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It looks like Stackoverflow was already in a decline even before Covid.

I wonder what developers started using during that time.

They still used it, they just didn't contribute. It's not that StackOverflow is useless, but rather that it already answers most questions.

That, and genuinely new questions get aggressively shut down.

Given the speed at which tech evolves, I do not see how that can be true.

I think it may answer most questions from five years ago, but I would phrase it as “it has answers for most questions, but many are outdated and there’s no easy way to tell whether an answer is outdated”

"Rank by recent votes" has been a feature for perhaps five years already.

The graph shows monthly questions asked, not monthly questions answered. It makes total sense that the slope of that graph would be much higher earlier in the life of the site; as time goes on, many common questions will have already been answered.

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