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The site is truly dying and is more outdated and questions are closed more than ever.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;
If the explanation were that all questions have been asked and therefore new questions are more likely to be duplicates, you'd expect the rate of duplicate question closure to increase, proportionally with the decline in questions being asked.
But the chart includes questions that are closed as duplicates (or any other reason). Also, the rate of duplicates has risen, but not as severely, and not to the degree that would account for the freefall.
I've been using SO since 2008, and I do see the community as getting more and more intolerant every year.
It's not surprising, as the old-timers have seen the same dumb questions a thousand times. Questions from people who can't or won't provide reasonable details, including what version of software they are using. Questions are sometimes worded so poorly that you can't even tell what is being asked. Questions that are verbatim dumps of homework questions. It's frustrating to wade through all that noise, so I do understand why there is more than a bit of grumpiness.
Stack Overflow didn't help by delegating moderation to community volunteers, who end up being chosen from the set of intolerant gatekeepers anyway.
I think that downvoting should not be permitted at all. I understand it was originally intended to filter out low-quality content (both questions and answers), but that's not how it is used. Downvoting has become a tool for aggression and punishment.
I can't imagine that newbies are getting any better results from LLM's when they ask low-quality questions. But at least they can try again without getting ostracized.