The Fall of StackOverflow: A Data-Driven Analysis

https://pdftranslate.ai/blog/stackoverflow-fall

by sh_tomer • 2 years ago

92 125 2 years ago

The linked site seems overloaded (it’s popular on Reddit right now) - is it the same article as this one? https://en.numere.org/home/blog/the-fall-of-stackoverflow

…if so, it was published a year ago: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erik-h%C3%A4nel-6a44151a6_num...

*EDIT:* The linked site (with an ironic… or apt domain-name) finally loaded for me - it is a different article.

Interesting to compare conclusions though:

2023 article:

In summary, it appears that the biggest contributor to "StackOverflow's fall" is not one of the two LLMs GPT3 or GPT4, but rather the market power of Google's algorithm. The latter's changes in May 2022 caused a significant drop in traffic that is much more significant than the effect of GPT. However, since traffic also provides advertising revenue, this can be a big problem in the future. […] Of course, this also reflects the previous analysis: most of the generally valid questions have already been answered (and their answers can also be generated by GPT). What remains are the few questions that are very specific.

2024 article:

StackOverflow's decline was a result of issues within its model and execution, which predated ChatGPT's introduction. While ChatGPT may have accelerated this decline, it was not the sole cause. There are likely many factors contributing to StackOverflow's struggles, but AI alone cannot account for the entirety of its challenges.

They both kinda agree - if you squint a bit.

byteface2• 2 years ago

You're right. For me personally, Discord was killing Stackoverflow about a year earlier. Waiting a week for a reply on Stackoverflow was becoming dull while discord live chat rooms were buzzing with instant feedback. Even as copilot first arrived it wasn't a scratch on asking an room of professionals at realtime. But now chatGPT has become a bit more fledged you can see why it would dent other platforms. I've often thought about this as how would you train future bots if all we do is talk with them now?. Where will they read their answers?

DaiPlusPlus9• 2 years ago

Whenever I go on Discord the chats are so busy my message flies up off the screen in seconds - how does it work for you?

frereubu2• 2 years ago

I haven't used Discord, but isn't the issue there that the answer gets quickly buried? It might work well for one person getting an answer, but the huge value of SO is that the answers stick around and turn up pretty well in searches.

jl6• 2 years ago

most of the generally valid questions have already been answered

My experience was that SO excelled at answering basic questions with definitive answers, but anything creeping outside that sweet spot would be poorly understood by both answerers and moderators. It’s still a useful resource for that historical record of basic answers, but it feels like complex, niche or subtle questions are not welcome.

seb1204• 2 years ago

So where to go with such questions? I have one that I am not sure if it is a bug, a user issue or an android issue or a phone/hardware issue.

dspillett8• 2 years ago

More complex questions are OK-ish, but the site's audience is not really setup for them.

They have to be asked in the sort of detail that most of those asking do not otherwise any answers end up either wrong (because of details not known at the time of writing) or at least as vague as the question. Also, a long question will put people off actually interacting with it which is one of the reasons people aren't going to change how they ask the question, that and sometimes people don't realise that their question isn't simple (though why they don't realise that when they can't search for a simple answer seems like an odd disconnect to me!).

hoseja• 2 years ago

The problem with volunteer moderation is, the "volunteers" eventually want to be paid in other, corrosive ways.

dspillett8• 2 years ago

The article is currently not responding so I can't see if this is covered, but a bigger problem is the volunteer answerers. Some left when the site was sold, many remained with a wait-and-see stance and are going due to licensing changes (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401324/announcing-a...).

Obviously people asking LLMs instead is an important factor, as are unverified (often not entirely correct) answers from those using LLMs to gain Internet points.

DaiPlusPlus9• 2 years ago

Some left when the site was sold

Que? What was sold - by whom and to who?

StackExchange is still its own company - and owns StackOverflow - doesn’t it?

DaiPlusPlus9• 2 years ago

The diamond-symbol moderators are masochists or flagellants.

Fortunately community-moderation works well - for the most-part - on SO/SE; not to say SE is anything like Reddit (e.g. the impotent protests over “Monica” which feels like it happened over a decade ago - and people still reference that episode in their display-names).

