Do you agree with Gergely that "Stack Overflow is almost dead"?

I would argue that Stack Overflow is "dead" in same sense that Wikipedia is "dead": In some sense they are, but in a more important sense they aren't.

I started to edit Wikipedia 22 years ago. At that time many articles I wanted to find were missing, and I actually found myself creating new articles from scratch, on anything from my favorite band, to some small town I happened to visit recently. I made hundreds of edits to Wikipedia every year, and it felt "alive" and I felt part of a community. Today, virtually anything I search for on Wikipedia already exists, so I rarely ever need to edit any article, and I haven't created a new article from scratch in years. I've become more of a "user" of Wikipedia than a member of a "community". But while some might lament that the Wikipedia community is "dead" and blame it on toxic interactions and other things they personally experienced, the simple truth is that Wikipedia is thriving as a mature product used by billions, and by no means "dead". It's more alive than ever, despite the fact that I rarely edit new articles anymore.

Exactly the same thing happened to Stack Overflow. When it started, every question was new, and people (including me) enjoyed answering those questions. But as the years went by, people were mostly using the same systems and programming languages that have been in use for years (consider, for example, that JavaScript, Python and Linux are all 30 years old!), and after Stack Overflow has been in existence for a few years - basically every question was already answered well. So people, including me, discovered that you could find good Stack Overflow answers in a simple Google Search - and the need to write completely new questions, and to answer new questions, became rarer and rarer. This was all before AI, mind you - AI can find answers even better, but the existing answers were already pretty easy to find using Google. On many days, I found myself finding Stack overflow answers multiple times each day, but only ask a new question on Stack Overflow once every few months.

Does this mean that Stack Overflow has died? Of course not - it means it became mature, even "complete" in a certain sense (only requiring minor additions as incrementally new technologies are invented), and super useful. It only "died" if the only thing you cared about was counting new users, new questions, and new answers. Perhaps Stack Overflow the company cares about these metrics, but why should Stack Overflow users care? Does anyone still believe that Wikipedia's success or failure should be measured right now by the number of new articles added every day or the number of new users? At the current point of Wikipedia, the vast majority of users never create any article, and never even bother to create an account. This is a sign of Wikipedia's success, not death. Similarly, the fact that Stack Overflow has amassed a huge amount of good questions and answers and no longer needs many new questions or answers or users that create accounts - is a sign of Stack Overflow's success, not death.

do you agree with the conclusion that "Stack Overflow is almost dead"?

It has in some senses been dying, and that's fine. It can still carry on for a long time. Being "alive" indefinitely isn't the point. It was never the point. The tour says:

With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.

Everyone who seeks to accomplish anything ought to be prepared for the possibility of succeeding. Stack Overflow has surely not found every question that can support high-quality answers yet; but in also accepting questions that don't support high-quality answers, it has managed to accumulate more than three questions about programming for every Wikipedia article about literally anything. Questions aren't the limiting factor.

Do you agree with that the rise of LLMs, and SO feeling unwelcome, are the cause?

These are absolutely causes of the decline in the rate of incoming questions. However,

Is number of new questions the right metric for "life" or "death" of SO?

Absolutely not.

When your goal is to have a "library of detailed, high-quality answers", you don't die because you run out of new attempts at questions.

You die because people stop trying to improve answer quality (edits), and stop trying to organize the library (identifying duplicates, deleting redundant answers etc.), and because people stop trying to find things there (no good direct measure, but view counts are a start).

If edits and other curation are on the wane, that has more to do with people losing hope, and growing impatient with the company.

If people stop writing site:stackoverflow.com in search queries and instead use an LLM that was trained on Stack Overflow data - well, it's too bad (for them, too) if they trust the LLM without verification, but the LLM is largely working as a cache that the site simply can't account for in the statistics.

With 6 months more data than the original post by Gergely relied on the trend of rapidly decreasing new questions continues. New questions are still dropping exponentially. The current decay rate (exponential fit to last 6 months) is a halving every 4.2 months (a factor of 7 per year). Of course, the decay rate will not stay like this forever but time's kind of running out. (I exclude the current month.)

