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The Fall of Stack Overflow
(observablehq.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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It's too much to attribute to any one effect. 50% is a lot for a website of this size (don't forget that Lemmy exploded from a migration of <5% Reddit usershare). Let's KISS by attributing likely causes in order of magnitude:
ChatGPT came out after the beginning of the trend in the charts. That falsifies the first 2 points of the hypothesis. The strike happened a month ago so that'a gone too. 4, 5 and 6 do not appear as abrupt processes even if we assume they're true so they likely don't explain it. There must be something else that's happened that could cause such a large and abrupt change before any of the above happened. I bet on a change in the major source of traffic - Google.
You've assumed that I want to explain the root cause of the initial decline. This is not the case. Historically, SO has seen several periods of decline. What I'm actually addressing is the question of why the decline has not stopped, because the sustained nature of this decline is what makes it unusual. If you look at the various charts, you can see a brief rally which gets cut off in late Winter 2022 -- this lines up rather nicely with the timing of ChatGPT's release, I feel.
Let's ignore that. Tell me more about your Google angle: what's the basis of your hypothesis?
I'm not who you were speaking to, but back when I used to read it occasionally, the stack overflow blog repeatedly mentioned that the vast majority of its traffic comes from Google. If the vast majority of your traffic comes from Google and then your traffic quantity changes dramatically, it's reasonable to look to the source of your traffic.
Thank you for doing my work for me. It's just Occam's razor.
but github copilot came out right around that time....