If I ever become a moderator on SO it’ll be because I want to bolster my resume (I did get to interview at BlueOrigin on the basis of my SO karma score - so it has value; certainly more than LinkedIn, ew)

dataengineer565• 2 years ago

All that the mods seem to do is stir up meta drama and they treat the paid SO employees horribly. You're right that community moderation is great on SO - users with certain amounts of karma can close questions, and downvotes are a powerful tool. I don't really see the purpose of the volunteer diamond mods.

babo• 2 years ago

Web archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240828071621/https://pdftransl...

2-3-7-43-18076• 2 years ago

just yesterday i wanted to ask a question about average data usage of macbooks on askdifferent (SO sibling in the stackexchange family for mac topics) ... of course the question was removed within half an hour for being too fuzzy. tried it on the macos subreddit ... couldn't even post it there for too low karma ... posted it on r/apple ... still waiting for moderator approval. it's not the first time that it feels like it's becoming more and more difficult to ask a simple question on the internet. and i have 20k points on SO - was using it a lot many years ago - i know the drill.

sshine2• 2 years ago

The asymmetry between questioners and answerers might be increasing.

I get quality answers on IRC. Most other places seem flooded.

nottorp6• 2 years ago

Only old farts are on irc :)

DaiPlusPlus9• 2 years ago

average data usage of macbooks

With all sincerity, I honestly don’t know what this is supposed to mean.

2-3-7-43-18076• 2 years ago

well, i didn't post the full question - right? b/c i'm not expecting an answer here ... but to be a little more clear: data usage refers to up- and download.

thousand_nights• 2 years ago

becoming more and more difficult to ask a simple question on the internet

i know people here like to hate on discord servers, but this is one thing they shine at, it's easy to drop in and just ask a damn simple question to people that are online, in real time

mhitza• 2 years ago

The same can be said about Discourse, and at least then the information is also publicly searchable.

Not realtime, sure, but for me most of that time that's perfectly alright.

nottorp6• 2 years ago

Well one thing to hate about discord is you should use "chat server" instead. Discord is trying to become a monopoly on that (bar the corporate oriented offerings) but it's not the only option.

And yes, the usual thing: since it's not a forum it's impossible to search the history (yes they have a search button which is useless for howto type questions). It's also impossible to browse it like a forum to see what problems people have encountered before you have them and possibly avoid them, or get better insight in the stuff you're using.

layer84• 2 years ago

The drawback is that it generally only helps the one question asker, and that answers only reflect who happened to be present synchronously and what they thought at that moment. Discord content is ephemeral and not discoverable, and tends to consist of reflexive rather than well-considered and thought-through answers.

The value of public forums is that their content appears in public searches, can be publicly linked to, and that they facilitate asynchronous, longer-form and longer-term discourse.

boxed3• 2 years ago

I have a different explanation:

Diminishing returns.

A 100% successful StackOverflow SHOULD show a tapering off of questions. This is exactly what we should expect from perfect success. Now, I don't think perfect success is what we see, but a system where a question can be answered once and then re-read many times should absolutely not keep new question counts high, that would be a sign of a massive failure.

The view counts is harder to explain. I would guess it can be partially explained by search engines inlining stackoverflow answers into the search results so people DO get answers from SO, but don't actually go to the site.

cen4• 2 years ago

Yup an Involution.

vintagedave2• 2 years ago

Technology does change though and a decent number of questions I see on SO should have different answers now than when the official answer was accepted. Answers tapering off is true but I think is also due to it being difficult to get new, different answers to old questions.

layer84• 2 years ago

New answers can be added and upvoted. Maybe there should be a mechanism for older upvotes to expire.

boxed3• 2 years ago

There does indeed need to be a way to make sure newer information is weighted properly. But this is quite a minor issue compared to the great mass of questions. I mean, statistically it's a minor issue. It's a big issue for certain domains like Swift where tons of the answers are comically out of date.

dataengineer565• 2 years ago

I find StackOverflow interesting because there is (in my opinion) a ginormous gap between how the volunteer moderators feel that the site should operate vs how its users actually use it. I think it would be almost impossible for a new user to ask a well-received question these days.

