Do I read that correctly — it is close to zero today?!

I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.

Not zero, but it is smaller than when it launched originally. And this is questions asked, not how many people are visiting and reading posts.

Still a couple thousand away from 0.

But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available.

I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there

It's surely both.

Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest

Most questions have negative karma.

Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem.

All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders.

SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them.

SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls.

It's both. I stopped asking questions because the mods were so toxic, and I stopped answering questions because I wasn't going to train the AI for free.

It can be both. Push and pull factors work better together than either does individually.

It's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now for confirmation.

I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_.

The last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun. If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small difference is probably due to the turn of the year.

There are tabs to change to a table view. I see a peak of 207k in 2014 and the last month was only 3,710.

Maybe the graph doesn’t include questions that get closed by moderators?

The steep decline started way before llms

AI didn't necessarily kill SO because it was strictly better at giving technical answers (and it certainly wasn't better when GPTs initially burst onto the mass-appeal scene several years ago), but that it provided an alternative (even if subpar) where users could actually get responses to their questions (and furthermore not be ridiculed by psychopaths while doing so was the cherry on top).