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?
There is a lot of Stack Overflow hate in this thread. I never had a bad experience. I was always on there yelling at noobs, telling them to Google it, and linking to irrelevant questions. It was just wholesome fun that briefly dulled my crippling insecurities
So you never had a bad experience, just were actively causing bad experiences for others?
I think you just fell for quite an obvious case of sarcasm.
A “woosh” if you will.
Sorry for being autistic ig
It isn’t obvious unless it has the slash s!
We should leave the /s back on reddit
Sadly, it really is necessary if one wants to be sure nobody actually takes the sarcasm seriously. It’s hard for people to tell in a textual medium.
Heck, my style of humor in RL is often sarcasm or deliberately ludicrous comments and people still sometimes go “wait, really?” Even though they know me well.
I’m going to go without it from now on. I can handle clarifying myself if it’s absolutely necessary for someone.
Yeah but those people who take the sarcasm seriously are fools and you can’t make things foolproof.
Encouraging and putting up with hair-splitting lawyerly un-generous readings of comments is what leads to people just straight up interpreting any “Plus I’m being genuine here” messages as lies.
We need to trust our readers, else we end up in an echo chamber culture where any deviation from the Party line is interpreted as “disruptive person who must be banned to protect our community”.
These things are linked.
The ability to deliver and detect sarcasm without training wheels is a layer of communication we need and can’t afford to abandon, in order to maintain a productive conversational environment.
Yeah but those people who take the sarcasm seriously are fools and you can’t make things foolproof.
Or you know, have a legitimatly very hard time distinguishing it for actual reasons.
chinesescholarshadasimilarst anceagainstallkindofpunctuat ionclaimingtheabilitytodeliv eranddetectmeaningwithouttra iningwheelswasalayerofcommun icationpeopleneededandcouldn otaffordtoabandoninordertoma intainaproductiveconversatio nalenvironmentwithanyoneunab letoreflectuponanddiscernthe intendedmeaningbeingafoolnot worthyoftheloftymessageswrit tencommunicationwasintendedf ortodiscernhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation
(This is a lesson in history, so I’ll let the discerning reader to decide for themselves whether there is sarcasm contained in it)
Sarcasm
No “/s”, no sarcasm.
I’m pretty sure they were being sarcastic.
Rather than cultivate a friendly and open community, they decided to be hostile and closed. I am not surprised by this at all, but I am surprised with how long the decline has taken. I have a number of bad/silly experiences on stackoverflow that have never been replicated on any other platform.
Like what?
All questions have been asked and all answers have been given
and copilot and chatgpt give good enough answers without being unfriendly
ChatGPT has no knowledge of the answers it gives. It is simply a text completion algorithm. It is fundamentally the same as the thing above your phone keyboard that suggests words as you type, just with much more training data.
Exactly this. SO is now just a repository of answers that ChatGPT and it’s ilk can train against. A high percentage is questions that SO users need answers to are already asked and answered. New and novel problems arise so infrequently thanks to the way modern tech companies are structured that an AI that can read and train on the existing answers and update itself periodically is all most people need anymore… (I realize that was rambling, I hope it made sense)
So soon they will start responding with “this has been asked before, let’s change the subject”
🤣 🤣
Exactly! It will all come full circle
yes! this! is chatgpt intelligent: no! does it more often than not give good enough answers to daily but somewhat obscure ans specific programming questions: yes! is a person on SO intelligent: maybe. do they give good enough answers to daily but somewhat obscure ans specific programming questions: mostly
Its not great for complex stuff, but for quick questions if you are stuck. the answers are given quicker, without snark and usually work
A repository of often (or at least not seldom) outdated answers.
@focus Is that the reason why we get more and more AI written articles?
No, thats because of capitalism
Are they all linked in a “duplicate of” circle yet?
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…
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
Honestly.
Stackoverflow is a horrible place to ask anything.
I have had 100% legit, well documented questions, closed as duplicate of unrelated other question.