Instead of striving to improve the user experience then the moderators spend their time bickering over meta issues. Many haven't asked or answered a question in the last five years.

DaiPlusPlus9• 2 years ago

Out of curiosity, have you seen the new “Staging Ground” feature?

lawgimenez• 2 years ago

I was one of the first testers of Staging Ground back in late 2022, if I remember they stopped it mid-2023. Now, I'm surprised they revived SG. Let's just say I'm not a fan of the idea or implementation.

dataengineer565• 2 years ago

Yes in my opinion it's an absolute disaster that does nothing to help the new user experience.

1. Post a question as a new user

2. It goes into Staging Grounds instead of the main site, so there's no way to get an answer

3. Watch as a handful of powerusers flag it and demand changes, with a combination of user-written and automated comments

4. Make some of the recommended changes

5. It gets closed anyway and never makes it to the main site

To me it seems like a forum that effectively sanctions the bullying of new users. I'd like to see Staging Grounds success statistics.

tempaway45751442• 2 years ago

I have a theory that if the homepage didn't show 'Featured On Meta' the reputation of the site would be much higher because we wouldn't all be getting a window into the bickering and nitpicking. The bickering and nitpicking is far too prominent on the homepage

blackbrokkoli• 2 years ago

That's a good point. I know no site where it takes less clicks to access the current in-group drama.

Thinking about it, know I want a "Current Drama" button where the "I'm feeling lucky" button used to be on gSearch :)

dunghill• 2 years ago

It’s also possible that the target audience has changed significantly since its inception. The early adopters and moderators were true enthusiasts.

pjc50• 2 years ago

The long standing tension is "StackOverflow is a Q&A site, not a forum". A key difference is forums allowing the same topics to come up over and over again, while SO was supposed to funnel all discussion back to "canonical" questions.

And of course many people come to SO with unformed questions or want a discussion for the social interaction, resulting in them getting hit with the SO hammer. Not quite sure where they've ended up, but the obvious one is Reddit.

People keep mentioning Discord, but I've no idea how you'd actually use a programming discord in the same way as you'd use SO, because if you make a post and come back an hour later surely it'll have vanished into the flow?

wvh• 2 years ago

There are a lot of questions that try to find out if something is still the best way of doing things or the right technical choice at the present time. Those questions feel like duplicates or opinions, but are really not in many cases. Some areas of expertise move a lot faster, answers to questions about for instance Kubernetes or Javascript ecosystems tend to be out of date pretty quickly.

At least I feel more often the need to ask if I'm making a sane choice for the next few years rather than literal `1 + 1` questions with clear ever-green answers, which StackOverflow seems to prefer.

layer84• 2 years ago

Maybe there should be a way to “bump” a question after a year or so, adding a comment along those lines.

Otherwise, if you explain why you’re asking the question again, link to the previous question, and maybe present arguments why you think the old answers might be outdated, then it’s lesa likely to be closed as a duplicate.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

The Views Count chart reveals an even clearer trend of constant decline starting in 2013, highlighting significant issues with the model StackOverflow operated under. This is the raw data used for this observation.

This seems to be wrong. According to the graph StackOverflow has nearly no views at all, which can't be right. The link goes to a query that selects votes not views, and does indeed show an enormous decline. But it's possible that people still view the site, they just don't vote.

vegabook2• 2 years ago

Indeed. But one possibility is that these are rate of change charts and that that crucial fact was omitted.

cybersquare2• 2 years ago

That's because the latest count is on the order of 3M views while the scale of the graph is 1B views, or 0.003% of the full scale. It's dramatic but not wrong if you believe SO's own data. Take a look at the raw data linked in the article.

gklitz• 2 years ago

That just has got to be wrong. I refuse to believe that we had a significant proportion of the world population viewing StackOverFlow answers in 2011, either the counting is wrong or the dating or aggregation is wrong. It simply cannot be true. I know a lot of HN readers live in the tech-mindset-bubble, but it simply was never the case that any answers on stack overflow rivaled GangNam styles popularity at its peak breakthrough.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

I did and that raw data query appears to be counting votes. Is there something odd about the SO schema that I don't understand?

