Stack Overflow falls below 1,000 questions a month, fewer than it got in its second month of existence in 2008
- Stack Overflow now logs fewer than 1,000 new questions a month, down from a peak of 100,970 in March 2011.
- The current rate is below the site's early months: August 2008, its second month of data, had 3,749 questions, and July 2008 shows 4.
- The number comes from a Stack Exchange Data Explorer query that counts Posts rows with PostTypeId = 1, grouped by month, returning 210 rows.
- Hacker News commenters split on the cause: some blame the site's question-closing culture and hostile moderation, others say LLMs made the product obsolete whatever the culture was.
- One commenter notes SO posts are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, so AI training on the archive was permitted, and another points out there is now little new question text to train on.
Hacker News opinions
AI didn't do this to SO, the new ownership did. It's been a hostile place with or without AI.
SO has been useless for years, but the other Stack Exchange sites are still interesting and deserve more attention.
I hit the non-tech stacks once or twice a week just for entertainment. The breakdowns on obscure topics are genuinely fun to read.
Honestly amazed it's still that high.
And how much of the training data came from there? Nobody is asking new questions, so there is not much left to train on.
They would have gotten eaten with or without the training. Models scrape every codebase in the world now, you just prompt them to fix their own mistakes and that goes into the next round.
Worth remembering SO posts are CC BY-SA 4.0, same as Wikipedia, so the training was allowed.
The highly technical sites, SO and Unix & Linux and MathOverflow, barely get used now. SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding stayed relevant, but the niche sites lived off SO referral traffic, so the whole platform is sliding.
It was a well designed community and it's sad to watch. Stack Overflow helped build the LLMs that replaced it.
Well designed? It launched well but badly needed a BDFL. Hand moderation to the user base and the people with nothing but time on their hands take over, same as school boards and HOAs.
It really was amazing until it wasn't. I learned enough there to build a career, then the close-every-question purists took over and made asking anything miserable. Even without AI, that culture would have opened the door for a competitor.
What a drop. They got fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.
I always found SO intensely hostile. ChatGPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use.
SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was Wikipedia for programming. Most new questions were plz debug my code, which ChatGPT ate, and GitHub issues ate the project-specific debugging.
Server Fault had the same problem, users more interested in rules-lawyering question quality than helping anyone. The gamification pulls those people in.
You're underselling it. Nearly every month last year was below their second month of existence, and lately it's below their first month. SO effectively doesn't exist anymore, and they'll keep the servers on only while the AI data licenses sell.
Part of it is speed. Throwing a question at ChatGPT means no waiting and no hostility for asking something stupid.
No, the drop is AI. The hostility was always there and SO was still growing. The product is as obsolete as a horse-drawn carriage now.