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?

  • Seriously, how should a community based on short two- to three-paragraph answers react to question after question like this:

    I am new to python. I would like to write a program which can collect information from multiple excel and pdf documents to output that in one single excel document to show similarities and differences between the documents . Is this possible ? If so, how and where would I start writing such a programme in python? Thanks

    I haven’t tried anything yet

    I mean, I’m glad that someone looks at that problem and thinks “programming could do this”, because it could, but it’s kind of a big task and getting someone from “I haven’t tried anything and am brand new to python” to that is beyond any question-and-answer forum. Welcome to programming, you may be able to get there, but it’s going to be a bit of a hike.