Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

jsLavaGoat

Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.

conradfr

Call me crazy but sometimes I still find a better solution on StackOverflow than what Claude Code insists to do. I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.

hintymad

Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?

pkamb

Forum? What forum? When has Stack Overflow ever been a forum?

jonas21

The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.

tantalor

StackOverflow always sucked. I never found it to be a useful resource.

woadwarrior01

This is happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.

kenty

Stack Overflow with all of its shortcomings was a marvel of the internet at it's peak. People especially in early were chasing karma and anything you asked, you were sure to get some answer. Not always right but some answer. While for sure LLMs will give much better answers on average. I feel that it's a piece of humanity we've lost there that should be adequately remembered and the memory cherished.

Animats

Wow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off. That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?

jrflo

I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...

_aavaa_

Just look at the graph, Covid peak aside its previous peak was in 2016 and it was in continuous decline since then. All LLMS this was increase the slope.

pkamb

LLMs are better than slow human support of any kind for debugging / helpdesk work (which was never that welcome at SO anyway). Stack Overflow is still great for canonical questions, multiple answers, public / SEO'd discussion between humans, etc. But that probably isn't enough to save the company as a private equity acquisition hoping to 100x their $1.8 billion investment. Hopefully the classic Q/A site eventually gets written off and spins into a Wikimedia-like foundation that is interested in preserving the original Q/A site and has no desire to grow or become something else.

m3kw9

i haven't been on stackoverflow for maybe 6 months, haven't seen it on google search, or needed to ask much on google either. Maybe they did a web search. On the plus side, its still used by AI agents

npollock

one of the interesting properties of public forums like SO is that the maintainers of software packages get visibility into the problems and frustrations that their users experience we're losing that signal when the Q&A behavior shifts into language models

bhouston

Did the founders have an exit or liquidity from Stack Overflow? I hope so.

legitster

Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time: If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer). At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems. (Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).

AlienRobot

Wow, has it really gone all the way down to zero?

BoppreH

Where do we go now for the answers validated by the community? How do we build knowledge? The answers that Claude gives might look good, but without community edits, votes, and comments it's a lot harder to evaluate. I don't see a way back, but it does feel like abandoning public transportation because we all own electric bikes now.

BrenBarn

One thing I've been curious about is how the other sites on StackExchange have fared. A lot of those are pretty interesting. Anecdotally the few that I check occasionally also seem to have declined a lot.

exabrial

There are a lot of reasons why that forum is dead. I loved answering questions on it in the heyday, it was fun and I learned a ton. The owners let a bunch "admins" run it into the ground first though. Another user that "outranks" you, but knows nothing about subject matter, has changed the content of your post. The great news is, it's still attributed to you. They removed the words "please" and "thank you" and other kind words to make you seem like a dick. Or they may have changed the wording completely to match their completely arbitrary tone and style. Have a nice day and kindly piss off, there's nothing you can do about it, hah, loser.