New questions asked with a log y axis

Update (2026-01-04): The trend continues mostly unabated with December 2025 having only 21% of the questions asked in December 2024 (3862 vs 18029) and that doesn't account for roomba etc deleting some percentage of the still counted December 2025 questions. The exponential fit said it would be down to 14%. At the current rate we'll be at 800 questions for December 2026 and 160 in December 2027. At that point it's 5 new questions day. SEDE Query

I've often felt that the issue is a lot more complex than it seems at first glance. Things like attrition amongst core users (and the momentum built up in the early days finally running out), drama in the network causing big drops in engagement amongst the most engaged and such are internal issues that I feel are causes.

Interestingly, one of my personal theories is over time, the company has tried to accommodate folks who want the benefits of a well curated knowledge base without the constraints, or want SE to change without engaging in the community directly. We've carved out pieces of ourself to try to serve folks who turn their nose up at us, perhaps.

I find the stack exchange timeline an interesting reference here - and I'd argue a few key things happened in 2017 and 2018 - or even earlier. The company lost its way with the community, and was both trying to be profitable at any cost and find the next big thing - a combination of downsizing, issues with company culture, and conflicts with key community members kicked off a period of attrition.

Externally, we're in a period where large tech companies, as well as contracting companies are doing large job cuts in the belief that AI can replace a lot of headcount. Incidentally, companies hired heavily during covid and this coincided with a period of user growth.

'Blaming' LLMs is simplistic, and complaints about SE 'moderators' being too quick to close questions is basically our equivalent of eternal september. There are things the company can do, but an excessive focus on the more vocal set of outsiders at the detriment to folks who use and thrive here probably has hurt more than helped.

As much as the company sees re-engineering the design of the network and new products as a future, I believe our survival lies in re-energising and rebuilding communities and attracting the sort of people who thrive here rather than disavowing our unique selling point - that we're quality focused and attract experts and trying to turn the network into something else.

I also find that a website - whether its a forum or a Q&A site is easier for finding knowledge artifacts than chat. Stack Exchange might be ailing but perhaps recovery isn't out of the question.

Sadly, I believe it is somewhat true. It's not quite dead yet, but it's on a fast track.

While the number of new questions dropping isn't concerning on its own, it creates a negative feedback loop. No new questions means contributors have less incentive to stick around and answer questions. Fewer answers mean there is less incentive for people to ask questions.

More than the number of new questions, the number of visits is a more important sign of how well Stack Overflow is doing. This has been pretty good until ChatGPT came along. LLMs have taken a huge chunk of traffic away from Stack Overflow, together with search providers offering summaries. These cause Stack Overflow to lose traffic and income from ads. Without revenue the site cannot stay alive.

As much as we always wanted to build a repository of information and we compared ourselves to the likes of Wikipedia, we were always very far from this goal. Unlike Wikipedia, people don't write an article together. They reply to a problem statement. And as such, the Q&A format is something between an encyclopedia and a forum. It's easier to find an answer here than on a forum, but there is too much noise and clutter compared to an encyclopedia. LLMs excel at solving this problem as they can summarise and quickly provide an amalgamation of all answers without the fluff. If they can do it reliably and accurately close to 100% of the time, then people will have no reason to come to Stack Overflow. But of course, Stack Overflow enabled that as it provided LLMs with the training data.

do you agree with the conclusion that "Stack Overflow is almost dead"?

No. Traffic is declining, but I don't think it's at that point say "almost dead". There still are quite a few questions coming in, and users contributing useful content (including new contributors).

Do you agree with that the rise of LLMs, and SO feeling unwelcome, are the cause?

From what I see people say for themselves on Reddit at least, a significant number of people feel like SO is unwelcome, and like that LLMs don't make them feel that way when they have questions. I have related-ish thoughts in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/384378/997587.

Is number of new questions the right metric for "life" or "death" of SO?

I think it should be part of whatever metric that is. I'd want voting activity to be considered too. Even if we somehow answer every question under the sun, as long as there are people in the field of software development, voting activity gives some picture of how many of those people encounter this platform and find its content useful. "How reusable is our content?" That's part of the core goal here.

