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The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)

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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[-] voidf1sh@lemm.ee 52 points 1 year ago

SO is such a miserable and toxic place that oftentimes I'd rather read more documentation or reach out to someone elsewhere like Discord. And I would never post a question there or comment there.

[-] DeadlineX@lemm.ee 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’d rather read the docs than just about anything. I love good documentation. I wanna know how and why things work.

The problem is that basically nobody has good docs. They are almost all either incomplete or unreadable.

[-] doxxx@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 year ago

While I agree, writing good docs is hard for a very intangible benefit. Honestly, it feels like doing the same work twice, with the prospect of doing it again and again in the future as the software is updated. It’s a little demoralizing.

[-] DeadlineX@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

It is hard, I agree. I’m not very good at it myself. But even semi-decent docs are better than googling around or stepping through a decompiled package.

And it’s super useful to new developers, and would have saved me a lot of time and frustration when I was new.

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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
347 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

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