StackOverflow Dec 2024 stats

StackOverflow Stats.md

Disclaimer: I'm in the Top 1% of StackOverflow contributors with 23,315 rep points.

I asked 1 high-quality question in 2024, and it was closed almost immediately, and I haven't engaged with the site since.

If someone with 20,000+ karma has their nicely-formatted questions closed so quickly, what must the newbies and rank-in-file encounter? This is probably a big reason why it's declining.

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In March 2023 when this article was published, StackOverflow received 87,105 new questions.

By March 2024, this was reduced to 58,792 (-28,313; -32.5%).

By June 2024, it was 41,616 vs 63,752 in June 2023 (-22,136; -34.8%).

By December 2024, it was 25,566 vs 42,716 in Dec 2023 (-17,150; -40.2%).

From March 2023 to December 2024, it's now reduced from 87,105 to 25,566 (-70.7%).

The site is truly dying and is more outdated and questions are closed more than ever.

The last time it received so fewer questions was in May 2009, 10 months after going live.

That may hint that StackOverflow has less than one year of life left.

Since ChatGPT launced: Nov 2022 (108,563), it's had 82,997 less questions (3.25x less; -76.5%).

SELECT YEAR(CreationDate) AS Year, MONTH(CreationDate) AS Month, COUNT(*) AS NumQuestions
FROM Posts
WHERE PostTypeId = 1 -- Questions only
GROUP BY YEAR(CreationDate), MONTH(CreationDate)
ORDER BY Year DESC, Month DESC;

stackoverflow-new-questions-over-time.2009-2024.csv

The decline is definitely not just ChatGPT, look at 2018, aside from December it's 150k-ish by 2022 it's below 120k more like 110k, it was already in decline. This is mostly because people are hostile to questions -- as you pointed out. ChatGPT merely made it unnecessary to interact with these people. The founders saw the writing on the wall, they brought in a corporate butcher in 2019 for a CEO, completely blundered relations with the community shortly after as they tried to become more enterprise friendly (Monica Cellio), then fired the community managers in 2020, sold the site in 2021. It's like the Soviet Union which ended in 1986 it was just so big it took the giant five years to topple to the ground. For SO, it seems it died in 2019 and will close in 2026 (at best).

May I also respond. Thx for the detailled stats here 🫶 I have around 10.000+ points and feel the same as you describe. It became suuuper demotivating to formulate a question on SO. Just minutes after your question is posted there are many corrections (which is actually good) but also lots of unproductive comments. Especially when I answered my own question because I already had a good answer to a non-existing question. This process is actually encouraged by SO, but many people react aggressively when you do so.

So that’s why I most likely also slowly switch to ChatGPT because especially for these kind of questions AI agents are perfect.

When did they put answers behind a pay wallet? It became too expensive for casual research. That's what killed it for me.

from my habits, it's entirely because of the AIs.
the one I use for dev is quite excellent in answering almost everything I need to know, sometimes after a few follow up questions...

havent really thought about it, but when i read this, it feels like months since i last went to SO (via google).
my google-searches have probably gone down like 95% or so as well, due to AI.

( i was never using SO for "chasing points", though, only to find answers.
if somebody would close my question
and point me to another thread I missed that already had the answer,
i was just happy to move on )

Their newsletter has been broken for a very long time, this has always been my main source of tech information. I'm sure it would help their statistics if they fixed it, I know I personally rarely go to news sites to browse, I prefer the email approach.

I'm not surprised. This was expected given the site's moderation. AI was just the coup de grace.

Quoting the link that got me here: StackOverflow was already in decline before ChatGPT's launch. It was just so big that it took years to topple to the ground.

StackOverflow was doomed from launch. The design-pattern of having canonical questions that duplicate questions could link to meant that it would fill up with old outdated questions. This is made even worse because the rank-by-upvoting favors old outdated answers over new answers. The site is for button clickers now, not for people typing-in questions/answers.

StackOverflow did it to itself, not AI. The poor AI that has to eat the outdated StackOverflow sludge as its baby-food is the real victim here.

StackOverflow had all the ingredients to become and remain a success. Why isn't it? For starters, it has become an extremely toxic environment in which to ask questions. Every question or answer is punished by bullies (moderators). I lost a lot of accounts in the last 2 decades and a lot of questions disappeared. The toxic regime punishes anyone who wants to get better at what they love to do. There is no respect for beginners and ‘open’ questions, no matter how well-meaning, are mercilessly punished. StackOverflow will disappear, and they have only themselves to blame. And AI solutions are always willing to help, without judgement, in a friendly matter. People only use bad solutions/companies until something better comes along. Then they leave ... And all those bully moderators spent a lot of time building a fake reputation with fake points for a platform that no longer exists. In a few years, nobody will remember there existence ...

The decline is definitely not just ChatGPT, look at 2018, aside from December it's 150k-ish by 2022 it's below 120k more like 110k, it was already in decline. This is mostly because people are hostile to questions -- as you pointed out. ChatGPT merely made it unnecessary to interact with these people. The founders saw the writing on the wall, they brought in a corporate butcher in 2019 for a CEO, completely blundered relations with the community shortly after as they tried to become more enterprise friendly (Monica Cellio), then fired the community managers in 2020, sold the site in 2021. It's like the Soviet Union which ended in 1986 it was just so big it took the giant five years to topple to the ground. For SO, it seems it died in 2019 and will close in 2026 (at best).

Another possibility is that many questions were already answered during its peak, leading to a decline in the need to post new questions post-2019.