- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
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?
Stack Exchange has been making a large number of bad calls over the past few years. Basically pissing off their moderators. The first one was Monica who actually sued them for it (libel or defamation or something, basically they said she was being transphobic or something when she wasn’t) and they settled. Around that time, possibly before, they removed a site from their Hot Network Questions because of a single tweet. Combine that with them constantly ignoring Stack Exchange Meta (where users and admins are meant to interact for the better of the site and discuss the sites themselves). Moderators were understandably furious when their posts get ignored in the place where Stack Exchange says they’re meant to communicate when a random tweet gets more attention and immediate action.
More recently they’ve given different instructions privately to moderators than what they said publicly with regards to suspected AI content.
I mean, combine all of that with how hostile the users of the site are. Accusing you of not searching before posting and marking your question as a duplicate because they think it is and refusing to listen to why you say it isn’t.
I’m sure they are bad, because general corporation and enshittification cycle, but when someone consistently mentions, “a single tweet” or something like that that they represent as purely innocuous (but without any explanation or link to source), gets my suspicious radar WAY up…
Your suspicion makes sense, let me provide some context.
(Quick aside for the unaware, not necessarily Snapz, Stack Exchange (SE) is the company and family of sites behind Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is the biggest and was the first and that’s why it doesn’t have the same “Blah Exchange” branding.)
I think this answer on SE Meta describes the Tweets the best. I can’t find good archived links to the tweets and they seem to be deleted now. This answer has screenshots and quotes them. This answer is not the first thing that happens in chronological order but it is the best thing I’ve found with quotes of the tweets. So just go here to see what the tweets were. I guess it was actually about three and not just a single one like I remembered. Summary here,
Someone then retweeted that,
This question on Interpersonal Skills (IPS) Meta is (as far as I can find) when the community at large first found out about what happened. Then later there was this question on SE Meta (which the earlier answer is in response to). Both of these posts have most of the context.
Feel free to look over as much as you want, I’ll just post some of the highlights proving the points I was talking about.
From the IPS Meta question, in this answer
This comment explains the community’s feeling very well I believe.
Also this
From the SE Meta question, this answer
Edit: Make individual links as bullet points in one of the quotes since Lemmy UI does not make it clear it is three links.
Edit 2: Add summary of the tweets so more context is on this post.