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The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)

submitted 11 months ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.

The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.

What happened?

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[-] RoboRay@kbin.social 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

A lot of companies won't employ technical writers, who exist to make good, thorough, complete and well-presented documentation... they rather assume their engineers can just write the docs.

And no, no they can't... very few engineers study the principles of effective communication. They may understand things, but they can't explain them.

[-] DeadlineX@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

That’s fair. At my company we have technical writers for the external docs and internal docs are usually written by whoever has worked on something and got frustrated that nobody in the company could give them a high level overview, and they had to go through the code for a couple hours.

Tbf though, I’ll take docs that aren’t written super well that tell me how things from our internal libraries should be used. Or just comments. I’ll take comments telling me WHY we are doing something.

I don’t expect our internal docs to be MSDN docs. But I like to read an overview of at least the workflow before I jump into updating a large project.