One of the more important knowledge repositories right now... and it's tied to a corporation. We should probably be supporting alternatives.
Anybody know of data backups? Do we have the whole thing on the internet archive?
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Do we have the whole thing on the internet archive?
Maybe?
Another consideration is that it's probably a part of many LLM training datasets by now. In fact, I'd say the combination of bad moderation and AI have made Stack Overflow less attractive lately.
Stack Exchange is a business owned by investment company Prosus, and the Stack Exchange products include private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams)
Private equity milking another product dry.
They don't allow me to create an account because email restriction, VPN/IP restriction...
If they don't want content, that's their choice
Even if your in and have a history of good questions and responses it is still ridiculously hard to get a question accepted. Stackoverflow is dying due to its own choices and its driven many people away from it. They caused their own peak in 2014 and its amazing it took this long to decline.
Maybe, just maybe, most of the big questions have been asked and answered already.
These days when I look something up it's been answered like 8 years ago, and the answer is still valid. And they aggressively mark questions as dupes, so people aren't opening too many repeat questions.
The annoying thing about the dupe policy is sometimes the answer does change and the accepted answer to the existing question is from 5 years ago.
It also doesn’t help when the answer is “yeah just disable this feature that is used for security. That fixes the issue” but that really isn’t the best solution
Yup. Infuriating. I can't remember how many times I saw a thread of someone asking my version of a question that was then closed as duplicate linking to an older one that wasn't the right version and therefore the fix was irrelevant or at least not best practice anymore.
The article also goes into it, but I think the invent of AI and asking somewhat specific questions may also explain the decline. If you can get a result that can get you 90% of the way there with an AI that used stack overflow as a resource, theres no reason to actually ask on stack overflow. Its faster to go on the AI result or go on google/bing/etc...etc... that has the answer right there on the page.
And the redesign....its pretty bad in my opinion.
I was once downvoted answering a question on a library....that I created on stack overflow. Still makes me laugh.
The graph suggests it started declining well before AI became mainstream. I'm sure it accelerates it, but it had already long peaked.
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Not in technology, it's a rapidly evolving field. Answers that might have been absolutely perfect five years ago can now be irrelevant archaic trivia.
Yep, I've never needed to ask a question on Stack Overflow as everything I've searched for has been answered already... or I've looked elsewhere for the answer as I'm not allowed to upvote, downvote or ask questions on it anyway due to lack of karma (or whatever they call it). No wonder it's in decline if nobody new is allowed to contribute, and every new question is closed as a duplicate.
The barrier to entry is silly.
The barrier to entry is why it's a good place for answers and not Reddit-quality responses.
Reddit can give quality tech responses though. The voting system on SO would be sufficient.
I've always been afraid of opening questions on stack overflow. To the point that I'd rather just figure it out myself.
I believe so. Whenever I have a problem, I look for an answer in the following order: search engine > reading a forum post > documentation > writing a forum post. I usually don't work on bleeding-edge software, so somebody probably has already asked my question and received an answer too. If it hasn't explicitly been asked yet, it might have already been answered in the documentation. Furthermore, as you said, Stack Overflow would much sooner delete your post for being a duplicate of a 21-year-old post than provide an answer to your question. There are other (and sometimes newer) tools out there that can provide the same answer without putting up so much resistance to you simply attempting to use them. If they want their traffic back, they could start there, instead of "rebranding".
(and sometimes newer)
My God man, say it louder for the folks in the back. A 21 year old answer, heck even an 8 year old answer like OP said, might not STILL be the best answer in the current age. Technology evolves, new languages get invented, old languages gain some new features, and all of that happens at a rapid pace.
I get super dismayed using SO and seeing the top answer predates Rust. (Note I don't mean to say Rust is always the answer, but that Rust is already 13 years old. Things change.)
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Stack overflow is still useful z it's just that the vast majority of answers are like 15-20 years old as most questions were already answered by then
The headline is a lie. Developers will be fine. One company will lose users. And rightly so.
so the ai kills off all its food sources and then what
Make sure users trust it so much they can no longer discern hallucinations and lies from reality, then keep the AI training on content generated by itself.
