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Comment on Stack Overflow seeks rebrand as traffic continues to plummet – which is bad news for developers

Maybe, just maybe, most of the big questions have been asked and answered already.

These days when I look something up it’s been answered like 8 years ago, and the answer is still valid. And they aggressively mark questions as dupes, so people aren’t opening too many repeat questions.

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WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The annoying thing about the dupe policy is sometimes the answer does change and the accepted answer to the existing question is from 5 years ago.

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- eronth@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yup. Infuriating. I can’t remember how many times I saw a thread of someone asking my version of a question that was then closed as duplicate linking to an older one that wasn’t the right version and therefore the fix was irrelevant or at least not best practice anymore.
  
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mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The article also goes into it, but I think the invent of AI and asking somewhat specific questions may also explain the decline. If you can get a result that can get you 90% of the way there with an AI that used stack overflow as a resource, theres no reason to actually ask on stack overflow. Its faster to go on the AI result or go on google/bing/etc...etc... that has the answer right there on the page.

And the redesign....its pretty bad in my opinion.

I was once downvoted answering a question on a library....that I created on stack overflow. Still makes me laugh.

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- Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The graph suggests it started declining well before AI became mainstream. I’m sure it accelerates it, but it had already long peaked.
  
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  - mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yep I agree. Its a combo of many different things.
    
    I cant tell you the last time I was on SO for a question. its been that long.
    
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i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yep, I’ve never needed to ask a question on Stack Overflow as everything I’ve searched for has been answered already… or I’ve looked elsewhere for the answer as I’m not allowed to upvote, downvote or ask questions on it anyway due to lack of karma (or whatever they call it). No wonder it’s in decline if nobody new is allowed to contribute, and every new question is closed as a duplicate anyway.

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- Speculater@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The barrier to entry is silly.
  
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  - DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The barrier to entry is why it’s a good place for answers and not Reddit-quality responses.
    
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    HazyHerbivore@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    Reddit can give quality tech responses though. The voting system on SO would be sufficient.
    
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ChillPenguin@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’ve always been afraid of opening questions on stack overflow. To the point that I’d rather just figure it out myself.

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RobotZap10000@feddit.nl ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I believe so. Whenever I have a problem, I look for an answer in the following order: search engine > reading a forum post > documentation > writing a forum post. I usually don’t work on bleeding-edge software, so somebody probably has already asked my question and received an answer too. If it hasn’t explicitly been asked yet, it might have already been answered in the documentation. Furthermore, as you said, Stack Overflow would much sooner delete your post for being a duplicate of a 21-year-old post than provide an answer to your question. There are other (and sometimes newer) tools out there that can provide the same answer without putting up so much resistance to you simply attempting to use them. If they want their traffic back, they could start there, instead of “rebranding”.

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WarlordSdocy@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I mean there’s always gonna be new libraries or frameworks or whatever that will have their own questions to be asked. I think the problem is at a certain point you’ve reached the maximum audience you can appeal to. Which I feel StackOverflow very much has but of course corporations have to keep making greater and greater profits so once you maximize audience you have to find other methods for profit. Which is what leads to rebrand stuff like this.

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coolmojo@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
How about this one then

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