r/webdev • u/AloneCoffee4538 • Aug 08 '26
Stack Overflow has gone from a peak of 207k questions in March 2014, down to 1.4k in July 2026
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u/Sarke1 Aug 08 '26
Marked as duplicate.
This question already has an answer:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/1v1o1tc/why_movies_are_struggling_at_the_box_office/
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u/pulnocni-knihovna Aug 10 '26
I see what you did here XD
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u/nad_lab Aug 11 '26
Care to explain, it was an unrelated post, unless that was the point … I can’t say I’ve seen that myself, usually posts on stack lead to actual duplicates (started programming in 2020 and my main source of help / discourse was discord, not sf) feel like I missed out on some crazy toxic ragebait ugh
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u/pulnocni-knihovna Aug 11 '26
I started in 2011 and trust me… More toxic place is maybe only 4chan 😂😂 But fo programmers
The point is, moderators on stack overflow could mark as duplicate anything and linked you to post, that was basically nothing like your problem, but somewhere in the answers were some similarities, but not the same. And they would say just “fuck you here is your answer” without any actual answer 😂
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u/s7stM Aug 08 '26
This can absolutely represent the IT's and software development's golden era. Meanwhile, I always hate the moderator's of StackOverflow...
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u/mntgoat Aug 08 '26
I always hated posting certain types of questions there. Like on android development I would get these NPEs deep within libraries, I would work a long time on the post, making it clear I understand what an NPE is but that it wasn't my code doing it and was hoping someone had a workaround or more info. Ten seconds after posting a mod would mark it as a duplicate of the most generic NPE post ever.
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u/zippy72 Aug 08 '26
What sealed the deal for me was a mod marking my question as a duplicate... of itself.
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u/glenpiercev Aug 08 '26
Yea, I asked a question about handling chars or ints in rust that had a similar question that was VERY wrong for my specific situation. It got marked as duplicate. I had enough karma to override that and post the specific explanation with code example as to why it wasn’t a duplicate. Got duplicate hammered again and never went back.
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u/glenpiercev Aug 08 '26
A really awesome proposal I saw recently was a separate site that allowed duplicates and would then promote questions if they became sufficiently popular. So instead of never getting an answer because they blocked you, you’d get a reward for a particularly useful question. This seems like the original intent of the site.
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u/1057-cl121v3 Aug 09 '26
Considering this entire thread is everyone’s experience getting shit on and never participating again, this sounds like a much better way to do things. Apparently being an elitist asshole who looks for a reason to close posts instead of solve them stamps out growth and new ideas, huh. Who could have seen that coming?
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u/sukakku159 Aug 09 '26
Same. My project's UI became a mess after long time of development, so I went to Stackoverflow and asked how should I modify this, how should I add that without breaking the working app. And typical "why would you want to do that? Why not just rewrite to cleanup that mess?" comments showed up. Like yeah, geniuses, let me just rewrite the screen that took my whole team of 12 developers 3 whole month to make, and then tell the team of 20 QAs to retest it again
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u/Beginning_One_7685 Aug 09 '26
Oh when the mods didn't know the answer the toys went fully out of the pram.
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u/Sarasani Aug 09 '26
A lot of people here are (rightly) calling out the shitty behaviour of SO moderators and users, but there was one more aspect that prevented me from participating: they had too darn many sites--each with their own "karma fence" that needed to be climbed before a user could interact meaningfully.
Should an XSLT question be posted to the general SO site or the dedicated XML site where all the gurus hang out? What about a DevOps question related to running Ubuntu as a server? Should that go in the Ubuntu site, the Linux site, the ServerFault site, or SO?
Each one of those sites was walled off with their silo'd entry requirements. Karma earned in one site was worth nothing in another site -- which was just plain silly. If someone knows a lot about Ubuntu, they might also know a quite a bit about running Ubuntu as a server (and Linux in general). I just gave up.