WithinReason• 2 years ago

That graph shows a negative value for number of views this August (-1751)

vegabook2• 2 years ago

yeah but hang on. Why are these charts going down? Is it because questions and answers are actively being _removed_?

Or is this a first-derivative of [answer/question] count ie the rate of change? In which case a) this should be clearly stated ("questions added per period x"), and also, it wouldn't be surprising that the charts go down because the knowledge is already there and so fewer questions/answers are needed, even without AI.

While there is indeed a big decline post-GPT et al, the decline started a lot earlier than general availability of AI.

physicsguy• 2 years ago

StackOverflow is one of the most hostile sites I've ever tried to use.

I vividly remember asking a question before was different in a subtle but important way from existing ones (which I'd seen) and it got marked as a duplicate.

klez6• 2 years ago

Can you please link your question?

matsemann2• 2 years ago

My experience from asking about that here earlier is that they seldom can. Their well-worded and perfect questions maybe weren't that good in retrospect when they dug it up again?

dspillett8• 2 years ago

Did you state that you'd seen those questions/answers, and why they did not cover the subtleties of your situation? While it sounds like gate-keeping to require you to provide this information up-front, it saves other people's time giving you answers (including links to those questions/answers) that are not relevant. “State what you have already tried” is mentioned up-front in all the places that describe how to ask a good question, and is good advice more generally, away from SO, too.

okaleniuk• 2 years ago

Around 2013, StackOverflow had started to turn into a history museum. There were still some niches where there was a bit of life but the rest become too much "do not touch the exhibits" to be viable.

ryu2k2• 2 years ago

A few years back SO used to be the common top result for my search queries regarding tech and development. I'm not sure when the shift started, but these days it's always a list of content farm links with maybe a link to SO somewhere in between.

The result for me was that I started to rely much more on documentation and writing down notes of stuff I found myself looking up a lot. I never used SO directly for looking up stuff, always relied on search engines, and as they declined in quality I just stopped visiting SO almost alltogether.

I imagine I'm not the only one with this story. Considering users also abandoned the site for LLM assistans and the strict moderation on there, I'm not surprised it is in heavy decline.

boxed3• 2 years ago

I think you just described the fall of Google, not anything to do with SO directly.

Ayesh• 2 years ago

I think StackOverflow/StackExchange has served their purpose, and are now rightfully in a decline.

There are some niches sites in the network like bicycling, English, Mathematica, Academia, etc. They contain extremely high quality answers. But for programming, it's nowadays much more easier on GitHub and relevant issue trackers. I think it's good, because there are many questions in those sites that contain often outdated answers. Some lucky questions get a comment there saying the answer is outdated, but there are many outdated answers.

Perhaps, JavaScript has a lot to do with this. JS evolves at a much faster rate than sites like StackOverflow can keep up.

caporaltito• 2 years ago

What a peculiar take, the whole of it

alecco3• 2 years ago

Maybe some post-StackOverflow site could do much better if split into communities. It doesn't make much sense to pile together highly popular topics (e.g. JS or Java a few years ago) with hard topics (e.g. low-level optimizations or difficult languages like Haskell). Or maybe even remove gamification altogether.

This is happening already with Discord communities but it's not searchable or usable and the format is not good.

StackOverflow (and mods on a power trip) betrayed the community. I hope something fills the void. I'd be happy to help or even throw a few bucks in. Or at least contribute. Maybe this time not VC-backed nonsense.

alecco3• 2 years ago

Other problems with StackOverflow:

  - gamification problems: e.g. a race to answer instead of thinking it through, downvoting competing answers
  - the accepted answer sometimes is incorrect (but sounds good enough to OP)
  - balance between repeat or vague questions and over-zealous mods blocking
  - need of better mod vetting (ideally, paid)
  - question quality

Some of these could be helped with tools. For example have a small repro and test answers in a VM. And have small ML helpers to fill in the spaces and link to other questions or official docs.

Maybe all answers should be wiki-style (cooperative).

