What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirrors if the main site disappeared.

Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work. It might become harder to find literal worked examples, but even those are mostly duplicated elsewhere and SO is just making it easier on search engines to find it.

The app Kiwix let’s you keep a static copy of stack overflow on your phone, it’s only a few gigabytes. It also has Wikipedia!

The Q&A have a very permissive license, so anyone can try to host a static version. (This was on purpose, the idea is that people would have been less prone to answer, if the answers were trapped in SO.)

Moreover, there are a few spammer sites that already does this, and one of the problem of SO is to compete with them to be higher in the Google results.

So ... probably you will be able to read the Q&A in other sites, and after a while there will appear SO-likes site for niches.

In my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway. I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.

I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect it would probably result in more netsplits on freenode, owed to the inevitable influx of programmers who would now seek assistance on IRC like the good old days.

I've definitely noticed a downward trend of activity in the assorted programming chat channels I've frequented over the last 25 years or so, which I guess could be a result of the growing popularity of Q&A sites like stackoverflow.

But I still think it's one of the best places to seek assistance - plus, helping out programmers on IRC in real time is a good way to stay sharp and on top of the continuously evolving software landscape.

I remember something Jeff talked about during the original Stack Overflow podcasts, that Google was the main interface for Stack Overflow. As in, your entry into Stack Overflow would for the majority of people be through search. And to speak for myself, this is how I use Stack Overflow 99% of the time.

This makes me wonder. Just having a copy of the SO data without the Google algorithms to bring you to the right question, the experience would probably be different when working of a copy.

I think it would have had more of an impact five years ago. Most of the best content is on blogs now not so. Most of the best so answers were really blog posts anyway

I wonder if we could implement a decentralized version of SO. It can be a CLI app since it is used by developers only. The app can keep all question/answers of topic relevant to the developer locally. This will allow developer to find answers offline as well. Since it is only text data it should not take more than a GB.

Oh we could start fresh with actual up to date answers!

If it’s that important to daily work it sounds like there’s a fundamental issues with documentation, training, and education in the world of software development.

Federated messaging seems popular these days. Maybe federated documentation is a good idea?

Perhaps git could be leveraged to distribute docs, examples, and questions?

Given how dated many of the answers are on Stack Overflow are, that refuse to get updated and prevent people from asking and answering similar questions on software versions that aren't from 2013, this has already happened but more slowly.

Before the World Wide Web and Stack Overflow, we used plenty of Reference Books and specific UseNet newsgroups.

Yes, it was a slower system, but it was just as good in the final result.

I think I use Stack Overflow once a month at the most, generally when I go there with a problem what happens is one of the following:

I have a problem I can't fix, I start writing down the problem, I realize as I am writing it down that it cannot be what I thought was the issue. I try other avenues for a few more hours and solve the problem.

I have a problem that I can't fix. I realize that I cannot reliably cut the problem down in minimal code to get a response on Stack Overflow because it is not a minimal problem. I try some other route to fix the problem.

I have a problem that as I am writing on StackOverflow I realize I have not tried a particular solution, I try it and solve my problem, I do not finish writing my problem.

I have a problem that seems like it is pretty esoteric, I ask a question, it never gets answered, I either manage to solve my problem, finding some github issue or similar suggesting the solution is a bunch of dependency updates or just not solvable. I either solve my issue or find some hacky workaround or do decide the requested functionality should be replaced by something else. No one ever answers my question, 6 months later someone says they have the same problem and did I solve it.

I have a problem that I actually finish writing and asking, someone responds and has misunderstood my question but their answer while wrong for what I'm answering gives me a clue on how to solve my problem.

I have something I want to do but I do not have workable code because I know absolutely no way about proceeding with the idea, so I do not ask StackOverflow because they just aren't helpful for anything that isn't simple.

I have a problem that is something like one of the previous situations, but I realize as I am writing it that it will get deleted or modded or something because it just won't work for StackOverflow guidelines, luckily most of the time when this happens I realize it should really be asked on one of the other Stack exchange communities. If I have progressed far enough to actually go ask a question on some other Stack Exchange community it tends to be answered reasonably quickly.

I have a problem in some area I do not know much about, perhaps because I am just started using the framework or something, my problem is simple but it does not work as I thought, I ask, it is a simple misunderstanding of how I thought it would work, someone responds with a solution really quickly and I fix my problem.

on edit: fixed bad grammatical error

on further edit: if StackOverflow went away pretty much nothing would change for me.

people who knows how to use web archives , and the ones who can search and click on show cached version on google search wont be much affected, i have developed a snippet management tool , so people can search there too , its https://codekeep.io

I wonder if the reason documentation is so crappy is because stack overflow exists?

Funny enough, the inception of stack overflow was because another Q&A site called "Experts exchange" suddenly put up a paywall.

I don’t use stack overflow to much, I usually prefer documentation or blogs

programming quality would really improve.

People would have to git gud I guess.

$1 Billion damage I think is easy.

$10 Billion before it's re-created. Maybe. It'll take years to re-code and re-build the community.

$100 Billion. Doubt it. But not sure.

10 million visits a day, $1 per visit. Are we including all the Stacks? I think Server Fault could be much higher than $1.

https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic

None. Most of the content on Stack Overflow is just people repeating what they heard from a more authoritative source looking for some internet points. (and often when it gets repeated it loses accuracy, context, and a real understanding of the issue at hand) There is a small subset of content that is original and not posted elsewhere but its not that common to be worried about. Often quality answers come from a person who has already published work somewhere else (eg. white paper, book, blog, documentation, etc).