alt Hacker NewsTotal monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
Comments
Good riddance. There were some ok answers there, but also many bad or obsolete answers (leading to scrolling down find to find the low-ranked answer that sort of worked), and the moderator toxicity was just another showcase of human failure on top of that. It selected for assholes because they thought they had a captive, eternally renewing audience that did not have any alternative.
And that resulted in the chilling effect of people not asking questions because they didn't want to run the moderation gauntlet, so the site's usefulness went even further down. Its still much less useful for recent tech, than it is for ancient questions about parsing HTML with regex and that sort of thing.
LLMs are simply better in every way, provided they are trained on decent documents. And if I want them to insult me too, just for that SO nostalgia, I can just ask them to do that and they will oblige.
Looking forward to forgetting that site ever existed, my brain's health will improve.
The corresponding answers graph: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927992/a...
They had pretty neat infra, maybe it still runs in the same clever way. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...
People are still asking questions, it's no longer on the public internet. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc get to see and use them.
I fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/
For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM"
I used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?
A decline in number of questions asked can also be because most people's questions are already answered in the database.
How would you query this for post views over time?
I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time.
I use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago.
I used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time.
So perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP.
I don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components.
Whenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you”
Man after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard, but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I, as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM instead of being able to peruse great answers from different perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.
Wow. I was expecting a decline but not to that extent.
Seems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold to a private equity firm.
StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me.
Actually I think it never did.
It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account.
And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile.
I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities.
I think the disallowing of “controversial” technical questions might have helped as much as the AI boom.
So frustrating to be reading a deeply interesting technically and intense debate to be closed down by an admin.
Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.
AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).
SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?
Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse?
The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.
I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.
The founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way that site is worth $1.8 billion now.
Spolsky and co. sold SO in 2021 - timing IS everything.
Wow, that's not just collapsing, that's collapsed.
Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to. LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact.
And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder.
I'm not sad.
Now imagine what happens when a new programming language comes along. When we have a question, we will no longer be able to Google it and find answers to it on Stack Overflow. We will ask the LLMs. They will work it out. From that moment, the LLM we used has the knowledge for solving this particular problem. Over time, this produces huge moat for the largest providers. I believe it is one of the subtler reasons why the AI race is so fierce.
Where will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration.
I still would like to get other humans' experiences and perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO doesn't go away entirely.
With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that, but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".
I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.
I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.
Everyone is saying LLMs did this site in, but what if we just asked all the questions already? We should be celebrating how we solved programming!
IMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community.
Before writing the comment I had in my head I did a CTRL+F search for "toxic" in the comment section here. 42 occurences. It says everything about what's happening to SO.
I'm glad I learned how to program when you could coax useful answers from Google searches.
Whenever a Stack Overflow result comes up now the answer is years old and wrong, you might as well search archive.org.
When you see AI giving you back various coding snippets almost verbatim from SO, it really makes you wonder what will happen in the future with AI when it can't depend on actual humans doing the work first.
I certainly use it less now that I get a CloudFlare check every time I go and sometimes it fails or loads forever. I usually just go back to search results and look elsewhere after a second or two.
SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now.
Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be?
The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?
I recently wrote a blog post similar to this situation: https://ertu.dev/posts/ai-is-killing-our-online-interaction/
Good times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show proof, etc.)
Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting questions and making snark comments.
People are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also don’t forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push his personal political agenda.
Interesting timing. I just analyzed TabNews (Brazilian dev community) and ~50% of 2025 posts mention AI/LLMs. The shift is real. The 2014 peak is telling. That's before LLMs, before the worst toxicity complaints. Feels like natural saturation, most common questions were already answered. My bet, LLMs accelerated the decline but didn't cause it. They just made finding those existing answers frictionless.
It's unfortunate that SO hasn't found a way to leverage LLMs. Lots of questions benefit from some initial search, which is hard enough that moderators likely felt frustrated with actual duplicates, or close enough duplicates, and LLMs seem able to assist. However I hope we don't lose the rare gem answers that SO also had, those expert responses that share not just a programming solution but deeper insight.
There will be a generation of coders that will never have heard of stack overflow.
How is Experts Exchange doing?
I am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me as much over the last ten years.
It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I for one will mourn its loss.
I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to be shared.
While SO is mostly dead, narrower stackexchange communities may be very much alive. E.g. the Emacs community is responsive.
There's no doubt that generally LLMs are better. In addition SO had its issues. That being said I can't help but worry about losing humans asking questions and humans answering questions. The sentimentality aside, if humans aren't posing questions and if humans aren't recommending answers, what are the models going to use?
So it seems all the questions have now been answered– Great!
Wonder if this is a good proxy for '# of Google Searches'. Or perhaps a forward indicator (sign of things to come), since LLMs are adopted by the tech-savvy first, then the general public a little later, so Stack Overflow was among the first casualties.
While I generally agree with the narrative of the negative arc that stack overflow took, I found (and have as recently as a few months ago) that I could have enjoyable interactions on the math, Ux, written language, and aviation exchanges. The OS ones in the middle (always found the difference between Linux and superuser confusing).
Game over. I didn’t notice all the toxicity mentioned in the other comments, although I did stop using it around 2016 maybe. It had its days, it was fundamentally a verb at some point. Its name is part of web history, and there’s no denying that.