Maybe questions could be first in a staging area and meta-evaluated if it's good, dupe, or too vague. And it could also be improved by the community.

And some mechanism to avoid Eternal September!

layer84• 2 years ago

Maybe all answers should be wiki-style (cooperative).

It’s valuable to read different perspectives, and even conflicting opinions, and have them attributed. Having only a cooperative answer would lead to edit wars and would drown out minority perspectives.

Etheryte3• 2 years ago

I feel like this article overlooks a very simple idea at the heart of what Stack Overflow is: there are only so many questions you can ask about e.g. how to write a CSS selector before all the others are duplicates. This is not necessarily a bad thing, the whole idea of Stack Overflow is to have answers to general questions, not to everyone's individual question. A lot of people, especially newcomers, don't understand this though, and then get frustrated when their question gets closed as a dupe. Closing dupes is a feature not a bug, just like all roads lead to Rome, you want your questions to build a linked list to a good canonical question with a quality answer. If the whole site is riddled with a hundred thousand questions that were caused by a typo then everyone would get drowned in the noise. In other words, as far as I'm concerned this is working as intended, Stack Overflow is a QA site, not tech support.

lkrubner• 2 years ago

"the whole idea of Stack Overflow is to have answers to general questions, not to everyone's individual question"

But why? I ran a site called WPQuestions.com for 7 years, it was where people paid between $10 to $50 to get fast answers for their WordPress questions. I called it "micro consulting" in that the consultants were answering small questions for small fees. While I get that StackOverflow wanted to be free, I wonder why it didn't commit to being more of a Helpdesk for people in need. Why have general answers, when people have such an urgent need for specific answers to their specific questions? An incredibly wasted opportunity. Even more so, with AI able to answer all of the general questions, the only avenue open to non-AI companies is answering very specific questions that are heavily context dependent.

Etheryte3• 2 years ago

Answering everyone's specific personal questions is geared towards beginners and doesn't add any value to others. E.g. fixing your typo doesn't help the next guy understand why their code doesn't work. Explaining the general case is timeless and valuable to all skill levels. There are plenty of sites that do what you describe, but there's a reason Stack Overflow became widely known and used instead: the QA is applicable to everyone working in that space, not just that one person who asked about their specific case.

frereubu2• 2 years ago

Depends on your use case in terms of the time pressure you're under, but I learnt a lot from SO answers. Having to figure out how a general answer applied to a specific question taught me much more than getting a specific answer to a specific question.

JohnBooty3• 2 years ago

Non-rhetorical question: is it possible to be both? That is: be a support/micro-consulting site and a repository for canonical knowledge and best practices?

Stack Overflow sort of flirted with this idea, I guess, with the concept of attaching "bounties" to your questions. The bounties were just Stack Overflow points, not cash. But AFAIK that wouldn't spare your question from being marked as dupe so you still couldn't use SO for support.

aucisson_masque• 2 years ago

pretty much, the article doesn't take into account all factor. There is so more question you can ask until you end up having most question already answered.

The 'dated' user interface is irrelevant, people don't scroll it endlessly like they do on facebook. they come for question and answer, the ui is fast and well made for that purpose.

berkes• 2 years ago

the ui is fast and well made for that purpose.

The UX not so much though.

There's so many x.stackexchange.com estates that often overlap (devops, serverfault, linux, askubuntu etc).

The search is, and has always been, very poor to unusable. I've always just reverted to DDG or google to search stackoverflow.

Having loads of answers and questions in a clean and fast UI is good, but if no-one can actually find the right Q and A, the overall "interface" is just outdated and poor.

(Edit: related: I've always voiced the opinion that "duplicates" aren't solved with more or harder moderation, but with better search)

sh_tomer• 2 years ago

That would be correct if technology doesn't advance and change constantly, which is not the case. New frameworks, new technology, new versions for programming languages are constantly on the rise, so I would expect that will be a good reasons to ask more new questions on SO, but that's not the case anymore.

cutemonster• 2 years ago

I think you did some "grammar typos" with the two "not the case"?

philbo• 2 years ago

Closing dupes is a feature not a bug

Yes, but it's implemented in a user-hostile manner that kills engagement and therefore retention.

