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?

  • DataDecay@beehaw.org
    139·
    11 months ago

    Rather than cultivate a friendly and open community, they decided to be hostile and closed. I am not surprised by this at all, but I am surprised with how long the decline has taken. I have a number of bad/silly experiences on stackoverflow that have never been replicated on any other platform.

      • qeasd42@lemmynsfw.com
        28·
        11 months ago

        Honestly I have a question I answered myself and was up for over 10 years with hundreds of views and votes only for the question to be marked as a duplicate for a question that verboten has nothing to do with the question I asked. Specifically I was working with canvas and svg and the question linked was neither thing. The other question is also 5 years newer so even if it were the same it would be a duplicate of mine, not the other way around.

        Another one is a very high rated answer I gave was edited by a big contributor to add a participle several years after I wrote it and then marked as belonging to them now

        • qeasd42@lemmynsfw.com
          18·
          11 months ago

          Both times i issued a dispute only for it to be completely ignored. Eventually I used a scrubber bot to delete every contribution I ever made instead of letting random power mods just steal content on my high profile posts.

        • JackbyDev@programming.dev
          3·
          11 months ago

          Can you give more context on the second one? Everyone can edit posts and it shows both the original poster as well as the most recent editor on the post. (I’m not defending SE. I dislike them too.)