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?
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.
Amazing how much hate SO receives here. As knowledge base it’s working super good. And yes, a lot of questions have been answered already. And also yes, just like any other online community there’s bad apples which you have to live with unfortunately.
Idolizing ChatGPT as a viable replacementis laughable, because it has no knowledge, no understanding, of what it says. It’s just repeating what it “learned” and connected. Ask about something new and it will simply lie, which is arguably worse than an unfriendly answer in my opinion.
The advice on stack overflow is trash because “that question has been answered already” yeah, it was answered 10 years ago on a completely different version. That answer is depreciated.
Not to mention the amount of convoluted answers that get voted to the top and then someone with two upvotes at the bottom meekly giving the answer that you actually needed.
It’s like that librarian from the New York public library who determined whether or not children’s books would even get published.
She gave “good night moon” a bad score and it fell out of popularity for 30 years after the author died.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Typically answers are getting upvoted when they work for someone. So the top answer worked for more people than the other answers. Now there can be more than one solution to a problem but neither the people who try to answer the question, nor the people who vote on the answers, can possibly know which of them works specifically for you.
ChatGPT will just as well give you a technically correct, but for you wrong, answer. And only after some refinement give the answer you need. Not that different than reading all the answers and picking the one which works for you.
Of course older answers are going to have more uovotes if they technically work. That doesn’t mean it’s the best answer. It’s possible that someone would like to make a new, better, answer and is unable to because of SA restrictions on posting.
The kinds of people who post on SA regularly aren’t going to be the people with the best answers.
On top of that SA gives badges for uovoting and it’s possible other benefits I’m unaware of.
As we saw with reddit, uovotes systems can be inherently flawed, we have no way of knowing if that uovote is genuine.
I hear you. I firmly believe that comparing the behavior of GPT with that of certain individuals on SO is like comparing apples to oranges though.
GPT is a machine, and unlike human users on SO, it doesn’t harbor any intent to be exclusive or dismissive. The beauty of GPT lies in its willingness to learn and engage in constructive conversations. If it provides incorrect information, it is always open to being questioned and will readily explain its reasoning, allowing users to learn from the exchange.
In stark contrast, some users on SO seem to have a condescending attitude towards learners and are quick to shut them down, making it a challenging environment for those seeking genuine help. I’m sure that these individuals don’t represent the entire SO community, but I have yet to have a positive encounter there.
While GPT will make errors, it does so unintentionally, and the motivation behind its responses is to be helpful, rather than asserting superiority. Its non-judgmental approach creates a more welcoming and productive atmosphere for those seeking knowledge.
The difference between GPT and certain SO users lies in their intent and behavior. GPT strives to be inclusive and helpful, always ready to educate and engage in a constructive manner. In contrast, some users on SO can be dismissive and unsupportive, creating an unfavorable environment for learners. Addressing this distinction is vital to fostering a more positive and nurturing learning experience for everyone involved.
In my opinion this is what makes SO ineffective and is largely why it’s traffic had dropped even before chat GPT became publicly available.
Edit: I did use GPT to remove vitriol from and shorten my post. I’m trying to be nicer.
I don’t want to compare the behavior, only the quality of the answers. An unintentional error of ChatGPT is still an error, even when it’s delivered with a smile. I absolutely agree that the behavior of some SO users is detrimental and pushes people away.
I can also see ChatGPT (or whatever) as a solution to that - both as moderator and as source of solutions. If it knows the solution it can answer immediately (plus reference where it got it from), if it doesn’t know the solution it could moderate the human answers (plus learn from them).
That’s fair. You don’t have to compare the behavior. There’s plenty of that in the thread already.
All questions have been asked and all answers have been given
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.
To be fair™ they did at least do a little bit to deal with the existing answers becoming obsolete by changing the default answer sorting. The “new” (it’s already been at least a year IIRC) sorting pushes down older answers and allows newer answers to rise to the top with fewer votes. That still doesn’t fix the issue that the accepted answer likely won’t change as new ways of doing things become standard, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.
One thing I’ve always wondered about stack overflow is why is there only one accepted answer ever possible even though this is programming and there are many different ways of doing any given thing?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
The timing doesn’t really add up though. ChatGPT was published in November 2022. According to the graphs on the website linked, the traffic, the number of posts and the number of votes all already were in a visible downfall and at their lowest value of more than 2 years. And this isn’t even considering that ChatGPT took a while to get picked up into the average developer’s daily workflow.
Anyhow though, I agree that the rise of ChatGPT most likely amplified StackOverflow’s decline.
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.
