Published on 09/01/2026 Updated on 10/01/2026

• #stack overflow
• #opinion The vanishing popularity of Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow has been the cornerstone of developer communities for years. Some remember its vibrant community with nostalgia, while others remember the "unwelcoming" comments, downvotes and the infamous "marked as duplicate".

In the recent days it’s popularity is vanishing, and questions are arising about its future.

Table of contents

1. The history of Stack Overflow

2. Born out of frustration with old-school programming forums / Q & A

3. The duplicate rules harden

4. The golden age

5. The decline (and why it accelerated)

6. So, what is the realistic future?

7. Conclusion

The history of Stack Overflow

Let’s first start with a little historical background.

Born out of frustration with old-school programming forums / Q & A

Stack Overflow was created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky and opened to the public after a short private beta. The public launch / public beta was September 15, 2008. Early on, the big idea was Wikipedia-like programming knowledge: tight focus, searchable answers, community moderation, and incentives (votes / reputation) instead of endless threads.

The duplicate rules harden

Very early Stack Overflow tolerated more discussion-like stuff than later (opinion / resource requests show up more in old posts). But around 2009 - 2011 it gradually narrowed the scope toward questions with concrete answers. The site formalized tooling for duplicates and even merging duplicates (to keep all answers / comments while reducing repetition).

The golden age

During 2012 - 2019 Stack Overflow accumulated a huge knowledge base. It was the peak era for posting volume. In 2013 Stack Overflow reported ~26.9M monthly visitors. Later, their 2019 survey showed up to 50M monthly visitors.

The decline (and why it accelerated)

After 2019 the participation started to decline, except in a short-lived spike of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. One of the reasons was high friction. A growing share of "simple" questions were quickly closed as duplicates / off-topic. Over time, that created a perception (and reality) that posting a survivable question was hard. That lead to fewer new questions.

The rise of the AI accelerated the process. Even before ChatGPT, developers were increasingly getting help from IDE / editor tooling. Then AI coding assistants made it instant. There is no longer such friction even when asking "stupid" questions.

The decline became dramatic by 2025. By early January 2026 reporting, question volume in December 2025 was down to 3862 questions (reported as 78% down YoY), versus a peak era where monthly question volume was far higher (they cite early 2014 as >200k / month).

So, what is the realistic future?

At first glance, the situation seems to be really catastrophic. But what is the realistic future?

In my opinion there are 3 probable scenarios:

• Stack Overflow becomes a curated reference library. The most probable outcome. There will be few, if any, new questions, instead more focus on:

• Canonical Q & A, editing, deduping, tagging, moderation quality.

• AI Assist-style "guided retrieval" that keeps attribution visible (to preserve trust).

• Stack Overflow becomes primarily an enterprise knowledge product. Also very likely. The business gravity shifts to Stack Internal / private Q & A inside companies, where the value is:

• "Institutional memory" (architecture decisions, runbooks, tribal knowledge).

• Auditability + permissions + AI search grounded in internal docs The public site then functions as brand + funnel + shared commons.

• Stack Overflow becomes a data utility for AI. If licensing grows, it can thrive even when public posting declines. Stack Overflow content becomes part of the verification layer behind AI tools (not necessarily the destination UI). But there is a big risk: contributor / community backlash if incentives and attribution feel unfair or opaque.

Conclusion

This is my brief history of Stack Overflow and my thoughts on its future. It’s very interesting to watch what happens in 2026. My best bet is that Stack Overflow survives, but just as infrastructure (trusted knowledge + enterprise layer + AI-grounding data). Also, if you are interested, you can read these articles too:

• Stack Overflow users don’t trust AI. They’re using it anyway
• Web rot rising
• Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar on embracing AI

See you later.