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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It's funny how if everyone just went and "read the documentation" like they tend to obnoxiously tell you to do.. stackoverflow wouldn't exist. Personally I go and look for things I can answer if someone asks a question that I know will get obliterated but I can tell they just need some help. I'll try to answer it before it gets downgraded and they get banned

Have you ever wanted to do something from the uncharted area? Encountered bad documentation? This is what it's supposed to be for, not handholding.

Uncharted is quite subjective. I used SO most when I was starting out in SE. Looking back through the questions I posted, most of them were very much beginner questions that I would just know nowadays or know where to look for. That was what I used SO for. Beginners asking veterans for help. The least of them were due to bad documentation or exploring uncharted territory. As I grew more confident in the field, I stopped using SO more and more. The latest only for best practices on simple problems I don't want to reinvent. And exactly those cases GPT now solves faster and I'd be surprised if not even better than SO posts.