For me right now, I think SO is dead when the people who are looking for what we're designed to provide (a community-built library of Q&A) no longer find us able to provide that.

Or otherwise, if nobody finds this platform/library useful for anything. I'm referring to reddit a lot (apologies), but I think it's worth doing since in my mind, they represent the masses, and on reddit threads that discuss declines in SO traffic, it's common to see a highly voted comment saying something like "but if SO dies, who will feed the LLMs?". Of course, we're not the only ones who do, but I suppose even if people hardly use SO directly, what we do can still contribute to making the world a better place... ? I'll leave a question mark there since I don't know if I can really stand behind LLMs as a "frontend" to SO making the world a better place (environmental impacts and all that).

Tangent: voting really matters. The other complaint I see a lot on reddit is about outdated information being the top answers. Ideally, voting means that the most useful stuff is at the top. Is it that these people aren't voting? If so, why? Is it that they can't vote? Or enough of them can't vote to change the sort order? These are questions I think are important to engage with. I'll take the liberty here to plug some of my thoughts about voting like I usually do: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/386224/997587, Add an option to sort answers by the viewer's previously cast votes, https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/393604/997587.

Apologies for the rambling.

In 12 years, the number of new questions asked has dropped per day has dropped by 99%, from 6690 to 78.

If you can believe it, the year-on-year rate of decline has actually increased every month since September 2025 (from 75.6% to 85.9%) - genuine free fall.

Decline in questions asked per day compared to 12 months prior: 0% means no change, 100% means no questions asked. Source

"Almost dead" is about the most charitable description you could put on StackOverflow as a collaborative enterprise. It's still...something, in the same way that Napster and SlashDot and StumbleUpon are still something even though their core activity collapsed.

do you agree with the conclusion that "Stack Overflow is almost dead"?

Strictly speaking, it's hard to agree with a statement that allows for that many interpretations. Yet, my guts tend to agree. Or, I would try to put it in a bit more strict way: Stack Overflow, the way it was conceived by founding fathers, failed to reach its goal, and - assuming the trend - hardly expected to reach it in the future.

Do you agree with that the rise of LLMs...

This looks like an established fact, no matter if I agree or disagree

... and SO feeling unwelcome

Although this fact drives gatekeepers crazy, but if anyone would try to impartially consider the following incomplete list of closure reasons,

• Duplicate
• Needs details or clarity
• Needs more focus
• Opinion-based
• Needs debugging details
• Seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more
• Not reproducible or was caused by a typo

they'd have but to conclude that it covers up to 90% of newly asked questions.

And however noble (and as of now - unreachable!) goal dictates these rules, a closed question makes any feeling than welcoming.

Still, the cause isn't lost yet. Although the traffic is declining, Stack Overflow still has a unique competitive advantage: the expertise of human experts. All needs to be done is to obsolete the aforementioned excuses. And

let people ask.

do you agree with the conclusion that "Stack Overflow is almost dead"?

Yes. There are new questions every day but most don't get answered. Not many views on new questions. People looking for help on new technologies don't try to ask on Stack Overflow so the community isn't on the rise and it's dead.

Do you agree with that the rise of LLMs, and SO feeling unwelcome, are the cause?

The rise of LLMs is definitely a reason why SO is dead.

Is number of new questions the right metric for "life" or "death" of SO?

Not necessarily number of new questions. It's the number of questions not being answered.

More broadly WE are killing ourselves. AI is being trained from SO, if any new technology is not being discussed on SO (or any other Q&A platform), AI won't have where to train from. And when AI doesn't have accurate data, it decides what's accurate. You want to use new technologies, you search Google and ask on SO but you don't get any response. You ask AI, it doesn't know what to answer and it answers what it thinks that it's correct which is in most cases rubbish...

A bit of anecdata from a long-term user's experience: The other day I asked a question outlining a real-world problem. First up some guy with a high rep edited the tags to remove the specific library I was asking about (and when I edited it back he changed it again) and then the question was closed for not incorporating a minimum reproducible example, something that is not easy to do when one is working on a very large application with complex dependencies and the question is about a problem arising from those dependencies.