Its… honestly, just not a friendly place to go. Full of a bunch of assholes…
Most of the answers actually suck too. Many times, you will find the correct answer downvoted, and incorrect or bad answers upvoted.
I found this when I was in college too. I only ever asked a few questions and they were all closed as duplicates and never found why the answers from those threads solved anything closed to what I was asking. Lol
I don’t even know how to answer questions.
I lost my old account and now I don’t have points on new account and I can not do anything. I can not vote, I can not comment, I can not answer questions. So I just dropped it. I can not even thank (by liking or upvoting) a person whose answer helped me.
I believe others have similar experience.
I feel you. At this point, its a circle-jerk of who can close tickets with the most non-helpful, ridiculous responses…
A few months ago I had a 7 year old question of mine closed as a duplicate of a 5 year old question. Just another sign that StackOverflow mods are hard at work.
Google search going to absolute shit is what happened
I also attribute most of this to google. I am used to google a coding question and getting 10 SO results i can quickly scan through. Since a year I only get blogposts about the general behaviour of the thing i was googling.
This is the most likely explanation. It doesn’t make sense to have such a dramatic dropoff in user behavior without an obvious trigger.
I don’t understand. Google search has its issues for sure, but it always shows stack overflow highly when I search programming things.
Understandably, it has become an increasingly hostile or apatic environment over the years. If one checks questions from 10 years ago or so, one generally sees people eager to help one another.
Now they often expect you to have searched through possibly thousands of questions before you ask one, and immediately accuse you if you missed some – which is unfair, because a non-expert can often miss the connection between two questions phrased slightly differently.
On top of that, some of those questions and their answers are years old, so one wonders if their answers still apply. Often they don’t. But again it feels like you’re expected to know whether they still apply, as if you were an expert.
Of course it isn’t all like that, there are still kind and helpful people there. It’s just a statistical trend.
Possibly the site should implement an archival policy, where questions and answers are deleted or archived after a couple of years or so.
human nature remembers negative experiences much better than positive, so it only takes like 5% assholes before it feels like everyone is toxic.
True that! and a change from 2% to 5% may feel much larger than that.
I can’t wait to read gems like “Answered 12/21/2005 you moron. Learn to search the website. No, I wont link it for you, this is not a Q&A website”.
Answers from 2005 that may not be remotely relevant anymore, especially if a language has seen major updates in the TWENTY YEARS since!
More important for frameworks than languages, IMO. Frameworks change drastically in the span of 5-10 years.
🤣
No, they shouldn’t be archived. I say that because technology can change. At some point they added a new sort method which favors more recent upvotes and it helps more recent answers show above old ones with more votes. This can happen on very old posts where everyone else might not use the site anymore. We shouldn’t expect the original asker to switch the accepted answer potentially years down the line.
There’s plenty of things wrong with SE and their community but I don’t think this is one that needs to change.
It’s hostile to new users and when you do ask you will likely not get answer might get scolded or just get closed as duplicate. Then there is the fact that most has answers doesn’t matter if it’s outdated or just bad advice. Pretty much everything has GitHub now. Usually I just go raise the question there if I have a genuine question get an answer from the developers themselves. Or just go to their website api/ library doc they have gotten good lately. Then finally recent addition with chatgpt you can ask just about any stupid question you have and maybe it may give some idea to fix the problem you encounter. Pretty much the ultimate rubber duck buddy.
chatGPT doesn’t chastize me like a drill instructor whenever I ask it coding problems.
It’s funny because if you look at the numbers it looks like traffic started to go down before chat GPT was actually released to the public, indicating that maybe people thought that the site was too much of a pain in the ass to deal with before that and GPT is just the nail in the coffin.
Personally, of all the attempts I’ve had it positive interactions on that site I’ve had only one and at this point I treat it as a read-only site because it’s not worth my time arguing pedants just to get a question answered.
If I went to the library and all the librarians were assholes I probably wouldn’t go to that library anymore either.
It just invents the answer out of thin air, or worse, it gives you subtle errors you won’t notice until you’re 20 hours into debugging
so, like SO?