Stack Exchange has been making a large number of bad calls over the past few years. Basically pissing off their moderators. The first one was Monica who actually sued them for it (libel or defamation or something, basically they said she was being transphobic or something when she wasn’t) and they settled. Around that time, possibly before, they removed a site from their Hot Network Questions because of a single tweet. Combine that with them constantly ignoring Stack Exchange Meta (where users and admins are meant to interact for the better of the site and discuss the sites themselves). Moderators were understandably furious when their posts get ignored in the place where Stack Exchange says they’re meant to communicate when a random tweet gets more attention and immediate action.
More recently they’ve given different instructions privately to moderators than what they said publicly with regards to suspected AI content.
I mean, combine all of that with how hostile the users of the site are. Accusing you of not searching before posting and marking your question as a duplicate because they think it is and refusing to listen to why you say it isn’t.
I’m sure they are bad, because general corporation and enshittification cycle, but when someone consistently mentions, “a single tweet” or something like that that they represent as purely innocuous (but without any explanation or link to source), gets my suspicious radar WAY up…
Your suspicion makes sense, let me provide some context.
(Quick aside for the unaware, not necessarily Snapz, Stack Exchange (SE) is the company and family of sites behind Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is the biggest and was the first and that’s why it doesn’t have the same “Blah Exchange” branding.)
I think this answer on SE Meta describes the Tweets the best. I can’t find good archived links to the tweets and they seem to be deleted now. This answer has screenshots and quotes them. This answer is not the first thing that happens in chronological order but it is the best thing I’ve found with quotes of the tweets. So just go here to see what the tweets were. I guess it was actually about three and not just a single one like I remembered. Summary here,
stack exchange: the #1 site for your questions about dataframes and female treachery
normal website
- IPS: How to approach a friend about his girlfriend asking to sleep with me?
- IPS: How do I tell students at a school I volunteer at to stop flirting with me?
- SciFi: Story about aliens nicknamed ‘Eechees’ who have created a network of tunnels on Mars
2:37 PM - 16 Oct 2018
1 Retweet 38 Likes
Someone then retweeted that,
When people seem confused about why Stack Overflow might not be the most welcoming/comfortable place for people to find answers to programming questions, show them this
[The tweet from above]
This question on Interpersonal Skills (IPS) Meta is (as far as I can find) when the community at large first found out about what happened. Then later there was this question on SE Meta (which the earlier answer is in response to). Both of these posts have most of the context.
Feel free to look over as much as you want, I’ll just post some of the highlights proving the points I was talking about.
From the IPS Meta question, in this answer
Was the removal of this site from the [Hot Network Questions (HNQ)] in response to a Twitter complaint?
Yep.
Oh. Well, that seems… crummy.
Yep. Let me tell you about it.
The initial response to the tweet in an internal discussion wasn’t actually “let’s pull IPS out of the HNQ” it was “Maybe we should finally kill the HNQ or redesign it to make it better.” I think that reworking the HNQ is something that many people want to see - myself included. Should a tweet be the final straw when it’s been discussed so much over the years? No. Am I willing to be OK with that if it means something will change? Begrudgingly, yes… but that’s a separate issue.
[…]
It’s easy to panic and focus on optics instead of tenable solutions, and while it looks really drastic, pulling IPS from the HNQ was a pretty moderate response. Yes, it was a quick decision - like pulling your hand away from a hot stove when it burns. It was the solution we chose - without consulting IPS - because it was effective and easy to implement since it would fix the perceived problem immediately and there was already a technical solution in place for doing it.
[…]
We are going to have some internal discussions to improve how we respond in situations like this in the future. We don’t want Twitter - or Reddit or any other external site - to be where users go to get real change to happen on the network. We love our meta system - the child meta sites and Meta Stack Exchange - and we need those to be where people feel they can come to and get a response from us.
This comment explains the community’s feeling very well I believe.
The immediate response doesn’t set a great example and looks outwardly like we didn’t think things over. I think is a massive, almost impossibly massive understatement. I don’t know if you guys can ever recover any of the massive amount of community trust you lost that day. Finding out that yes, indeed, a twitter complaint is a more powerful force of site governance then months of meta discussions by the most engaged users of the site just means that there’s no point participating at all until whatever dynamic causes this is completly [sic] and provably wiped out.
Also this
[…] Removing IPS and only IPS based on the outrage of a few Twitter users is incredibly unfair to this community and sends a very strong signal that SE considers the opinions and efforts of valuable contributors practically worthless. If y’all do care about this site, then please act like it? […]
From the SE Meta question, this answer
[…]
What happened was that someone called SE out on Twitter for something you could conceivably see as problematic (two questions with out of context bad titles showing next to each other in that list). After that, not only was that change done within 40 minutes of it being pointed out, this happened after MONTHS of engaged users of that site asking for the HNQ to be adressed.
