Visualizing the Impact of AI on Stack Overflow Question Trends
What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
I analyzed the monthly question volume on Stack Overflow from 2008 to 2011 using the Stack Exchange Data Explorer. The data reveals a dramatic surge in user inquiries during the platform's early growth phase, highlighting the community's rapid expansion before the era of generative AI. This visualization tracks the raw numbers of questions posted each month to understand historical engagement patterns.
The data shows a massive explosion of questions starting in 2009, proving that programmers have always needed a place to ask for help.
- lynndotpy
Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.
I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
- nolok
SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community.
I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
- jeanlucas
I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]
Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.
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[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...
[2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion
https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...
- TomMasz
I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
- blablabla123
The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.
I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...
- avaer
The collapse into a ghost town is striking.
Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO.
This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transform into a feudal dictatorship of nerds who feel like they are deciding what's true, and they can get off on that.
SO did not have that kind of incentive to keep the nerds around.
- wtfHN26
Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.
I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.
AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.
- _ink_
Ironically it gives me: This IP address has performed an unusually high number of requests and has been temporarily rate limited.
That's also something what AI did to the internet :(
- khalic
Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision
- sph
I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer.
There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.