Suffice to say if somebody who knew how to solve that problem saw my question, I have no doubt they would be able to answer it. I knew it was a relatively long-shot but it could have saved me a lot of effort if someone could answer, and if not I'd share the solution once I figured it out and other people would be able to benefit from what I've learnt. Now I can't do that.

This reminds me very precisely of the way that Programming.SE went from a useful community for discussing the broader questions that SO isn't designed for to something so narrow that it was impossible to ask an interesting or practical question there without having it immediately closed. In that case, being a smaller site, a single overzealous moderator was able to render the community worthless to the point that most of us left over the months following his takeover.

I've been here since day one and I've consistently found the community useful and practical. I've had questions closed because they were correctly dupes and questions ignored because nobody had run into the same problem I was having (a useful indicator in its own right) so I'm not unfamiliar with the platform or how to ask a good question. This felt different. Thinking about it a little more it seems as though the goal is to limit us to questions that can be efficiently used for AI training, which I suppose is in keeping with the current management thinking that AI is the answer. As a human I'm a second-class consumer of the site, rather than part of the active community we used to have.

If this is the direction of travel for Stack Overflow then it is clearly on a moribund path.

Does the graph show reasonable data? Is it representing a proof of death?

• In the beginning there was just StackOverflow for all programming-related Q&A. Some time ago it split in multiple sites under then new StackExchange. How does the sum of performance metrics on StackOverflow, TeX, UX, and other specialized sites show compared to only SO metrics? Isn't the SO's decline emphasized by focused questions being asked on dedicated sites?

• Is the "New questions per day" a good metric of a Q&A server, because the larger the pool of existing questions (and answers) is, the harder it is to find a question that hasn't been asked.
  How does the "weighted questions per day" metric look like? Say we give a question a weight based on its score N days after asking (discarding ones below a threshold). Or estimate the weight as a sum of question's reputation times 1, top M answer's reputation times 1/m (for m-th most favourite answer).

• Can we expect change in the question targets? Say from "give me code for task X" to more abstract and general questions? The graph can be read as well as having a platteau between 2012 and 2022 with question count 10000-20000 qpd. Can we expect that offloading some questions to LLMs and saturating the LLM hype (LLMs are known for being very confident liars) is leading to lower qpd counts but the metric will hit new platteau (reach different equilibrium)?

queeg

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Fact is this.

Does it mean that the SO is almost dead? It is subjective.

To me, while I dislike categoric statements in subjective cases, the case is surely not far from what the facts say.

Does it mean that everything is over?

Might, but not for sure. On the behavior of the company is it also visible, they still fight. It is only the public platform, they also have private SE sites as a company service (among them customers like Microsoft, as far I know it), they have intellectual property, they have brand, they have databases.

Beside that, AI is now in its exponentially growing phase, just like SO was between 2008 and 2014, until the current, wonderful "curators" did take over the control. Some years, and hopefully AI won't be in exponential phase any more. Also its limitations are becoming more and more clear, I simply hate if I ask a code from it and I get a code what does almost what I wanted. I hate if the AI simply does not know the answer and then answers a bullshit, and I can not flag it for NAA.

Many thinks, they will grow until the infinite, and then it takes over the humanity / solar system / universe. I think, it will be some different, of course it does not mean, that a world ruled by a "better AI", would unavoidably contain also humans, too. Currently, AI does not exactly, what I want. It can create sample code what I can not copy-paste into my work, I must understand it and alter it.

Beside that, as the value of being a "king" here, decreased, very likely also the vehemency of the "curation" decreased. It is visible already now on the MSO.

SO, as we knew it until about 2022-2024, yes that is over. SO as an existing entity, surely not.

What will grow on the ruins, no one knows yet. We are still in decreasing tendency, but the company is investing. What we should wait for, in my opinion: I believe that we will soon reach a point, where the count of the well-receied questions does not decrease for 3 consecutive months. That will be a new balance, as something new starts. No one knows yet, what will be it.