```{post} Jan 21, 2025
:category: link-blog
```

# Stack Overflow's decline

> The volume of questions asked on StackOverflow started to fall quickly
> after ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and the drop continues
> into 2025 at alarming speed. Fresh data shows how bad things are,
> courtesy of software engineer, Theodore R. Smith, a top 1%
> StackOverflow contributor. He shared the number of questions posted by
> users in [this Gist
> dump](https://gist.github.com/hopeseekr/f522e380e35745bd5bdc3269a9f0b132?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com#file-stackoverflow-new-questions-over-time-2009-2024-csv):
>
> ![](/_static/img/substack/stack-overflows-decline_image_1.webp)
>
> \- [Gergely
> Orosz](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackoverflow-irrelevant/)

This is a solid post looking at the relative decline in traffic for
Stack Overflow in the last few years. I'm a little worried about
something like this will happen to Read the Docs, but so far we haven't
seen a huge decrease in traffic. I think perhaps being "official docs"
for a project is a bit more resilient than a Q&A site, since it's
serving a slightly different use case. I do think that LLMs have
replaced a lot of Q&A type activity, but there still a need for
canonical reference information like documentation.