The rise and fall of Stack Overflow

I can remember when the great Jeff Atwood (User #1) went on Twitter and asked people to suggest names for a website that would be useful for developers. He was vague about what that site would do exactly, but eventually he, along with his partner, Joel Spolsky, founded Stack Overflow.It was a revelation. Their vision was clear—to become a free, open place where developers could ask questions, and get answers from other developers. Good answers would be upvoted, and a vast knowledge base would be built. Atwood and Spolsky accomplished what they set out to do. They fixed the internet for developers.

Who didn’t love doing a Google search for something and seeing a Stack Overflow link right there at the top, knowing you’d almost certainly get a complete answer to your question? The site soon became a powerhouse in the development world. Beloved by developers, and thus wielding strong advertising power, it was sold for $1.8 billion dollars in 2021.

As any economist will tell you, incentives matter. And Stack Overflow provided incentives via a reputation score and badges. Reputation was won generally through providing good answers—and questions—that were upvoted by other members. Increasing reputation unlocked various privileges. Badges were coveted. You could even display a small widget on your website that showed your score and the number of gold, silver, and bronze badges that you had won.

Bad reputation

But people are people, and some subtle problems started arising. Then they became not so subtle.

Like with any system that lets people earn privileges, folks started wielding those privileges rather forcefully and earnestly. For instance, asking a good question is an important part of Stack Overflow. However, many new folks, as new folks do, would ask bad questions. Thinking that Stack Overflow was a discussion board, they’d swoop in and ask a question that wasn’t as complete as it might be. Understandable.

But it soon became the culture to rather bluntly vote down these bad-according-to-standards questions. The comments explaining why questions were bad were not always friendly or gentle, and the newbies—who didn’t understand the mission of Stack Overflow and who just wanted to get their questions answered—would often leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Adding insult to injury, getting downvoted hurt the newbie’s reputation. Cliques began to dominate certain tags, or keywords, and they often ruled with a less-than-gentle hand. And what was the point of a Tumbleweed badge? To drive people away?

The site soon garnered a reputation as an unfriendly place. It didn’t take long for people to start wondering if this culture wasn’t a problem. Large discussions ensued on Twitter and blogs. Even the mighty Jon Skeet—one of Stack Overflow’s most helpful people of all time, with a huge reputation score—weighed in on how to make the site friendlier.  

Stack Overflow took measures to try to improve the situation, but once a reputation is established, it’s hard to dial it back. The site even recently created a Staging Ground feature to allow new members to ask questions in a more forgiving, reputation-free zone. But if you have to do that, you are already losing.

AI conundrum

The rise of AI-powered coding assistance isn’t helping either. Stack Overflow has seen a clear decline in traffic, both in questions and answers, as people get help for their exact problems without having to hunt through the site for the solution. The company has had to lay off personnel as a result. To make matters worse, Stack Overflow’s policy of openly providing their data via a Creative Commons license is the very thing that makes these AI tools so effective and useful.

I myself can’t remember the last time I thought to ask or answer a question on Stack Overflow. Now I just ask GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT. I find that those two tools answer, well, every question I have.And in what seems to be an “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” move, Stack Overflow recently created an API, called OverflowAI, that allows the AI coding tools to access its knowledge base. The company is working with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft to allow those AI providers to better leverage the data of the site. Of course, this will not sit well with many of the developers who have contributed their knowledge over the years.All of this creates an interesting—and well-known—conundrum. Stack Overflow provides much of the knowledge that is embedded in AI coding tools, but the more developers rely on AI coding tools the less likely they will participate in Stack Overflow, the site that produces that knowledge.

We all know that AI is disrupting all kinds of industries in ways we are only beginning to understand. For better or worse, Stack Overflow seems to be a leading example of this disruption. I don’t know what the future holds for Stack Overflow, but whatever happens, its glory days are probably behind it.