Stack Overflow's forum traffic peaked during COVID-19 in 2021-2022 and has dropped sharply since ChatGPT launched in 2024, according to data pulled from the Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE). The decline shows monthly question volume collapsing after a long climb from 2008, with the biggest drop correlating directly to the rise of large language models.

ChatGPT's launch appears to be the main driver of the forum's death. A company representative noted that complex questions still appear on Stack Overflow because no other platform matches its curated human-generated data, making it the best source for technical knowledge. The post-author ran SEDE queries to confirm the trend across questions, answers, and comments.

The SQL queries in the post are straightforward — counting posts by PostTypeId per month. Standard grouping techniques for monthly transaction data were also discussed. The decline reflects a backlog of answered fundamentals, fewer new languages, GitHub traffic shifts, and toxicity on the platform driving users elsewhere.