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The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

258 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.