decline of Qtforums
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There may or may not be correlation. I myself try to avoid forums where a preisthood assigns worthiness value to your questions, such as stack-exchange does.
@Kent-Dorfman Yes, StackOverflow is really annoying to use (unless you are just reading answers without being logged in). I have seen discussions that were missing crucial details, but I'm not allowed to comment or answer. A lot of knowledge goes missing over there. The worst thing is when you are trying to upvote an answer and StackOverflow just tells you that they have registered your upvote, but they are not counting it because I don't have enough points. It just needed a few interactions like this where I don't normally even upvote answers anymore. From what I've heard the StackOverflow community is also a little bit more toxic.
Non of this can be said about this Qt forum. So, I hope there are not too many hurdles when using this forum (occasionally users are complaining that their posts are categorized as spam or that they are throttled in their number of answers).
I have seen interpretations of the graph mentioned by @Christian-Ehrlicher and there seem to be the following facts: 1) StackOverflow usage went down before AI. 2) There was a small peak during COVID, but the downward trend quickly continued. 3) AI only slightly accelerated the downward trend. This means the downfall of StackOverflow is not primarily because of AI (you really cannot give AI too much credit over there).
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Qt forums are quieter mainly because AI provides quick answers, licensing has become restrictive, and younger developers prefer Flutter, React Native, or web apps. Qt remains strong in niche industries, and initiatives like Qt Academy could help, but casual forum activity will likely stay low.
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Qt forums are quieter mainly because AI provides quick answers, licensing has become restrictive, and younger developers prefer Flutter, React Native, or web apps. Qt remains strong in niche industries, and initiatives like Qt Academy could help, but casual forum activity will likely stay low.
@inam said in decline of Qtforums:
licensing has become restrictive
The open source license has always basically been the same. And the Qt company has always tried to scare people into buying the commercial license. I'm not sure if anybody is driven away by changes in the commercial licenses.
@inam said in decline of Qtforums:
and younger developers prefer Flutter, React Native, or web apps
This would only be relevant if these technologies are stealing people away from C++. However, C++ is still growing: https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/ . Maybe there is a shift in regular desktop apps away from C++ (I don't know).
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Qt forums are quieter because AI gives fast answers, licensing feels restrictive, and younger developers favor Flutter, React Native, or web apps. Qt remains strong in niche industries, and initiatives like Qt Academy can help, but casual forum activity will likely stay low.
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and because of AI posts like this ^
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Qt forums are quieter because AI gives fast answers, licensing feels restrictive, and younger developers favor Flutter, React Native, or web apps. Qt remains strong in niche industries, and initiatives like Qt Academy can help, but casual forum activity will likely stay low.
@inam said in decline of Qtforums:
Qt forums are quieter because AI gives fast answers, licensing feels restrictive, and younger developers favor Flutter, React Native, or web apps. Qt remains strong in niche industries, and initiatives like Qt Academy can help, but casual forum activity will likely stay low.
About a month ago you wrote the exact same thing with just a handful of words changed. If you don't have anything new to contribute, you should stay quiet. And if you are really a bot, I'd like you banned on the forum.
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Since we started talking about this, I now even have fewer new posts in my inbox. Now, there is almost nothing new. Can anybody else confirm that over the past two months the number of posts has decreased even further?
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I log on every few days and see virtually nothing new in any of my frequented subforums.
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It's sad. I prefer forums where technical excellence is the main focus, and the inevitable "virtual community social experiment" is quickly put back in the closet where it belongs...and my other lurking spot (freebsd forums) just got hacked so I cannot give my bountiful opinions there now. LOL
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I too miss the traffic, but maybe it's not really a sign of the forum declining, but rather morphing. Let's face it: for some tasks, an AI agent is at least as good as any advice found here, plus it's much faster. So yeah, that kind of traffic is going to drop off.
BUT:
Members of this forum have much more to add than just their ability to write/solve algorithms, or serve as a document lookup. Over the years, many of my questions have been subjective, and the answers benefitted from the real-world experience of more senior Qt-ers. AI can't replace that.
So yeah, there'll be less traffic, but what remains is still quite valuable.
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Perhaps the outsourced anti spam Akismet has an upgraded algo (AI powered?) :p
https://forum.qt.io/topic/158678/can-t-reply-to-a-post-because-my-comment-gets-flagged-as-spam
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IMO it applies MUCH more to the Qt Forums than SO. This forum is populated by knowledgable people who want to help others. SO is populated by teenage computer nerd misfits who take perverse pleasure in negrating and flagging posts without providing explanations.
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Did you see this (via Hacker News) https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-we-do-not-stop-to-help-each-other-what-do-we-become/
It speaks about Stack Overflow but it applies equally well to the Qt Forums.@hskoglund said in decline of Qtforums:
Did you see this (via Hacker News) https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-we-do-not-stop-to-help-each-other-what-do-we-become/
It speaks about Stack Overflow but it applies equally well to the Qt Forums.Did not but it does make sense.
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IMO it applies MUCH more to the Qt Forums than SO. This forum is populated by knowledgable people who want to help others. SO is populated by teenage computer nerd misfits who take perverse pleasure in negrating and flagging posts without providing explanations.
@mzimmers said in decline of Qtforums:
מאוכלס בבני נוער חנוני מחשבים שגרים בפח של שלילת פוסטים וסימון אותם מבלי לספק הסברים.
Hey, that’s not nice; you’re insulting me as a bored, nerdy teenager.
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What matters is the niche community that sustains this place—
a few dozen people who genuinely care.It’s sad; AI is indeed rendering us obsolete.
@Nils-Sjoberg (and everyone else):
I don't understand the collective mentality that implies "bigger is better."
There is nothing wrong with the Qt Forums being "niche."
There is nothing wrong with Qt being "niche."
Provided that Qt provides sufficient value to a sufficient audience, Qt will survive. And the same can be said of us.
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@mzimmers That is exactly, exactly what I said.
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there are also devs helping each others at Qt Discord server: https://discord.gg/ksPhdUZyA
also noticed less traffic here and at Qt Discord and Reddit etc because of AI
I'm sure this will change next years, and more and more developers will miss human interaction and come back (fingers crossed)
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There doesn't seem to be many interesting or sophisticated threads anymore and activity seems to have dropped way off over the past year or so. I'm kicking around in my neuro-divergent brain any possible reasons I can immagine. Any thoughts?
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