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From 50M Questions to Zero: How ChatGPT Killed the World’s Biggest Dev Community
The graveyard of tech platforms grows larger each year, but few deaths have been as dramatic or as fast as what we’re witnessing with Stack Overflow in 2026.
The Numbers Tell a Brutal Story
Remember when Stack Overflow was the developer’s first stop for any coding problem? Those days feel like ancient history now. The platform that once fielded millions of questions monthly has seen an unprecedented collapse:
- Late 2022: LLMs arrive on the scene
- December 2025: Traffic down 78% from peak
- January 2026: The exodus accelerates
I’ve been coding for five years, and Stack Overflow was my constant companion. Need to parse JSON in Python? Stack Overflow. Struggling with CSS flexbox? Stack Overflow. Wrestling with a cryptic error message at 2 AM? You guessed it.
But something fundamental changed when ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
The Old Way vs. The New Way
Let me show you what this shift looks like in practice.
The Stack Overflow Era:
# I would search: "python read csv file pandas"
# Wait for page to load
# Scroll through 8…
