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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] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's too much to attribute to any one effect. 50% is a lot for a website of this size (don't forget that Lemmy exploded from a migration of <5% Reddit usershare). Let's KISS by attributing likely causes in order of magnitude:

ChatGPT became the world's fastest growing website in a single month and it's actually half-decent at being a code tutor
ChatGPT bots got unleashed on SO and diluted a lot of SO's comparative advantages
Stack Overflow moderators went on strike, which further damaged content quality
Structurally speaking, SO is an environment which tends to become more elitist over time. As the userbase becomes progressively more self-selective, the population shrinks.
The SO format requires a stream of novel questions, but novel questions generally get rarer over time
Developer documentation has generally improved over time. On SO, asking about a well-documented thing is a short-circuit pathway to getting RTFM'd & discussion locked

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

ChatGPT came out after the beginning of the trend in the charts. That falsifies the first 2 points of the hypothesis. The strike happened a month ago so that'a gone too. 4, 5 and 6 do not appear as abrupt processes even if we assume they're true so they likely don't explain it. There must be something else that's happened that could cause such a large and abrupt change before any of the above happened. I bet on a change in the major source of traffic - Google.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You've assumed that I want to explain the root cause of the initial decline. This is not the case. Historically, SO has seen several periods of decline. What I'm actually addressing is the question of why the decline has not stopped, because the sustained nature of this decline is what makes it unusual. If you look at the various charts, you can see a brief rally which gets cut off in late Winter 2022 -- this lines up rather nicely with the timing of ChatGPT's release, I feel.

Let's ignore that. Tell me more about your Google angle: what's the basis of your hypothesis?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not who you were speaking to, but back when I used to read it occasionally, the stack overflow blog repeatedly mentioned that the vast majority of its traffic comes from Google. If the vast majority of your traffic comes from Google and then your traffic quantity changes dramatically, it's reasonable to look to the source of your traffic.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Thank you for doing my work for me. It's just Occam's razor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

but github copilot came out right around that time....