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The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)

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

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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] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People isn't considering that documentation has greatly improved over time, languages and frameworks have become more abstract, user-friendly, modern code is mostly self explanatory, good documentation has become the priority of all open source projects, well documented open source languages and frameworks have become the norm.

Less people asking programming related questions can be explained by programming being an easier and less problematic experience nowadays, that is true.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't entirely agree that more and better documentation removes bugs, problems, questions, concerns, or cuts too much into a 50% drop in site usage. Having documentation is just another tool in the toolbelt, to be used alongside community forums.

Discovery process for myself and many of my coworkers has always been; Look up obscure errors, problems, etc. to get an idea of what I'm dealing with, and then off to the documentation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They don't remove bugs, but it is easier to solve them without having to wait for some random guy to answer on stack overflow.

I don't know now (I haven't asked a question in ages) but to get a good answer on stack overflow it used to take weeks sometimes

GitHub issues are usually more useful