# Julia questions on SO sharply decreased: reasons?
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186
**Category:** Community
**Created:** [June 25, 2024, 7:10am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186 "2024-06-25T07:10:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 15
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@sylvaticus](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/sylvaticus)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 7:10am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/1 "2024-06-25T07:10:56Z")
Just noticed that the number of Julia related questions on SO has sharply decresed in latest months and weeks.
I don’t like SO, I don’t find it very welcoming and I prefer much more the community here on discourse, but I wonder if this decrease in Julia questions on SO is due to (1) people choosing [discourse.julialang.org](http://discourse.julialang.org) for Julia related questions; (2) more generally SO is declining; (3) there is a less general, but perhaps more focused interest in Julia (this could be correlated to 1)
What do you think?
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### Author:  [@mkitti](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mkitti)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 7:45am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/2 "2024-06-25T07:45:12Z")
StackOverflow definitely lost some of their audience to ChatGPT and other LLMs.
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### Author:  [@Benny](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Benny)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 8:22am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/3 "2024-06-25T08:22:02Z")
This graphic is from last year so not sure if the trend continued like that, though I expect it has. I couldn’t find anyone who wrote about updated site analytics data, I never had the privileges to see it for myself so I don’t even know if they’re available.
This 2 year trend of course wouldn’t explain a trend in the last weeks or months
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### Author:  [@xgdgsc](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/xgdgsc)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 8:38am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/4 "2024-06-25T08:38:03Z")
Might because the stackoverflow-feed bot on slack is broken?
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### Author:  [@nilshg](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nilshg)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 8:42am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/5 "2024-06-25T08:42:54Z")
Zulip as well, but I don’t think that is a major factor as the feeds are mostly to alert people to new questions to make sure they get answered, I wouldn’t expect them to have an influence on the rate of new questions being posted.
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### Author:  [@paalon](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/paalon)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 8:59am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/6 "2024-06-25T08:59:09Z")
When I asked a question on StackOverflow comparing the Go language with Rust, Julia, and C++, even though it was a serious question, I received an overwhelming number of downvotes and had a terrible experience.
The question was deleted but I archived it here.
> **[How to infer the type of container from elements types in Go?](https://web.archive.org/web/20240524232930/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78515821/how-to-infer-the-type-of-container-from-elements-types-in-go)**
>
> I want to let Go infer the element type of a container like arrays or map in its initialization like Julia, C++ and Rust do:
> \# Julia
> dictionary = Dict("a" =\> "apple", "b...
Since then I dislike StackOverflow and its system, and unwelcoming people in the Go community. However, I know there are kind people too. Some people taught me about Go gently out of StackOverflow. I hope that the majority of them are nice.
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### Author:  [@Dan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Dan)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 10:18am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/7 "2024-06-25T10:18:18Z")
Hypothesis (2) would be my guess. Do you have (reliable) numbers for the past month or two? Perhaps a time-series of the question timestamps with Julia (or in general)?
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### Author:  [@sylvaticus](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/sylvaticus)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 12:09pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/8 "2024-06-25T12:09:51Z")
No. But yes, there is a clear trend, I wrote originally past few months, but indeed it’s longer that I see this reduction in number of questions there.
[Here](https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-overflows-traffic/) people claim a -60 / -80% in SO asked questions… now, it would be interesting to compare with a reduction here in discourse posts, perhaps for its nature this is more resilient to the arrival of ChatGPT/LLMs than Q/A sites…
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### Author:  [@Dan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Dan)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 12:40pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/9 "2024-06-25T12:40:08Z")
Stackoverflow has a “Site Analytics Dashboard” which is accessible with 25k points. I’m not at that level (yet), so maybe someone who is can supply some insight from that Dashboard.
Link:
[Site Analytics](https://stackoverflow.com/site-analytics)
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### Author:  [@tbeason](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tbeason)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 12:49pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/10 "2024-06-25T12:49:00Z")
I definitely favor AI tools over stackoverflow. The question is answered immediately and I usually know enough to work out when it gives me back something incorrect. If I get really stuck, I do a deeper dive on my own or ask here.
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### Author:  [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 1:35pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/11 "2024-06-25T13:35:50Z")
Wow, I had no idea how far it had fallen. The axes here are terrible, but you can see the start of each year with the holiday lull. There was a bump during the 2020 lockdown, but then a slow decrease until 2023 when things just fell off the cliff. The numbers here are posts per week:
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### Author:  [@gdalle](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/gdalle)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 1:43pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/12 "2024-06-25T13:43:05Z")
For comparison here’s the monthly number of posts on the Julia discourse since 2018. I’m surprised to see that we’re not doing so bad!
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### Author:  [@Tortar](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Tortar)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2024, 1:51pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/13 "2024-06-25T13:51:40Z")
I think part of the reason why SO partecipation is decreasing so sharply is also SO management, many late decisions were perceived very badly from the community, e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/398127/our-partnership-with-google-and-commitment-to-socially-responsible-ai, https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partnership-with-openai. This clearly affects more answers than questions though. But it is a vicious circle actually.
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### Author:  [@djsegal](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/djsegal)
#### Post date: [July 18, 2024, 1:32am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/14 "2024-07-18T01:32:32Z")
I don’t think people gave up on SO because of SO management. It’s solely because of LLM usage
That’s why I brought these concerns up around that time:
> [@Is Bard better at writing Julia than ChatGPT?](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/is-bard-better-at-writing-julia-than-chatgpt/101617):
>
> Tried to work on a Tetris playing bot in Julia using ChatGPT, but ran into the problem where every package’s API had changed since 2021. Has anyone had any better luck using Bard? Never fun to start the process and then realize nothing is going to work
Claude may be the correct answer still today, don’t know.
However people still come to forums/discord/tulip for real people to answer questions live - that’s not going anywhere
* * *
Also related to: [Is there an alternative of StringCases.jl that changes string cases? - #4 by acxz](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/is-there-an-alternative-of-stringcases-jl-that-changes-string-cases/40994/4), I’m still a little worried about how often package api’s are changing and LLM’s ability to keep up with them
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### Author:  [@Tortar](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Tortar)
#### Post date: [July 18, 2024, 2:11am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-questions-on-so-sharply-decreased-reasons/116186/15 "2024-07-18T02:11:34Z")
I’m not sure on the solely, maybe I’m the exception, but I personally started to use Discourse also because I disliked SO management, maybe some people migrated to more specialized sites apart from asking LLMs some of their questions?