alt Hacker NewsDo I read that correctly — it is close to zero today?!
I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.
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Still a couple thousand away from 0.
But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available.
I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there
It's surely both.
Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest
Most questions have negative karma.
Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem.
All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders.
SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them.
SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls.
It's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now for confirmation.
I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_.
It can be both. Push and pull factors work better together than either does individually.
The last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun. If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small difference is probably due to the turn of the year.
There are tabs to change to a table view. I see a peak of 207k in 2014 and the last month was only 3,710.
The steep decline started way before llms
It's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going to train the AI for free.
Maybe the graph doesn’t include questions that get closed by moderators?
Not zero, but it is smaller than when it launched originally. And this is questions asked, not how many people are visiting and reading posts.