> 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.
"monthly questions asked" is a weird metric to measure the decline of StackOverflow tho. How many times are people gonna ask how to compare 2 dates in python, or how to efficiently iterate an array in javascript? According to the duplicates rule on SO, should be once anyway. So it's just inevitable that "monthly questions asked" will forever decrease after reaching its peak, since everything has already been asked. Didn't mean it was dead tho, people still needed to visit the site to read the responses.
A better metric to measure its decline would be "monthly visits", which I guess was still pretty high pre LLM (100s of millions per month?), even if the "monthly questions asked" was declining. But now I imagine their "monthly visits" is closer to zero than 1M. I mean, even if you don't use Claude and its friends, searching anything about programming on Google returns a Gemini answer that probably comes from StackOverflow, removing any reason to ever visit the site…
Your first point only holds if nothing ever changes in the programming world. People write new languages and frameworks all the time. How do you compare dates in pandas? How about polars? Duckdb? Etc.
> [0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-... (monthly question asked on Stack Overflow)
"monthly questions asked" is a weird metric to measure the decline of StackOverflow tho. How many times are people gonna ask how to compare 2 dates in python, or how to efficiently iterate an array in javascript? According to the duplicates rule on SO, should be once anyway. So it's just inevitable that "monthly questions asked" will forever decrease after reaching its peak, since everything has already been asked. Didn't mean it was dead tho, people still needed to visit the site to read the responses.
A better metric to measure its decline would be "monthly visits", which I guess was still pretty high pre LLM (100s of millions per month?), even if the "monthly questions asked" was declining. But now I imagine their "monthly visits" is closer to zero than 1M. I mean, even if you don't use Claude and its friends, searching anything about programming on Google returns a Gemini answer that probably comes from StackOverflow, removing any reason to ever visit the site…