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?
Not the original commenter, but once I asked a small question when I was starting to teach myself Java (something about calendar not returning what I expected and me not understanding the documentation, but I can’t quite recall the details).
I got 9 upvotes and a few helpful answers, but the only thing i can clearly remember is one answer that said unless I had a severe learning disability I should understand the documentation and not ask (r-word) questions.
I didn’t understand it because of a language barrier since I also had to teach English to myself at the same time. But that comment really hurt me for some reason. It was just unnecessary rude.
That answer eventually got removed but the first time I flagged it I got the response that the mod could not see anything wrong with the answer.
But it wasn’t even an answer! More like a comment, but even then completely unnecessary.
Before that I really enjoyed the site, answering js and PHP questions, helping out a bit with formatting on other people’s questions or answers etc but ever since then I go there rarely and only if I am looking for something already answered.