A friendlier implementation imo, would be for the asker to be shown the duplicated answer(s) inline under their question, with a note that it's a dupe and a link to the original question(s). That leaves them with a vastly different experience, and regular users can still continue to see it as just closed. Kinda like shadow banning, but healthier.

klez6• 2 years ago

A friendlier implementation imo, would be for the asker to be shown the duplicated answer(s) inline under their question, with a note that it's a dupe and a link to the original question(s).

That would occupy a lot of space. What's wrong with the current approach of posting a link to the duplicate? Mind you, when the first user votes to close as a duplicate, the system automatically posts a comment with a text more or less like "this question already has an answer on this link http://stackoverflow.com/.... If you think this case is different please state why". Then after three votes the question gets closed.

But please notice it can still be reopened. Users with 3000+ reputations (so not only what many people percieve as sort of barons on stackoverflow) can vote to reopen. And three votes are enough to reopen a question.

ahmahxee• 2 years ago

Instead of closing dups, I think they should go into a pile and "a link" shows you the list. The reader can then sift through them. Literal duplicates could still be closed from there. I've run into many closed dups where the original answer, while still correct, didn't click for me where the closed question got responses that gave me the Aha! moment.

SEO the hell out of the "pile pages" so the top hits go to something useful, as opposed to a closed question with everyone commenting that it's the top Google result.

detaro• 2 years ago

Closing dupes is a feature not a bug

Closing actual dupes? yes. Closing as "dupe" questions that sound similar to other questions, that's a massive bug, and happens if "close all dupes" is a major goal for people, over "ensure I understand the question and the question I think it's a a dupe of" (which can be quite hard and specific!), the overall context (yes, the question was answered in 2009 with "use jQuery". No, that's not the answer in 2024, but there is no process to "re-open" a question where the state of the art has changed), ...

klez6• 2 years ago

but there is no process to "re-open" a question where the state of the art has changed)

Of course there is. When you get closing privileges you also get re-open privileges. And, believe it or not, people do reopen questions when it's appropriate.

JohnBooty3• 2 years ago

    the overall context (yes, the question was 
    answered in 2009 with "use jQuery". No, that's 
    not the answer in 2024

This is the crux of SO's problem. At scale, it's just an impossible task for the moderators to parse out this sort of context since the problem space (the number of potential dupes) is massive and getting larger every day.

At a minimum, for that problem to be overcome, IMO there would need to be a lot of metadata associated with each question so that moderators could make faster and more accurate judgement calls regarding the question of, "is question A a dupe of question B? are question B's answers still relevant?"

This seems like an issue where LLMs could actually be of some assistance. In my experience ChatGPT has been pretty good about understanding that sort of change over time and which solutions are deprecated. I wouldn't want LLMs making the decisions outright, but I could see them being a valuable assist for human moderators.

apwheele• 2 years ago

This is a good take on that admin like identifying dupes is a feature and can be grating for newcomers.

But I don't think their is a practical upper bound on good questions though, so the reduction in total questions and answers in those graphs is definitely not good.

I have always thought the scale itself is very hard to maintain. I thought the different sites had a good balance but it is hard work. Mods and superusers should get compensation.

ruthmarx• 2 years ago

Closing dupes is a feature not a bug

The problem is with uneducated mods who falsely close a question as a dupe.

Separating real dupes from possibles dupes is a hard task, but if they are not up to the task then SO needed to find people that were or change the system.

dpkirchner• 2 years ago

SO wouldn't be nearly as annoying and avoided if they bothered to noindex or 301-redirect closed-duplicate questions. I mean, both of those would also be terrible, but at least it would reduce noise in all of our search results.

mrgoldenbrown• 2 years ago

IME the problem is that the criteria for "dupe" is way too low. Like, I start with a question asking how to do X in .NET8, which is what I am trying to answer. But it's closed as a dupe of something else that answers the "same" question for .NET framework 4.5, an API that was deprecated 10 years ago. Part of this might be Microsoft's awful naming choices, but some is also Stack Overflows obsession with no dupes.

