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The Fall of Stack Overflow
(observablehq.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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You've assumed that I want to explain the root cause of the initial decline. This is not the case. Historically, SO has seen several periods of decline. What I'm actually addressing is the question of why the decline has not stopped, because the sustained nature of this decline is what makes it unusual. If you look at the various charts, you can see a brief rally which gets cut off in late Winter 2022 -- this lines up rather nicely with the timing of ChatGPT's release, I feel.
Let's ignore that. Tell me more about your Google angle: what's the basis of your hypothesis?
I'm not who you were speaking to, but back when I used to read it occasionally, the stack overflow blog repeatedly mentioned that the vast majority of its traffic comes from Google. If the vast majority of your traffic comes from Google and then your traffic quantity changes dramatically, it's reasonable to look to the source of your traffic.
Thank you for doing my work for me. It's just Occam's razor.