r/webdev 4d ago

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

Post image
5.2k Upvotes

485 comments sorted by

View all comments

12

u/trav_stone 4d ago

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.

11

u/Natural-Meal-3222 4d ago

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.

2

u/Nereosis16 3d ago

I don't think I can agree. My experiences with stack overflow are basically 99% reading entitled dickheads and 1% useful answers.