Stack Overflow's monthly question volume is below 1000, HN users discuss the reasons

Hacker News discussion thread shows that the number of new questions on the programming Q&A site Stack Overflow has fallen below 1,000 per month. The post was submitted by user babelfish and points to a public query chart from Stack Exchange Data Explorer, which has about 247 points and 223 comments.

In the comments, some users indicated that the decline in the number of questions began before ChatGPT was publicly launched in November 2022, and that AI tools have accelerated the decline. Other users mentioned that the threshold for asking questions is high, the review process is strict, the community is not friendly enough to questioners, and that existing Q&A has already covered a large number of common issues.

Some comments referenced logarithmic scale statistics across Stack Exchange sites, suggesting that the decline has become more pronounced since the launch of ChatGPT, and provided corresponding queries and charts as evidence.