Stack Overflow is almost dead

My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the best!

&gt; 2014: questions started to decline, which was also when Stack Overflow significantly improved moderator efficiency. From then, questions were closed faster, many more were closed, and “low quality” questions were removed more efficiently. This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site felt unwelcome.<p>I also felt around that time that it became unwelcoming. I didn’t realize they had revamped the moderator tools. That is the time period when I stopped using it too. Now I know why.<p>How many other websites have also shot themselves in the foot by tweaking things?

How ironic. &quot;AI&quot; feeds off structured knowledge, artistic creations and otherwise any human production to generate its output. As a consequence of its widespread adoption, people start to lean <i>even more</i> towards consuming rather than producing, a tendency which was already increasing before the advent of LLMs and modern machine-learning. This, in turn, leaves &quot;AI&quot; implementations with no new human content to feed off of. Now what? The whole process folds onto itself. Are we entering the dark ages of cultural (in the widest sense of the word) production? Not that I don&#x27;t think that we&#x27;re already there, in any case, but for other, somewhat related causes...

I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say &quot;in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now we are doing it as it was meant to be&quot;.<p>Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it&#x27;s dying. Maybe something was better before, when &quot;it was not done correctly&quot;?

The timing on the sale was genius. Similar to Mark Cuban with Broadcast.com. I guess it&#x27;s best to sell something before the value plummets to 0.<p>As far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven&#x27;t even gone to the site for a couple of years now.

Doesn&#x27;t feel like the AI is the main driver. Many things changed over time - dev tools got better, editors got smarter, compilers got better error messages, various primary resources improved, tutorial websites, courses and youtube boomed.<p>Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.

Woof. Looking at a single metric and extrapolating &quot;LLMs killed the radio star&quot;<p>Stack Exchange sites are designed to nuke duplicates, help people <i>before</i> they post a new question. It seems a natural conclusion that the number of original questions decreases over time.<p>I won&#x27;t pretend that some people live their lives inside and LLM but many of us still use search engines and SO.

It is a bit sad. And obviously the reason why it sees such a decline is because AI (ChatGPT and similar) took the job of answering the basic questions about programming that StackOverflow used to help with.<p>Looking at my profile since 14 years ago, the most upvoted answer that I solved was about a basic question of how to specify fields properly when you serialize JSON into a C# class.<p>I do believe the value of StackOverflow was only about people who were lazy enough to read the documentation of the language&#x2F;framework they were trying to use. I used to be active on StackOverflow back in the days, but in the last 10 years the only value I saw in it was if I needed to get back to some language to just find an answer on how to write a for loop in that specific language (swift vs go vs ...).<p>I personally do not believe there is much knowledge base on StackOverflow. In most of my questions to &quot;google&quot; for the last 10 years, very rarely would I be directed to StackOverflow for the right answer.<p>There are a lot of complicated questions on StackOverflow, but the site was flooded by people asking and answering basic questions about programming. And people who are there just to get some karma.

Where will training data come from for new tech &amp; programming languages if SO dies?

I used to answer questions a lot, by around 2013 I had answered maybe ~12% of all HTML canvas questions ever asked. To me it declined a lot sooner, 2014 really does feel like the right inflection point.<p>There was a belief, sometimes unstated but often explicit, that no more (serious) discussion is really to be had, and further wondering how can one stop people from asking. It became difficult to discuss anything if there was even something vaguely related asked before. It was not possible to discuss something you knew the answer to, but did not know why, or wanted to hear arguments for which of 5 ways might be best. All (to me) very worthwhile technical discussions. Totally shut down.

My approved to shut down question rate was about 40&#x2F;60. And within the approved questions, I only got the answers I looked for like 50-60% of the time. Got to 350 points myself. I hated every second of it.<p>Really aggressive moderation, people trying to score points for a worthless achievement system by spamming comments like &quot;You should narrow the scope of this question&quot;<p>Having to grind achievements to be able to comment, like or dislike.<p>I used it for a year or so back in 2013?, went back to posting in forums like XDA developers, Codeguru and Reddit.

Questions asked isn&#x27;t the metric to declare it dead. What matters for financial viability is traffic and deals with search engines&#x2F;indexes (used by LLMs)<p>For community viability: people will keep using it where LLMs fail. For new problems. It&#x27;s still the place to go for undocumented workarounds.<p>Traffic and voting activity is certainly down but there is still immense value and new valuable questions are asked and answered there.

