Total Monthly Number of Stackoverflow Questions Over Time
Key topics
As the total monthly number of StackOverflow questions plummets to near zero, commenters are abuzz with theories: is it AI that's replacing the platform, or has the site's culture become too toxic? Some users, like vjvjvjvjghv and ForHackernews, share personal anecdotes of being driven away by hostile moderators or feeling no longer needed due to AI advancements. Meanwhile, others like Bratmon and eterm suggest it's a combination of both push and pull factors – the unwelcoming environment and the rise of AI – that's contributing to the decline. The debate rages on, with some, like braiamp, poking fun at the state of new questions, while others, like marcosdumay, dissect the voting patterns that might be contributing to the problem.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
25m
Peak period
101
0-6h
Avg / period
16
Based on 160 loaded comments
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- 01Story posted
Jan 3, 2026 at 5:23 PM EST
4d ago
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Jan 3, 2026 at 5:48 PM EST
25m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
101 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Jan 7, 2026 at 2:14 PM EST
1d ago
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I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.
Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest
Most questions have negative karma.
Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem.
All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders.
SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them.
SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls.
The 8 at 0 are just taking longer to amass those negative votes. It's incredibly rare that a positive one ever goes somewhere.
So, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in the positive direction.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest
But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available.
I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there
I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_.
Precise troubleshooting data is getting rare, GitHub issues are the last place where community live nowadays.
Software quality is now generally a bit better than it was in 2010, but that need is ultimately still there.
PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345#46482620
At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by default, Google would get you to the answer page. LLMs were just a cherry on top.
We get exactly the same thing on hn, because it's the same people, the same culture, the same incentive structure, the same codified toxicity.
And the exact same thing is going to happen to hn. Already is. Already has, frankly.
It's just how sellout culture works. There's no integrity.[1]
SO failed because the founders had no integrity and HN is going to fail because the founders have no integrity.
Lacking integrity has short term benefits that sacrifice the long term.
From Good to great to failure.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-...
You think being on this site gives you cred. That's why you personally identify yourself. You likely have your hn profile link on your resume or website etc. Hoping maybe this place will lead to something for you.
Clearly we don't agree on that. I don't even bother to turn off secret mode for this tripe.
This is the toxic destruction of hn I'm talking about.
You are the toxic one. You offer negative value.
Click on my name you get nothing.
Yours is full of hope of someone reaching out to you. Mine is idgaf.
I don't need to defend the status quo. I don't want karma pOints.
I want integrity.
Prove it. Use your main account, you coward.
You are the toxicity I'm talking about. You've added zero value to the discussion. I've offered value.
You attack my account age and I've already said why it's not old.
Because idgaf.
SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though.
But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior.
I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.
That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture. It's everywhere.
Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement.
Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter.
They are not "threads" and are not supposed to be "threads". Thinking about them as if they were, is what leads to the perception of toxicity.
The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without hesitation and producers just also don't do actual documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which works in the moment, but terrible for future team members to even know what questions to search/ask for.
If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.
It was bad enough that I got back in the habit of buying and building a library of serious reference books because they were the only reliable way to answer detailed technical questions.
2020 there was new CEO and moderator council was formed: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-o...
A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented.
If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that.
Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc.
Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.
Typical response:
I am RJ, an Independent Advisor and Microsoft Gold Certified Support Specialist Enthusiast.
I know how your system is not functioning as desired! Rest assured, I am here to help you resolve this today.
Please follow these steps in order. Do not skip any steps.
Step 1: Reboot your computer Step 2: Reinstall windows Step 3: Contact Microsoft support
Did this resolve your issue? [ Yes ] [ No ]
If this helped, please mark this as the Answer and give me a 5-star rating so I can continue providing high-quality, scripted responses to other users!
Standard Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft. I am an independent volunteer who enjoys copying and pasting from a manual written in 2014.
I agree the toxic moderation (and tone-deaf ownership!) initiated the slower decline earlier that then turned into the LLM landslide.
Tbf SO also suffered from its own success as a knowledgebase where the easy pickings were long gone by then.
I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid moderation.
Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
Gen 1: stackoverflow.com
Gen 2: chatgpt.com
Google answers
And the horrific Quora
Random example:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/762357.html
It's remarkable how similar in style the answers are to what we all know from e.g. chatgpt.
No way.
The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes.
The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions.
Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.
>zombie community
Like Reddit post 2015.
For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not quite comparable because the more subjective questions are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the direction of adding many more libraries than most people should).
This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.
> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.
This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.
The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.
I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.
When someone says "I feel like" and you answer "No, you don't", you're most certainly wrong :-).
I do feel like the parent.
Are you being serious here?
I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in the way. So I stopped.
I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.
If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?
