Stack Overflow is ChatGPT Casualty: Traffic Down 14% in March
Stack Overflow, originally known for being the go-to source for developers to find answers to coding challenges, has been experiencing a steady decline in traffic since the beginning of 2022. As the popular AI assistant, OpenAI's ChatGPT gains more popularity, Stack Overflow has been bearing the brunt of the competition.
With the introduction of CoPilot, an AI coding assistant from Microsoft's GitHub, which is built on the same OpenAI large language model as ChatGPT, developers now have the option of writing entire functions instead of searching for code snippets on Stack Overflow.
While developers using ChatGPT miss out on the debate and community approval that Stack Overflow provides, they have the benefit of receiving quick and efficient coding solutions. However, according to Stack Overflow's management, ChatGPT's answers to coding questions are too often incorrect, leading to the temporary ban of ChatGPT content on Stack Overflow.
GitHub, which is growing traffic, provides many free services, including CoPilot, which has become one of its most popular paid features. There has been controversy over ChatGPT and CoPilot generating code based on open-source content without following the relevant open-source licenses. Additionally, some of OpenAI's accumulated knowledge on coding techniques may have come from digesting content on Stack Overflow and similar sites, making the competition even more interesting.
As the comparison between Stack Overflow and ChatGPT continues to grow, the competition is proving to be challenging for Stack Overflow. However, Stack Overflow CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar has announced plans on how to merge community and generative AI technologies to work together.
In conclusion, while Stack Overflow and GitHub provide specialized services for developers that are different from ChatGPT's mass-market appeal, the trend shows that the new lazy-but-efficient coding trick is to get quick solutions from ChatGPT, CoPilot, or Bing Chat to write significant chunks of code for you.