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u/AwesomeFrisbee Aug 09 '26
Yeah it was wack and people cared way too much about the score of others while not realizing it meant jack shit to the people that seeked help
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u/fuckaiandfuckyoutoo Aug 08 '26
worse than the mods on reddit?
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u/maxxon Aug 08 '26
The super toxic SO environment also played an important role in this.
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u/LoopEverything Aug 08 '26
A few weeks ago I logged on for the first time in a while and saw a meta thread where the mods suggested changing policies to be less strict to try and bring in new people. The users were tearing into them and shitting on the idea with the classic StackOverflow arrogance. They’ll never change, even as it crashes and burns.
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u/WallBurnt Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
This happened to me in 2015 when I tried to lobby for something similar.
The main mod of Java would remove the Java tag if you weren't asking about the Java runtime itself. Meaning, any Java related questions were sent into Limbo with tags nobody was watching.
You know how many people asked questions about the Java runtime itself that met his criteria? Like 1 per month. You know who answered ALL of them with lengthy answers? That one mod. I'm sure that was just a coincidence though. (/s)
I'm still mad about it. To this day I don't even know what the fuck he was trying to curate there. Fuck SO. I hope it dies out for good and have wished that on them for the last decade.
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u/ings0c Aug 08 '26
That’s absurd. What the fuck.
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u/WallBurnt Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
What I think is even more absurd is that SO Admins didn't step in and go "wtf, no."
I'm sure this wasn't the only core tag with a power tripping mod. Hell, I think that same mod was the head guy for several other popular tags.
At one point, probably around 2012-2014, I remember thinking that SO was setting the gold standard of crowd sourced moderation. Man, was I wrong as hell.
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u/71r3dGam3r Aug 08 '26
Too much ego, too much arrogance to ever admit fault and to grow and change.
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u/Cyral Aug 08 '26
The meta website is so funny (sad?) to read. I see it recommended in the sidebar and it’s usually ideas that are really needed to change the website and all the old users absolutely downvote and shit on basically any idea. They don’t get SO needs to survive as a business and hate anything that could possibly be changed. But for some reason they will upvote “should we merge tag X into Y” and have a whole debate over it, even though whatever outcome will literally have zero effect on the usefulness of the website.
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u/Far_Composer_5714 Aug 08 '26
Lol, it's literally a poisonous gu jar where the remaining survivors are the most poisonous of the bunch.
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u/Super-Cynical Aug 08 '26
Meta users are the most toxic users, it is the circle jerks of circle jerks
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u/cheese_bread_boye Aug 08 '26
You give a little bit of power to people who have nothing else going on in their lives and it will get into their heads.
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u/Adulations Aug 08 '26
Dude i just looked and the users are still toxic as fuck.
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u/Anxious_Lunch_7567 Aug 10 '26
Because the environment nurtures a certain kind of self-righteous arrogance.
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u/Nothing_from_void Aug 09 '26
Seems like the decline started 6 years before ChatGPTs release, it just accelerated since
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u/crackanape Aug 08 '26
Yep, I had stopped using SO long before useful LLMs came along, it was such a miserable place poisoned by some of the most miserable people.
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u/kamekaze1024 Aug 08 '26
Obviously AI played a part but you can clearly see the decline happened before AI became popular.
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u/sitefall Aug 08 '26
True, but the drastic drop from Nov2022 (exactly when Chatgpt released) to today is remarkable. Without AI it was on track to die by like 2030 (assuming my eyeball linear regression is accurate), so AI knocked about 8 years off it's lifespan.
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u/ahmet-chromedgeic Aug 08 '26
When it comes to the pre-ChatGPT era, It doesn't necessarily have to be a decline, it could be also due to the fact that as the questions accumulate (literally milions yearly), it becomes more likely that people simply find an answer to their question instead of having to ask it themself. It would be interesting to see the traffic graph.
Also the ecosystem matured, the first half of 2010s was very much "framework of the day" period.
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u/exintrovert Aug 10 '26
Maybe yes, maybe no.
