StackOverflow Dec 2024 stats

StackOverflow Stats.md

Disclaimer: I'm in the Top 1% of StackOverflow contributors with 23,315 rep points.

I asked 1 high-quality question in 2024, and it was closed almost immediately, and I haven't engaged with the site since.

If someone with 20,000+ karma has their nicely-formatted questions closed so quickly, what must the newbies and rank-in-file encounter? This is probably a big reason why it's declining.

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In March 2023 when this article was published, StackOverflow received 87,105 new questions.

By March 2024, this was reduced to 58,792 (-28,313; -32.5%).

By June 2024, it was 41,616 vs 63,752 in June 2023 (-22,136; -34.8%).

By December 2024, it was 25,566 vs 42,716 in Dec 2023 (-17,150; -40.2%).

From March 2023 to December 2024, it's now reduced from 87,105 to 25,566 (-70.7%).

The site is truly dying and is more outdated and questions are closed more than ever.

The last time it received so fewer questions was in May 2009, 10 months after going live.

That may hint that StackOverflow has less than one year of life left.

Since ChatGPT launced: Nov 2022 (108,563), it's had 82,997 less questions (3.25x less; -76.5%).

SELECT YEAR(CreationDate) AS Year, MONTH(CreationDate) AS Month, COUNT(*) AS NumQuestions
FROM Posts
WHERE PostTypeId = 1 -- Questions only
GROUP BY YEAR(CreationDate), MONTH(CreationDate)
ORDER BY Year DESC, Month DESC;

stackoverflow-new-questions-over-time.2009-2024.csv

Why This Experience Has Been Personally Frustrating for Me

There are a few things that have slowly added up and shaped how I feel about this experience.

Asking a question is not asking for charity
When I post a question on Stack Overflow, I am not asking someone to do me a favor. The person answering also benefits—through reputation, visibility, and recognition. So when it’s presented as though I should be grateful for someone “helping” me, it feels unfair. We are both gaining something from the exchange.

The tone often feels patronizing
What bothers me more is the attitude that sometimes comes with the answer. Even while earning reputation, some responders behave as if they are helping purely out of generosity, positioning themselves as seniors or gatekeepers. At times, it feels like I’m being subtly made to look foolish for even asking the question.

People underestimate the effort behind a question
What many don’t see is how much work goes into asking a good question. I often have to take a complex, real production issue, strip it down into a reproducible example, format it properly, add context, and make sure it’s understandable. Then I wait. Sometimes answers come quickly—but usually only if the problem is simple. Other times, it takes hours or days. And occasionally, moderators step in and edit the question in ways that change its original intent.

By the time I ask, I’m already under pressure
I don’t go to Stack Overflow casually. I usually go there only after exhausting every other option—and after burning a lot of time. At that point, I’m already under a tight deadline. When someone then labels the question as “incomplete,” “not reproducible,” or “poorly formatted,” it doesn’t feel constructive—it feels dismissive. And in those moments, time is too precious to wait endlessly for acceptance or answers.

The early backlash against ChatGPT felt unfair
During the early days of ChatGPT, the hostility from parts of the Stack Overflow community was intense. I’ve seen valid answers removed simply because they were suspected to be AI-generated—even when the solutions were actually implemented and tested in SSMS. Sometimes the only thing “AI-assisted” was the wording, because English isn’t everyone’s first language. That experience felt deeply unfair.

@Jitu108 I agree with many of your points. I have comments. I don't mean these comments to disagree with you, but to explain why some things happen.

Early in my career, I worked in technical support for an SQL database product. Our customers were themselves software developers. My employer had us take a training class on customer service skills. One of the things they told us is that by the time someone contacts tech support, they have already been struggling with a problem, perhaps for days or even weeks. We were trained to respect their struggle and acknowledge it. The last thing we should do is solve their problem quickly and effortlessly. We had to validate that their struggle was because the problem was exceptionally difficult, otherwise if we solved it with no thought, it would make the customer feel stupid and incompetent for having struggled with it.

Folks answering questions on Stack Overflow don't get that training, and they think their job is to answer questions expediently. They have experienced the struggle, they know the answer, and they will give it to you as quickly as possible. This is probably the origin of why answers sometimes feel like they are designed to make you feel foolish. They aren't acknowledging your struggle.

Also, at its peak Stack Overflow got over 7000 questions per day on average. But the number of people answering questions didn't increase to match it. For every person who regularly answered questions, there were 100-200 new questions every day. Even on my active days, I probably wrote only about 10 answers. So the demand for answers was greater than the community could keep up with.

Folks who tried to answer as many questions as possible formed a habit of being as brief as possible. This also makes their responses seem abrupt and impatient.

You're right that people underestimate the effort behind a question — that includes people who are asking questions. Of course some people do put in that effort, but a lot of people don't. They write questions poorly, with important details missing. Some of the most annoying cases were questions where the OP finally admitted that they had posted the wrong code in their question. So anyone who had put in effort to read it and try to troubleshoot it — sometimes running the code on their own computer to reproduce an error — had wasted their time.

Respect for the time and effort needs to be mutual, but in some cases, it wasn't.

Given that some questions were not written well, answerers became less willing to put in time to draw out the information needed to troubleshoot. If a question wasn't clear, or was obviously missing details, or was a novice question that had already been answered, it would either get ignored, or would get judgmental comments from annoyed users.

What could have happened was for the community to develop more professional customer service skills, and create a process to coach users to ask more complete questions.

Unfortunately, the original founders of Stack Overflow had lost interest. Jeff Atwood left around 2012. Joel Spolsky gradually reduced his role, leaving the position of CEO in 2019, and stepping down as chairman in 2021.

I think the original vision for Stack Overflow was good for its time, but that vision didn't have any strategy to scale up to the level of demand it grew to have.

After making the statement that I seldom answered more than 10 questions per day, I was curious so I checked using the Stack Overflow Data Explorer.

select cast(CreationDate as date), count()
from Posts
where OwnerUserId = 20860 and PostTypeId = 2
group by cast(CreationDate as date)
having count() >= 10;

The result is that the most answers I posted in one day was 17.
I wrote 10 or more answers on a given day 28 times between 2008 and 2022.

I also queried to see the peak output for any user. That is, what was the most answers posted in a single day by a given user.
It was 75 questions answered on 2011-05-07 by user 722331.