StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014 (minus a very transient blip from covid).

Then the chagpt effect is a sudden drop in visitors. But the rate of decline after that looks more or less the same as pre-chatgpt.

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silverwind 2 hours ago | parent [-]

StackOverflow was killed by its toxic moderators. I hope it stays online thought because it's massive source of knowledge, although in many cases outdated already.

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devsda an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Overzealous moderator issue was probably the main reason but I think the direct answer and summary from Google directly also had a significant impact on StackOverflow. It took away potential contributors and reduced the incentives for active contribution.

In a way it was a trial and glimpse of what was coming with the AI revolution

	▲	DSMan195276 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I agree it was a moderation issue, but for me it's Reddit that largely replaced my SO usage starting some years ago. Reddit is pretty similar to SO in design, but the more decentralized nature of the moderation means that questions rarely get "closed as duplicate" and answers tend to be more up-to-date as a result. There's not always a consensus answer and I'm often looking across multiple threads on the same thing, but that's still better than an outdated SO post.
	▲	usefulcat an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> It took away potential contributors There were multiple times I wanted to contribute to SO but couldn't because I didn't have sufficient "reputation", or something. I shrugged and moved on.

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foxglacier 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I always thought StackOverflow was meant to fizzle out over time as more questions get answered and don't need to be asked again. Perhaps the decline is just a necessary part of their rule of having no duplicate questions - keeping it as a clean repository of knowledge rather than a messy forum.

Just the other day a question I asked about 10 years ago got flagged as a duplicate. It turns out somebody else had asked the same question several years later and got a better answer than my question got, so that other one is the canonical one and mine is pushed away. It feels kind of offensive but it makes complete sense if the goal is to provide useful answers to people searching.

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RHSeeger 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately, the rule of no duplicate questions also destroyed lots of questions that weren't duplicates... because _someone_ couldn't be bothered to read them and realize it wasn't the same.

Plus, there were a lot of fun questions they were really interesting to start with; and they stopped allowing them.

	▲	jamesfinlayson an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, this. I've asked a couple of questions where the only responses are from people saying "possible dupe of x" where x is something that has a couple of the same words but no relation to what I'm asking.

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nextaccountic an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The major trouble with StackOverflow is that nominally duplicate questions may have different answers if asked on 2011 vs 2026 - and the trouble is that answer rankings (the thing that determines what answers are in the top) don't decay over time. So if someone try to answer an old question with up to date info, they won't garner enough upvotes to overcome the old, previously correct but now outdated accepted answer at the top. (even with a ranking decay, there is little incentive to give a new up to date answer to a established thread - people are more likely to contribute to brand new threads)

It would be better to allow duplicates in this specific case, but mark the old thread as outdated and link the questions in such a way that one can see the old thread and compare it to the new thread.

	▲	snailmailman a minute ago \| parent [-]
		This is something I saw all the time. I’d look something up, knowing that there was probably an easy way to do <basic programming task> in modern c++ with one function call. Find the stack overflow thread, answer from 10+ years ago. Not modern C++. New questions on the topic closed as duplicate. Occasionally the correct answer would be further down, not yet upvoted. “Best practice” changes over time. I frequently saw wrong answers with install instructions that were outdated, commands that don’t function on newer OS version, etc etc.

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appplication 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem with this, and why SO’s downfall was completely self-inflicted, is that the correct answer from 2013 is only occasionally still the correct answer in 2018. There are a lot of other issues with SO’s general moderation policy but well and truly it was as idiotic and myopic as it was toxic.

They treated subjective questions about programming methods as if they were universal constants. It was completely antithetical to the actual pursuit of applied knowledge, or collecting and discussing best practices and patterns of software design. And it was painfully obvious for years this was as a huge problem, well before LLMs.

That said, I will say after being traumatized by having my threads repeatedly closed, I got so good at boiling down my problem to minimal reproducible examples that I almost never needed to actually post, because I’d solve it myself along the way.

So I guess it was great for training me to be a good engineer in the abstract sense. but absolutely shit at fostering any community or knowledge base.

	▲	gf000 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> that the correct answer from 2013 is only occasionally still the correct answer in 2018 Exactly! They should have added proper structuring to questions/replies so that it could specifically apply for Language/library version X. Later, such a question could be answered again (either by proving it's still correct for version X+1, or by giving a new answer) - that way people wouldn't have to look at a new reply with 2 votes vs an older, possibly outdated one with 100 and make a decision which to prefer.