I agree with you that it sometimes gives wrong answers. But most of the time, it can help better than StackOverflow, especially with simple problems. I mean, there wouldn’t be such an exodus from StackOverflow if ChatGPT answers were so bad right ?
But, for very specific subjects or bizarre situations, it obviously cannot replace SO.
And you won’t know if the answers it gave you are OK or not until too late, seems like the Russian Roulette of tech support, it’s very helpful until it isn’t
Depending on Eliza MK50 for tech support doesn’t stop feeling absurd to me
Sounds the same as believing a random stranger.
How many SO topics have you seen with only one, universally agreed upon solution?
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
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.
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?
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.
Thank you for doing my work for me. It’s just Occam’s razor.
but github copilot came out right around that time…
Why is everyone saying this is because Stack Overflow is toxic? Clearly the decline in traffic is because of ChatGPT. I can say from personal experience that I’ve been visiting Stack Overflow way less lately because ChatGPT is a better tool for answering my software development questions.
Half the time when I ask it for advice, ChatGPT recommends nonexistent APIs and offers examples in some Frankenstein code that uses a bit of this system and a bit of that, none of which will work. But I still find its hit rate to be no worse than Stack Overflow, and it doesn’t try to humiliate you for daring to ask.
It depends on what sort of thing you’re asking about. More obscure languages and systems will result in hallucinated APIs more often. If it’s something like “how do I sort this list of whatever in some specific way in C#” or “can you write me a regex for such and such a task” then it’s far more often right. And even when ChatGPT gets something wrong, if you tell it the error you encountered from the code it’ll usually be good at correcting itself.
I find that if it gets it wrong in the first place, its corrections are often equally wrong. I guess this indicates that I’ve strayed into an area where its training data is not of good quality.
Yeah, if it’s in a state where it’s making up imaginary APIs whole cloth then in my experience you’re asking it for help with something it just doesn’t know enough about. I get the best results when I’m asking about popular stuff (such as “write me a python script to convert wav files to mp3” - it’ll know the right APIs for that sort of task, generally speaking). If I’m working on something that’s more obscure then sometimes it’s better to ask ChatGPT for generalized versions of the actual question. For example, I was tinkering with a mod for Minetest a while back that was meant to import .obj models and convert them into a voxelized representation of the object in-game. ChatGPT doesn’t know Minetest’s API very well, so I was mostly asking it for Lua code to convert the .obj into a simple array of voxel coordinates and then doing the API stuff to make it Minetest-specific for myself. The vector math was the part that ChatGPT knew best so it did an okay job on its part of the task.
Your follow up question should be for ChatGPT to write those APIs for you.
I was going to say ChatGPT.
I think the smugness of StackOverflow is still part of it. Even if ChatGPT sometimes fabricates imaginary code, it’s tone is flowery and helpful, compared to the typical pretentiousness of Stackoverflow users.
deleted by creator
In my experience, ChatGPT is very good at interpreting documentation. So even if it hasn’t been asked on stack overflow, if it’s in the documentation that ChatGPT has indexed (or can crawl with an extension) you’ll get a pretty solid answer. I’ve been asking it a lot of AWS questions because it’s 100x better than deciphering the ancient texts that amazon publishes. Although sometimes the AWS docs are just wrong anyway.
Also, you can have it talk like a catgirl maid, so I find that’s particularly helpful as well.
Over the last five years, I’d click a link to Stack Overflow while googling, but I’ve never made an account because of the toxicity.
But yeah, chatGPT is definitely the nail in the coffin. Being able to give it my code and ask it to point out where the annoying bug is… is amazing.
In my experience many of the answers have become out of date. It’s gradually becoming an archive of the old ways of doing things for many languages / frameworks.
Questions are often closed as a duplicate when the linked question doesn’t apply anymore. It’s full of really bad ways of doing things.
I’m not really sure of the solution at this point.
Also ChatGPT.
It’s a last resort for me nowadays.
