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 49 days.
What happened?
I remember going to the vmware communities looking for help almost 20 years ago and some smug person was really upset that I didn’t use the right wording when I was starting out. He spent something like 2 whole days worth of posting. It was a chore to divine what he was saying while stumbling through his weird rant/lecture about proper terminology. I eventually called him out on it and never went back.
So long story short, communities and companies who don’t nip this kind of behavior in the bud and heavily moderate the assholes almost universally turn into the next expertsexchange community. Stack Overflow kind of leaned heavily into enshitification because of this, they eventually just stopped caring about what was being put on their forums, maintaining high content quality, and getting rid of argumentative power-users. Ironically reddit was a much nicer community and usually you’d find an answer or get help without the attitude, especially in the IT space.
SO claims a lot of this is because it is meant to be a tool where people go for correct answers and I get that, but getting downvoted or your question being closed as a duplicate feel mean regardless of how welcoming the admins claim they’re trying to make the place.
A big part of the problem is that users seek out reasons to close answers as opposed to seeking ways to try and fix them and avoid them being closed. And they’re rewarded for it! I think review queues overall are probably a positive but when you’re sitting there just going through them and you find one that could be closed as is but also could possibly be fixed, which are you going to try and do? Vote to close which takes like one second of effort or try and edit which could take a lot longer and may even involve input from OP? Then even if you do try and fix it, what if everyone else does vote to close?
I’ve had a question closed and my comments explaining why it wasn’t a duplicate deleted. The response from everyone was that because I have been using the site off and on for years they expected me to understand the process so they didn’t explain to me that I needed to edit and instead just deleted my comment and didn’t tell me anything.
The amount of anxiety I have when asking a question there is insane. And I have 6k+ rep. They weren’t wrong, I do know the site well. I have used it a lot. But like, of me, an experienced user, is afraid to ask a question that’s messed up. I’ve sat there and been like “okay, people will probably think it is a duplicate of this, I really hate getting questions closed as duplicates so I’m going to preemptively explain why it isn’t a a dupe” and then they still close it as a dupe. It’s insane. Or they find the one magical combination of words that I didn’t quite think of despite spending a good ten minutes or so looking for dupes prior to asking that did ask my question the act smug about it.
I don’t really use the sites anymore. Not even the more lighthearted and fun ones like RPG and World Building. I’ve just been so soured to it.
Yup that’s practically the same problem I had. I posted maybe one question over the past 15 years. I got crapped on by one of their power users for not doing something properly and I never posted or asked a question again. I don’t even remember what account I originally used, either.
This is sort of why I like ChatGPT, I don’t get harassed for asking something incredibly stupid, and the crappy answers are about as bad as the “marked as duplicate” nonsense that gets me nowhere anyways. Why bother trying to interface with those communities ever again? IT in general already tilts heavily towards salty misanthropes, I’ll pass on that.