I just looked at the “questions per month” graph and… wow. Not a gentle decline — a cliff. 😬
Here’s the stats link: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph
🔸 TLDR
▪️ Stack Overflow isn’t “dead” as an archive — but the habit of asking moved elsewhere.
▪️ It’s not just AI. It’s also docs getting better, GitHub becoming the new helpdesk, and a moderation model that pushed beginners away.
▪️ The big loss: fewer fresh “edge-case” answers → more stale knowledge over time.
🔸 WHAT DEVS ARE SAYING (THE COMMENTS HIT HARD)
▪️ “As a beginner, my questions got shut down.” 😕
▪️ “As a mid-level, everything was already asked — SO became a reference book.” 📚
▪️ “As a senior, I don’t need a Q/A… I need a conversation with another pro.” 🤝
▪️ “Docs improved a lot (Microsoft, Swift, etc.), so I end up there first.” ✅
▪️ “For modern stuff, I search GitHub Issues/Discussions. For older stuff… back to SO.” 🧩
▪️ “Duplicates are often nonsense: closed as ‘dupe’ of a tangential, obsolete post.” 🪦
▪️ “Toxic / hostile tone + moderator risk → people prefer LLMs because they don’t judge you.” 🤖
▪️ “New languages/frameworks feel underrepresented vs real-world usage (Rust/Go mentioned a lot).” 🦀🐹
▪️ “SO wanted to be a Wikipedia-like knowledge base: one question, one canonical answer.” That goal can conflict with learning, discussion, and evolving tech.
🔸 MY TAKE: IT’S A PERFECT STORM (NOT ONE CAUSE)
▪️ AI accelerated it (late 2022/early 2023 timing is hard to ignore), but the decline started earlier.
▪️ Better docs + better project-maintained knowledge shifted “how-to” support closer to the source.
▪️ The “one right answer forever” model aged badly in a world where frameworks change every 6 months.
▪️ When moderation feels like punishment, you don’t get contributors… you get lurkers.
▪️ And once SO becomes only a reference book, it stops being a “live document” — fewer people update, curate, and refine answers.
🔸 WHY THIS MATTERS (EVEN IF YOU LOVE LLMs)
▪️ LLMs are great… because they were trained on human-written knowledge.
▪️ If fewer humans write public, high-quality troubleshooting + edge-case solutions, tomorrow’s models get worse.
▪️ And GitHub/Discord/Slack knowledge often becomes fragmented, unindexed, or hard to search later.
🔸 TAKEAWAYS
▪️ If you maintain a library: invest in docs + examples + troubleshooting (that’s the new frontline).
▪️ If you run a community: optimize for welcoming + iterative improvement, not “gotchas”.
▪️ If you rely on AI: keep a verification loop (docs, source, issues, reproducible steps). 🧪
▪️ As an industry: we should care about durable public knowledge, not just fast private answers.
🔸 QUESTION FOR YOU
▪️ Where do you go first when you’re stuck today?
▪️ Docs? GitHub Issues? LLMs? Reddit? Stack Overflow?
#stackoverflow #programming #softwareengineering #developers #documentation #opensource #github #devtools #ai #community #knowledge #tech