Yeah, this is what they get and deserve. They rose by providing meaningful, helpful, and technically adept answers to questions. Then they encouraged an abusive moderator culture that marks questions as duplicate, linking to unrelated questions. They also still do not offer easy ways for the knowledge base to be updated as things over time change. Now the company abusing their abusive moderators, causing them to basically go on strike right now.
Here’s hoping the next thing doesn’t suck as much ass as Stack Exchange ultimately has.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
Based on that, there is no “q&a” type of Fediverse software (a clear answer and a clear “voted best” answer).
Stack overflow had a huge number of “mod tools” to help curate the content (gold nuggets) given. They did not do the step of aggregating content (gold ingots) like Wikipedia has. The marking as duplicate could and should be tempered by “due diligence” or “age of the last time this was asked”, but how it is implemented is up to them.
Ironic, since one of ChatGPT’s biggest weaknesses is that it’s an archive of the old ways of doing things. You can’t filter by time on ChatGPT, and ChatGPT isn’t being retrained on the latest knowledge live. These aren’t inherent to GPT, so it’s possible that a future iteration will overcome these issues.
On ChatGPT, if a solution doesn’t work, you can ask in real time for a different one. On SO, your post just gets locked for being a duplicate.
Asking in real-time wouldn’t help in this scenario (e.g. some mirror is no longer accessible). If anything, it’d just lead you further astray and waste more time, because GPT’s knowledgebase doesn’t have this knowledge.
SO is such a miserable and toxic place that oftentimes I’d rather read more documentation or reach out to someone elsewhere like Discord. And I would never post a question there or comment there.
I’d rather read the docs than just about anything. I love good documentation. I wanna know how and why things work.
The problem is that basically nobody has good docs. They are almost all either incomplete or unreadable.
A lot of companies won’t employ technical writers, who exist to make good, thorough, complete and well-presented documentation… they rather assume their engineers can just write the docs.
And no, no they can’t… very few engineers study the principles of effective communication. They may understand things, but they can’t explain them.
That’s fair. At my company we have technical writers for the external docs and internal docs are usually written by whoever has worked on something and got frustrated that nobody in the company could give them a high level overview, and they had to go through the code for a couple hours.
Tbf though, I’ll take docs that aren’t written super well that tell me how things from our internal libraries should be used. Or just comments. I’ll take comments telling me WHY we are doing something.
I don’t expect our internal docs to be MSDN docs. But I like to read an overview of at least the workflow before I jump into updating a large project.
While I agree, writing good docs is hard for a very intangible benefit. Honestly, it feels like doing the same work twice, with the prospect of doing it again and again in the future as the software is updated. It’s a little demoralizing.
It is hard, I agree. I’m not very good at it myself. But even semi-decent docs are better than googling around or stepping through a decompiled package.
And it’s super useful to new developers, and would have saved me a lot of time and frustration when I was new.
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.
I miss when SO used to be a good place to ask questions.
I said I was a novice on the Code Review site and then the one answer I got told me to look into something like “mount genius and the valley of stupid” like dude, I fucking said I was a novice, I’m not claiming to be a genius. All over me using a term wrong. And when I asked what term they’d use they still smarted off. It wasn’t until I asked them again that they told me the term I was actually looking for.
I remember going to the vmware communities looking for help almost 20 years ago and some smug person was really upset that I didn’t use the right wording when I was starting out. He spent something like 2 whole days worth of posting. It was a chore to divine what he was saying while stumbling through his weird rant/lecture about proper terminology. I eventually called him out on it and never went back.
So long story short, communities and companies who don’t nip this kind of behavior in the bud and heavily moderate the assholes almost universally turn into the next expertsexchange community. Stack Overflow kind of leaned heavily into enshitification because of this, they eventually just stopped caring about what was being put on their forums, maintaining high content quality, and getting rid of argumentative power-users. Ironically reddit was a much nicer community and usually you’d find an answer or get help without the attitude, especially in the IT space.
