alt Hacker NewsStackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
Comments
I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.
I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.
When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)
Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.
Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.
Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.
OK, let's get this out of the way:
1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.
2. AI clearly finished the job.
I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.
SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It bounced when 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow.
I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.
Reddit is going the same way.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use
Related discussion What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph (483 points, 3 months ago, 595 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949
They should reboot, focused on
1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and
2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
This does four things simultaneously:
1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model
2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)
3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.
4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
SO has been useless for years now, but the other Stack Exchanges can be interesting, they deserve more spotlight.
I do not miss StackOverflow. It wasn’t a community, it was a toxic environment that rewarded asshole behavior.
And how much was AI trained on their data? That's the sad part. Nobody asking new questions, so not much more for AI to train from.
StackOverflow is great if your question is "How would we have done X back in 2012?" Because you can't re-ask or re-answer questions that have had their correct answers change as technology changed. So the sites is stuck back in time when each question was first answered.
as a student i remmeber ikept getting my questions removed even after trying to follow every rule. this one time i decided i will use their top questions as a template just to test it, so i did i made sure it was a new question, following each rule
It was also deleted, die already stack overflow
It was an extremely good tool and now it’s outdated. Just like a bronze sword.
I'm curious if the quality of AI answers will get worse without public sources like Stack Overflow or if LLMs have gotten to a point where that doesn't matter as much.
If there is any proof that no one will be writing code, this is it.
I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.
Still over $100M in revenue, now mainly from AI and Enterprise customers.
https://archive.is/20261017123508/https://medium.com/inside-...
Mods are finally happy.
They get that many?!
Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.
Deserved.
Could never reply posts to help other unless I had done:
* 1 trip to mars
* 10 trips to the Moon
* Converted water to wine
The worst system until you can finally help others.
Also, the CICD guy from my previous job, could not answer a single question if he was unable to search there, full stop. It will be fun watching those who doesn't really know anything dragging the whole team down.
A developer girl knew more than him, and fixed problems he was unable to fix.
Meh… you can't create duplicated questions on SO so obviously 20 years later there is not much left to ask.
A better metric would be visits per month… which probably doesn't look very pretty too. I used to visit SO every day several times a day for like 15 years: ask a technical question on google, click on the first SO result, get the solution I was looking for. Now I still ask google but I just have to read the AI Overview to get the solution I'm looking for…
I have some wishful thinking for everyone reading this: what if the people at StackOverflow built one of the best bot protections out there? I would honestly expect the graph to go up with all the LLMs and automated content spamming..
And here's why: https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-ove...
LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:
Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?
A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]
I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.
I answered a number of questions on there. Some non-native English speaker started going my answers and making language editing suggestions. The grammar was fine. I refused all the changes because they were at best basically the same or at worst incorrect. I refused maybe 4-5. The next day the guy got on and had done a bunch more then went to some of my answers and made hostile comments about my answers on simple things like Pandas for Python.
That was that for that site.
This question has already been asked?
Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.
It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.
It is sad because it was such a well designed community. But its lessons live on.
The highly technical sites -- StackOverflow, Unix & Linux, MathOverflow -- see little use.
Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.
Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.
I am amazed it's still that high
good, make it die faster
I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).
SO suffered from its success and, bluntly, the laziness of humans.
I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.
I stopped contributing.
The riddle was: "What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?".
Oedipus answered: "Man: as an infant, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks on two legs and; in old age, he uses a walking stick".
You're underselling it. It's less than in their second month of existence - and that has been true every month for the past year. For the last few months it's also lower than their first month. Stack Overflow, effectively, no longer exists.
And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.