The Fall of Stack Overflow

Over the last one and a half years, Stack Overflow has witnessed a 35% drop in its traffic. A concerning slump mirrored in site activity with roughly a halving in questions, answers, and votes. companions, it’s not entirely accurate to blame them for this traffic nosedive. The timing just doesn’t line up correctly. The most pronounced drop-kicked off around April 2022, a whole seven months before ChatGPT debuted. So why this startling downturn? It’s a curious mix of cookies, cyber civility, and the colossal Google. We need to rewind a little to May 2022 when Google Analytics tweaked its cookie storing methodology due to privacy laws. The result? A noticeable 15% traffic loss for Stack Overflow. But this wasn’t the only driving force behind the decline.

Next, we need to talk about the elephant in the room — the toxicity of Stack Overflow. Yeah, for a platform that was built for inquiries, it’s surprisingly one of the Internet’s most venomous forums, albeit in a passive-aggressive manner. Reams of complaints have been spewing out about its hostile environment for over a decade. Send a question into the ether, and more often than not, it gets flagged as a duplicate — sometimes accurately — but other times, not so much. Provide an answer, and you’re downvoted too. Offer a comment, and…wait, you can’t! Not without racking up some arbitrary internet credit, that is.

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