In 2009, roughly 30,000 monthly questions were asked on the fledgling developer forum Stack Overflow. Now, this metric has dropped below this figure again, with the site’s standing declining by the day. What happened?
Stack Overflow is considered an important resource for developers. Any programmer getting stuck regularly discover that their exact problem has been raised years earlier by someone else and solved by a helpful Stack Overflow user. This organically grown knowledge base has proven to be a gold mine for AI: deals with GitHub, Google and OpenAI have provided the forum’s owner Prosus with an unknown, but presumably sizable, sum of cash.
But now, the forum is “truly dying“. as one prominent Stack Overflow user describes it. He accompanies the claim with some worrisome user statistics. The number of questions, which is the lifeblood of the site, has been declining precipitously on a monthly basis since a last peak in 2020. Many users blame AI.
Is AI cutting out the human in the loop?
A core rule of Stack Overflow is that no AI-generated answers are allowed. Thus, users should be able to count on reliable, human-checked advice. In addition, the rule is intended to prevent the data from being poisoned by AI answers, meaning the information remains organic. Stack Overflow itself describes its newfound business model in the age of AI as “Knowledge-as-a-Service,” a similar concept to the wealth of information also made available by Reddit and The Associated Press for a fee. The questionable nature of some answers in said “Knowledge” aside, it now appears that the data on offer will be expanding at an ever-decreasing rate. This will eventually prevent Stack Overflow from having anything left to sell. Or anything recent, at any rate.
Is this all due to developers taking their questions elsewhere? GitHub Copilot has been available since 2021 after all, while solutions like Devin promise to provide a full-fledged AI software engineer, side-stepping the whole notion of getting stuck (at least in theory, which is a fact that we ought to emphasize). On top of that, the sharpest phase of decline in Stack Overflow queries has been seen since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022. In short, developers can now turn to GenAI tools of all shapes and sizes that provide almost instant answers to any question, and regularly do so based on Stack Overflow information, at least to some degree.
Other problems
Still, several users question that AI is the culprit. First of all, Stack Overflow’s fall has been noticeable well before, as discussions were raised of a similarly apocalyptic nature mere months after ChatGPT was introduced. In addition, the overall decline in queries started back in 2020, before there even was GenAI tooling for developers in the first place.
The problems faced by Stack Overflow seem to be of a very human nature, if a treasure trove of users is to be believed. Since the forum has tried to provide objective answers, there is no room for opinion or recommendation. This has been the case for years. However, visitors are experiencing a breakdown in the level of communication. There is said to be wide-ranging hostility to questions, something that at face value sounds like the death knell for a successful Q&A forum. Respondents are alleged to regularly be elitist and toxic, as claimed in a 2023 discussion about the demise of Stack Overflow.
There isn’t really an alternative to Stack Overflow waiting in the wings. This is striking, as there are some would-be contenders. Discussions on GitHub, however, are decentralized, though also popular and provided with solid advice. Reddit may take Stack Overflow’s mantle, but due to a wide variety of subforums with different popularity levels, it’s inconducive to Stack Overflow’s setup. Nor is there a tradition like the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey, where the (continued) growth of Rust and Python has been well charted in recent years.
In short: Stack Overflow is on its way out, if the years of decline are to be seen as non-reversible. Many saw the 2021 acquisition as a sign of things to come, when popular community managers had already been fired and the site was said to have shifted its focus towards enterprise players. One experienced user compared the forum’s demise to that of the slow death of the Soviet Union, seeing a similar dynamic: “For [Stack Overflow], it looks like it died in 2019 and will close in 2026 (at best).”
Also read: Google Developer Program puts new features behind pay wall