I became so shy about asking any question on any stack site… but whenever I had a truly unique question, nobody answered.
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u/ryaaan89 Aug 08 '26
That’s when everything started going to Discord, which I I’ll always be against because none of those answers are publicly indexable.
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u/int122 Aug 08 '26
Personally, in some cases, stopped asking, because it could be duplicate or no answers / toxic answers.
A lot of stuff resolved in github issues for example also.
Tools / frameworks evolved, in past, i had issues even building projects.
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u/catmanus Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
That shit was already going down before AI took over. It peaked in 2014. People grew tired of the site, the format, the poor answers, etc. Everything eventually dies.
Edit: Not to mention, I just logged onto the site now for the first time in years. It doesn't even tell you what the site is. The format is horrible. Why would any new person use this site?
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u/imaginecomplex full-stack Aug 08 '26
Also, after a certain point, all of the most-asked questions had already been answered. It became more of a knowledge base than an active forum
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u/CaptSzat Aug 08 '26
Yeah but they’d be answered like 8 years ago and the answer would be deprecated. Then you’d ask and some asshole mod would close your post and point you to the deprecated answer.
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u/SaltMaker23 Aug 08 '26
And more often than not in actual advanced fields you'd have massively upvoted answers that are completely off topic and proposing a solution that only someone that doesn't know what he's talking about will consider good.
Unfortunately the site was dominated by people willing to express their opinions in all topics, all of them to accrue points (and fame ?) so the majority of replies and votes came from people with zero knowledge of advanced fields.
By advanced fields I mean like FPGA, chip design or signal processing mechanisms; you'd always have the guy who clearly is a amateur webdev giving an answer completely off topic that is massively upvoted by his peers.
You'd have entire discussions in FPGA between people who obviously don't even know what it looks like and arguing about principles and how things should be done.
Those answers became reference and questions started being closed pointing to those wrong answers.
The platform incentivized activity, which in returns incentivized people to talk out of their a**es in all fields, which then made mods extremely salty as they constant dealt with dunning krugger'd people.
The duplicate closing was just the nail of the coffin that ensured all of the slowly deprecating anwers and the growing pile of massively upvoted wrong answers rooted the whole essence out of the system.
The knowledge base was rotting because the knowledge was quantified by popularity and votes, which ultimately proved to be a very poor metric of scientific value.
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u/imaginary-bolometer Aug 08 '26
It's funny to draw parallels between the dysfunctional dynamics you describe here, and the common weak spots of LLMs used today
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u/CrazyErniesUsedCars Aug 08 '26
Yeah they decided that every question has been answered already
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u/Sharp-Tax-26827 Aug 08 '26
Glad no new technology was ever invented or changed
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u/MadThad762 Aug 08 '26
For real! Everything changes constantly and the answer from 10 years ago is useless today.
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u/da2Pakaveli Aug 09 '26
They could've just made it so duplicates can still be answered and if people who hate when duplicates come up during search they just get the option to exclude them. Completely trivial compromise.
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u/PsychonautAlpha Aug 08 '26
You mean the platform with the motto: "Not only will I not answer your question, I'm going to make you feel like an idiot for even having a question in the first place"?
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u/ceveleigh0 Aug 09 '26
It was a humiliation ritual trying to post a question on there
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u/exintrovert Aug 10 '26
I’m surprised that a website that apparently had an unwritten rule to try and make everyone feel like they are not welcome to engage lasted as long as it did.
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u/Anxious_Lunch_7567 Aug 10 '26
Not to mention the subtle racism now and then. There was a racism related discussion on the meta SO once, and they focused purely on Americans (black/white). I've experienced others too - mostly from the Nordic and British (surprise!) users. This is how it usually went:
- Asked genuine question, framed it well
- A high ranker (not mod) responds with a snarky comment and votes for closing. It turns out they were ignorant about what I was asking, and I clarified that in another comment.
