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 represented by a moving average of days. Traffic Votes Posts Traffic table Posts table Votes table
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Great! One less opponent on the way to dominate the developer’s question/answer space! The last worth mentioning opponent is AI. Oh, wait! We can integrate it in forum just like we have bots for news! We have already won!
Ok, now more seriously … Stack **/** stuff maybe (ehem … of course) does not have the best community, but it’s huge. I’m surprised how fast it loses traffic. I wonder if it’s only this site or maybe other sites have similar issues … How does it looks like for our forums?
In the next industrial revolution the AI could take most of jobs and therefore the only jobs would be engineers that would maintain the system and “human” services in case you don’t want to have a contact with AI / robot which does not have any natural emotions. Anyway, looks like our community is safe at least before atomic war, so for now we can close the topic.
True, it is more convenient to ask an LLM a question than to search StackOverflow, however many devs will learn the hard way how wrong LLMs are sometimes. Anything remotely more complicated and ChatGPT will start to hallucinate or suggest code that is slightly wrong - code that compiles and seems to work, but it is inefficient or bugged.
ChatGPT is great for small/homework like programming. Try to replace a good C++ programmer with ChatGPT in a medium to large code .
In short term? Sure. In long term? I don’t think so. Look that for example Ray Tracing which many years ago was something amazing for creating a single movies is now better or worse supported by modern graphic cards, so in theory it could be used even in hobby projects. I think that same may be with AI. Alternatively big corporations may block it if they would smell too much money in something they would call like “AI Cloud Services”.
Something to think about is the number of posts and votes have been declining since 2021, before chatgpt, so maybe there’s something else causing this fall besides chatgpt… or am I reading the graphics wrongly?
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