this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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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

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[–] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been mediocre for as long as I can remember.

Who cares what the average is? You only need one good answer. And even a shitty answer can often steer you in the right direction by pointing out a facet of the problem you missed by being too deep in the weeds. Bad answers can easily be edited to transform them into good answers or once the asker figures it out they can even answer it themselves, maybe a week later. Also it's not just the person asking the question, but also every other person who stumbles across your question has a chance to be helped.

And on top of that, you could could add a bounty and you'd definitely get a good answer - as long as you have enough reputation to place a bounty, which was pretty trivial.. just go answer other questions while waiting for yours to be answered and your your rep would climb high - doing that got me to the top 1% on the site.

Bad questions can also be edited to become good questions (often that's as easy as marking it a duplicate, which then helps people who search with alternate phrases find what they're looking for).

These days your question is likely to just be deleted. Even if it's a good question... my rep is high enough that I see deleted stuff and it's full of things that should not have been deleted - the fall of Stack Overflow is a travesty in my opinion.