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.
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The site is truly dying and is more outdated and questions are closed more than ever.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 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of having canonical questions that duplicate questions could link to meant that it would fill up with old outdated questions. This is made even worse because the rank-by-upvoting favors old outdated answers over new answers.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 The poor AI that has to eat the outdated StackOverflow sludge as its baby-food is the real victim here.