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The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While I agree, writing good docs is hard for a very intangible benefit. Honestly, it feels like doing the same work twice, with the prospect of doing it again and again in the future as the software is updated. It’s a little demoralizing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It is hard, I agree. I’m not very good at it myself. But even semi-decent docs are better than googling around or stepping through a decompiled package.

And it’s super useful to new developers, and would have saved me a lot of time and frustration when I was new.