StackOverflow, once the favoured destination of developers in search of coding help, is suffering from declining activity, with new questions tumbling 75 percent since their peak in 2017, and down 60 percent year-on-year in December 2024.
The data is taken from the StackExchange Data Explorer which allows SQL queries against StackExchange databases (of which StackOverflow is much the largest), updated every week.
Developer Theodore Smith, who was formerly among the top one percent of contributors to the site, suggested “StackOverflow has less than one year of life left,” noting that new questions had declined by around 76 percent since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. However he blames not only AI assistants but also the culture of the site, complaining about what he called a “nicely formatted question” of his own that was closed as being both a duplicate and opinion-based – though we note that the question was in fact answered.
Moderators of StackOverflow perform an essential role in keeping the site usable but tread a difficult path between accepting low quality content and making the service approachable for newcomers.
The stats show 2017 was the peak year for new questions, but that the numbers were relatively stable until 2020 and declined sharply from 2022. It seems obvious that ubiquitous AI assistants are a part of the reason, though given that decline began even before the arrival of ChatGPT, they are perhaps not the only reason.
Developers can get value from StackOverflow without asking new questions, but a smaller number of questions means that new technology is less likely to be covered by a question someone has already asked.
The impact of AI on StackOverflow is complex. Two years ago, the site banned the use of generative AI for answering questions, based on both unreliability and the risk of swamping the site with answers that take too much time to moderate. The policy is frequently questioned, especially as the quality of AI-generated answers improves, but remains in place.
That said, StackOverflow is a business (owned since 2021 by global investment group Prosus) and has monetized its knowledgebase as a source for AI, cutting deals with Google, OpenAI, and most recently GitHub. The company also markets OverflowAI, a $10 per user/month add-on to its Teams Enterprise product that adds generative AI features for searching and summarizing both StackOverflow and private data.
The risk StackOverflow faces is that further decline in its core question and answer site will undermine the quality of its knowledgebase and therefore impact its business elsewhere.