StackOverflow, once the favoured destination of developers in search of coding help, is suffering from declining activity, with new questions tumbling

Coding help on StackOverflow dives as AI assistants rise • DEVCLASS

submited by

Style Pass

2025-01-09 17:30:05

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.