Stack Overflow lost 15 years of growth in two years.

In December 2025, less than 4,000 developer questions were posted on a platform that once handled 200,000 a month. Developers moved to AI tools that give instant answers. Now Stack Overflow is surviving by selling that community-built knowledge back to the AI companies that killed the forum. The people who built the knowledge base got nothing. The companies that mined it kept the revenue.

The archive was the product. Nobody told the people who built it.