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 was going to say ChatGPT.
I think the smugness of StackOverflow is still part of it. Even if ChatGPT sometimes fabricates imaginary code, it’s tone is flowery and helpful, compared to the typical pretentiousness of Stackoverflow users.
Also, you can have it talk like a catgirl maid, so I find that’s particularly helpful as well.
ChatGPT works very well (and patiently) when the person asking the question is asking one that has been answered a thousand times before on Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow works poorly when google search results for it have been declining in quality over the years and it gets cluttered with duplicate (and unanswered) content that isn’t removed in a timely manner to keep the people who answer questions with quality material (not “try {code}. Hope this helps.”).
For an individual who is unsure about what to ask or how to ask, ChatGPT can walk them through the common problems much more easily and with better (and prompt) feedback compared to trying to get someone to help in the constant scrolling of the new questions feed.
On the other hand, if you are able to ask the question well, and have something sufficiently interesting that requires human eyes, ChatGPT becomes less useful while Stack Overflow becomes more useful.
In my experience, ChatGPT is very good at interpreting documentation. So even if it hasn’t been asked on stack overflow, if it’s in the documentation that ChatGPT has indexed (or can crawl with an extension) you’ll get a pretty solid answer. I’ve been asking it a lot of AWS questions because it’s 100x better than deciphering the ancient texts that amazon publishes. Although sometimes the AWS docs are just wrong anyway.