one will work.

It's not just ChatGPT that's to blame. The VP of Knowledge & Information at Google mentioned that the younger generation doesn't search for things the same way.

“We keep learning, over and over again, that new internet users don’t have the expectations and the mindset that we have become accustomed to.” Raghavan said, adding, “the queries they ask are completely different.”

These users don’t tend to type in keywords but rather look to discover content in new, more immersive ways, he said.

“In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search,” he continued. “They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

Anecdotally, I've witnessed younger people searching on Youtube for a video explanation of a technical issue (e.g. an error code when installing some software), rather than using Google Search. It's baffling to me, but Gen Z has a different way of consuming information.

Edit: Clarity

That may be, but I know my browsing history, even as I get older and older, and I am using StackOverflow hardly at all compared to ChatGPT which I am using almost a scary amount.

I know I am not the only developer, this is how things are going.

ChatGPT is a big, big part of it.