StackOverflow should have focused on linking duplicates rather than forbidding duplicates.<p>No Boilerplate recently said &quot;writing is thinking&quot;[0], and suggested links are the ultimate knowledge graph organizational tool--not tags, not folders--links[1].<p>StackOverflow tried to prevent all duplicate questions. This was stifling and reduced writing, reduced thought, and most importantly, reduced user engagement.<p>The people who wanted to write their problems and ask their questions stopped going to StackOverflow. The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow.<p>Look at Discord or IRC and you&#x27;ll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over. Let the people write their questions, and write their answers and give advice. Instead of preventing duplicates, link duplicate questions together.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sqm4-B07LsE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sqm4-B07LsE</a> [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B0yAy2j-9V0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B0yAy2j-9V0</a>

Stack Overflow was a question and answer site that discouraged people from asking or answering questions.<p>LLMs probably sped things up, but it seems like it was inevitable that it would fall into disuse and eventually be overtaken one way or another.

The article talks about the number of questions asked in SO, but there are no mentions of visualizations.<p>Feels natural that after 16 years of refinements, most normal questions are already there. I use it every week, but can count on one hand the number of questions I asked (0 through my account) over 12 years of having an account. ~All my questions were already asked.

This will have interesting implications for the LLMs as well, since SO is a wealth of training data. In my experience, LLMs are pretty useless when it comes to helping me with newer, faster-evolving, experimental tools and libraries, which is not surprising. But, if the SO community really atrophies to the point that a lot fewer people are bothering to answer questions, there won&#x27;t be another centralized resource for answers. Perhaps that just means balkanized communities like random Slack channels will fill the gap, but those aren&#x27;t search-indexed and I&#x27;d bet getting them all into training corpi won&#x27;t be as easy either.<p>Maybe the future involves LLMs <i>asking</i> questions on something like SO when it routinely fumbles a particular topic. People could get paid to answer them and provide more training data. Who knows at this point

Just how is 25K new questions a month dead? Even if it gradually asymptomates to just 1K, the answers to them are enough to continue serving as a critical base layer of high-quality training data for LLMs.<p>Let&#x27;s say for the sake of argument that 95% of humanity perished. Is humanity then dead? It isn&#x27;t.

I think &quot;number of questions asked&quot; is the wrong metric. Because it feels like all the questions have already been asked. Whenever I need to know something, I can google it and find answers on Stack Overflow. I can&#x27;t remember the last time I actually had to ask something. Or the last time I found a question that didn&#x27;t already have a good answer. Stack Overflow&#x27;s library of question is pretty complete, and the only reason for new questions are new tools.<p>Certainly LLMs are a huge factor, but I feel that LLMs rarely give good (and trustworthy!) answers to the things I would check on Stackoverflow. Just like LLMs are no good replacement for API references because they get the details wrong all the time.

A sociological case study. Legit founders, a fruitful niche, immense value. Growth, politics, corporatization. They did so many things right, then so many things wrong.<p>If it were up to me, moderation would have been overhauled. But it wasn&#x27;t up to me.

&gt; June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor, Prosus. In hindsight, the founders – Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky – sold with near-perfect timing, before terminal decline.<p>Hey, if it all crashes and burns, at least it’s the so-called smartest guys in the room going down with the ship. Just a bunch of VCs learning the hard way that they had no idea how to actually run or grow the company they bought. “Look at how well we optimized it!” Yeah — right into the ground.

Personally my usage of S.O. was significantly reduced just by sticking to the same stack and tools for the last 7 or 8 years and letting depth accumulate instead of always being in the midst of learning a new framework &#x2F; language &#x2F; whatever that necessitated googling how to do x in y or z.<p>And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don&#x27;t recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.

I always considered stack overflow to be a Band-Aid placed on top of a mistake! The mistake was always poor documentation by the original system designes, and a policy of not allowing edits to the system design doc! And the more mistakes a documentation person makes, the larger the stack overflow corpus!<p>Now ChatGPT for SO is a Band-Aid on top of a Band-Aid on top of a mistake!<p>I really don&#x27;t believe in the elitist policy to qualify for being able to answer stack overflow questions ... Whenever I have a better answer than all the existing ones stack overflow says I&#x27;m not qualified to answer so shut up! To hell with SO - I answer more questions at my company than anybody else and SO is run by elitst fools ...

I don&#x27;t miss spending hours trying to find the right config to make things work and trying random answers on SO. Overall the dev world is a better place now and MANY dev hours are being saved. Plus, AI can now learn any new framework&#x2F;language directly from docs. Even obscure ones, just pass all the .md files to gemini and ask!

I have mixed feeling about this.<p>It has helped me in the past but yet, I could not reply nor post anything back to help others when I knew the solution because of the way how it works.<p>To make matters worse while working in IT, I worked with a guy that didn&#x27;t know anything, if there was no SO post about the problem, the guy couldn&#x27;t fix the problem.<p>I have been using Perplexity AI and it has been awesome, and it does provide all the sources it used making it easy to cross check the answers. It has helped me to speed my python learning curve, I am not using search engine anymore, and SO has the problems mentioned above so I have zero interest in using it.<p>Also, the website layout is a mess, I have to use uBlock Origin with a ton of element picker to stop loading half of its crappy.

