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?
chatGPT doesn’t chastize me like a drill instructor whenever I ask it coding problems.
It’s funny because if you look at the numbers it looks like traffic started to go down before chat GPT was actually released to the public, indicating that maybe people thought that the site was too much of a pain in the ass to deal with before that and GPT is just the nail in the coffin.
Personally, of all the attempts I’ve had it positive interactions on that site I’ve had only one and at this point I treat it as a read-only site because it’s not worth my time arguing pedants just to get a question answered.
If I went to the library and all the librarians were assholes I probably wouldn’t go to that library anymore either.
It just invents the answer out of thin air, or worse, it gives you subtle errors you won’t notice until you’re 20 hours into debugging
so, like SO?
Just like real humans.