Either Butlerian Jihad or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
time for a jihad
MSDN subscription
Every time I go to SO I have to deal with CloudFlare checks or captchas. I'm not genuinely not sure why, but it has kept me from clicking SO links from search engines first. Not even using a VPN. Kind of odd.
I’m sure they have all the heuristics in Cloudflare cranked up due to all programming model training aggressively digesting their content. Can’t blame them, honestly.
sure we can
Grab a copy of the stackoverflow database and use it locally, or train your own local LLM on the datastore.
And if you can, donate to the Internet Archive -- those people do really important work in today's age of killing off old information and constant enshittification.
Came here to say something similar about a local archive.
You can also use the app Kiwix to make it a little easier to download/search (and grab several other doc archives like Python PEP and Wikipedia)
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Ha. I remember I used my points to create a bounty for something I kind of saw as broken with Windows but that eventually expired or something and after that, never looked back. Whole thing doesn't make sense. Why make a bounty possible if it can just expire. Nobody answered the question... and I couldn't accrue points to do it again in a reasonable manner so go figure...
Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.
ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site's coffin because it's now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn't "use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic."
In the earlier days of StackOverflow, the founders try to fight the toxicity. I don't know whether they got overwhelmed or just gave up, but the trolls wound up taking over. Maybe good moderators aren't willing to put up with both overwhelming toxicity AND no pay.
I still love what StackOverflow once was. I tried coming back and giving a chance a few times. My last question got "answered" by people who clearly had not taken time to read the question. After updating the question with, "Note: I'm am NOT talking about 'X', its subtle, please read the question fully." I was told that I didn't know what I was talking about.
I eventually figured it out and didn't bother posting the answer to the issue. Fly-by answers by people just looking to improve their stats made continuing to interact with SO frustrating and pointless.
I've been contributing on SO for a decade and comments like this drive me nuts.
It was a free self moderating tool and people couldn't even ask question properly for people to do the work for them for free. The entitlement is astonishing and to have the gal to call SO toxic just shows how undeserving some people are of any assistance.
Yes use the search bar and yes lock the thread if people can't spend 5 minutes to form their question there is no saving of these fools. Period.
In fact my main reason for stopping to contribute was dramatic decrease of question quality not the AI. Just try to follow the new section for a day and tell me it's not a problem, I'll wait.
I too contributed fairly significantly over a long period of time, particularly on electronics.stackexchange.com. I generally just ignore the weak/low quality questions or vote them down. I might respond and ask them to fix the question if I felt charitable, but I never understood the "question nazis".
SO did go overboard at times; I've seen quite a few instances where posts were locked for being "duplicates" of completely unrelated problems. Oftentimes they were accompanied with unnecessarily rude messages as well.
But yes, the unwillingness of some (most?) people to use the search function baffles me. They'd prefer to write a narrative essay in SO for their FizzBuzz assignment and argue with mods rather than type a few keywords to instantly get the solution.
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Well it might goes both ways. People are not afraid to ask stupid questions to AI. And at the same time, AI will not judge the user.
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they're gonna rebrand to ai first or turn it into an experts-exchange aren't they?
It does feel like they're going that way. But that's okay. Everyone needs an Expert Sex Change every now and then.
Stack Overflow, like Reddit, derives its value entirely from its users—it's just a host. Now that users (and their knowledge) are moving elsewhere, the platform’s importance is fading.
It’s odd when people worry about Stack Overflow’s decline. Online communities have always shifted: from BBSs and newsgroups to forums, chat, Yahoo Groups, Reddit, and Stack Overflow. Each had its time.
The next gathering spot for tech-savvy users might be the fediverse, but who knows at this point. AI isn’t solely to blame for the shift—people moved to Stack Overflow because it was better than what came before. Now, as it declines in quality thanks to general enshittification of services as companies try to monetise uaers, they’re moving on again.
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