Stack Overflow’s decline¶
The volume of questions asked on StackOverflow started to fall quickly after ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and the drop continues into 2025 at alarming speed. Fresh data shows how bad things are, courtesy of software engineer, Theodore R. Smith, a top 1% StackOverflow contributor. He shared the number of questions posted by users in this Gist dump:
This is a solid post looking at the relative decline in traffic for Stack Overflow in the last few years. I’m a little worried about something like this will happen to Read the Docs, but so far we haven’t seen a huge decrease in traffic. I think perhaps being “official docs” for a project is a bit more resilient than a Q&A site, since it’s serving a slightly different use case. I do think that LLMs have replaced a lot of Q&A type activity, but there still a need for canonical reference information like documentation.