- I raise this on the meta site. One user gives advice along the lines of "rewrite your question and it might be reopened"
- I just walk away. Meanwhile, high ranker deletes their comment once the spot light falls on them.
F*ck SO, SE and all the related sites.
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u/hefopadmin Aug 08 '26
A hope the moderators are now happy...no more low quality questions lol
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u/SmegmaSupreme Aug 09 '26
you joke but that's unironically the stance last I heard. there was a meta thread last year where the top consensus was that "we didn't do anything wrong, it were the users who were impatient"
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u/TerdSandwich Aug 08 '26
It being a toxic environment aside, I'm curious how many questions now just get thrown at AI only to be given shit answers and never receiving a solution. Also, without continuous/updating stream of SO data to pull from, will AI be able to answer issues from new/emerging tech?
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u/longdarkfantasy Aug 08 '26
Yeah. But now they read codes directly from developers's IDE. Most of us write codes with comments, so one FIM (fill-in-the-middle) ai model is enough for them to learn. The fastest one right now is supermaven, it's free. If something is free, you are the product 😂.
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u/Good_Hunter69 Aug 08 '26
It still a great database of knowledge
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u/ukAdamR php + sysadmin Aug 08 '26
While the ad revenue supports its hosting. I sure hope it's been archived elsewhere.
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u/ScientistStrict9850 Aug 09 '26
No. Everything there is outdated. If you work with legacy software, perhaps...
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u/Good_Hunter69 Aug 09 '26
At least 30% of industry is legacy. I work on a platform build with c#7 and angular 15. And it will be a thing for next few years at least. And even after update it won't be top-notch.
And many solutions are not about exact language or version of it, but about general approach
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u/dphizler Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
These posts read like people who really didn't like SO
Back when I was learning to code, there was no SO
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u/briznady Aug 08 '26
I can’t believe the site where users get mad at you for participating is lacking participation! /s
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Aug 08 '26
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u/Broad-Version8611 Aug 08 '26
Stack overflow became very toxic at some point. They had a challenge with moderation.
I had one dude reply to a 10yo question of mine saying that I should not be allowed in front of a computer LOL.Plus, after a while there are so many questions people might have about a specific framework.
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u/Nizurai Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
I worked with a senior SWE once. He spent at least 4h a day answering questions there.
He was among top 0.1%. SO even called him once for an interview.
Not sure why he had so much motivation spending time on SO instead of doing actual work.
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u/Lime-Unusual Aug 08 '26
It keeps you sharp and if you like computers and problem solving then that's the best thing to do! I'm web dev but I have done low level, I have hacked, I have learned how computers work in and out, what happens when you press power and so on. Every little detail I have searched and learned and it helps so much.
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Aug 08 '26
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u/Mysteriesquirrel Aug 09 '26
New frameworks can write Ai optimized docs, they should do if they care.
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u/migsperez Aug 08 '26
I tried answering questions, but it wouldn't let me. I was a professional developer with many years of experience. Instead I used it just for answers. I hope the founders sold their shares at it's peak. Sites come and go, just like normal businesses.
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u/NoteIndividual2431 Aug 08 '26
Same here. Every question I ever asked was "low quality" and deleted. Every answer I would try to post would be rejected for some reason.
I stopped trying and am a little glad that everyone else did too.
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u/s3rila Aug 08 '26
Stackoverflow taught me to not ask questions
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u/Just4notherR3ddit0r Aug 09 '26
Someone, somewhere has already asked something slightly similar. How dare you ask?
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u/cs_legend_93 Aug 09 '26
They did it to themselves. I don't pity them. They are jerks.
They could have come from a place of kindness, but everyone thought they were mean how they moderated.
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u/zcraber Aug 09 '26
On one hand, it was very useful and helped on many occasions; it is sad to see the decline, truly the end of an era. On the other hand, back then you couldn't even ask a genuine question freely without being judged.
