In May 2024, moderators on StackOverflow started banning users’ accounts. This was because they deleted their answers after the company agreed to share data from the website to train AI models. Many tech industry observers and journalists have wondered what, if any, would the repercussions of this event be.
The number of questions asked per month on StackOverflow
is dropping to a record level. Source.
It’s been a year since that announcement, and the consequences are becoming clearer. In this article, we will rehash the events that led to Stack Overflow’s increasing decline. Then, we will discuss alternative Q&A platforms developers are choosing to embrace. PS: It’s not ChatGPT!
Immediate Fallout
Last year, StackOverflow’s move to ban users for deleting their content sparked widespread debate over data rights, ethics, and corporate control over community-generated knowledge.
In the weeks following the bans, a significant portion of the platform’s most active contributors either voluntarily left or were removed by moderators enforcing the policy. According to the terms of the platform’s guidelines, StackOverflow retains ownership of all community-created content and prohibits users from deleting their posts after posting.
The result of the drastic enforcement of this particular clause in its guideline has been manyfold, including but not limited to.
Decline in high-quality answers
A newly registered StackOverflow contributor narrated his
ordeal on the website
As experienced developers abandoned the platform, more and more complaints about it began to appear on forums. An ex-StackOverflow user noted the decline of quality answers and speculated one possible cause of the decline in usage of the website, as based on its moderators being ‘condescending jackass[es]’.
According to another user’s speculation, ‘everyone on Stack Overflow is a complete dick.’
These past users describe the experience of querying the platform as toxic and blame it for why fewer and fewer questions get asked and answered.
Narrating his opinion on the platform’s decline on Reddit, a high-profile contributor with 325k karma noted that he gave up on the website 5 years ago. According to him, when he tries to provide good answers, even in some cases to bad questions, by providing a preliminary answer that would subsequently get updated as he asks follow-up questions to posters, people would just vote to close the question altogether.
To him, ‘It just got so hard to actually ask and answer questions. People just seemed intent on policing whether or not the question was «good», or was possibly related to some other question that had been asked and answered (even if tangentially), rather than actually helping people out.’
Version-specific & locked questions
Closely related to the issue of the decline in quality answers on the site induced by the exodus of its top contributors is a long-standing complaint that questions are perpetually ‘locked’ as answered and prevented from being updated, even in cases where these questions need an update due to their age.
Many programming tools, languages, and frameworks evolve rapidly, which frequently makes previously accepted answers quickly obsolete. However, Stack Overflow’s rigid moderation culture often prevents these questions from being reopened and updated.
This has led to a bizarre paradox that developers are increasingly struggling to find up-to-date answers on the website.
Furthermore, when users post new but related questions, they get shut down for being duplicates even if the original question is years old and no longer relevant, leading many developers to turn to other resources and further contributing to the platform’s decline.
This quote from a Reddit thread, I believe, succinctly captures developers’ frustration about StackOverflow:
“Yes, I’m sure the assholes on stack overflow are in shambles. Now where will they go to harass people for daring to asking questions on sites dedicated to answering questions.”
Legal scrutiny
Yet, this quote might also represent the platform’s biggest issue from the perspective of its executives. What do we mean?
Here’s how one commenter details it:
“Stack Overflow has ever been misunderstood.
Stack Overflow was not, originally, meant to be a site to ask questions on; it was meant to be a «reference» site where you would find high-quality questions & answers.
The key idea behind it was twofold:
Answers are provided for free. If people have to answer the same question again and again, they’ll burn out and leave. Eternal September was dreaded.
Don’t Repeat Yourself, or Quality over Quantity. When there are 500 copies of a question, most answers will be similar, but who’s going to review all of them? Fix issues? Update them with new versions? Take the time to really go in depth, 500 times?
And thus, to solve both problems, the core original idea was to try and have good quality unique questions — trimmed down to their essentials, so they are more generic — and for each, to build a good quality set of answers.
I still believe it’s a great ambition.
I’m less than convinced that it worked.
Not everybody wants to be a curator, so many people would just answer questions rather than try and merge similar questions together. This was not helped by the terrible search engine — it never quite worked, and Google only helped so much — so actually curating is a really hard problem. In trying to avoid the hordes of Eternal September burning out answerers, SO managed to have them burn out curators instead.
It also quickly became clear that just because two questions can be answered with the same answer does not mean they’re the same question — yet the only action available still remained to «close the question as duplicate» when regularly the better option would be to cross-post the answer (or suggest cross-posting). Long requested, never implemented.
