The Banyan Tree called StackOverflow is Dying

In the centre of every Indian village once stood a banyan tree. No one remembered who planted it or cared about who owned the land. It was just there, older than anyone could remember, its aerial roots dropping into the ground to become new trunks. Under its shade, the entire village gathered. Elders settled disputes. Travellers rested. If you had a problem, you walked to the banyan tree, and someone helped you.

StackOverflow (SO) launched in September 2008. Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky built it because the existing programming Q&A landscape was broken. They built the banyan tree under which an entire generation of programmers would gather for a couple of decades (almost).

In early 2026, StackOverflow quietly removed the SO Trends page. The data still lives in the Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE), served raw as a database for anyone who could ask their coding agent to frame an SQL. Most developers have likely noticed silently that they are performing fewer internet searches and asking almost no questions on SO. I ran the same numbers through SEDE. They showed 99% fewer questions than five years ago across the board.

Gergely Orosz has been tracking this closely at the Pragmatic Engineer. In January 2025, he published data showing questions at 2009 launch levels. By May 2025, his headline was direct: “Stack overflow is almost dead”. His numbers and mine agree. The trend has not reversed.

But the data is not the story. The story is about a tree that is losing its leaves. Every developer using AI to skip the banyan tree is benefiting from a corpus built by strangers who answered under its shade for free. The AI reads the answer on your behalf. You never see the original page. No one upvotes. No one thinks “I could write a better answer.”

I wrote the longer version of this piece because the data raised a question I could not stop thinking about. What happens to the knowledge that was produced by random acts of kindness at scale when the institution that housed it fades?

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