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?
SO is such a miserable and toxic place that oftentimes I’d rather read more documentation or reach out to someone elsewhere like Discord. And I would never post a question there or comment there.
I’d rather read the docs than just about anything. I love good documentation. I wanna know how and why things work.
The problem is that basically nobody has good docs. They are almost all either incomplete or unreadable.
While I agree, writing good docs is hard for a very intangible benefit. Honestly, it feels like doing the same work twice, with the prospect of doing it again and again in the future as the software is updated. It’s a little demoralizing.
It is hard, I agree. I’m not very good at it myself. But even semi-decent docs are better than googling around or stepping through a decompiled package.
And it’s super useful to new developers, and would have saved me a lot of time and frustration when I was new.