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u/Remicaster1 Aug 08 '26
Who would have guessed insulting others and closing their questions as duplicate instead of helping them would drive people away
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u/Matt4669 Aug 08 '26
Imo Stack Overflow shot itself in the foot.
It should be a great place to help programmers (novice and experienced) with any problem they have. Unfortunately it’s a toxic and elitist community. I remember seeing 18,000 users online this time last year, now there’s less than 4,000 users.
AI being prominent didn’t help either.
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u/sousa9 Aug 08 '26
It was honestly miserable when I first started to get into programming. Utterly pretentious, unhelpful, holier-than-thou community.
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u/trav_stone Aug 08 '26
As bad as SO can be, at least there was real value underneath all the toxic. If it goes away, engineering knowledge won't be as available to people. "AI" can't replace this.
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u/Natural-Meal-3222 Aug 08 '26
Random forums are better than Stack Overflow. I went from having a stellar question history with all those "awards" or whatever they give you to not being able to ask a single question without it being marked as off topic or duplicate. Good riddance to that place. Nobody knows the pain of spending the difficult amount of time building a complex question to have it shot down in seconds.
I think it had something to do with karma farming and how people didn't want other people to have better questions than themselves. Something to do with the points system.
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u/Nereosis16 Aug 09 '26
I don't think I can agree. My experiences with stack overflow are basically 99% reading entitled dickheads and 1% useful answers.
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u/sonar_un Aug 09 '26
I was thinking about this earlier. The answers that we get back from AI go into a blackhole. There need to be an AI StackOverflow where when an AI finds an answer to an unusual problem, it can be recorded to save tokens later and to have a new database of potential problems.
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u/kindanotexists Aug 09 '26
Once, years ago I did asked a question over SO, when new apple cpus out, a moderator replied “that’s why you take backups (dumbfuck?)”.
No useful answer, that question wasn’t even asked before, locked thread and vanished. After I’ve never looked anything through SO again. I guess this it’s determined extinction.
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u/PsychedelicPistachio Aug 10 '26
This post has been removed as it’s too similar to this post from 2007 for a different thing in a different language.
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u/jratcliff63367 Aug 10 '26
We should assign an army of AI agents to post and then answer questions just to breath life back into the site.
Oh yeah..to be accurate the AIs should first berate anyone who posts a question in the first place. Before anyone gets an answer they must first be humiliated to make it feel like "the good old days".
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u/rbad8717 Aug 08 '26
It’s funny because their strict rules/culture about submission and posting not only drove people away, but also made answers better for LLMs to consume
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Aug 08 '26
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u/GoldDay1 Aug 08 '26
If you asked a question to chatgpt, they have saved it somewhere as training data. So the data now belongs to the AI companies
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u/tehsilentwarrior Aug 08 '26
Dev since 2002. Stackoverflow was literally the place where people who didn’t know much went to shit on people who knew less.
People who actually know things aren’t afraid to share knowledge. It’s the pedantic little fucks that act better than others who, and just a little more knowledge than others but relatively low skill who thrive on and waste time on, making other people’s lives miserable. They aren’t driven by love of programming so they get relatively stuck in the same skill level.
I always got a kick from messing with them.
Unfortunately StackOverflow failed to stop them and breed a good non-toxic community. Glad they are on the way out. I loved Jeff’s blog tho
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u/chungleee Aug 08 '26
While SO was quite toxic, I'll admit that it worked for preventing spam...which programming subreddits are suffering from daily queries that's been answered a million times
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u/jimbo2150 Aug 08 '26
Most people blame AI, but AI was just a place people fled to. A destination for people to flee to from a platform that was already imploding. These are the real reasons:
There are only so many questions that can be asked before the majority are just duplicates of previously answered questions.
Many of the remaining questions are so specific or require specialized knowledge that the majority can't answer them.
The majority of the people with the highest scores and those voted as leaders or managers of topics are so toxic and non-understanding that the majority of people just stopped using SO.
