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?
Understandably, it has become an increasingly hostile or apatic environment over the years. If one checks questions from 10 years ago or so, one generally sees people eager to help one another.
Now they often expect you to have searched through possibly thousands of questions before you ask one, and immediately accuse you if you missed some – which is unfair, because a non-expert can often miss the connection between two questions phrased slightly differently.
On top of that, some of those questions and their answers are years old, so one wonders if their answers still apply. Often they don’t. But again it feels like you’re expected to know whether they still apply, as if you were an expert.
Of course it isn’t all like that, there are still kind and helpful people there. It’s just a statistical trend.
Possibly the site should implement an archival policy, where questions and answers are deleted or archived after a couple of years or so.
human nature remembers negative experiences much better than positive, so it only takes like 5% assholes before it feels like everyone is toxic.
True that! and a change from 2% to 5% may feel much larger than that.
The worst is when you actually read all that questions and clearly stated how they don’t apply and that you already tried them and a mod is still closing your question as a duplicate.
I can’t wait to read gems like “Answered 12/21/2005 you moron. Learn to search the website. No, I wont link it for you, this is not a Q&A website”.
Answers from 2005 that may not be remotely relevant anymore, especially if a language has seen major updates in the TWENTY YEARS since!
More important for frameworks than languages, IMO. Frameworks change drastically in the span of 5-10 years.
🤣
No, they shouldn’t be archived. I say that because technology can change. At some point they added a new sort method which favors more recent upvotes and it helps more recent answers show above old ones with more votes. This can happen on very old posts where everyone else might not use the site anymore. We shouldn’t expect the original asker to switch the accepted answer potentially years down the line.
There’s plenty of things wrong with SE and their community but I don’t think this is one that needs to change.