[Lemmy UI does not underline individual links, so here are the three links individually]
- https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1520/should-we-edit-titles-that-are-not-sufficiently-descriptive
- https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1291/should-we-step-up-our-voting-culture/1294#1294
- https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1314/moratorium-on-hot-network-questions-until-we-have-greater-control-over-content
Yet, this happens only after Twitter outrage from non-users of the site. Why is that? Even if you have the very best of intentions and had this cooking internally for a long time (which I’m going to just assume for the purposes of this argument - good faith and all), this couldn’t possibly have had less fortunate timing.
I’m not trying to rag on Stack Exchange for doing this, but why was such a massive change made without consulting, collecting feedback from or even notifying the site’s active user base? Why does an engaged user of IPS have to visit twitter of all places to find out SE has cut out more than half of their site’s traffic overnight?
Why wasn’t the community consulted on this? We had discussions on it before, a lot of people came down in favor of restricting IPS from showing up on the sidebar in some fashion or another, and now we get this. No feedback, no discussion. Someone that apparently SE wants to placate made a stink on Twitter, and somehow that’s more effective than months of constructive reasoning in driving change. What reason, if at all, does an engaged user of the site have to trust the community governance model with this?
If it sounds like I’m really annoyed by this its because I am, yes I was in favor of removing IPS from HNQ before, but the circumstances under which it happened is making me lose all hope I have for SE’s leadership’s ability to formulate concrete plans to make changes constructively.
Edit: Make individual links as bullet points in one of the quotes since Lemmy UI does not make it clear it is three links.
Edit 2: Add summary of the tweets so more context is on this post.
I bet Google searching in general has gone down too. It’s often times quicker to just ask ChatGPT for an answer, and usually you can tell when an answer is correct or not. It’s like the old days of manually searching on Google for StackOverflow questions and then finding answers, and then trying to determine which one will work.
Half of a fuck-ton is still a lot. If they scale down their operational costs they can still run a very comfortable business for a long while on these kinds of numbers.
I think the point is not their viability as a business but their relevance in the industry.
If this and Reddit are going downhill, where will we look for our tech questions?! (/s, there will always be others)
We may have to start reading the manuals!
@ryan659 Activity Pub.
My bets for the future:
- RTFM
- Have ChatGPT RTFM
- Read a book about general principles
- Ask ChatGPT to apply general principles to its own answer after RTFM, then ask it to double check it
- Spin up a VM, just try the thing. If it doesn’t work, ask ChatGPT why.
When everything else fails…
- Ask a question at any random place (SO, Reddit, Discord, Mastodon,Lemmy, etc.)
- Feed the answers to ChatGPT and have it summarize them, then double check its own answer
As alluded to by comments here already, a long coming death.
Will probably go down as a marker of the darker side of tech culture, which, not coincidentally (?) manifested at time when the field was most confused as to what constitutes its actual discipline and whether it was an engineering field at all.
I routinely skip SO unless I’ve already exhausted most possibilities. If it was ever a good place to get answers, I frankly didn’t see it. What I did see was infinite amounts of bitching about “bad” questions, non-duplicate duplicates, lazy-ass people who just wanted an excuse not to answer, and assorted people tripping on their little iota of perceived “power”.
Hell, even the indexed results on Google etc. just stopped being even remotely useful a few years back. After that, most shit I searched for ended up in an unanswered and possibly locked question with some passive-aggressive bullshit remark. It’s got the culture of helpfulness of a 2003 gaming forum - except the people telling everyone else to go fuck themselves are mods, not pubertal kids. (Although if the mods were pubertal kids that would actually explain quite a bit)
This hasn’t been my experience at all, but I’m old and have been using SO since it was new.
I have stopped visiting it to answer questions because the questions aren’t interesting anymore. They’re either “how to do this incredibly obscure thing in SOMELIBRARY” (where I’ve never heard of that library) or “why does my function exit early at the first return statement instead of continuing on” (basic “you misunderstand programming so fundamentally a single answer is unlikely to help” kind of questions)
As far as I can tell, the range of “I’ve tried this, and partially gotten it working, but this thing does FOO when it should do BAR” questions don’t show up, or at least it doesn’t show up when I open the site.
Answering basic questions again and again and again isn’t fun. It’s something I could be paid to do, I suppose, but I’m not paid for that.
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.
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The pandemic ended
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.
