The decline of stack exchange – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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The decline of Stack Exchange.

Over at his newsletter, The Diff, Byrne Hobart observes that Stack Exchange is shrinking. Hobart attributes the declined to ChatGPT:

When someone’s asking a question because they want to be in a position to independently produce the answer and to fully understand the principles behind it, a good Stack Overflow answer will beat what ChatGPT produces. But even though that’s the most socially-valuable service Stack Overflow offers, it’s not a good description of the typical user interaction, where the task at hand is less “I want to finally understand the Rust borrow checker” and more like “I want to fix this bug so I can finally log off.” And LLMs are a better way to access Stack Overflow’s knowledge base in order to provide that answer—it’s visible right there in the data.

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