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The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

267 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the issue is how people got to Stack Overflow. People generally ask Google first, which hopefully would take you somewhere where somebody has already asked your question and it has answers.

Type a technical question into Google. Back in the day it would likely take you to Experts Exchange. Couple of years later it would take you to Stack Overflow. Now it takes you to some AI generated bullshit that scraped something that might have contained an answer, but was probably just more AI generated bullshit.

Either their SEO game is weak, they stopped paying Google as much for result placement, or they've just been overwhelmed with limitless nonsense made by bots for the sole purpose of selling advertising space that other bots will look at.

Or maybe I'm wrong and everybody is just asking ChatGPT their technical questions now, in which case god fucking help us all...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It gives decent answer and is still relatively at the top. However, if you need to ask something that isn't there you're going to be either intimidated or your question is going to be left unanswered for months.

I'm more inclined to ask questions on sites like Reddit, because it's something I'm familiar with and there's far better chance of getting it answered within couple hours.

ChatGPT is also far superior because there's a feedback loop almost in real time. Doesn't matter if it gives the wrong answer, it gives you something to work with and try, and you can keep asking for more ideas. That's much preferable than having to wait for months or even years to get an answer

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Ya im not sure what the deal with the hate is. ChatGPT gives you an excellent starting point and if you give it good feedback and direction you can actually churn out some pretty decent code with it.