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Recent Questions - MathOverflow Meta · Mar 25, 2026

Is MathOverflow at risk of being let down by StackExchange Inc?

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MathOverflow Meta

This is the number of questions asked each month on StackOverflow, the most active site of the StackExchange network. The data is directly sourced from StackExchange, which helpfully provides a service to run SQL queries on their databases.

Graph showing a steep decrease after 2020, ending in near-zero values in 2026 compared to 2020 levels

Note that the Y-axis is not truncated, it really starts at 0. That's right, the number of questions decreased more than tenfold between September 2024 and February 2026, and that was already an approximately sixfold decrease from January 2020. Obviously, StackOverflow is being completely killed by AI (the sudden decrease around early 2023 is in the first few months after the initial release of ChatGPT), although it was on a slower decline long before.

(The number of questions on MathOverflow itself also fell sharply, though not nearly as much.)

Here's another query to show the total number of views of all posts on StackOverflow:

Another graph showing a similarly sharp decrease

That's a hundredfold decrease between January 2024 and February 2026, and January 2024 was an approximately tenfold decrease from January 2020.

My concern is that as far as I understand, StackExchange Inc's revenue comes from showing ads, so it should be directly correlated to the number of post views (although I didn't find actual figures about the company online). (I suppose the addition of "native ads", a.k.a. ads disguised as posts, might be related to these revenue problems.) This would seem to create a risk that StackExchange closes down or downsizes significantly and no longer can or wants to keep running MathOverflow.

Is this something we should worry about? Also, if this happens, what are our options? In theory, MathOverflow is independent from StackExchange Inc and the agreement between the two allows MathOverflow to obtain a full copy of the database and migrate it elsewhere, but how technically feasible would it be to import all MathOverflow data into a different software system?

Read the original on meta.mathoverflow.net

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