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The site is truly dying and is more outdated and questions are closed more than ever.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

There's definitely a link between LLMs and new questions in SO but I don't think it's as strong as some people may conclude. Asking a question in ChatGPT is closer to searching for an SO answer using Google. It takes considerable more effort, and a different kind of context, for someone to post an actual question on SO. You have to have an account, write the question (title) and the body, take care of formatting, examples, tags, then monitor your post for replies.

But, on top of all that, as the author and many others called out here, you have to deal with the shenanigans of SO's community. And that is really what pushed long time members away (myself included.)

I think moving in the enterprise direction was a futuristic step, anticipating the impact of ChatGPT in making Stack Overflow less relevant. However, what went wrong with this enterprise path? Why couldn't they successfully position it as a company-specific version of Stack Overflow, tailored for internal use? Such a product would store a company’s internal data, questions, and solutions privately, addressing one of the key concerns with ChatGPT, which rely on publicly trained models and cannot ensure data privacy.

Placing that data into chart form makes it clear the severe impact of LLMs on StackOverflow: (new monthly questions are down 77% since November 2022)

Placing that data into chart form makes it clear the severe impact of LLMs on StackOverflow: (new monthly questions are down 77% since November 2022)

The decline was already in progress since 7/2020

Undoubtedly, friendly Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc., are the primary reason why StackOverflow is dying. Also, as many have already commented, many contributors stopped contributing to it mainly because of bad moderation. I started contributing to it around mid-2019 and in a couple of months, I realized that many moderators had connived with some gangs. Someone who has contributed between 2019 and now can easily count some names of these rogues.

@hopeseekr In case you're still tracking this, the data for January and February 2025 could be nice.

@HenkPoley, did you mean the traffic to StackOverflow improved between January and February 2025? I doubt it. Is it your guess, or did you say it based on some data?

The major problems with StackOverflow were clearly pointed out in ForrestKnight's video 4 years ago ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ZK0t9-llo

@arvind-kumar-avinash The number of questions asked in February 2025 (29693) was again significantly lower than January (34390) and all previous months since 2010.

We don't have direct access to measure traffic on Stack Overflow, but we can use the Data Explorer interface they provide to measure the number of questions posted.

FYI my chart queries the posts_with_deleted table in the Data Explorer instead of posts. I do this to include the count of questions that get deleted by users and moderators.

It's possible their read traffic isn't slowing as much as this measurement suggests. For example, the rate of questions has slowed down a lot, but maybe that's because so many topics have already been covered.

But I doubt that.

I think people continue to be turned away from using Stack Overflow because of nasty comments and unsympathetic moderators. They prefer to use LLM tools because they get quicker response, and it's less judgmental.

Last week the leadership of Stack Exchange had an online Q&A on YouTube. The CEO described the vision for the company. It sounds like they plan to embrace LLM-produced content, even though they know it tends to be lower quality.

Ahah, that SQL(-looking) query in the top post you paste into the Stack Overflow Data Explorer, for example for a direct link like this, where you can execute the query: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1889886

Thanks @billkarwin

@billkarwin I could not agree more. I'm a ~14k rep on SO but my last question/answer which I spent a couple of hours on and is factually correct, was downvoted and in meta had nasty comments like "the answer is easily found by googling"... I'll never post there again. LLMs for the win.

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