Stack Overflow questions per month
C · Weak signal An anonymous Stack Exchange Data Explorer query that counts Stack Overflow questions per month; a public data source with no analysis, and the saved copy only holds the first rows of its results.
Summary based on the title and listing only; the content itself was not available·Original: about 2 minutes to read
In short
A public SQL query on the Stack Exchange Data Explorer that groups Stack Overflow questions (post type 1) by month of creation. It is often cited to show the fall in Stack Overflow activity since chat assistants arrived. The saved copy holds the query text and only the first 34 of 220 result rows (July 2008 to April 2011), because the results grid loads further rows on scroll. The live page could not be fetched for this digest, so the recent months that carry the argument were not read.
Key numbers
- 220monthly rows returned by the query, starting July 2008
- 100932questions in March 2011, the highest month in the part of the results that was saved
As reported by the source.
English·Web page·opens data.stackexchange.com
What it reports
- The query counts rows in the Posts table with PostTypeId = 1, grouped by the first day of each creation month, ordered by month.
- It returned 220 rows. The saved rows show growth from 3,744 questions in August 2008 to 100,932 in March 2011.
- The page lists the query as created on 3 January by an anonymous user.
How they got it
A single aggregate SQL query run against Stack Exchange's public data dump through its Data Explorer. No filtering beyond post type, no adjustment, no commentary.
Limits
- Graded on metadata only: the saved copy stops at April 2011 and the URL could not be opened, so post-2022 values could not be checked against the source.
- The query counts questions present in the dump; it does not explain causes or separate changes in moderation, closure or site policy from changes in demand.
- Anonymous query, no author or method note.
Why it matters for companies
If the recent months show the decline commonly reported, this is a cheap, reproducible indicator of developers moving from public question-and-answer sites to assistants, with a side effect: fewer public answers for future tools to learn from. Anyone citing it should rerun the query and state the run date, because the figures depend on when the data dump was refreshed.
Summary based on the title and listing only; the content itself was not available. Read the original for the full argument and data.Read the original on data.stackexchange.com