Hacker News Reader

Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

These figures show an extremely precipitous (and permanent) decline in traffic over the course of a few days in May of 2022 [0], during which the number of daily new visits dropped from ~1M to ~300K, the number of total daily page views dropped from ~20M to ~14M, and the number of daily sessions dropped from ~9.4M to ~6.1M.

However, there is no commensurate decrease in posts/votes during the same time period. Posts/votes remained relatively constant through 2022 (modulo normal seasonal fluctuations), until February 2023 when both fell off a cliff (I assume due to the rise of LLMs). Traffic data are sourced from Google Analytics, while post/vote data are computed internally by StackOverflow [1]. I wonder if the apparent precipitous drop in traffic in May 2022 is simply an artifact of Google Analytics suddenly changing how it tracks traffic/visitors.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/qMj7Lge.png

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36856249

View on HN

From the comments on this answer https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/391625/136010 it is suggested and agreed by staff that the chnage in May 2022 was the role out of a proper cookie consent form. If you don"t have performance cookies SO can"t work out the analytics. Fro staff member Catija

"@JourneymanGeekOnStrike Yeah, if you go back further, the "traffic" numbers see a 40M/week drop between April and May 2022, which is when the cookie tracking changed, and then normalizes again until December. So, prior to the cookie changes, traffic was about 140-150M per week. But, to be clear - this is stuff we're aware of and have "corrected" for, I guess."

Drops like that are either due to how bots are tracked, a Google algo change, or a major internal design change.

or else bad measurement.

the post doesn't explain where they got these traffic numbers, and it seems unlikely they have access to stackoverflow's real traffic stats. they're using some sort of estimation here. there's always a chance that their estimates are wrong - especially if they're showing implausible shifts like this.

> it seems unlikely they have access to stackoverflow's real traffic stats.

The question and user profile view stats (among other things) are public on the Data Explorer and included in the dumps:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/database-schem...

Not sure what they’re counting as a “visit”, though.

That makes sense. "New visits" are first time users, likely young coders who are looking up answers to things on a search engine, find what they're looking for on Stack Overflow, maybe click on an ad, and leave. They probably don't vote or post much. A sudden die-off there suggests something very bad happened to organic traffic (change in Google? Terrible new SEO scheme? A sudden stop in ad buys?)

The new content rate been dropping at a dismally constant rate for a long time, but the first few months in 2023 were awfully grim. I wonder what might've corresponded to that.

If SO was worried about that drop I think they would have bought back some of that traffic. More likely something has changed how they count the visits or they blocked some bad traffic. Traffic data is often sampled as well.

The fall in the beginning of 2023 may be the introduction of ChatGPT. A more worrying idea is that the numbers reflect not just the decline of SO but a decline of the whole IT business.

Perhaps they focus more on their enterprise offerings now?

Or a StackOverflow-scraped site peeled off users looking for quick solutions, while those with SO accounts still used it for posting and voting.

I’d say the peak of Github copilot adoption might have been during that month as well, IIRC the VS Code extension got released late March

Which would make sense, right? You are more likely to get an answer on StackOverflow for questions that touch very common technology (because more people are likely to answer). And that is exactly where Copilot probably shines too (I don't use it): because that is where there is a lot of training data.

I personally used to like StackOverflow as my last recourse: I grew up in those years where we had to RTFM, and I kept the habit. So if I go ask on StackOverflow, it is a tricky question. It used to be fine, and I was getting an answer eventually (sometimes after adding a bounty).

But in the last few years, I have had legit questions downvoted or even closed, and it was obvious that the people voting to close it did not even understand it. I agree that the moderation culture on StackOverflow is toxic. If everytime I contribute something, I have to fight to not get downvoted or closed, then I will slowly stop contributing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com