"Sunsetting Jobs & Developer Story" 3/2022 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
(That seems comparable to arguing that Facebook shouldn't subsidize posting baby photos).
But if it was the case that SO mgmt decided (2017-2020) that they didn't care to keep experienced users engaged, and just let the site degenerate into new users posting bigger volumes of duplicates, questions without code, etc., then that would be on them. You don't have to assume their actions were rational; look how badly they mismanaged moderation in that period and how many experienced users that lost them.
They could go with "when in doubt, keep the duplicate", but they chose the opposite. Meaning that instead of happy users and duplicates, they have no duplicates, and no more users.
Eventually SO becomes a site exclusively for lurkers instead of a platform for active participation
Which is kinda cool, but also very biased for older contributors. I could drop thousands of points bounty without thinking about it, but new users couldn't afford the attention they needed.
I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.
This is killer feature of LLMs - you will not became more experienced.
My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as time went on.
I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I encountered, were the types of things that people who ship, encounter; not academic exercises.
Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on there, don't ship.
I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting.
I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP.
I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes.
Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up.
No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO heavy-handed moderation memes.
Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.
You would be able to see which questions were too long-tail or difficult for the AI to answer, and humans could jump in to patch things up. This could be gamified with points.
This would serve as fantastic LLM training material for local LLMs. The authors of the site could put in a clause saying that "training is allowed as long as you publish your weights + model".
Someone please build this.
Edit: Removed "LLMs did not kill Stack Overflow." first sentence as suggested. Perhaps that wasn't entirely accurate, and the rest of the argument stands better on its own legs.
"Troubleshooting / Debugging" is meant for the traditional questions, "Tooling recommendation", "Best practices", and "General advice / Other" are meant for the soft sort of questions.
I have no clue what the engagement is on these sort of categories, though. It feels like a fix for a problem that started years ago, and by this point, I don't really know if there's much hope in bringing back the community they've worked so hard to scare away. It's pretty telling just how much the people that are left hate this new feature.
[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/435293/opinion-base...
Isn't this how Quora is supposed to operate?
- A huge number of developers will want to use such a tool. Many of them are already using AI in a "single player" experience mode.
- 80% of the answers will be correct when one-shot for questions of moderate difficulty.
- The long tail of "corrector" / "wiki gardening" / pedantic types fill fix the errors. Especially if you gamify it.
Just because someone doesn't like AI doesn't mean the majority share the same opinion. AI products are the fastest growing products in history. ChatGPT has over a billion MAUs. It's effectively won over all of humanity.
I'm not some vibe coder. I've been programming since the 90's, including on extremely critical multi-billion dollar daily transaction volume infra, yet I absolutely love AI. The models have lots of flaws and shortcomings, but they're incredibly useful and growing in capability and scope -- I'll stand up and serve as your counter example.
You oversimplified and lost too much precision. Try again?
It's very tedious as the kind of mistakes LLMs make can be rather subtle and AI can generate a lot of text very fast. It's a sisyphean taks, I doubt enough people would do it.
The whole pitch here just feels like putting gold flakes on your pizza: expensive and would not be missed if it wasn't there.
Just to say, I'm maybe not as experienced and wise I guess but this definitely sounds terrible to me. But whatever floats your boat I guess!
Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open source, I've written everything from emulators and game engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc.
The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in documentation, specifically related to undocumented behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO, I received either no response and downvotes, or negative responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back, so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button if folks were super negative and didn't answer the question.
Later on, most of my answers actually have come from Github,and 95% of the time, my issues were legitimate ones that would've been mentioned if a decent number of folks used the framework, library, or language in question.
I think the tl;dr of this is this: If you can't provide a positive contribution on ANY social media platform like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Github, etc. Don't speak. Don't vote. Ignore the question. If you happen to know, help out! Contribute! Write documentation! I've done so on more than one occasion (I even built a website around it and made money in the process due to ignorance elsewhere, until I shut it down due to nearly dying), and in every instance I did so, folks were thankful, and it made me thankful that I was able to help them. (the money wasn't a factor in the website I built, I just wanted to help folks that got stuck in the documentation hole I mentioned)
EDIT: because I know a bunch of you folks read Ars Technica and certain other sites. I'll help you out: If you find yourself saying that you are being "pedantic", you are the problem, not the solution. Nitpicking doesn't solve problems, it just dilutes the problem and makes it bigger. If you can't help, think 3 times and also again don't say anything if your advice isn't helpful.
I don't know why you put "duplicates" in quotation marks. Closing a duplicate question is doing the OP (and future searchers) a service, by directly associating the question with an existing answer.
Reminds me of my most black-hat project — a Wikipedia proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah, perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.
The timeline also matches:
https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...
https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...
Quicker than searching the entirety of Google results and none of the attitude.
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