Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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?

While SO is mostly dead, narrower stackexchange communities may be very much alive. E.g. the Emacs community is responsive.

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).

For me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose. Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me.

But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?

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.

I recently wrote a blog post similar to this situation: https://ertu.dev/posts/ai-is-killing-our-online-interaction/

There are still airgapped places in the world where transferring information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they’re not worth using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for engineering teams working in these environments.

It is always good to see other cultured people who structure their SQL queries the right way.

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.

I think the bigger point we should realize is LLMs offer the EXACT same thing in a better way. Many people are still sharing answers to problems but they do it through an AI which then fine tunes on it and now that problem solution is shared with EVERYONE.

Far better method of automated sharing of content

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.

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.

I wonder what the April 2020 spike is about... maybe lockdowns meant people started learning new stuff?

There will be a generation of coders that will never have heard of stack overflow.

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.

I'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often at one time. These days I don't even think about it.

On what will the LLMs train, now?

Surprising to see it bottom out so hard.

I imagine at least some of the leveling off could be due to question saturation. If duplicates are culled (earnestly or overzealously) then there will be a point where most of the low hanging fruit is picked.

Seems like there are "blocked by cloudflare" number of questions per month.

Their blocking of everyone not using chrome/etc from accessing their website probably contributed quite a bit to the implied downturn I'm reading in other comments.

The SO mission is complete. It's now an LLM training set.

Things would be different if we didn't.

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!

So it seems all the questions have now been answered– Great!

This is a great example of how free content was exploited by LLMs and used against oneself to an ultimate destruction.

Every content creator should be terrified of leaving their content out for free and I think it will bring on a new age of permanent paywalls and licensing agreements to Google and others, with particular ways of forcing page clicks to the original content creators.

Someone needs to archive the entirety of StackOverflow and make it available over torrent so that it can be preserved when the site shuts down. Urgently.

It's amazing to think that in the next few years, we may have software engineers entering the workforce who don't know what StackOverflow is...

What if we filter out all the questions closed as dupes, off topic, etc?

When StackOverflow dies, who will train the LLMs?

Acquired in June 2021 for $1.8 billion usd. Hurts but acquirer Naspers is a prolific tech investor, its stake in TenCent is worth > $150B usd today.

I suspect a lot of the traffic shift is from Google replacing the top search result, which used to be Stack Overflow for programming questions, with a Gemini answer.

I misread the title at first and thought it was hacker news questions [comments] that were being graphed. That’s what I would be interested in seeing

Everyone here talks about LLMs, but for me, the reason why StackOverflow became totally irrelevant is because of dedicated Discord servers and forums.

Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity.

Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their practical value and original intent.

Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing products. As a result, answers from genuine users that recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience were frequently removed altogether.

Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction and discourages broader user participation.

Looks like they sold right before the end. Wonder whether the AI deals they've struck make up for the difference

The result is not surprising! Many people are now turning to LLMs with their questions instead. This explains the decline in the number of questions asked.

I really admire that they publicly posted this data, and hope that the platform can find a new type of pivot or draw to bring back a community.

Has AI summarization led to people either getting their answer from a search engine directly, and failing that, just giving up?

Good riddance.

I stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the community was such a pain in the ass to deal with.

While the decline started a decade ago in 2014 and accelerated in 2020, the huge drop since 2023 is remarkable

Couldn’t have happened to a meaner community

It's funny to see people's new year's resolution to learn how to code in the graph

Monica has the last laugh it seems

Maybe the average question will be more "high level" now that all simple questions are answered by LLMs ?

they pretend like everything is fine at HN too wouldn't surprise me looking similar in the future.

It was a good idea ruined by the compulsively obtuse and pedantic, not unlike Reddit.

It was a good 16 year-ish run.

And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - "too broad". I mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds?

Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well.

I've never once asked a question on there Mostly because you can't unless your account has X something-points. Which you get by answering questions.

This threw me off so much when I got started with programming. Like why are the people who have the most questions, not allowed to ask any...?

I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.

Probably similar for google. My first line of search is always chatgpt