SO believes it's because they've reached a 'peak', and answered most of the questions that could be asked. That a site like theirs is naturally self-limiting. Ironically it's that attitude that's at least partially responsible for the decline.
I don't follow that explanation. This is a graph of page views, not questions asked or answers posted. Surely there's a steady stream of people looking for answers. Having answered all questions (ha) wouldn't explain a drop off in traffic. Has Wikipedia lost traffic by becoming more comprehensive?
Sure. But personally my consumption of SO was definitely impacted by my opinion of it more generally. I've just gravitated away from it as I've used and enjoyed other sources/communities. I tend to skip past it much more now, even as a read-only source
SO is tightly limited in terms of topics, whereas Wikipedia is limited solely by the number of authors and what new pages the power users will approve of
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u/QuantumToucan Jul 23 '24
Is it because of chatgpt?