Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
SO is such a miserable and toxic place that oftentimes I’d rather read more documentation or reach out to someone elsewhere like Discord. And I would never post a question there or comment there.
I’d rather read the docs than just about anything. I love good documentation. I wanna know how and why things work.
The problem is that basically nobody has good docs. They are almost all either incomplete or unreadable.
A lot of companies won’t employ technical writers, who exist to make good, thorough, complete and well-presented documentation… they rather assume their engineers can just write the docs.
And no, no they can’t… very few engineers study the principles of effective communication. They may understand things, but they can’t explain them.
That’s fair. At my company we have technical writers for the external docs and internal docs are usually written by whoever has worked on something and got frustrated that nobody in the company could give them a high level overview, and they had to go through the code for a couple hours.
Tbf though, I’ll take docs that aren’t written super well that tell me how things from our internal libraries should be used. Or just comments. I’ll take comments telling me WHY we are doing something.
I don’t expect our internal docs to be MSDN docs. But I like to read an overview of at least the workflow before I jump into updating a large project.
While I agree, writing good docs is hard for a very intangible benefit. Honestly, it feels like doing the same work twice, with the prospect of doing it again and again in the future as the software is updated. It’s a little demoralizing.
It is hard, I agree. I’m not very good at it myself. But even semi-decent docs are better than googling around or stepping through a decompiled package.
And it’s super useful to new developers, and would have saved me a lot of time and frustration when I was new.