this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology

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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?

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[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

In my experience many of the answers have become out of date. It's gradually becoming an archive of the old ways of doing things for many languages / frameworks.

Questions are often closed as a duplicate when the linked question doesn't apply anymore. It's full of really bad ways of doing things.

I'm not really sure of the solution at this point.

Also ChatGPT.

It's a last resort for me nowadays.

[–] Backslash@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair™ they did at least do a little bit to deal with the existing answers becoming obsolete by changing the default answer sorting. The "new" (it's already been at least a year IIRC) sorting pushes down older answers and allows newer answers to rise to the top with fewer votes. That still doesn't fix the issue that the accepted answer likely won't change as new ways of doing things become standard, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

[–] Quexotic@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

One thing I've always wondered about stack overflow is why is there only one accepted answer ever possible even though this is programming and there are many different ways of doing any given thing?

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