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?
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.