Is ChatGPT Dominating Stack Overflow?
SimilarWeb’s recently published data indicates that ChatGPT is dominating the market and affecting Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow, a forum for techies to vote and discuss common coding challenges, has been experiencing a steady decline in traffic. On the contrary, ChatGPT has witnessed exponential growth within the past few months. It has attracted 1.6 billion visits in March and another 920.7 million in the first half of April.
According to year-on-year analysis, stackoverflow.com that was created 14 years ago has experienced a decline in traffic by an average of 6% every month since January 2022. In March, its traffic was down by almost 14% YoY to 258 million. This suggests that ChatGPT's popularity is gradually catching up with Stack Overflow's audience.
Additionally, SimilarWeb compared the performance of Stack Overflow against GitHub, a site that incorporates Copilot, which is built on the same OpenAI LLM as ChatGPT. GitHub is aimed at a broader audience that includes developers. In contrast, Stack Overflow has a sole focus on developers. SimilarWeb found that even GitHub performed better than Stack Overflow. GitHub enjoyed a 26.4% YoY increase in traffic to 524 million visits in March.
Generative AI's use is still a matter of choice for coders. However, these statistics clearly indicate that the technology is here to stay and challenges traditional ways of solving coding challenges. Teams can now generate detailed code samples and complete functions using tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. Nonetheless, it's worth mentioning that Stack Overflow continues to proscribe the posting of ChatGPT-generated content on its site.
Despite Stack Overflow's resistance towards AI, the company is not turning a blind eye to the possibilities of AI. Stack Overflow has set up a dedicated team to evolve the platform and build generative AI applications. The team will closely work with customers and the community to find the right approach to this burgeoning new field.
It is evident that ChatGPT's and GitHub's popularity is on the rise, signaling the arrival of a new era of coding. While the technology presents a new way of coding, it is expected that Stack Overflow will continue to evolve its platform progressively.
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