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The site is truly dying and is more outdated and questions are closed more than ever.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;
@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_deletedtable in the Data Explorer instead ofposts. 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.