2y ago

The Fall of Stack Overflow

observablehq.com The Fall of Stack Overflow

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 repr...

The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.

What happened?

Technology @kbin.social

wave_walnut @kbin.social

2y ago

The Fall of Stack Overflow

observablehq.com /@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow

22 11

TechNews @radiation.party

irradiated @radiation.party

BOT

2y ago

The Fall of Stack Overflow

observablehq.com /@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow

2 0

260 comments

Google search going to absolute shit is what happened
- I also attribute most of this to google. I am used to google a coding question and getting 10 SO results i can quickly scan through. Since a year I only get blogposts about the general behaviour of the thing i was googling.
- This is the most likely explanation. It doesn't make sense to have such a dramatic dropoff in user behavior without an obvious trigger.
- I don't understand. Google search has its issues for sure, but it always shows stack overflow highly when I search programming things.