My day job includes moderation. I think I am more empathetic to the issues that moderators deal with on a day to day basis given that they are underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked.<p>It&#x27;s very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don&#x27;t have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren&#x27;t transferred from one group to the next. So although that I noticed that SO started getting more strict from 2014 onward, I wouldn&#x27;t know immediately what to do about the content quality issue.<p>My take is that, like most things, the medium of the old will be appreciated the way it wasn&#x27;t in 2014. As the Brian Eno quote goes: &quot;Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.&quot; People will yearn for the human forums the same way they did years past when people tire of the LLM slop. (If they do.)

I&#x27;m curious if Stack Overflow was a good resource for human learning? As in, run into a problem, look through other related questions and answers, check the documentation, struggle for awhile learning and figuring out how to frame and pose the question, struggle some more while you wait to get an answer. I kind of find LLMs &quot;too easy&quot; and can distinctly feel myself &quot;not learning&quot;, not the way I used to, but after all I am getting older.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure you can get a stack overflowy experience out of an llm with the right system prompt, but the human factor might not be the same. Not wanting to be berated by others on the internet is maybe underrated as a motivational tool. How are we going to get that back?

How will ChatGPT learn the next computer language now?

Of course it&#x27;s dead, that&#x27;s what you get for harassing users who try to ask questions.

I have some minimally popular answers on SO and for years my &quot;points&quot; graph has notched its way upwards. It flatlined at the start of 2024 as people moved to AI.<p>The best thing about SO is seeing the competing solutions, the discussions, meaning with some discernment you can find that peer-reviewed high quality code snippet. Why would people prefer whatever the AI spits out?<p>Fortunately I see a few blips on SO so hopefully people are coming back now that the shine has worn off AI.<p>What is the value of SO to the world economy? Billions. Like the internet archive, it should be some sort of government funded (UN?) library

Are there any similar articles on the state of the rest of the Stack Exchange network? There are many, many other SE sites that have nothing to do programming and are often less amenable to being answered via LLM.

To Ai paraphrase Obi-Wan: I felt a great disturbance in the Force — as if millions of developer voices from the future cried out in confusion and despair, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened to the future of our craft.<p>In short before we Ctrl+Copy our way to StackOverflow or Forums or IRC and we got collection of responses between good and ugly. But made us think and read or talk to others.<p>Now we Ctrl+Copy into LLM into a room of hell.<p>If LLM function is useful but don&#x27;t get addicted to like honey.

&gt; The question seems to be when Stack Overflow will wind down operations, or the owner sells the site for comparative pennies, not if it will happen.<p>I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on <i>nine</i> servers two years ago [1]. That&#x27;s barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.<p>Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don&#x27;t waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;ll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.<p>Yeah fuuuuck that. It&#x27;s so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can&#x27;t pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA&#x2F;Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34950843">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34950843</a>

It will neither be the first or last site destroyed by hamfisted power tripping overmoderation. And they do it in the worst possible way - Leaving the question up, but preventing anyone from answering it. So, the default experience with SO becomes finding your question already asked and unanswered.<p>Still, it may find its place as a last resort.

my business has a similar revenue curve, and of course LLMs are a big cause, but it&#x27;s more to do with me being distracted from moving with the times. I just didn&#x27;t fancy the fight and saw enough value in the curve to let it follow ranged decline<p>I&#x27;m assuming the owners of stack felt similar? Don&#x27;t know anything about them so could be easily wrong

Discussion on Meta SO: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;433864&#x2F;do-you-agree-with-gergely-that-stack-overflow-is-almost-dead" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;433864&#x2F;do-you-agree...</a>

Kind of a catch 22 isn&#x27;t it? LLMs trained off stack overflow data. Without new data for them to train from, what will happen to the quality of LLMs in the future?<p>How will technology advance without research sharing?

It looks like Stackoverflow was already in a decline even before Covid.<p>I wonder what developers started using during that time.

Stackoverflow answers kind of provided a source of truth by being confirmed &#x2F; upvoted by people trying them out. We&#x27;re completely abandoning this medium (on which LLMs are trained), even as technologies keep changing. Perhaps coding agents should start posting to stackoverflow too...

Didn’t SamA paid out StackOverflow already?[0] So as far as the owners go they are doing fine.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;api-partnership-with-stack-overflow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...</a>

Stack Overflow simulator is a functional museum of Stack Overflow... using AI<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sosimulator.xyz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sosimulator.xyz</a>

Per the post, it seems as if SO was going to going to slide beneath the surface anyway but that LLMs were one of a number of factors that maybe accelerated the process by maybe a few years. Without having deep knowledge of the area, this feels about right.

