This chart has been going around showing Stack Overflow's rise and fall in terms of questions asked. I joined the company as a community manager in 2013 and left in 2019, which tracks pretty well with the plateau there in the middle. Before I left I wrote up my concerns: https://lnkd.in/gfjw4udS The problem wasn't with questions. Stack Overflow was getting far too many questions and far too many were basically unanswerable. No the problem was the number of people willing and able to answer questions. Since Stack Overflow was developer-centered company, it naturally took a technological approach to the problem. The system was designed to filter out as many questions as possible automatically and give veteran members of the site power to close (and potentially delete) questions. But that created a deep-seated culture of suspicion of questions. Questions, in the Stack Overflow culture, are annoyances that must be dealt with. Even now, with question levels at the level they were during the site's beta period, people in the community are terrified that bad questions will destroy everything the site stands for. The reality is they are probably right! The community was founded from the start with a exclusionary mentality and resisted attempts to moderate. In the end it will get what it wants: a manageable stream of questions. Sadly that result comes with the consequence of very few answers of any quality.
Nico Hertz
3w
I hope they made a deal with some AI giant. What if ChatGPT made it easy to post your question if you are not satisfied with its help? There is still value in human answers.
finally, someone acknowledging the real problem with SO, not pretending it's dying purely because of AI
Looking at the chart you can also see a downward trend from 2016 which only gets sharper at 2023. So it's not just AI.
Gokhan U.
2w
Mostly bad advice on there anyway.
Sam Brand
3w
It’s a little heartbreaking but that’s creative destruction for you I suppose.
Stack Overflow Teams was launched in 2018, which actually lines up pretty well with this graph, too. Focus was given to the for-profit platform rather than the public platform that built up the platform's relevance and usefulness. When I was there, I kept pushing for better accessibilty promises and improved moderator tools because our curators were struggling, but they were only ever focused on the for-profit platform and fixing things there, because companies refused to sign up for Teams until accessibility issues were addressed. Stack Overflow is yet another example of ignoring its users and allowing greed to dictate the company's direction.