SO claims a lot of this is because it is meant to be a tool where people go for correct answers and I get that, but getting downvoted or your question being closed as a duplicate feel mean regardless of how welcoming the admins claim they’re trying to make the place.
A big part of the problem is that users seek out reasons to close answers as opposed to seeking ways to try and fix them and avoid them being closed. And they’re rewarded for it! I think review queues overall are probably a positive but when you’re sitting there just going through them and you find one that could be closed as is but also could possibly be fixed, which are you going to try and do? Vote to close which takes like one second of effort or try and edit which could take a lot longer and may even involve input from OP? Then even if you do try and fix it, what if everyone else does vote to close?
I’ve had a question closed and my comments explaining why it wasn’t a duplicate deleted. The response from everyone was that because I have been using the site off and on for years they expected me to understand the process so they didn’t explain to me that I needed to edit and instead just deleted my comment and didn’t tell me anything.
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. I’ve sat there and been like “okay, people will probably think it is a duplicate of this, I really hate getting questions closed as duplicates so I’m going to preemptively explain why it isn’t a a dupe” and then they still close it as a dupe. It’s insane. Or they find the one magical combination of words that I didn’t quite think of despite spending a good ten minutes or so looking for dupes prior to asking that did ask my question the act smug about it.
I don’t really use the sites anymore. Not even the more lighthearted and fun ones like RPG and World Building. I’ve just been so soured to it.
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.
One aspect that I’ve always been unsure about, with Stack Overflow, and even more with sibling sites like Physics Stack Exchange or Cross Validated (stats and probability), is the voting system. In the physics and stats sites, for example, not rarely I saw answers that were accepted and upvoted but actually wrong. The point is that users can end up voting for something that looks right or useful, even if it isn’t (probably less the case when it comes to programming?).
Now an obvious reply to this comment is “And how do you know they were wrong, and non-accepted ones right?”. That’s an excellent question – and that’s exactly the point.
In the end the judge about what’s correct is only you and your own logical reasoning. In my opinion this kind of sites should get rid of the voting or acceptance system, and simply list the answers, with useful comments and counter-comments under each. When it comes to questions about science and maths, truth is not determined by majority votes or by authorities, but by sound logic and experiment. That’s the very basis from which science started. As Galileo put it:
But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.
For example, at some point in history there was probably only one human being on earth who thought “the notion of simultaneity is circular”. And at that time point that human being was right, while the majority who thought otherwise were wrong. Our current education system and sites like those reinforce the anti-scientific view that students should study and memorize what “experts” says, and that majorities dictate what’s logically correct or not. As Gibson said (1964): “Do we, in our schools and colleges, foster the spirit of inquiry, of skepticism, of adventurous thinking, of acquiring experience and reflecting on it? Or do we place a premium on docility, giving major recognition to the ability of the student to return verbatim in examinations that which he has been fed?”
Alright sorry for the rant and tangent! I feel strongly about this situation.
But it’s not truth that is implied by voting.
Voting determines the sorting precedence. It’s a way of handling the fact that the site contains more content than a person can read. It’s a way of guiding what they should read first given limited time.
That’s how I interpret it. My question is if it’s generally interpreted that way, or misinterpreted.
I have to agree with this cause I have run into not a couple but many in recent years where when a proper answer is given, the accepted one despite being flawed or not recommended(Python 2->3 changes for example) anymore, it’s still the highest voted one. And proper answer is in 3rd or 4th place. And it’s where the old r/science shine cause you can properly ask some really specific domain question there and a qualified scientist might just pop up and answer you in detail. ( not that they can’t be wrong, just highly unlikely in current understanding of those topics. )
Gibson was correct about much of our education system and Galileo was certainly right about the consequences of overvaluing mediocre wit that merely happened to well-timed. what neither of them had to content with, however, was the internet and how social media can combine the inability to reason critically and mediocre wit with crippling insecurities and anti-social personalities to what should be predictable results.
a least Gibson understood that a technocratic future didn’t imply that people’s lives would necessarily improve.
