Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
This hasn’t been my experience at all, but I’m old and have been using SO since it was new.
I have stopped visiting it to answer questions because the questions aren’t interesting anymore. They’re either “how to do this incredibly obscure thing in SOMELIBRARY” (where I’ve never heard of that library) or “why does my function exit early at the first return statement instead of continuing on” (basic “you misunderstand programming so fundamentally a single answer is unlikely to help” kind of questions)
As far as I can tell, the range of “I’ve tried this, and partially gotten it working, but this thing does FOO when it should do BAR” questions don’t show up, or at least it doesn’t show up when I open the site.
Answering basic questions again and again and again isn’t fun. It’s something I could be paid to do, I suppose, but I’m not paid for that.
Seriously, how should a community based on short two- to three-paragraph answers react to question after question like this:
I mean, I’m glad that someone looks at that problem and thinks “programming could do this”, because it could, but it’s kind of a big task and getting someone from “I haven’t tried anything and am brand new to python” to that is beyond any question-and-answer forum. Welcome to programming, you may be able to get there, but it’s going to be a bit of a hike.