And the latter issue is perhaps the most crucial. Especially since SO has been taken over by financials, all the money is going to channeling more traffic (for ads) and hyping up AI. Prettying up the website with endless redesigns nobody asks for. And never implementing the actual functionalities that are necessary.
The enshitification of SO, in short.”
Since the idea behind SO was to be used as a reference for high-quality questions & answers rather than being a platform to get, for instance, quick and direct answers regardless of however many times such questions have been asked according to this user, it might be ‘unfair’ to judge the platform on the point that it doesn’t allow for out of date but already accepted answers on its website to be updated.
Additionally, it might also be unfair that digital rights activists questioned whether StackOverflow had violated data protection laws by monetizing user contributions without clear consent in the wake of its partnership with OpenAI mentioned above.
You agree that any and all content […] is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive basis…you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you…This means that you cannot revoke permission for Stack Overflow to publish, distribute, store and use such content and to allow others to have derivative rights to publish, distribute, store and use such content. —extract from StackOverflow’s terms and conditions.
Stack Overflow’s terms and conditions prevent users from deleting posts. And although there may be an argument to be made about how users seldom read these terms and conditions, nonetheless, the platform might be within its rights as determined by its binding T&C.
The Rise of Alternative Platforms
Regardless, by mid-2024, there had already been signs of several new platforms gaining more and more traction from SO following its mass banning event.
Many ex-StackOverflow users migrated to self-hosted knowledge-sharing platforms and federated knowledge networks. Platforms built on ActivityPub and blockchain models, which offered user-owned content where contributors retained control over their posts, started to show up in forum conversations.
So much so that it inspired a shift in developer sentiment toward ChatGPT as succinctly captured by the following short forum discussion and chat.
GregBahm: Yeah Chat GPT is just Stackoverflow without the toxicity. Which is huge.
Turtvaiz: Except that chatgpt makes up answers half of the time
Unknown1: It’s more like about 5% of the time on a bad day, 1% of the time on a good day – about the same as SO.
The big plus, for me, is that when you ask ChatGPT something technical, it doesn’t respond like a condescending jackass.
Unknown2: Chat GPT for me is why I avoid asking 75 percent of questions. Easier to ask it, and get a better answer, and at least feel like your conversing with someone trying to listen to you, compared to what you get on Stack Overflow.
Most developers who use ChatGPT want to keep using it (75% Admired), which is
up from previous years.
That said, the surge in alternative Q&A platforms to Stack Overflow is currently being led by decentralized and community-run alternatives like Codidact and self-hosted instances of Discourse, Lemmy, and GitHub issues.
The rise of GitHub issues
GitHub issues and discussions particularly have become a definitive solution to many of the challenges developers face with StackOverflow.
A lot of developers have found GitHub issues and discussions to provide clear answers to their questions. Indeed, StackOverflow may still be an excellent source for beginning developers, but as developers gain experience, they often transition to GitHub issues, which are more suited to address problems related to niche libraries, frameworks, and more.
Developers are increasingly turning to GitHub for help
Although it’s common to encounter GitHub discussions that end with a suggestion to take the question to Discord or proprietary forums. Overall, developers are frequently and increasingly turning to GitHub issues when troubleshooting.
StackOverflow’s AI-Powered Transition
The rigor with which SO implemented its ban and the manner of its relationship with OpenAI, led many developers on the platform to speculate about its future throughout 2024.
By 2025, StackOverflow executives appeared to be quietly moving the forum towards the transition to AI-generated responses with the introduction of an Answer Assistant to reduce the number of unanswered questions and increase community participation.
“StackGPT is a better name.”— A response to the introduction to the Answer Assistant in the Meta Stack Exchange community forum.
Although, despite its agreement with AI giants, the site has until now resisted the use of AI-generated content except for its use of AI to help users frame questions via the experimental Question Assistant.
The Future of StackOverflow & Developer Q&A
Nevertheless, the answer assistant may never proceed into widespread use on SO even though it appears to be a tempting strategy for the site to pursue in response to declining traffic.
If and when it happens, we can only hope that Stack Overflow’s role as the go-to platform for developer Q&A for the better part of the last two decades can be looked over with fondness. That its golden age is remembered with love for all the developers it has fostered and delivered from the jaws of mind boggling bugs that were both inherited and simultaneously created.
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