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?

  • The amount of anxiety I have when asking a question there is insane. And I have 6k+ rep. They weren’t wrong, I do know the site well. I have used it a lot. But like, of me, an experienced user, is afraid to ask a question that’s messed up.

    Yup that’s practically the same problem I had. I posted maybe one question over the past 15 years. I got crapped on by one of their power users for not doing something properly and I never posted or asked a question again. I don’t even remember what account I originally used, either.

    This is sort of why I like ChatGPT, I don’t get harassed for asking something incredibly stupid, and the crappy answers are about as bad as the “marked as duplicate” nonsense that gets me nowhere anyways. Why bother trying to interface with those communities ever again? IT in general already tilts heavily towards salty misanthropes, I’ll pass on that.