this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026

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Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions (www.techzine.eu)

submitted 3 days ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/devops@programming.dev

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The number of questions on Stack Overflow fell by 78 percent in December 2025 compared to a year earlier. Developers are switching en masse to AI tools in their IDEs, making the popular developer forum increasingly irrelevant.

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[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 32 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Beyond AI tools in IDEs, the reputation of the site's attitude towards new question posters definitely doesn't help. Neither does the site's pivot towards AI that alienated a bunch of the power users. The reputation issue isn't new though, and I'm not sure of when the AI pivot started.

I'm also not sure if it's a great metric. Personally, anything complicated enough for me to want outside help with is usually so far into the specifics of my work environment that it's not safe to ask about online. It'd either be too revealing or devolve into the classic "I refuse to answer your question because I refuse to believe your starting scenario and limitations". Otherwise it tends to be stuff I can sort out by piecing together stuff from blogs, documentation, and tangentially related stackOverflow answers. Not always easy, but easy enough that I'd rather work through it myself instead of asking the internet for help.

[–] dev_null@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 days ago

And to add on to your experience, I find I'm also too impatient to ask the internet for help. The harder and more annoying an issue is, the more motivated I am to finally solve it, meaning having to wait for someone to potentially answer, maybe the next day if ever, is not very appealing. I'd rather spend hours on the issue and solve it myself, which still means it's solved faster.

[+] Feyd@programming.dev -12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

the reputation of the site’s attitude towards new question posters

Waaah I copy pasted my homework question and the expert that donates his time for free was mean to me

[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, ok. Now explain these:

Closed as duplicate. Question is barely related to the supposed duplicate.
Ask question about library X. Get answers for library Y, with demeaning remarks about having used library X instead of library Y.
Newcomers have a solution. Can't post it or even comment because minimum reputation requirements.
Accepted answer is wrong. The useful advice is in another answer or its comments.

[–] Feyd@programming.dev -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

While I'm sure you can find examples of those, the reality is that mods are right the vast majority of the time. The truth people don't want to acknowledge is that the strict moderation keeping up the quality of the answers is the reason stack overflow was so popular.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Was so popular. Past tense.

It was popular before the current ridiculous moderationlevels. Now people just go there for the older content, since all of the newer stuff gets closed as 'duplicate' despite not being a duplicate.

[–] andioop@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I never even thought of using Stack Overflow to cheat when doing my homework. Still heard of its reputation during college and decided I should never ask a question there (even now after I've graduated so it absolutely would not be homework help), lest someone, yes, be mean to me.

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

Is that before or after all the closed due to duplicate?

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Question... what were all those AI tools in IDEs trained on?....

..........

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 13 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Well, they used to be trained on Stack Overflow.

In the future they'll be trained on all your code, as per the end user licence agreement you clicked through.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 days ago

How valuable will all of that code be without the context added by human conversation emphasizing and explaining aspects of code?

Sure, this will work for programming languages that are unchanging and dead, but as people begin to need to learn new aspects of programming language this system will spectacularly fail. AI does not beat high quality human conversations about a technical topic, it can only badly summarize them.

[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago

Yeah, good luck fixing issues with "intelligence" based on MY code.

[–] Avicenna@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago

Well that might suck phenomenally because at least in stackoverflow people (albeit sometimes toxically) point out issues with replies/codes. In GitHub anyone can post any code that may have critical errors. Even worse GitHub wil be full of AI generated code like internet is filled with AI generated videos. So things may start to get weird when AI gets trained on AI code.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 days ago

Yeah, either trained on or they do a web search when you ask them knowledge questions. Gonna be an interesting one, when all the actual knowledge sources have disappeared.

[–] EarMaster@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Answering the easy dumb questions is now done by AI pretty good. I would say even better because the AI does not care about flagging your question for duplicate or mocking you for not being precise.

StackOverflow needs to refocus on those questions not answered by AI easily. They need to adjust their business to fewer questions that need thorough investigation and specialist solutions. That is a hard thing to do with only volunteers to answer these questions, so maybe they need to switch to a paid model which pays the correctly flagged answer a cut of the fee…

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Meanwhile, Discourse forum software continues to grow in popularity an doesn’t have the reputation for toxic communities.

Jeff Atwood co-founded both StackOverflow and Discourse.

[–] EarMaster@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

You can see the similarities. I really like the trust levels both systems use instead of the classic system of fixed user tiers.