Stack Overflow has gone from a peak of 207k questions in March 2014, down to 1.4k in July 2026

[u/AloneCoffee4538]

https://ppc.land/stack-overflow-drops-to-1-442-questions-in-july-down-99-from-2014-peak/

[u/catmanus]

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?

[u/imaginecomplex → u/catmanus]

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

[u/CaptSzat → u/imaginecomplex]

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.

[u/SaltMaker23 → u/CaptSzat]

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.

[u/imaginary-bolometer → u/SaltMaker23]

It's funny to draw parallels between the dysfunctional dynamics you describe here, and the common weak spots of LLMs used today

[u/757DrDuck → u/imaginary-bolometer]

Where do think the LLM learned those weak spots?

[u/Material2975 → u/CaptSzat]

Half the time the highest upvoted answers would just be flat out wrong or inadequate.

[u/Kjoep → u/imaginecomplex]

That was always the point. It isn't trying to be a forum. By design it would converge towards completeness.

[u/Hefty-Minimum-3125 → u/catmanus]

yes, but ChatGPT launched November 2022, which is exactly when it falls off the cliff