JohnBooty3• 2 years ago

    there are only so many questions you can ask about e.g. 
    how to write a CSS selector before all the others are 
    duplicates

Right, but there's a staggering number of permutations of other factors.

Think how many ways there have been to center a freaking HTML element over the years! There are, at a minimum, at least 10-20 "correct" answers to that question over the years.

Even today, that answer varies a lot. What is your render target? A state of the art desktop browser with automatic updates turned on? Browser in some locked down corporate/government/military environment that is 5 or 10 or 20 years old? HTML embedded in email? Some combination of those?

But Stack Overflow's design lacks that kind of specificity - there's no metadata associated with questions that would reliably specify the specific environment and software/library versions being targeted.

And even when the person asking that question does give that information, the moderators don't have the time or the inclination to manually and laboriously parse out those specifics and compare them to the specifics of the other possible dupe candidates... a comparison space which grows by zillions of candidates per hour.

code_biologist• 2 years ago

The views chart is wildly wrong and misleading in the context presented. The linked query [1] returns aggregate views by question creation date — when it should be showing aggregate views by view date. It's not surprising that earlier questions have racked up a lot more views.

[1] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/185820...

Sammi• 2 years ago

I don't understand the difference you are describing, but the data you link to shows a very similar graph to the OP. Or at least I can't see what the difference is. Could you elaborate?

josh-sematic• 2 years ago

If a question was created in 2013 and viewed by somebody in 2020, that moved the line higher in 2013, not 2020. A more useful view would be one where it contributed to 2020. In other words, the graph shown answers “how often were questions viewed, dependent on when they were written.” The point the post is trying to make would benefit more from “how many total views were there in a given year.”

dagelf2• 2 years ago

Ah... the graph of "how many real programmers are left".

Behold this X post, and cringe as you slowly die... https://x.com/dagelf/status/1827622956849078618

nunobrito• 2 years ago

Yeah, that site where is difficult to place an answer and you get criticized often by derranged people. Never participated there again.

m11a• 2 years ago

I think some contributing factors are:

1) a lot of questions have been answered. How often do you ask something that is answered by a 2010-2014 answer very well? IME, often

2) programming isn’t as niche as it used to be. these days, a lot of SO is just asking for free labour on very niche questions like an exception someone is getting. which was never the point of SO

there’s a wealth of answers on SO historically, which are great. But I don’t remember the last time I used SO to answer a specific question for a recent software tool, or relied on any post-2021 question/answer

SebFender• 2 years ago

A great example of where rules took over usage.

dagelf2• 2 years ago

... another factor... don't underestimate the power of Google's algorithm to subvert. Don't have to look far for examples. What's the source of most of their traffic?

SO is still the best evergreen forum for a bunch of things. Not to mention, how much dumber would today's almost-not-dumb AI's be without its data?! Not everyone should measure their "health" in terms of foot traffic. "The best things on the internet can't be measured?" ... a modern counterpart to "can't buy me love?"

nottorp6• 2 years ago

2. Heavy moderation discouraged people from asking questions.

... or answering questions.

If you answer with anything but something ready to copy/paste the moderators will frown upon it at best. No "teach the man how to fish" answers.

To rephrase in 2024 terms:

Before LLMs SO's moderation discouraged questions that a modern LLM couldn't answer (anything going into more than syntax) and also discouraged answers that are beyond what a modern LLM can generate (i.e. code ready to copy/paste, possibly wrong because neither the LLM nor the reputation chaser bothered to at least try to compile it).

But let's not blame just the moderation. Karma whores that answer every new question with a mildly related copy/paste within seconds have been a thing ever since SO grew up.

ivanjermakov• 2 years ago

My problem with SO (does not affect other Stack Exchange sites) is that the more experience I gain in programming, the more I find more efficient ways to solve my problem (read the spec/source code), therefore less use cases I have for SO.

Additionally, isn't the goal of a site like SO is to finally answer every programming question? It is not an insurmountable task if you disallow opinionated questions and be strict about duplicates.

I feel like it serves its purpose well and will be a valuable resource for years to come.

The Fall of StackOverflow: A Data-Driven Analysis

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