2y ago

The Fall of Stack Overflow

observablehq.com The Fall of Stack Overflow

Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive. The charts below show the usage repr...

The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.

What happened?

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2y ago

The Fall of Stack Overflow

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2y ago

The Fall of Stack Overflow

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260 comments

chatGPT doesn't chastize me like a drill instructor whenever I ask it coding problems.
- It's funny because if you look at the numbers it looks like traffic started to go down before chat GPT was actually released to the public, indicating that maybe people thought that the site was too much of a pain in the ass to deal with before that and GPT is just the nail in the coffin.
  Personally, of all the attempts I've had it positive interactions on that site I've had only one and at this point I treat it as a read-only site because it's not worth my time arguing pedants just to get a question answered.
  If I went to the library and all the librarians were assholes I probably wouldn't go to that library anymore either.
- It just invents the answer out of thin air, or worse, it gives you subtle errors you won't notice until you're 20 hours into debugging
  
  so, like SO?
  
  I agree with you that it sometimes gives wrong answers. But most of the time, it can help better than StackOverflow, especially with simple problems. I mean, there wouldn't be such an exodus from StackOverflow if ChatGPT answers were so bad right ?
  But, for very specific subjects or bizarre situations, it obviously cannot replace SO.
  
  And you won't know if the answers it gave you are OK or not until too late, seems like the Russian Roulette of tech support, it's very helpful until it isn't
  Depending on Eliza MK50 for tech support doesn't stop feeling absurd to me
  
  How do you know the answer that gets copied from SO will not have any downsides later? Chatgpt is just a tool. I can hit myself in the face with a wrench as well, if I use it in a dumb way. IMHO the people that get bitten in the ass by chatgpt answers are the same that just copied SO code without even trying to understand what it is really doing...
  
  Sounds the same as believing a random stranger.
  How many SO topics have you seen with only one, universally agreed upon solution?
  
  Just like real humans.

260 comments