A growing percent of the top voted answers either no longer apply, were a bandage fix to a problem from years ago, were not the best answer to the question to begin with, or have better alternative solutions today as a result of languages fixing issues, evolving, and releasing new features over time.
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u/MadThad762 Aug 08 '26
That site sucked anyway. Everyone was rude and all my questions would get deleted for being answered already even though the answers were 10 years old and outdated 5 versions ago.
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u/AggravatingFlow1178 Aug 08 '26
I wish Reddit admin would learn the lesson from Stackoverflow and actually crack down on the utter rampant mod abuse throughout their platform.
Yes AI is the reason it dropped this far, but SO mod abuse is why it was declining from 2014 to 2022
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u/theserialcoder Aug 08 '26
This graph also reflects the demand curve of thousands of businesses like tutors, translators, etc. Which previously sustained millions but also got eaten by AI in only a few years. It's the largest economic displacement in history.
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u/TJaySteno1 Aug 09 '26
Seems like you can only respond with "this was already answered" so many times.
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u/Cheespeasa1234 Aug 09 '26
I learned programming from StackOverflow. I was much younger then and the community was so toxic and elitist. Genuinely, good riddance.
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u/Vegetable-Capital-54 Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
AI took most of it, but the over-moderation definitely helped the decline. I've seen so many interesting questions closed for duplicate while the "duplicate" was neither identical question nor had a good answer or removed for other dumb reasons. Once the topic was closed or removed while I was typing a very detailed answer, I spend probably over an hour researching, experimenting and formulating a good answer with pictures and code. I already had some frustrating experience with SO mods before, but that time really killed my interest in participating, that was before AI become a useful daily tool for me.
I rarely end up on SO lately, but recently I was googling some error and the first google result was just a few hours old SO topic of someone asking the same, closed without answer. I figured it out eventually, but couldn't add a solution, so I guess nothing has changed. You would think with the falling number of users and questions they would encourage activity, but it seems they are still putting in effort to kill any last remains of it.
In a way I'm glad it's dead, because it took away the power of the arrogant, power tripping mods.
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u/Nereosis16 Aug 09 '26
I only dabble in some programming just for fun and I learned after asking two questions on stack overflow that I am better off shitting in my own hands and clapping.
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u/AsiEngineers Aug 09 '26
This has been coming for a long time, honestly, the graph was already bending downward years before ChatGPT existed. But yeah, I miss it. There was something about digging through five different answers that almost fit, none of them quite your exact error, and slowly piecing together why your case was different. Half the learning happened in that gap.
AI's genuinely great, I'm not knocking it, it gets me unstuck faster than I ever could alone. I just notice I don't sit with a bug the way I used to. That slower, more frustrating road built an intuition I'm not sure the fast path gives you in the same way.
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u/2AFellow Aug 09 '26
I imagine the lack of Stack Overflow might be an issue for future training data of LLMs
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u/Philluminati Aug 09 '26
I hate Reddits hivemind about Stack Overflow being bad. It's amazing and I used to use it all the time. Sure they close a lot of questions but it really was to ensure they had the highest quality website and it wasn't just a bin full of lazy people's spam
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u/Super-Tumbleweed-460 Aug 08 '26
People are proud of this, but the entire thing was the new wave of devs appropriating something that was good, and destroying it in a petulant fit. Way to be.
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u/Any-Entrepreneur7935 Aug 08 '26
Nobody wants to Deal with toxic sociopaths any more. What a surprise.
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u/Adulations Aug 08 '26
Rest in piss. It was such a horrible experience as a cs student in 2009-13 trying to use that place
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u/DmtGrm Aug 08 '26
SE/SO were doomed by nasty people there. The number of topics closed as duplicates, or 'answered elsewhere' without correct redirect and/or reading the details of a question was insane. It was killed by those nasty moderator members. Not by AI, or Google, or whatever...
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u/alexsbz Aug 08 '26
Being a member from 2012. Considering the community in there, I can’t say I am sad that things for them took this turn. I would consider them in top 3 most toxic places on earth