While traffic to OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been growing exponentially, Stack Overflow has been experiencing a steady decline – losing some of its standings as the go-to source developers turn to for answers to coding challenges.
How Stack Overflow and GitHub compare with ChatGPT
Most websites suffer by comparison with ChatGPT these days, and this is not a fair comparison in the sense that Stack Overflow and GitHub are specialized services for developers. ChatGPT has gained mass market appeal, in addition to being useful to developers.
GitHub is growing, and Stack Overflow is shrinking
On a year-over-year basis, traffic to Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com) has been down by an average of 6% every month since January 2022 and was down 13.9% in March.
While Stack Overflow and GitHub are a lot closer to each other in size than they are to ChatGPT, GitHub is growing its traffic while Stack Overflow is shrinking. We can’t say how much of GitHub’s growth is related to its embrace (and Microsoft’s broader embrace) of OpenAI technologies, but the related buzz is probably helping.
CoPilot signups just tripled
GitHub provides many free services, but CoPilot is one of its paid features – and popular enough that free trial signups for the service tripled between February and March.