I wonder if they could survive if they added a mode like phind.com wrapper - where each question stores LLM answers as answers. So (SO!) many more content and would people reason to still use it.

An old fact about StackOverflow is that there’s a disproportionate amount of views compared to questions asked.<p>Something like 1000x more views than posts&#x2F;comments… I wonder if that statistic has changed over the years?…

Everyone is blaming AI, and it&#x27;s undoubtedly a factor.<p>But also, the culture of Stack Overflow has changed significantly over the years. It used to be a place where anyone could ask a question and get help with a problem ... and it was amazing.<p>Today, you&#x27;re far more likely to have your question downvoted, flagged as a duplicate (of an unrelated question), or attacked in the comments by overzealous responders (and once that happens, good luck on actually getting help). Your odds of actually getting help on the site are only a fraction of what they once were.<p>And I&#x27;m not just saying this as some SO newbie: I&#x27;ve been using the site since beta! As someone who has used it that long, the change in quality is undeniable.

stackoverflow started declining long before AI. Their ban-happy moderators were to blame.

AI is great but when it gets stuck I go to stack overflow. Happened to me yesterday

the stock market looked like that chart in 2008 and look where we are now<p>unless LLMs can be instantly trained on all new software frameworks and languages that come out, im not worried stackoverflow will still have a place

All things have their time.<p>Some get superseded.<p>Others accelerate their decline through self-foot-shooting and&#x2F;or enshittification.<p>Stack Overflow&#x27;s journey into obscurity is via a mix of private equity indifference, better docs elsewhere, and a lack of leadership over its moderators. It was in decline long before LLMs.<p>It is not a new story - but it does help map out the modes of platform senescence.<p>Wasn&#x27;t the first; won&#x27;t be the last.

Or: all programming problems have been solved! ;-)

No wonder, the CEO basically said they&#x27;ll use the free labor of love of all member devs to sell training data for AI in order to replace such devs so why would anyone keep contributing there?

They really only have themselves to blame. Yeah AI has massively accelerated the decline but I think it&#x27;s mainly provided an option that isn&#x27;t so frustrating to use. ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.<p>I think if they had <i>actually</i> fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was <i>good</i> that so many valid questions were closed.<p>They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.<p>Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.

I wonder how the other -overflows are doing?

I suspect there will always be a place for SO-esque sites, but it will shift to be primarily for creating high quality data for ingestion by LLMs.

&gt; This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions.<p>Respectfully: outsiders like the author of this piece are <i>not the ones entitled to decide</i> whether a question is &quot;legitimate&quot;, or &quot;valid&quot; (another term I see used all the time by people who have no understanding either of Stack Overflow&#x27;s standards or its goals).<p>Reference reading:<p>What is Stack Overflow’s goal? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;254770" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;254770</a>)<p>How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;261592" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;261592</a>)<p>Question Close Reasons - Definitions and Guidance (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;417476" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;417476</a>)<p>How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;260263" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;260263</a>)<p>A satirical answer to &quot;The rudeness on Stack Overflow is too damn high&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;262791&#x2F;_&#x2F;309018#309018" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;262791&#x2F;_&#x2F;309018#309...</a>)<p>What is the point of closing questions for details and clarity, debugging details, needs more focus, or very low quality? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;405519" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;405519</a>)<p>Why should I help close &quot;bad&quot; questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;429808" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;429808</a>)<p>Why is the rate of positively scoring questions and answers steadily declining? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;393032" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;393032</a>)<p>When is Stack Overflow going to stop demonizing the quality-concerned users who have made the site a success? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;366858" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;366858</a>)<p>Is ChatGPT and LLM killing Stack Overflow (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;430994" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;430994</a>)

Interestingly, the site stopped growing at about the same time when the &quot;fun killers&quot; [0] took hand of it. Notably, when they <i>deleted</i> the all-time highest voting question &quot;New programming jargon you coined?&quot;.<p>This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;new-programming-jargon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;new-programming-jargon&#x2F;</a>

All the &quot;overflow&#x2F;exchange&quot; sites suck, not just the stack overflow. Too many questions being closed. I had a question closed in mathexchange because, I surmise, it was &quot;too obvious&quot; even though easier questions were asked as recently as 2021, even much more elementary ones. Moreover, my specific question had never been asked there before, and the point of math exchange is to ask easier questions, compared to mathoverflow.<p>But it&#x27;s also possible it&#x27;s pivoting to a Wikipedia-like model where it becomes a repository for answers, and less about contributions. In which case, this is not the same as it dying. As seen with Wikipedia, it can still get a lot of traffic and revenue even if few people contribute to it anymore.