Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
661 points (99.3% liked)
Programming
17319 readers
95 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Stack Overflow reached its maximum "duplicates". So new users arent engaged on asking anything because it is of course already a duplicate of xyz.
Tbf it's a normal problem to have, it wasn't meant to be a forum. But it looks like they haven't considered what to do with the moving parts of the community once they reached content saturation. π
So why did they structure it as a forum?
Itβs also a problem for advertisement revenue and therefore funding. If there is an active discouragement of any interaction because questions are simply closed as previously answered, then page views fall dramatically, and revenue with it. You only need to load a page once if the question and answer are already locked.
Same thing came to my mind. Is it so bad if the content grows at a slower rate and the traffic of adding new content drops to a new equilibrium.
Isn't it a good thing if your question is marked as a duplicate? That means you now have lots of answers readily available which already answered the question.
Often the question marked as a duplicate isn't a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn't spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.
Don't get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn't great these days and hasn't been for a while.
But then would you be like "Oh boy let me get slapped next time too"
I'd be like "Oh boy let me get redirected to lots of useful answers to my question next time too".
I don't understand why you would frame that as being "slapped". Does having your question marked as a duplicate hurt your feelings?
No but it feels redundant then to ask it anyways.
Not really. A question thatβs simply closed as a duplicate isnβt going to get any answers, and the answers to the original question, while they may have once been reasonable enough to be accepted, might be outdated.
Languages move on and add features, and closing any question as a duplicate precludes new, modern features that provides a better way to answer the original question.
A lot of content on SO is dated to say the least, precisely because reputation harvesters with a dated knowledge of the language are overly keen on closing questions.