Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
664 points (99.3% liked)
Programming
17358 readers
289 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I bet this is directly related to ChatGPT
ChatGPT isn’t that good at code generation lol.
Doesn't need to be good. Just good enough that people need SO less often. If GitHub Copilot gives a code suggestion, I don't need to look up some syntax or some method I forgot. I'm reminded, and can see that it's correct. No searching online required.
is that what people used stackoverflow for? I google cheatsheets for simple syntax reminders.
What I found stack overflow useful for was 'I have this random bug in this random browser / os combo - here's what hasn't worked, has anyone dealt with it?' - and then hopefully we can all share the misery of this bug until someone figures out the source.
Not sure where to go for that type of thing anymore.
Not exactly why people seek out SO, but it shows up in Google searches and people click. Now there are fewer google searches for that sort of thing.
It's a little more decent than you give credit for. I use it all the time for easy generic subroutines and functions. It struggles a bit with specific, complex requests but is generally pretty versatile as a miniature code assistant. It's good at catching human errors like loops starting or ending at the wrong specified integer, so I use it as a debugging tool.