Jul 27, 2023 06:00:00

The traffic of the IT technology Q&A community 'Stack Overflow' has halved in just one and a half years, is it affected by chat AI?

It is reported that the traffic of the knowledge community '

Stack Overflow ' about computers and programming has been halved in just over a year from April 2022 to the end of June 2023.

The Fall of Stack Overflow / Ayhan Fuat Çelik | Observable
https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow

The Fall of Stack Overflow | Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516

Engineer Ayhan Huat Serik reported that Stack Overflow traffic began to decline sharply in April 2022, peaking in February 2021 at about 22 million page views per day. but. As of the end of June 2023, it has decreased to about 9.6 million times per day.

Stack Overflow's new visitor graph shows a rapid decline in new visitors, from about 1 million per day in early April 2022 to about 300,000 per day recorded in June 2022. I can confirm.

The decrease in traffic is also reflected in the usage of the site, and 'accept votes', which indicates the number of votes by users, has continued to decline since its peak in May 2022, reaching approximately 850,000 by the end of June 2023. is declining to

Similarly, 'all posts', which indicate questions and answers, peaked at about 20,000 per day in May 2020, but are steadily declining to about 7,000 by the end of June 2023.

There's been a lot of discussion on social news site Hacker News about the drop in traffic on Stack Overflow. While some have

pointed out that the decrease in traffic was due to the rise of ChatGPT and the emergence of GitHub Copilot , the sudden decrease in traffic was due to a sudden change in the way Google Analytics measured traffic and visitors. There is also an opinion that 'Google changed the algorithm'.

People who claim that ``the rise of chat AI is the cause of the decrease in traffic'' say, ``When you ask a question on Stack Overflow, you will sometimes receive irrelevant answers , while chat AI such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot may contain incorrect content. You can get good answers,” he said .

SimilarWeb, a web analytics farm, says, ``Stack Overflow is a mechanism in which community members discuss the questioned code, give various answers, and vote for the best answer.However, chat AI such as ChatGPT Although we can't discuss it, we can get answers more efficiently and quickly than asking questions on Stack Overflow, 'he speculates that many programmers have switched to ChatGPT.

On the other hand, those who claim that ``Google is the cause of the decrease in traffic'' say, ``With the increase in spam sites for profit purposes, unless you enter 'stackoverflow' in the search query, Stack Overflow questions will appear at the top of the search results. and answers are less likely to be displayed,' he

said , 'Google seems to have lost the battle against spam sites.' However, it is also pointed out that 'spam sites may contain Google ads and analytics, and may be intentionally thriving spam sites to increase Google's revenue.'

There is also a harsh opinion that 'Google is no longer a search engine, but a'suggestion engine', so everything makes sense.'

Furthermore, since traffic has been declining since around May 2022, before ChatGPT became available in December 2022, some argue that the decline in traffic is not due to the rise of chat AI. .

When technology news media Gizmodo asked Stack Overflow for comment, the person in charge acknowledged that traffic was decreasing due to the rise of ChatGPT, but said, ``The growth of generative AI is a big deal for Stack Overflow. It's an opportunity,' he said .